Tag: Thomas Sowell

Amusing

The 25 Best Quotes About Liberals

25) Whenever I read liberals reporting about the goings- on of conservatives I always get the nature-documentary vibe. A liberal reporter puts on his or her Dian Fossey hat in order to attempt to write another installment of Conservatives in the Mist. I’ve followed this particular brand of reporting for years, it’s almost a fetish of mine. Most attempts fail. Of these lesser varieties, there’s fear (“Troglodytes!”), mockery (“Irrelevant troglodytes!”), condescension (“I had to explain to them they’re troglodytes.”), bewilderment (“Why don’t they understand they’re troglodytes?”), astonishment (Dear God, they’re not all troglodytes!”), and a few combinations of all the above. — Jonah Goldberg

24) There are no bad guys on the left. There are only people who’ve been driven to desperation by conservative evil. — Allahpundit

23) Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago. — Ann Coulter

22) Inside many liberals is a totalitarian screaming to get out. They don’t like to have another point of view in the room that they don’t squash and the way they try to squash it is by character assassination and name calling. — David Horowitz

21) The reason any conservative’s failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites. — Ann Coulter

20) Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy. It leads the modern liberal to invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Very simply if nothing is to be recognized as better or worse than anything else then success is de facto unjust.

There is no explanation for success if nothing is better than anything else and the greater the success the greater the injustice. Conversely and for the same reason, failure is de facto proof of victimization and the greater the failure, the greater the proof of the victim is, or the greater the victimization. — Evan Sayet

19) It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely “patriotic” about running down America. Anti-Americanism — a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization — became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest “patriots” because dissent — not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself — became the highest virtue. — Jonah Goldberg

18) But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims — always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups. — Ann Coulter

17) Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that America is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as a result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair — because the promised solutions don’t work. And they will never work — they never have. — Rush Limbaugh

16) One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian “isms” of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do. — Jonah Goldberg

15) Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion. — Dennis Prager

14) When one becomes a liberal, he or she pretends to advocate tolerance, equality and peace, but hilariously, they’re doing so for purely selfish reasons. It’s the human equivalent of a puppy dog’s face: an evolutionary tool designed to enhance survival, reproductive value and status. In short, liberalism is based on one central desire: to look cool in front of others in order to get love. Preaching tolerance makes you look cooler, than saying something like, “please lower my taxes” — Greg Gutfeld

13) Stupidity is a luxury and you will find time and time and time and again that those who are overwhelmingly on the left are those who can afford to be. — Evan Sayet

12) With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan’s premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society. — Ann Coulter

11) If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they–and we all–can be “liberated.” The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions–the vision–which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback. — Thomas Sowell

10) Liberals claim to love gays when it allows them to vent their spleen at Republicans. But disagree with liberals and their first response is to call you gay. Liberals are gays’ biggest champions on issues most gays couldn’t care less about, like gay marriage or taxpayer funding of photos of men with bullwhips up their derrieres. But who has done more to out, embarrass, and destroy the lives of gay men who prefer to keep their orientation private than Democrats? Who is more intolerant of gays in the Republican Party than gays in the Democratic Party? — Ann Coulter

9) End results that work that don’t involve government threaten liberals. — Rush Limbaugh

8) In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong–surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences. — Thomas Sowell

7) That is one reason “feelings” and “compassion” are two of the most often used liberal terms. “Character” is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. “Good and evil” are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one’s feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, “How do I feel about it?” or “How do I show the most compassion?” — not “What is right?” or “What is wrong?” For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality. — Dennis Prager

6) In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group. — Thomas Sowell

5) Everyone moralizes. The suggestion that liberals aren’t moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about “moralizers.” Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion — you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people’s children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise. — Jonah Goldberg

4) If you can somehow force a liberal into a point- counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder. — Ann Coulter

3) My analysis is that most faith based systems depend upon an absolute moral order. The declaration of things as absolutely evil or absolutely good, as sin or virtue, puts liberalism into a horrible position because it’s founded on no judgment on anything. As a result, any faith that is seriously practiced or understood is a challenge to the politics that depend on constituencies that would rather not be told that their choices are bad and their lives are not virtuous. — Hugh Hewitt

2) The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? — Thomas Sowell

1) To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. — Charles Krauthammer

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Amusing

Thomas Sowell: A Fatal Trajectory

A very sobering article by the great conservative writer Thomas Sowell.

A Fatal Trajectory

An increasing number of recent letters and e-mails from readers strike a note, not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but a note of despair.

Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst. Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved.

First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat.

Only the most reckless gambler would have bet on them to win. Only an optimist would have expected them to survive.

Against the background of those and other desperate times that this country has been through, we cannot whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses had just a few years ago has now evaporated.

In another sense, however, looming ahead of us– and our children and their children– are dangers that can utterly destroy American society. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead.

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs.

Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?

Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.

If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea.

Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the militarily strongest nation on earth, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not.

It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender– and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb– dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles– might be enough to get us to surrender.

If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.

It doesn’t matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians– at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.

Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.

The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of “non-judgmental” affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.

The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.

We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington’s army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge.

In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet.

Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.

