No one has yet left Dara any comments. I feel almost certain that's about to change.
Comments on selected items from Dara's article:What happened?
You lost the election. You lost it badly.
A score of homophobic bans on gay marriage passed.
And so the pathological insinuations begin quickly. Dems just can't help themselves.
The Senate Minority leader ousted for the first time in 52 years. The popular vote not only in Bush’s favor, but a few million people in his favor. The first actual majority vote for a President since his father in 1988.
It is sweet, isn't it?
...if Bush could fraudulently win as a candidate four years ago...
The ubiquitous Democrat self-deluding mantra. Isn't the denial phase of mourning supposed to end eventually? Perpetually staring at hanging chads will make you cross-eyed.
How does a progressive keep going after this?
Either A) She finds lots of like-minded friends and family to prop up her false beliefs, or B) She begins to learn the painful truth: She's wrong.
My father jokes, “Remember the Reagan years, when Republicans were happy to just ignore the poor people?”
And that nasty Reagan went and lifted most of those ignored poor people out of poverty with one of the most vibrant economies in history.
...changing the government’s legal interpretation of the Second Amendment to bring it in line with the NRA for the first time ever.
Changing it to bring it more in line with the original intent of the authors of the Bill of Rights? Sounds like a good move.
Declaring the policy of the United States to be preemptive warfare on their own terms.
Preemptive warfare following repeated attacks on US citizens, at home and abroad, by IslamoTerrorists and the repeated, flagrant violation of all international law by a brutal, narcissistic dictator...if you can truly call that preemptive.
Chipping further and further away at a woman’s right to choose.
Translation: Further affirming an unborn child's right to live and not face summary execution at the hands of a death doctor acting to preserve the mother's carefree lifestyle. Again, good for us!
Making homosexuals the burning effigy to draw out more support.
Translation: Further affirming the sanctity and social importance of the time-honored institution of marriage. Reacting with revulsion to the depraved, frontal assault waged by the professed enemies of marriage and family. May we continue with redoubled effort.
Bush defeated John McCain in the Republican primary by starting a gossip campaign stating that McCain had a black child out of wedlock.
...and I have a hand-typed memo from 1971 from his campaign director proving that Bush was the source of these rumors. The source is unimpeachable.
The politics of hate are no longer a goal; they’re the tactic as well.
Correction: The politics of hate truth are no longer a goal; they’re the tactic as well.
I still can’t quite believe that it’s become acceptable political discourse to stand up and argue that a discrete and insular minority group should have less legal rights than the majority.
I still can't believe the overt perversion of facts necessary to come up with the idea that failure to give additional benefits to an immoral and disease-ridden lifestyle constitutes deprivation of rights. You don't have the right to marry someone of the same sex; I don't have that right either. You may marry someone of the opposite sex and receive exactly the same benefits I receive from marriage. We're equal under the law.
I can’t believe that the politics of hatred and prejudice have become a better election tactic than running on your platform.
The only hatred and prejudice I have seen before, during and after the election have been:
- From the left: Blatant racism in attacks on Dr. Condoleeza Rice and Justice Clarence Thomas.
- From the left: Incessant anti-Christian bigotry and juvenile name-calling aimed at all conservatives and Southerners in particular
- From the right: A pronounced intolerance for B.S. and hypocrisy from the Left and the Legacy Media
Good for us.
I was calling up stores in the mall at 10 years old to say that they shouldn’t sell fur because it killed animals, because I was so sure that if I could just tell them, they would change. I just assumed that people did bad things because they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong, and if I showed them, they would stop. I don’t know when it finally came home to me that sometimes people do the wrong thing because they didn’t care about injustice, or that they hold values that make an unjust result seem to them worth striving for.
And sometimes people live stridently certain of their innate moral superiority, derived from... their innate moral superiority.
Arguments about making abortion illegal again, and ending all gun control, and continuing and intensifying the oppression of homosexuals provided a rallying cry for the right, and they clung to it even as we sink further into a morass of military casualties, a tanking economy, and systematic destruction of the social programs that progressives fought so hard for fifty years ago.
- Killing another human being should be illegal.
- Ending infringements on the Constitutionally guaranteed right to arms and effective self-defense is a good thing.
- Homosexuality will be its own undoing. The laws of nature don't give a crap about the gay/lesbian protestations about rights and equality; they'll just keep dying from STDs and lack of reproduction anyway. We will, however, do everything we can to prevent the indoctrination of our children with their depraved and destructive propaganda.
