Obama Unleashes the Left

The Wall Street Journal ^ | 5/7/2014 | DANIEL HENNINGER

[Beave Meister]

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge. It's a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left's increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard.

Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers's speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left's long-sought replacement for the Vietnam War. Brandeis terminated its invitation to Somali writer Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam violated the school's "core values."

Azusa Pacific University "postponed" an April speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid "hurting our faculty and students of color." Come again? It will "hurt" them? Oh yes. In a recent New Republic essay, Jennie Jarvie described the rise of "trigger warnings" that professors are expected to post with their courses to avoid "traumatizing" students.

[Beave Meister]

As George Orwell said, "So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot." The left does not think past the moment, they are fortunate that the opposition has the foresight and values to not use the left's tactics and rules to crush them in the future when they are not in charge.

[2ndDivisionVet]

Someday we will.

[kiryandil]

[GeronL]

It’s called fascism.

[GeronL]

When the time comes, and they are making sure it will come, we can’t afford to show mercy on the fascists

[Graewoulf]

Was the inconvenient, but bloody, 2012 Behghazi Massacre a State Department approved massacre, or just a well-planned end result of a tightly controlled Foreign Policy that leads from behind?

Soon to be Chairman Trey Gowdy needs to get to the bottom of this, - - - or does he?

Maybe former prosecutor Gowdy needs to get to the TOP of this?

Ponder this:

“- - - - get to the bottom of - - - -”

For strict adherence to The HE-WHO Transparency Executive Order, it must be fully disclosed that this is a phrase-quote taken directly from the Obama Community Organizer’s Handbook, commonly known as OCOH.

OCOH clearly lists a partial list of the desired effects of “getting to the bottom” of a useful crisis as follows:

* Attention will be directed away from HE-WHO chose which crisis-of-the-day was worthy of his arrogant attention, usually requiring a teleprompter set, but often just the simple use of a pen or a phone;

* Before those at the bottom are partially found out, they must receive a severe tongue-lashing by HE-WHO, using all manner of vile accusations, including, but not limited to, the most hated of all phrases: making BONEHEADED Decisions;

* Before the crisis is incompletely resolved, Executive Orders must be put in place by HE-WHO himself “TO MAKE SURE THAT THIS NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!”

* Additional inquiry into this phony crisis by The Enemies of Obamanation, must be clearly labeled as “political football,” or in persistent cases the ultimate PC Label White Guilt/Shame Word: “Racists.”

[43north]

I agree. There is no future in timidity. The libtards must be utterly and totally destroyed. After all, its what they want to do to us.

[Billthedrill]

It's obvious that the far left has decided there are no longer constraints on what it can do to anyone who disagrees with it. How did this happen? Who let the dogs out? The answer is not university presidents. The answer is that the Obama administration let the dogs out.

This is the rotten fruit of the tree of "transformative government". It has become painfully obvious that there is an enormous cultural push taking place and that those of us who have been identified as enemies will not simply be stilled, but eliminated. The perpetrators know perfectly well that they are not the majority, but a temporarily empowered minority that may, through violence, have an effect disproportionate to their actual numbers.

No single election is going to stem this relentless hatred, this deliberate provocation, this totalitarian insanity. The culture war has turned hot. It didn't need to be this way but we have what we have.

[dowcaet]

Exactly. If we want our country to return to its rightful place as the leaders of the free world we need to destroy the left in every institution in this country. We can’t compromise with these people anymore. The Democratic Party speaks with one voice today, and that is of socialism and excessive governance in all of our lives. How the hell can you find common ground with people like that if you believe in individual freedom and liberty?

[blueplum]

releasing an Education Department list of 55 colleges that are "under investigation" for possible Title IX violations. Not formally cited but "under investigation." The list includes such notorious Animal Houses as Catholic University, Swarthmore, Knox College, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Law School. In truth, every school in America is effectively on the list.

The college that turned down oscar-winning Dustin Black, Pasadena City College, then selected a guy named Walsh to give their commencement speech. 'Activists' investigated his background and found Walsh was a 7th Day Adventist (although the 7th Days seem to have some confusion as to whether he is or isn't one). The activists didn't like his sermons, some of which were posted on utube. A 'public outcry' was fabricated and now the Left wants him removed from his public service position because the Left believes anyone with religious views can't possibly function in or be fit for public jobs or commencement speeches. The kicker? Walsh is black. http://www.whittierdailynews.com/20140505/pasadena-investigation-of-eric-walsh-to-focus-on-job-performance

[Disambiguator]

How the hell can you find common ground with people like that if you believe in individual freedom and liberty?

