Posted on 08/14/2012 8:03:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Joan Didion wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." I'd modify that slightly for this presidential election year and say, we tell ourselves stories in order to vote. Which is why Mitt Romney maintains a huge lead in the polls among blue-collar white men.
The differential is staggering. Non-college-educated white men give Romney a 37-point advantage over President Barack Obama according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll. Why would struggling wage earners support a candidate who would give tax cuts to the top 1 percent, a group that controls 43 percent of the wealth in the country, while adding to the tax burdens of people at the lower end of the income scale? Racial issues aside — and I'm not discounting the significant "black president" factor, it comes down to the power of myth and story.
White men have been fed the myth of the rags-to-riches, self-made man, the quintessential American narrative that says hard work and perseverance will equate to success. The idea cemented in the male cerebral cortex is that people who start from nothing can work themselves from the Horatio Alger mailroom to the corner office.
The unflattering flip side of this is that failure is a character flaw. If you don't succeed, you didn't work hard enough. As the story goes, anyone who takes government help falls into this category.
A recent Romney campaign ad draws on this theme by accusing Obama of trying to take the work requirement out of welfare. (A false assertion, by the way.) As CBS News' Bob Schieffer explained, this ad is designed to shore up support among white working-class men. In shades of Willie Horton, the ad offers a racially divisive subtext while reinforcing the self-made-man corollary that people who need government assistance are lazy moochers.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
>>Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Unfortunately, liberal stories are all lies.
When I was small and my grandma caught a child in a lie, she would say they were telling stories.
Conservatives do not need stories.
She was incubated in the progressive academic womb, surrounded and groomed by elites, insulated in a union ivory tower and then plopped down at the St. Pete Times to regurgitate.
re: “Why would struggling wage earners support a candidate who would give tax cuts to the top 1 percent, a group that controls 43 percent of the wealth in the country, while adding to the tax burdens of people at the lower end of the income scale?”
As has already been point out, the second part of her sentence, “while adding to the tax burdens . . .” is a total lie.
But, I want to address the first part of her sentence regarding why “struggling wage earners would support a candidate who would give tax cuts to the top 1%”, (a lie of omission in that Romney/Ryan are proposing tax cuts for everyone, not just the “1%”).
The reason we lowly wage earners would also support tax breaks for the wealthy is that we know it is from the wealthy that JOBS and the MONEY to pay the employees comes - DUH!.
It is also from the private sector that all public employees receive their funding as well. Obama somehow thinks that by growing the public sector, this will stimulate the economy, when as we all know, this simply drains money from the economy.
I’m not saying there is no need for some governmental employees - but, their funding has to come from the private sector. If you want to have a stable tax base to pay truely needed state public employees, then do what you can to support business and it’s growth and maintenence.
Obama thinks business is a never-ending well of money. He shoots, cooks, and eats the golden goose, a new goose may come along to replace it but it will be smaller and weaker, then, he does the same to that goose, then the next one comes that is smaller and weaker than the one before, and so on till there is no golden goose at all.
This is what democrats both local and national do. They never “get it” about business. Just raise business taxes on anything that makes money (or, even if it doesn’t) - if it keeps making a profit or somehow stays in business, then tax it some more. If it goes out of business, then look for the next victim. The problem is the victims are about played out.
Boy, did you dig up a winner here! Can’t wait to read her brilliant insights about the forthcoming GOP convention in Tampa.
Congrats!! Sounds like a great story.
Go Dawgs!!
........."The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity—often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.
Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?
If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.
That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.
That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.
If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?
What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.
But you never had the honesty—then or now—to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.
Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual—both of which you despise.
It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.
[SNIP]
Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left—by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them." David Horowitz
It sounds like Robyn E. Blumner is a racist. The “media” is full of her type these days.
Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Steve Wynn, Sheldon Adelson, George Westinghouse, Harvey Firestone, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Perdue, Sam Walton, Russell Simmons, John Harold Johnson, Michael Dell, Ronald Reagan, John Hancock, George Pullman, P.T. Barnum, W. Clement Stone, A.L. Williams, Ross Perot, Ray Kroc, Larry Ellison, Sean Combs, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Milton S. Hershey, Walt Disney, John Sperling, David Sarnoff, Dwight Eisenhower, Philip Danforth Armour, etc., etc. I could go on and on.
Who wrote this crap? “Julia?”
The idea of America — the experiment — liberty and success.
Thought it was one of those semi-satire articles, alas it is not!
15 years ago or so, I watched that house being bulldozed to oblivion by a big CAT. My aunt and mother were with me. We lived just behind it in a new house built in 1970.
Before the demolition, my mother asked me to try and get something from the well. The base for the well house was laid by my grandpa who lost his entire leg after going to a doctor for the then equivialent of a hangnail on his toe.
He was a carpenter/farmer(necessity) by trade and did things with precision. What my mom asked me to ‘get’ was the piece of the concrete foundation that held the footprints of her’s and my aunt’s adolescent feet imprinted on it the day grandpa laid it. I burned through two concrete abrasive disks and some work to remove that piece. The bottom resting on the dirt was nearly as smooth and precise as the top - that’s the way he did things. I digress, though.
When the CAT got to crunching up the now-flattened house, you could actually see the pine ridge poles my grandpa cobbled out of pine logs to support the roof of that house.
Both my aunt and mom are dead now. The piece of concrete sits on my fireplace hearth and once in a while one of my grand daughters will ask me about it, trying to compare their feet with the imprint.
So every time I read an article by people like Blumner who oppose conservatives, I can't help thinking that if Republicans came out for abortion-on-demand and Dems opposed it, they'd switch sides.
Two hundred years from now, that piece of concrete needs to have a place of prominence in another descendant's home so that every granddaughter in the family can compare their footprint with your mother's and your aunt's.
To be fair, there’s plenty of nepotism and crony capitalism going on in the private sector that has nothing to do with government.
Thank you for this post and your one above.
Progressives want to rob Americans of their right to do what you did, succeed.
They cripple them, then make them hate others who did not follow their progressive lies.
Bump!
what a great story :) very nice. Yes my grandfather was also similar :)
Those companies tend to be less efficient. Something a free market adjusts for rather well.
Robyn, honey, you really need to emigrate to Cuba. You'll love it there. You'll fit right in...
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