Amusing

Barack Obama: A Huge Gulf Between His Values and Those of Most Other Americans

Thomas Sowell hits back to back home runs with the continuation of his series on “The Real Obama“.

The Real Obama Part II is an excellent article and should be read by anyone that is still undecided as to who to vote for.

A recent Republican campaign ad sarcastically described as Barack Obama’s “one accomplishment” his supporting a bill to promote sex education in kindergarten.

During an interview of a Republican spokesman, Tom Brokaw of NBC News replayed that ad and asked if that was something serious to be discussed in a presidential election campaign.

It was a variation on an old theme about getting back to “the real issues,” just as Brokaw’s question was a variation on an increasingly widespread tendency among journalists to become a squad of Obama avengers, instead of reporters.

Does it matter if Barack Obama is for sex education in kindergarten? It matters more than most things that are called “the real issues.”

Seemingly unrelated things can give important insights into someone’s outlook and character. For example, after the Cold War was over, it came out that one of the things that caught the attention of Soviet leaders early on was President Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controllers’ strike.

Why were the Soviets concerned about a purely domestic American issue like an air traffic controllers’ strike? Why was their attention not confined to “the real issues” between the United States and the Soviet Union?

Because one of the biggest and realest of all issues is the outlook and character of the President of the United States.

It would be hard to imagine any of Ronald Reagan’s predecessors over the previous several decades– whether Republicans or Democrats– who would have broken a nationwide strike instead of caving in to the union’s demands.

This told the Soviet leaders what Reagan was made of, even before he got up and walked out of the room during negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev. That too let the Soviet leaders know that they were not dealing with Jimmy Carter any more.

There is no more real issue today than “Who is the real Barack Obama behind the image?” What does being in favor of sex education in kindergarten tell us about the outlook and character of this largely unknown man who has suddenly appeared on the national scene to claim the highest office in the land?

It gives us an insight into the huge gulf between Senator Obama’s election year image and what he has actually been for and against over the preceding decades. It also shows the huge gulf between his values and those of most other Americans.

Many Americans would consider sex education for kindergartners to be absurd but there is more to it than that.

What is called “sex education,” whether for kindergartners or older children, is not education about biology but indoctrination in values that go against the traditional values that children learn in their families and in their communities.

Obviously, the earlier this indoctrination begins, the better its chances of overriding traditional values. The question is not how urgently children in kindergarten need to be taught about sex but how important it is for indoctrinators to get an early start.

The arrogance of third parties, who take it upon themselves to treat other people’s children as a captive audience to brainwash with politically correct notions, while taking no responsibility for the consequences to those children or society, is part of the general vision of the left that pervades our education system.

Sex education for kindergartners is just one of many issues on which Barack Obama has lined up consistently on the side of arrogant elitists of the far left. Senator Obama’s words often sound very reasonable and moderate, as well as lofty and inspiring. But everything that he has actually done over the years places him unmistakably with the extreme left elitists.

Sadly, many of those who are enchanted by his rhetoric are unlikely to check out the facts. But nothing is a more real or more important issue than whether what a candidate says is the direct opposite of what he has actually been doing for years.

The old phrase, “a man of high ideals but no principles,” is one that applies all too painfully to Barack Obama today. His words expressing lofty ideals may appeal to the gullible but his long history of having no principles makes him a danger of the first magnitude in the White House.

Amusing

Barack Obama: Guilt By Association


Thomas Sowell hits a home run in this artical about “The Real Obama”.

Obama has many questionable alliances, and the public deserves to know the truth about him before he lies his way into the White House and destroys America.

It is not so much that each of these is problematic; it is the pattern that disqualifies the man. ~ Sarah Palin

Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.”

We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood, or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.

Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands.

Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama’s election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers’ money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance — but an alliance is not just an “association” from being at the same place at the same time.

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that.

Unfortunately, all that most people know about Barack Obama is his own rhetoric and that of his critics. Moreover, some of his more irresponsible critics have made wild accusations — that he is not an American citizen or that he is a Muslim, for example.

All that such false charges do is discredit Obama’s critics in general. Fortunately, there is a documented, factual account of what Barack Obama has actually been doing over the years, as distinguished from what he has been saying during this election campaign, in a new best-selling book.

That book is titled The Case Against Barack Obama by David Freddoso. He starts off in the introduction by repudiating those critics of Obama who “have been content merely to slander him — to claim falsely that he refuses to salute the U.S. flag or was sworn into office on a Koran, or that he was born in a foreign country.”

This is a serious book with 35 pages of documentation in the back to support the things said in the main text. In other words, if you don’t believe what the author says, he lets you know where you can go check it out.

Barack Obama’s being the first serious black candidate for president of the United States is what most people consider remarkable but how he got there is at least equally surprising.

The story of Obama’s political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot — after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates’ petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

Despite his words today about “change” and “cleaning up the mess in Washington,” Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini.

Why much of the public and the media have been so mesmerized by the words and the image of Obama, and so little interested in learning about the factual reality, was perhaps best explained by an official of the Democratic party: “People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done, they come because of what they hope he can be.”

David Freddoso’s book should be read by those people who want to know what the facts are. But neither this book nor anything else is likely to change the minds of Obama’s true believers, who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts.

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