Liberals don't want to make fun of Obama because they feel it will weaken him.

Liberals don’t want to make fun of Obama because they feel that it will weaken him if they honestly point out his foibles and his short-comings. The narrative is that Obama is sort of a god (in fact, Evan Thomas of Newsweek said exactly that.) Gods don’t have any flaws. Thus, if they point out a single flaw, they are entirely destroying the narrative

Conservatives don’t think of their leaders as “messiahs” (or mythical knights in the fictional kingdom of Camelot) and thus, poking fun at them is not sacrilegious. To the Modern Liberal who looks to their leaders the way small children look to their parents, making fun of Obama is simply beyond them.

From Evan Sayet author of the book, “The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks And Why He’s Convinced That Ignorance Is Bliss.

Modern Liberalism is a utopian ideology that is predicated on the notion that, since mankind lost paradise when Adam and Eve ate from the apple of knowledge, then mankind can return to paradise if only we’d all just “regurgitate the apple” and give up all knowledge of right and wrong. The notion is that, if we can eliminate the quest for what I call “the better,” then there’d be nothing for people to disagree about. If people didn’t disagree about things, then they wouldn’t fight; and, if they didn’t fight, then of course they’d never go to war. Peace on Earth — in fact, paradise — can be achieved, they’re convinced, if only they could eliminate the quest for the better. This is the environment that is found in kindergarten, where every child’s finger painting is declared “beautiful,” and every child is declared special (but none more special than any other), and where every child gets a cookie, but no child gets two. Modern liberalism is predicated on the notion that, if we could just retard the child’s moral and intellectual growth at a level prior to his having begun to learn about the better, then paradise will reign.

It is essential that one understand that the “Modern Liberal” is not simply a liberal who happens to be alive today. I call them “Liberals” only because they typically call themselves Liberals, and I felt that any other word would fail to make clear just how prevalent the ideology is. I inserted the modifier “Modern” to make clear that they are not who they say they are, nor are they what “Liberals” used to be. In fact, the Modern Liberal is as much at war against “classical” liberal values as he is against conservative ones, for mature values are not found in the kindergarten classroom, and they can be the stuff about which people might disagree, fight and even war.

Modern Liberalism is a new ideology — or rather, one that is new in its prevalence to the Modern Liberal era (post-World War II through today). It traces its call for the rejection of intellect to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sought to replace thinking with passion and feeling (just like the small child). But whereas Rousseau’s ideology of abject and intentional stupidity was roundly rejected by people who lived in times and places where intelligence was required to avoid and survive real world difficulties like disease, hunger, poverty and physical pain, in post-World War II America — with science and technology having just about eradicated these things — an ideology that was based upon recreating paradise by retarding the moral and intellectual growth of its followers found greater acceptance.

These are what I call the first two Laws of the Unified Field Theory of Liberalism. The first is that thinking is an act of bigotry to be avoided by all moral people and reviled when seen practiced by others. The rationale behind the outlawing of thought is that, anything a person concludes is going to have been so tainted by his personal prejudices – prejudices all people possess as simply part of the human experience based on things like the color of their skin, the nation of their ancestry, their height, weight, sex and so on, that the only way not to be a bigot is to never think at all.

The Second Law is that indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy, it leads — and, in fact can only lead — to the Modern Liberal siding with evil over good, wrong over right and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. After all, if no culture, no religion, no form of governance or anything else is better than anything else, then the Modern Liberal has no explanation for success and failure. To those to whom indiscriminateness is a moral imperative (because its opposite is discrimination), success – as proved by nothing other than the fact that it has succeeded is all the proof that’s required for them to conclude that some injustice must have taken place. The same is true with failure. If nothing is better than anything else, then failure – as proved by nothing other than the fact that it has failed – serves as definitive proof that the failure has somehow been victimized. And the same is true of good and evil. If no person, culture, religion and so on is better or worse than any other, then anything society deems to be good can be said to be so only because of society’s bigotries. This led Thomas Sowell to conclude that, to those I call the Modern Liberals, “That which is held in esteem qualifies to be their target; that which is held in disdain qualifies to be their mascot.”

I have no doubt and don’t make any other claim that the Modern Liberal’s purpose is altruistic. Their desire is, in fact, the ultimate in altruism: to create heaven on Earth. It’s just not mature, has no relationship to the grown-up, real world and, ultimately, because it doesn’t, it leads them to policies that are invariably destructive. Those who hounded former Harvard President Larry Summers off of campus were doing so out of “altruism” and the desire to end “sexism” by making it virtually illegal to consider differences between the sexes, but they did nothing to advance the cause of science or promote sound policy that can only come from the truth.

