Why are liberals so gullible?

American Thinker ^ | August 25, 2008 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

The Democratic National Convention is a great time to reflect on the Conundrum of The Century: Why are our liberal buddies so amazingly gullible? Why do they fall for the most obvious scam artists? Why, when Hillary crashes, do they slobber all over the next edition of God's Anointed on Earth?

When Obama went body surfin' in Hawaii before the convention, we had a chance to hear The Aloha State's very own brand of liberal love. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin quoted one sun-tanned beauty saying:  

"He's genuine. You can feel his aloha,"

... said 41-year-old Sama Evaimalo, a Hanauma Bay tram dispatcher.   

"I never voted in my life, and I said I was going to vote if it was a woman or a black man that was running."    

Well, bless her sweet little aloha. There's another well-informed vote for the Big O. Remember, your vote counts for just as much as Sama Evaimalo's. Aloha-ayy!

A Defect

French thinkers of the Enlightenment used to consider "gullibility" a kind of mental defect. They thought it was a breakdown of the rational intellect.   

Gullibility is not listed in the psychiatry manual today, but it's pretty dysfunctional in real life. If you fall for just about any used car salesman, or any danceaway lover, or any telemarketer, or any smarmy politician, you're going to make big mistakes. It could cost you your country.

John Edwards was a bad 'un, as anybody with a grain of sense could tell as soon as we saw ol' John spending twenty minutes making love to his own reflection in the mirror during the '04 campaign. It reminded me of an old Feiffer cartoon about a New York bachelorette who turns up her nose at one suitor after another, and then goes home, looks in the mirror, and says, "Now you I could like!"

There are loving couples who look like identical twins; they have fallen in love with their own reflections.

In his stellar career suing big corporations, rich doctors, insurance companies and other evil-doers, Edwards' figured out how to play his juries against the Evil Rich. That paid for Edwards' mansion  after he famously channeled the soul of an unborn baby during a lawsuit against an obstetrician who had waited for 90 minutes before doing a Caesarian section. John Edwards felt -- actually felt -- the brain-injured baby speaking through him in his closing arguments to the jury.  

"She speaks to you through me ... And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you."

I don't know if Sama Evaimalo was on that jury, but her brothers and sisters in spirit were. After soaking up all that good aloha they came back with a $ 6.5 million verdict for the plaintiff.  Call it a good 2 million bucks for John Edwards. Edwards' reputation soared in the plaintiff bar, which funds a good deal of the Democratic Party. With the enthusiastic help of other lawyers  Edwards mounted a Robin Hood vs. the Sheriff of Nottingham campaign for the presidency in 2004.

And the liberals fell for it. That's what is shocking. 

Just think about it. From the comfortable limo libs of the New York Times to millions of little old ladies in tennis shoes, they fell down and Believed in John. Edwards' own wife, who should have known better, made a play for public sympathy and support for John's campaign after she developed cancer.  It was shameless, but the media whooped it up. Rielle Hunter, flying around with him on the campaign plane and cheating, apparently just trusted his plain ole' boy sincerity. Even Walter Isaacs, grand old lodge-master of all right-thinking journalists, fell for him like a school girl.  

All the professional media fell flat on their faces for John Edwards except the National Enquirer, and you know what they're like. Not real professionals. 

H.L. Mencken would have busted a gut laughing. 

It's not surprising that hustlers like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama rise to the top of the Democratic Party. What continues to astonish the saner fraction of the world is the abject gullibility of their followers. If the libs ever wised up, the Democratic Party would have to go out of business.   But there's no danger of that. There's another one born every minute. They call them infants, and if they're liberals they never have to grow up.

Fools, Prophets and Knaves

The Left could be divided up into fools, prophets and knaves. The knaves are just the Edwards-Clinton-Obama types, expert hustlers who can bring the crowds of suckers to their knees -- just watch the Convention.  There's a sadistic-sociopathic kernel in some of the knaves of the Left; they're not satisfied with exploiting dupes, they need to rub it in. That's what brought down Bill Clinton; he had to stick it to more and more of his victims, to prove that the old mojo still worked. These are not nice people. Some of them are malevolent.

One step beyond the knaves and fools are the Prophets of the Left. Karl Marx himself was a knave with a prophet complex, who was notoriously malicious -- to his fellow radicals, to his wife Jenny and his lifelong friend and benefactor Engels, and to ethnic groups he hated, like the Jews. (But then he hated Christians, too. He was catholic in his hatreds, so to speak.) Marx was a nasty customer in his personal life, and his malevolent legacy as a prophet should come as no surprise. With Marx, the political really was personal.