You can't.

[tcrlaf]

“they are fortunate that the opposition has the foresight and values to not use the left’s tactics and rules to crush them in the future when they are not in charge.”

I’ve been chiding liberals I know with, “Just THINK of all the wonderful things the next Republican President is going to do with all of these new presidential powers Obama has discovered!!”

[txhurl]

They’re making their stand.

Question is, where will we put them all once we destroy them (politically) as the infestation they are?

We have to de-fund the departments they will run to after being voted out. There is no job demand for these parasites in the private sector.

[Little Pig]

Just as “Islam delenda est”,

so

“Leftism delenda est”

[Democrat_media]

wow I agree with all of the freeper posts i’ve read on this thread. i haven’t read them all but I agree with all I read . good thread imo

[nathanbedford]

Back in the halcyon days of the Republic in the 1960s before race riots tore the nation apart, I can be forgiven for adhering to a belief that free speech was enshrined in the Constitution and was sought after by all people of goodwill. In those days the Democrat party and the left could at least plausibly lay claim to a definition of "liberal" which retained its historic meaning which, at root, stood for freedom of expression.

In those days the siren of the ACLU seduced me for a time as exciting ideals of individual liberty and freedom of expression were being propounded by the Warren court. The frontiers of individual freedom were advancing! I was young, I was earnest, and, God knows, I was naïve.

I was naïve because, although I never wavered from conservative conviction, I believed the left when it said it was advancing freedom of expression out of regard for the Constitution. It did not occur to me to suspect them of duplicity, of exploiting the Constitution while they were out of power in the law courts, culturally and in the popular mind. Alas, they advanced the "liberal" arguments for freedom of expression quite cynically with no intention of observing those principles once they gained legal and cultural power.

Unlike Hillary, I had no idea who Saul Alinsky was nor was I informed about the Frankfurt School. Rather, it all sounded so noble. Perhaps I am still uninformed but I can think of no example in history in which the left, having gained power, has kept their end of the "liberal" bargain. Does freedom of expression thrive any place where the left dominates, in North Korea, China, Cuba, Venezuela…?

Having lost that bit of naïveté, or rather having it wrenched from me, I had to come to terms with the understanding that the left is wholly untroubled by conscience in this or any other regard. They do not operate out of a belief system which is in any way congruent with ours -or the belief system of any decent person. They proceed from a principle that all means are justified by their utopian ends.

Appeals to conscience leaves them unmoved because their computers function with a different operating system, their conscience is alien to us, using the same words they speak and hear a different language. In this Orwellian world it is pointless for us to try to restore the Enlightenment's definition of "liberal," because that is to take a knife to a gunfight.

[GeronL]

bump

[Gene Eric]

I make a distinction between the Left and liberals — the latter not necessarily relying on the force of statism to ensure the realization of its irrational ideology.

[Talisker]

I make a distinction between the Left and liberals — the latter not necessarily relying on the force of statism to ensure the realization of its irrational ideology.

Leftists are liberal controllers.

Liberals are Leftist automatons who cannot act without Leftist instruction. The "achievement" of liberalism is the utter surrender of personal conscience to the collective. The "achievement" of Leftists is the control and use of liberals as a social weapon to destroy Western Civilization in favor of absolute collectivist tyranny.

[nathanbedford]

Gene: I quite agree with your distinction. I was trying to draw that out with reference to my own history since as the 1960s.

My thought is the liberals make the high-minded public face of the left and lose power to the outright leftists the more their movement gains power. Today, the leftists are dominating the Democrat party and we see the dismaying specter of a real although crypto communist put in charge of our affairs. As they have gained dominant political power in Washington and cultural power throughout society such as we see illustrated on campuses, liberals increasingly abandon the high ideals which they had advocated to gain power in the first place.

If we consider the historical instances of the left gaining power, the French revolution, the Spanish Civil War, fascism, Nazism, Russian and Chinese communism, we see the pattern played out over and over again. Always, individual rights, especially freedom of expression, must give way to a more important utopian goal, a collective goal in which the individual is minimized and one "enlightened" set of values is discarded for the new. The left as distinguished from liberals whom they themselves often despise as dupes, are never in doubt about the endgame.

I suppose we might equate those leftists (read Barack Obama for example) with elitists here in America and in Europe and with the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union.