Libs Say the Darndest Things
In my never-ending effort to understand the liberal mind, I'm beginning to scribble down nutty sayings from the liberals I happen to run into. I call it Libs say the darnedest things.
This idea started for me a couple of weeks ago, when a lefty cat-lady (a big demographic) told me with a hypnotic stare, "There are no facts."
Wow. Floored in one. I was left gaga. Couldn't figure out what to say that would get through her concrete space helmet.
So I staggered off and had a drink.
This one has gone viral in the lefto-psychosphere. You get 2,560,000 google hits for "There are no facts."
Such little mindworms tell us about our age of ignorance and superstition.
Obama has contributed his own pearls to the genre, like "The private economy is doing fine" when unemployment is at 8.2%, about 7% of American workers are underemployed, and another big chunk are on permanent disability, making for about 20% of the work force not working.
Wow.
The Bamster is an endless fountain of oddball quotes, and half the country doesn't notice anything wrong. At least Jimmy Carter got bitten by a killer rabbit.
Heard about Obama's Relativity Theory of the U.S. Constitution? It's really true.
A couple of years ago, the Washington Post boasted about Obama's brilliance as a student at Harvard Law. Just to prove the point, a WaPo reporter cited Professor Larry Tribe's thank-you footnote for Obama, in an article claiming that Einstein's Relativity Theory applies to the U.S. Constitution. It appears that constitutional time and space can be twisted around heavy objects, like the heavy-duty intellects of Barry and Larry, twin stars of the legal cosmos.
Or something.
Obama is pretty awful, but Joe Biden...well, that's shooting ducks in a pond.
Here are a few I've picked up. Please add your own in the comments below.
1. A couple college-educated libs talking about insecticides that are safe to use around pets: "It's organic. It's safe."
The organic poisons that will kill you include arsenic, apple seeds, cherry leaves, unsoaked kidney beans, cassava roots, and uncooked potato skins. But they're organic! They can't hurt you!
This is sheer, unvarnished superstition, straight from the Dark Ages. Every other liberal believes it.
Or how about...
2. "My kids will have free health care for life."
Told to me by a rich but really eccentric lib, with two unemployed children in their 30s living in San Francisco.
Guess why they can't find jobs. Right.
3. "Marijuana is a medicine."
The PubMed biomedical database has 648 scientific articles on the toxicity of marijuana. It seems that maryjane can trigger schizophrenia in some teenagers, and that it may cause "paranoia" (severe anxiety) in chronic users. Countries like Egypt and India have used bhang for centuries and have long linked it to low-level depression and poor motivation. Cannabis makes male mice infertile. Smoking rather than chewing bhang causes clouds of burn particles to get into your lungs with every breath you take. That's one reason why cigarettes cause lung cancer. It's not the nicotine; it's the burn particles in the smoke.
The only nugget of truth in this urban myth is that synthetic THC can help manage the pain of some cancers in carefully controlled doses with near-perfect purity. But the marijuana plant in your backyard has thousands of molecules beyond THC, with completely unknown effects, different toxins in different plant varieties, and hitting your lungs and bloodstream in totally uncontrolled amounts. It's a crapshoot.
Scientists aren't allowed to study people smoking joints, but about 100 million Americans are running their own trials at home. In about ten years we'll find out what happens to them as the cumulative effects of decades of dope-smoking start to take their toll. Baby-boomers may actually end up saving Medicare, because they may go down long before Social Security runs out. I don't think that's good, but self-inflicted ignorance carries a high price.
A lot of modern America makes more sense when you realize that tens of millions of people are getting chronically stoned on mind-altering drugs. Alcohol is not hallucinogenic. Being a drunk is bad enough, but now you can have 57 varieties of mind-altering chemicals at your local high school.
The media won't tell you if a popular drug is toxic, because they're the biggest dope fiends around. Ever wonder why celebrities seem to die before their time?
Here's another stunner.
4. "I voted for Obama because Hillary is too white."
This one came from a young, unemployed man in 2008. He still doesn't have a job, is still living on Mom's income, but can't figure out why.
Another collectible:
5. "It wasn't really rape-rape."
I don't know if this gets a pass from the International Society for Goofy Lib Sayings, because it's from Whoopi Goldberg, who is technically a comedienne. The "not really rape-rape" she was referring to was committed on a 13-year-old girl by an adult narcissist of the Hollywood type, who is now idolized by the cult that runs the darker nooks of our celebrity culture.
6. "Gangsta rap is art."
This one goes under Things Liberals Are Not Allowed to Question. They are commanded by Lady Gaia to believe in Darwinian evolution even if they know nothing about it -- but they are strictly barred from questioning the profound artistic value of gangsta rap.
Go figure.
7. "How can they stand being so hated?"