Today we have a glut of messianic liberals. The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg just explained the global warming fraud in a whole new way: Prophet competition. To economist Lomborg, the reason we get ever weirder scare stories about the global warming scam is that different prophets compete against each other.   In the bad old days you put up a soapbox in the town square and kept yelling The End of the World Is At Hand!!! as long as people kept dropping coins in your hat. Then you found another spot and did it again. 

Today, with modern media, the biggest Prophets compete each other out of business, just like Wal-Mart competes against the mom 'n pop stores. For every world-renowned Prophet Algore there must be thousands of others who are just sick with envy.  Al has cornered the market on Global Doom. We think Algore has it in for the American economy, but he's actually looking to destroy his fellow doomsayers. Prophet envy.

So we have the Algores, the Carters and the Obamas -- because Barack and Michelle just love that Prophet schtick, too. They almost believe it themselves.

What staggers me is the lib masses -- "masses" is a very Marxist word -- who always come back for more, even after they find out they've been duped again.  These are the people who are honestly disappointed by John Edwards's cheatin' heart. They were shocked by Monica's Blue Dress -- but not enough to blame Bill Clinton. He was an innocent victim.

The sucker masses include our "professional media," slack-jawed dupes, every single one. They just never admit they've been had. Even Dan Rather couldn't bring himself to admit that he had been suckered out of his job as the Most Trusted Man in America by some wild-eyed Bush-hater out of Texas.   

The liberal masses are True Believers, the little old ladies of both sexes, who hate-hate-hate George W. Bush so much that when one Saviorette gets dirt on her skirt they desperately beat the bushes for a New Messiah to replace last year's model. Liberal victims are terribly out of place in the bloody jungle of politics. They should never vote. They are too needy emotionally, and their yearnings drive them to worship any idols in sight.  They can't accept that John Edwards would ever lie to them. Or Bill Clinton. Or Barack the Savior. Never!

Tough Minds/Tender Minds

William James called the libs of his time the "tender minded," in contrast to the "tough-minded" people who try to stay in touch with reality, like farmers, plumbers and accountants. If your toilet leaks all over the floor you can't deny reality; but if you're in the media game, fantasy-mongering is your bread and butter. It's a huge difference between human beings.

In the 19th century New England grew tender-minded folk in large batches, flocking to hear uplifting speeches from Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York City was for tougher characters at that time, and not many liberals survived there until the sentimental middle class grew big and prosperous. By the 20th century New York City was taken over by libs -- they called themselves "progressives" -- with well-known results: street crime,  violent schools, family breakdown, broken windows, ugly graffiti, and of course the biggest scammers of all running City Hall. (In Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has now been caught doing exactly the same thing.)

"Sophisticated" Europe is going through the same farce. The Scamming Class are called socialists over there, which is more honest than the word "liberal" -- which used to mean somebody who believed in liberty. Today it means the flummery of the Mommy State. Socialism is very appealing to Mommies, Would-be Mommies, and Those Who Still Need their Mommies. But of course it's government of the scammers, by the scammers, and for the scammers. That describes Europe's new Ruling Class, which in the EU machinery has now completely protected itself from the vulgar business of elections.

That's what our Obamanoids have in mind for the United States. Marxism is the revolt of the apparatchiks -- the Ruling Class -- against the people. It depends on convincing the most gullible that they are really in control. Obamanism is Marxism Light. It's the Swedish Model of Perfected Humanity.

When you see Obama's next Nuremberg Rally with his nose in the air, take it as a sign of things to come.  He really does despise us, you know. But he feels sorry for us, too, because he knows better. Contempt and pity go hand in hand. Maybe the liberal masses just love being pitied. Maybe they just accept being weak, helpless, and not too bright. Good grief.

Liberalism doesn't change. What might change, over time, is for more sensible folk to recover their voices, after being completely shut out of the public square by the Sixties Left. The answer to liberal gullibility is debate, debate, debate. Open up those minds, tell them it's ok to think your own thoughts, it's ok to be different. Intellectual courage matters.

The media should never be run by a professional guild. Monopolies kill competing voices.  Real thinking only thrives with vigorous intellectual competition.  That's why our universities have become brain-dead company towns. That's why the Old Media need to go out of business, and the sooner the better.

When America rediscovers open debate, freedom will thrive again. The victims of media delusions will discover a world of intellectual excitement and danger. True Believers will have to deal with the reality of Doubt.

Here's to it. Vive la liberté!

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

[Hildy]

Because they make mortals their Gods....that’s what happens when you have no spiritual base.

[ETL]

Also see the “Useful Idiot” Syndrome.

[JasonC]

Good column, worthy of the Mencken he cites, and all true.

[wardaddy]

because much like every homosexual I have ever known....they too are neurotic.

it’s classic projection and transference of that neurosis that commands their leftist redress

[FlingWingFlyer]

“You’ve got stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” - Aaron Tippin

[ETL]

Useful idiots
By Thomas Sowell

LENIN is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years -- including our own times.