- You, dear lady, have no clue what a "morass" is. While we regularly and deeply mourn the loss of every single member of our military killed in action, this war pales in comparison to others that have come before. Talk to a WWII veteran about the word "morass".
- The economy is doing fine, much to Dems' chagrin.
- You mean the steaming, smelly pile of failed social programs left behind by all clear-thinking people who have dared to assess their viability and efficacy? Those programs?
...the closest we ever come is towards the rich white plutocrats oppressing the rest of the country...
Oh, poor you. You live in such a terribly oppressive country. Isn't it horrible that you have the freedom to write such critiques without the likelihood that doing so would mean your children would be executed in front of you? In your excruciating, oppressed life, have you been brutally beaten for showing your ankles in public? To even use the word "oppression" in the USA is a naive, sad joke.
Dara, your plaintive diatribe serves only to rehash the stale leftovers of the Left: The weak are oppressed. The corporations are taking over the world. The Right-Wing hates everyone who doesn't think like they do. The VRWC stole everything I hold dear in this life. Blah blah blah.
People don't like B.S. served up with a side of whining propaganda even when it's fresh.
>>>Along with the anger, I've also heard a lot of disgust. Several people have said they feel ashamed to be an American, and I've heard "they deserve him" a couple of times. Is this response only amongst your college friends? Everyone I know is thrilled. We aren't a nation of college students. Clearly, democracy, that is, one-person-one-vote, means that the majority rules. In my experience of the last thirty days, this idea is hated by Democrats when the majority doesn't rule in their favor. Because I prefer a moral man over a previous president who lied under oath and got off scott free, or even because I prefer W over a man who acknowledges faking one Purple Heart and who wrote in his diary that he "met with terrorists" after returning from Viet Nam, I am now viewed by the Left as a small-minded Christian homophobe who married his sister, with no education, and who wants to herd those who don't agree with him into camps. I can't believe people that want to defund the Boy Scouts, take God out of the Pledge and the schools, remove Christmas carols in favor of "holiday celebrations", tax me for the food I eat, take our guns, and make racist comments about Condi Rice are preaching to me about being "intolerant".
The Democrats, once the party of FDR, once fought for the little guy. They pushed back against the robber barons, they stood up for minorities, they championed the rights of women. But ever since twelve years ago, they have defended (and still defend) a rich, powerful white guy, ignoring his lies to a grand jury (which you know would have put you or I in jail), ignored serial gropings of defenseless women, looked the other way at the charges of Juanita Broderick's rape, and most of the Democrat senators didn't even take the short walk to the Ford building to view the evidence against him. Bill Clinton lost you the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and is the main reason you will soon lose the Supreme Court...and he won't shut up and go away, and you continue to fawn over him because he kept abortion legal. My president has three people of color at Cabinet level...and you won't hear a kind word about him, because the people who preach tolerance to me absolutely, frothing at the mouth HATE W. How do you reconcile that?
>>>But I don't think that will ever happen. My father jokes, "Remember the Reagan years, when Republicans were happy to just ignore the poor people?"
My father says that the way to help poor people is to give them a job. When you give nothing buy handouts, the incentive to work withers and dies along with their self-esteem. (A much proclaimed Democrat Value. It is more important to feel good about yourself than to actually accomplish anything.) The smartest thing I can do is make rich people richer, so they can afford to hire more people who can earn a living. JFK lowered taxes, and the economy took off. It worked then; it worked now.
Republicans say "Every person has the ability to educate themselves, to become better, to make themselves a success in a great country that expects everyone to become all they can be." Democrats say, "You poor little person from any group except white men, you are hideously oppressed and obviously can't be expected to become better educated, get a better job, or really amount to anything without government money to pay for it, you sad thing. You need the Democrats to vote money out of the pockets of other people who made themselves successful. Vote us in, and we'll keep you on the gravy train. And remember, people like Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas and the new Hispanic Attorney General aren't really examples of hard-working people who you should want to be like. Just remember all the minorities we put in cabinet level positions! There's...well...umm...uhh..."
If anybody has a positive view of minorities, it's the Republicans. You saw the black defectors in this election who saw through the Dems. Just wait for the next time. Small business owners know who is going to soak them, and who's not.
>>>He's right; those days seem like halcyon twilights of tolerance. Look at the policy goals Bush was able to accomplish after an election he didn't win-
Take the advice my Liberal friends gave me during the Clinton years..."Move on!"
>>>changing the government's legal interpretation of the Second Amendment to bring it in line with the NRA for the first time ever.