Finally, a little gem from a nice Episcopalian lady at a get-together with cookies and everybody being painfully nice. She had this one all lined up and ready to launch, as I could tell from the glitter in her eye. The "they" she was talking about was Israel.
"How can Israel stand being so hated?"
How about sixty years of oil-fueled hate propaganda? But I didn't say that, because she had me in shock. I spend a lot of time being floored by the things liberals say.
Months later I thought of the perfect answer: "How could Jesus stand being so hated?"
I don't know if Episcopalians still believe in Jesus, so even that zinger might have bounced off her Grade A mental armor. But you can think of a slew of examples.
"How could blacks stand being so hated in the Jim Crow South?"
"How can Coptic Christians stand being so hated by the Muslim Brotherhood?"
"How could witches in the age of Cromwell stand being so hated?"
"How could the Jews of the Holocaust stand being so hated?"
Come to think of it, all the celebrated victims of the left are hated, or at least live with the idea that they are. Being hated is the very essence of liberal victimhood.
Or as the King James Bible renders Isaiah 53-3:
He was despised
rejected
rejected of men;
a man of sorrows,
and acquainted with grief...
Remember that tune in Handel's Messiah? You can probably hum it.
Naturally, I didn't think of the Jesus comeback, because I was left floundering at "How can they stand being so hated?" -- a single sentence that captures endless depths of ignorance.
But my nice Episcopalian lady knew in her bones that she had the answer to all that noisy fuss in the Middle East, not to mention the question of war and peace through human history.
Talk to your local liberal. They believe they have all the answers, which may be the real peak of arrogant ignorance. To prove their moral superiority, they carefully avoid reading the news. That's another gem I hear over and over again.
Superstition is nothing new, and those stellar gas giants of ignorance aren't, either. What we have today -- added to the long history of mass delusions -- is two new things.
First, our superstitious masses are the product of 12 to 20 years of formal schooling, in which they learn great quantities of nonsense.
They also find out that it's not nice to question anybody's beliefs, no matter how demented.
So you're a little Wiccan, are you? You're so cute! And what did you do for your Winter Solstice? Sacrifice a virgin on a rock?
Second, and just as mad, there are now huge money-making professions specializing in making up lies and spreading them -- like public relations, media studies, and "journalism." College students are taught to appeal to pop delusions, make up new ones, spread them, and build them into fantastical castles in the air -- to sell either laundry soap or Obama.
PR professionals don't seem to care which it is.
In this presidential era, fantasy-peddler David Axelrod may be a more important sign of the times than the messiah himself. Our Current Occupant is an opportunistic infection of the body politic, but Axelrod's industry is a permanent parasite dwelling in our guts. Obama is this season's flu, but we'll get over it. But Axelrod is a tapeworm, and nothing will dislodge him from our national intestines, except for a long and nasty bout of worming.
Sophisticated lies are responsible for our energy crisis, which doesn't exist and never has. We don't have a shortage of oil, coal, or gas, and with vast new shale discoveries around the world, real energy prices are almost bound to come down.
But that will not stop the epidemic of lies. Carefully designed green lies are responsible for huge misallocations of federal moneys to the likes of Solyndra and the Chicago Carbon Exchange. The wacky State of California is on the rocks, but it just authorized billions more for a rail system it lacks any prospect of paying for. The Golden State is sinking, and all the sailors are busy bailing buckets of water -- from the ocean into the ship.
Our national media are responsible for our infantilized discourse, so we can no longer discuss anything that can't be turned into baby food.
We used to be a nation of adults.
Not anymore.
Take a natural demagogue like Obama, add a PR fiend like Axelrod, and you get four years of self-destructive government for 300 million people.
That's all it takes.
Sigmund Freud spent a lifetime listening to neurotics, and he came up with one big conclusion: sane people have come to terms with the Reality Principle in their lives. Neurotics are stuck with false and self-defeating beliefs. They keep doing what doesn't work. If you want to see how that happens, check out southern Europe. Over there, entire nations are suffering from self-destructive, immature thinking.
The Reality Principle is what separates the average conservative from the average liberal. Conservatism is not a man-made ideology made up by some furious scribbler in 1848. It is the common wisdom humans have distilled from Confucius to Plato and Ecclesiastes, Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Conservatism comes down to humane realism. American conservatives understand how much practical wisdom is found in places like the Constitution. The Founders were the most thoughtful political minds of their century, and they built a legal foundation to last.
Constitutional government has brought us through stormy seas for 23 decades, longer than any comparable document in the world. France is on its sixth or seventh constitution, and the latest one is beginning to smell like Limburger cheese. As soon as the southern half of Europe dumps the euro, the Franco-German axis will have to cobble up yet another constitution -- because Europe has failed to learn the first rule of stable government:
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yes, we have nutty conservatives and moderately sane libs. But on the whole, conservatism equals realism, which equals sanity.
(Feel free to add your own Libs say the darndest things below.)