Stalin's man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust -- and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in Communist China.

The most famous of these was the New York Times' Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Duranty assured his readers that "there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be." Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on "rumor factories" with anti-Soviet bias.

It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always identified in politically correct circles as "right-wing." Yet when the Soviets' own statistics on the deaths during the famine were finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.

Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20 million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet famine. One celebrated "expert" on China wrote: "I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famines." Horrifying as the pre-Communist famines were, they never killed as many people as Mao's famine did.

Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the gulags and after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said: "To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I'm not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."

Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.

Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives. Some were shot trying to get past the Berlin wall and hundreds of thousands of "boat people" were drowned trying to escape a Communist Vietnam that many useful idiots were celebrating from inside free democracies. Many who escaped from the Soviet Union to the West during the Second World War were sent back by American authorities, except for those who committed suicide rather than go back.

Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would be an "insult" to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral equivalence line.

Turner's instructions to the historian who put this series together was that he wanted no "triumphalism," meaning apparently no depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled "CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy," edited by Arnold Beichman.

Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into the useful idiots of the future.

JWR contributor Thomas Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author, most recently, of The Quest for Cosmic Justice.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell090100.asp

[Gondring]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

[JennysCool]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

What would you have liked for an alternative at the time?

[Tzimisce]

They’re not gullible, they’re agenda driven which is a HUGE difference.

It’s not that they don’t know the truth in many cases, it’s that they deny it.

Examples: Surge Worked, Clinton Lied, 9-11 was done by terrorists....

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

“Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West.”

This is a big part of it. It’s just too damned simple, this idea that people would risk their lives for freedom and opportunity, things the intelligentsia have for “free” and feel so guilty about having, while those poor ones do not. The whole theory behind the thing just isn’t complicated enough. It doesn’t have the intellectual depth the libs need to support their self-assumed intellectual-based righteousness.

Therefore, you have to be a dumb neanderthal reactionary conservative to think that way, that freedom is immensely valuable. It’s a piece of irresolvable cognitive dissonance for them. The elites have the freedom, but it’s free, so it’s not worth fighting for, nor is it worth getting misty-eyed about. And yet....if it’s free....and it just grows on trees....then how on earth can some folks be so crazy to want it enough to risk their lives to get it?

I’m serious. Even today, this minute, Mexicans flooding over the Southern border exemplify this perfectly. They are poor innocents to the elites; but in no way can any criticism of the Mex government be leveled. Nor can any appreciation of exactly what the illegals are striving for be acknowledged. Freedom is free, right? So WE must be the bastards for denying illegals that which is free.

[neverdem]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

I volunteered for McCain in 2000. I volunteered for Bush in 2004. I was hoping for Thompson this year, so I changed my registration to pubbie. I'll continue to vote on the Conservative line most likely, at least until I leave NY. I can't see helping rats. The world is too nasty, and the left is too crazy.

[x_plus_one]

Liberals are sure that they can legislate morality. They are sure that with enough force we can all be made to give up our right to bear arms, our right to free speech and that the unborn never had any rights to speak of....

Those afflicted with the bossy older sister syndrome, the 'I know better than you' types and liberal academic superstars all cluster together to warm themselves with their mutual hot air. They absorb the light of life like massive black holes hungry for the next star to wander too close by.

[Califreak]

[cricket]

To be a Liberal; a willing suspension of the rational is required. After than. . .it’s easy.

[Christian4Bush]

mark

[neverdem]

I wouldn’t be so quick to confuse being gullible with short term memory impairment from reefer madness. Alzheimer’s starts with short term memory impairment. The war on drugs has morphed into the the war on guns & drugs.

[highlander_UW]

Because they think they’re smarter than everyone else and therefore immune to being fooled...which leads to their being fooled.

[Wpin]

“Fall for Bush”?

I didn’t fall for Bush, I followed and am damn proud of it. This man liberated over 50 million people, reduced taxes and did his best to remove democrat bigotry from our public education schools. He has brought prosperity, freedom, leadership, sound moral judgement, and integrity to our nation. It is no wonder that nation after nation in Europe is electing conservative leaders that are openly pro-American. It is also no wonder that with this brilliant mans war on terror strategy al qaeda is losing ground in it’s own home turf. Not just by us but by middle eastern folks who no longer believe in the terrorists cause. How dare you equivacate President Bush with the low life democrat scoundrels the author is talking about. And shame on you for putting down people like myself who believe in a courageous man who has stood up for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the best in world history. Perhaps you should look in the mirror to truly see who has fallen.

[BigCinBigD]

Because for the most part they are drug addled morons.