It is essential that one understand that the “Modern Liberal” is not simply a liberal who happens to be alive today. I call them “Liberals” only because they typically call themselves Liberals, and I felt that any other word would fail to make clear just how prevalent the ideology is. I inserted the modifier “Modern” to make clear that they are not who they say they are, nor are they what “Liberals” used to be. In fact, the Modern Liberal is as much at war against “classical” liberal values as he is against conservative ones, for mature values are not found in the kindergarten classroom, and they can be the stuff about which people might disagree, fight and even war.

[Hayek’s] "liberal of the old type" is of course what we would call a classical liberal, not a modern "liberal", who is a socialist who has Orwellianly appropriated the word "liberal”. - FreedomPoster, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1394906/posts?page=23#23

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.
The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
Here Hayek nails the "Orwellian" concept of word-meaning inversion in "Newspeak.”
Hayek, in a preface to the 1956 edition of the full Serfdom text, discusses the American inversion of the word “liberalism.”
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term "liberal" in the original nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And, make no mistake, in America "conservative" is a negative connotation.
Americans believe in progress of, by, and for the people; that is the patent meaning of
Article 1 Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
American belief in progress is why the reactionary socialists in America put on the mantle, in Newspeak, of being “Progressives.” But of course, the “progress” which they favor is progress of, by, and for the government, not progress of the people.
It will take you a long way in translating leftist Newspeak if, whenever you hear the word "social" as a word or the root of a word, or you hear the word "public," you mentally pencil in the word "government" as a possible replacement. Thus "socialism" is accurately translated into "governmentism" - which is, aptly a synonym for "tyranny." And thus when the leftist says, "society should feed its children" no one can seriously question that someone in society should and must - but the leftist actually means nothing other than that the government should do it. "The public sector" is a circumlocution for "the government," too - and (as Milton Friedman vigorously asserts) a "public school" is a government school.
It is not to be thought, BTW, that journalists are appropriately called “liberals.” There is of course not a scintilla of difference between the ~~thought~~ feelings of the “liberal” and those of the “objective journalist” - but, in Newspeak grammar, the mere difference of the hat the journalist is wearing makes labeling a journalist anything but “objective” gauche in the extreme (double plus unhood, as Orwell would put it).

It is essential that one understand that the “Modern Liberal” is not simply a liberal who happens to be alive today. I call them “Liberals” only because they typically call themselves Liberals, and I felt that any other word would fail to make clear just how prevalent the ideology is. I inserted the modifier “Modern” to make clear that they are not who they say they are, nor are they what “Liberals” used to be. In fact, the Modern Liberal is as much at war against “classical” liberal values as he is against conservative ones, for mature values are not found in the kindergarten classroom, and they can be the stuff about which people might disagree, fight and even war.

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.
The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
Here Hayek nails the "Orwellian" concept of word-meaning inversion in "Newspeak.”
Hayek, in a preface to the 1956 edition of the full Serfdom text, discusses the American inversion of the word “liberalism.”
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term "liberal" in the original nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And, make no mistake, in America "conservative" is a negative connotation.
Americans believe in progress of, by, and for the people; that is the patent meaning of
Article 1 Section 8. The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
American belief in progress is why the reactionary socialists in America put on the mantle, in Newspeak, of being “Progressives.” But of course, the “progress” which they favor is progress of, by, and for the government, not progress of the people.
It will take you a long way in translating leftist Newspeak if, whenever you hear the word "social" as a word or the root of a word, or you hear the word "public," you mentally pencil in the word "government" as a possible replacement. Thus "socialism" is accurately translated into "governmentism" - which is, aptly a synonym for "tyranny." And thus when the leftist says, "society should feed its children" no one can seriously question that someone in society should and must - but the leftist actually means nothing other than that the government should do it. "The public sector" is a circumlocution for "the government," too - and (as Milton Friedman vigorously asserts) a "public school" is a government school.
It is not to be thought, BTW, that journalists are appropriately called “liberals.” There is of course not a scintilla of difference between the ~~thought~~ feelings of the “liberal” and those of the “objective journalist” - but, in Newspeak grammar, the mere difference of the hat the journalist is wearing makes labeling a journalist anything but “objective” gauche in the extreme (double plus unhood, as Orwell would put it).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.