Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

The greatest enemy of t***h is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. --JFK, June 11, 1962

You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. I'm perfectly willing to mislead and tell unt***hs...FDR, May 1941 (Morgan p 550)

Karl Marx is going to win this war.-- Father Coughlin

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Is Liberalism Exhausted?


Jonah Goldberg / Feb 27, 2015


Canaries are not very formidable birds, but they have their uses. For instance, coal miners learned over a century ago that when canaries gag and drop dead at the bottom of the cage, it's a sign that maybe there's something wrong with the air in the mine.


MSNBC is not a very formidable network, but its wheezing is similarly instructive. MSNBC's slogan is "Lean Forward," which has a robust sound to it. But it turns out the phrase is a more apt descriptor of how the Peacock Network's mini-me is poised to teeter off its perch and plunge beak-first into the droppings-stained pages of the fading New Republic below.


It is suffering "cataclysmic ratings declines" (in Politico's words) from already mediocre ratings to begin with. The hope had been that Ronan Farrow, the Prius-dashboard saint of Brooklyn hipsters and the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (or Frank Sinatra), would, like David Hasselhoff in "Baywatch," leap into the waters and save the drowning network. It turned out that Farrow's flotation device was a messenger bag full of bricks. His show has been canceled, as has Joy Reid's daily show. Other MSNBC stars are being followed around by the Grim Reaper. Al Sharpton, a race-baiting tax c***t with blood on his hands, is slated to be moved out of his 6 p.m. slot, presumably so he can spend more time with his wayward teleprompter.


MSNBC had thought it could mimic Fox News' success from the left. The problem is that it never understood what Fox News is. MSNBC's execs saw it through the prism of their own ideological bias and so ended up offering a left-wing caricature of a caricature. Contrary to myth, Fox (where I am a contributor) is in fact an actual news network, albeit with prime-time opinion shows. Meanwhile, a study by Pew found that MSNBC was 85 percent opinion.


The more salient point is that there's such a small appetite for that opinion. As Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal recently observed, Barack Obama has successfully moved his party to the left but has failed utterly to bring the rest of the country with him. In 2012, James Stimson, arguably America's leading expert on U.S. public opinion, found that the country was more conservative than at any time since 1952.


This might seem counterintuitive given that Obama was re-elected that year, but there's an obvious explanation. Obama has a singular sk**l: getting Barack Obama elected. In all of the e******ns since 2008, he has shown a remarkable inability to get anyone else elected or to move public opinion in his favor. (Obamacare, for instance, remains stubbornly unpopular.) Measured in terms of statehouses, state legislatures, and House and Senate seats, the GOP is stronger today than any point since the 1920s. If you still think Obama has generous coattails, ask Rahm Emanuel for a second opinion.


The president is unbowed, of course. He's unilaterally using -- and abusing -- the powers of his office to legalize i*****l i*********n, throw a wet blanket on cheap energy and turn the Internet into a government-regulated utility. He has the support of his dwindling party and the equally dwindling mainstream media. But even here his policy agenda is as threadbare as his cultural legacy. A majority of Americans believe race relations have gotten worse since he was elected.


Meanwhile, the cultural left has disengaged from mainstream political arguments, preferring instead the comforts of identity-politics argy-bargy. You judge political movements not by their manifestos but by where they put their passion. And on the left these days, the only things that arouse passion are arguments about race and g****r.


For instance, the feminist agitprop drama "The Vagina Monologues" is now under fire from the left because it is not inclusive of men who believe they are women. Patricia Arquette was criticized from the right for her Oscar acceptance rant about women's wage e******y, but the criticism paled in comparison to the bile from the left, which flayed her for leaving out the plight of the t*********red and other members of the Coalition of the Oppressed.


Such critiques may seem like a cutting-edge fight for the future among the protagonists, but looked at from the political center, it suggests political exhaustion. At least old-fashioned Marxists talked about the economy.


Of course, liberalism isn't dead, it's just resting. But it certainly could use an exciting, charismatic savior to breathe new life and fresh thinking into its ranks. Thank goodness Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings.

Ve'hoe

" There are three ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army: By commanding the army to advance or to retreat, being ignorant of the fact that it cannot obey; This is called hobbling the army. By attempting to govern an army in the same way as he administers a kingdom, being ignorant of the conditions which obtain in an army; This causes restlessness in the soldier’s minds. By employing the officers of his army without discrimination, through ignorance of the military principle of adaptation to circumstances. This shakes the confidence of the soldiers.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War



That last quote,,, that is Obama and the current dems...

Don G. Dinsdale Loc: El Cajon, CA (San Diego County)

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I agree... Don D.

Ve'hoe

There is another quote that I loved, but cannot remember whom it was who said it,,, he was a king of Sparta,,, (not Leonidas)


A country that is governed by its military,,, and defended by its politicians,,,

Is governed by i***ts, and defended by cowards...

I wish I could find who said that,, it is soooo apropos

bmac32 Loc: West Florida

And may the liberals have a long long rest.

BOHICA

Thucydides.

Here's another one I like.

“When one is deprived of ones liberty, one is right in blaming not so much the man who puts the shackles on as the one who had the power to prevent him, but did not use it.”

Ve'hoe

Ahhhh thank you!!!

I have searched all over "washington DC" (I use that now, instead of hell) for that!!

Ve'hoe

Here it is,, different than I remembered,, but that is it!!!

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
― Thucydides


I have a civilian medical doctorate,,, and work with freeking geniuses,,, but I have never seen men as intelligent and proactively intuitive,,, than those men whose action, success and/or failure, will mean their lives,,,

That is why I went back into the military, it is incredible to match wits and bet your life against the evil of the world,,, once you break that barrier,,, that the evil have and know about, you are sort of "freed" from the fear that "you cant do it!" which is what politicians and attorneys want you to think.
It keeps you needing them.

But you can fight evil, and you will win, you need to stand up and step over that line, that the criminals and evil men have stepped over,,, once enough good men get on the other side, evil runs like "washington DC" because they are full of fear,,, it is a strange feeling,, but it is also empowering,,, not at all like some of the liberal wussies on OPP try to make it out to be..

What is worse is the idea like John Kerry tried to get away with that there is an acceptable level of death, crime, murder, rape, etc,,,,, and that is just OKIE DOKEY!!