“Liberalism isn’t doing so well lately. In fact I’d go so far as to say that liberalism is becoming downright pathological. The disease is progressive (in more ways than one). Precursors were visible as far back as 1964, and again in the 1980s. Yet this latest uspsurege has been building since 2000, and has never yet spread so widely or threateningly across the body politic.
The chief symptom of liberal distress is an intense form of denial. Liberals now actually deny that conservatives exist. There are, of course, strange, cartoon-like images that liberals call conservative, yet these bear little resemblence to complex conservative human beings with thoughts capable of posing a reasoned challenge to liberal convictions. In psychiatic terms, liberals have split off an all-bad version of conservatism in an effort to defend against the intolerable reality of actual threats to the liberal point of view. I don’t think this denial has quite reached the level of psychosis. Perhaps we could call it high-functioning borderline instead. At any rate, we are now clearly in the realm of pathology.
The problem is visible in the 2012 presidential and vice-presidential debates. If we treat President Obama and the three debate moderators as manifestations of a troubled liberal mind, the progress of the debates makes perfect sense. It is an exercise in the gradual breakdown of denial, accompanied by increasingly frantic efforts to shore that denial up.
The first debate reflected a relatively stable form of denial. It had been going on for years, after all. President Obama and Jim Lehrer simply assumed that no conservative opponent existed. There was thus no need to prepare, no real need to show up, and no need for the moderator to impose time limits or interrupt the conservative with questions. It’s easy enough to crush a stick figure.
Once Romney broke through this first form of denial, more active and less stable attempts at denial were required to hold reality at bay. .........................”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/330800/debates-2012-exercise-liberal-pathology-stanley-kurtz
Sorry, Mr. Kurtz, but it's been a one-way ratchet to socialist hell over the past 80 years.
Bush's medicare drug coverage; No Child Left Behind; Obamacare; rise of the Apparatchik class and crony capitalist "investments" in green energy scams in exchange for campaign money; bankrupting of the US to pay for more liberal voters; EPA assaults on private property rights; violations of centuries of contract law to pay off unions.
Are there any serious conservative wins in the past 80 years? What have we actually conserved?