The Founding Fathers were afraid of King George's "big government" where he had all the firepower to make those second-class Englishmen in America do as they were told. They didn't want that error to occur again. Blame your Liberal professors for not teaching you any American history.
>>>Declaring the policy of the United States to be preemptive warfare on their own terms.
For the last hundred years we have had that right, by virtue of being a superpower, powered by our free-enterprise-based economy, the envy of the world.
Hitler never attacked us. The Japanese did, in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But Hitler? Nope. Based on your argument, we should have left Hitler in power. And that tells me about both your reasoning and your politics. Saddam fed people into plastic shredders while their families watched, he jailed five-year-olds as political prisoners, he conspired with the highest ups in the UN to skim billions of dollars off a corrupt "oil-for-food" program, in part through the son of the UN's leader, starving his own people while he blamed us for the deaths. Tell it to the gassed children from the Kurdish villages, now lying in mass graves. I imagine they'd be glad if we had gone in and stopped Saddam a few years earlier. Except the UN wanted to diddle around for fourteen meaningless, empty resolutions while France and Russia got secret oil contracts. THEY didn’t think it important to act and stop a dictator from murdering millions. And with all this corruption and death, who the real criminal in your world? George Bush, and swaggering America.
>>Chipping further and further away at a woman's right to choose.
The idea that a woman can kill her children is a 20th Century invention of the courts. What is your position on a man (they're a good effigy, they're ALWAYS evil) purposely thrusting a pair of scissors into the brain of his wife's baby? The courts say its murder. Do it inside her body? Scott Peterson got the death penalty. But the Left says it's OK to partially birth a baby, as long as the head is still inside, and puncture its brain with a pair of scissors...and that's just a "woman's choice." If you place yourself in a position where you have to defend this, you have already lost the argument with most Americans. There is a generation coming up beyond you that understands this. Hold on tight.
>>Making homosexuals the burning effigy to draw out more support.
You are injecting vivid imagery that ignores what really happened. A majority of the people don't want the age-old institution of marriage redefined by a handful of activist judges in two states. The stupidest thing the Gay lobby ever did was push the marriage issue. They had lots of people behind them for a legal contract idea, and probably would have pulled it off. But when Lefty judges started reinventing the Law from the bench, America saw where it was all going. Now, there is no hope for a national marriage policy, and the contractual thing is going down with it. Majority rules in a democracy. Sour grapes to those who lost.
>>>Four years ago, Bush defeated John McCain in the Republican primary by starting a gossip campaign stating that McCain had a black child out of wedlock.
Prove it.
>>>This season, Republican operatives stood outside polling places where African-American congregations marched to after their services with signs saying things like "Gay Adoption Now!" matched with an actual Kerry/Edwards sign with a rainbow background.
Photos, please. When and where, documented in newspapers and on the web, not just "a friend of a friend told me!" Show me the evidence. And are blacks stupider than you if they don't want homosexual marriage? That's pretty racist, isn't it? Or would you deny them the right to vote against things they don't believe in? You begin to see why W got twice the black vote he did last time...and why you are shrinking as a political party.
For that matter, I saw on TV and in the papers Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton and others preaching from the pulpit about the election. Why hasn't the IRS shut these churches down? That's right...because the only time it is a crime is when the GOP does it. You have two sets of rules. Prove it happened, and then please push with equal fervor to see the other people are punished equally, or you are a hypocrite of the worst stripe.
>>>The politics of hate are no longer a goal; they're the tactic as well. I still can't quite believe that it's become acceptable political discourse to stand up and argue that a discrete and insular minority group should have less legal rights than the majority.
If I choose to become a drunk, I can't argue that drunks are unfairly represented in the legal system. I can't make myself a minority. And I still have every right granted to everybody else who doesn't choose to be a drunk.
>>>I can't believe that it isn't a topic discussed in shadowy back rooms, while the candidates deliver bright and shining lies about acceptance. I can't believe that the politics of hatred and prejudice have become a better election tactic than running on your platform.
Again, examine the bile and vitrol of the Democratic party in the past four weeks, and get back to me on the "Politics of Hatred". If you say “two and two is five” I can disagree with your conclusions and not hate you for being wrong. I haven’t been given this courtesy by the Left…if I disagree with their views, I am vilified. Seems like your side has cornered the market on the politics of hate.
>>>So where do we go from here? What possible consolation do we, the young activists of the left, have to cling to?
Not a damn thing. The majority rules. And the voting public is no longer strangled by three networks that pre-chew the news until it is a nice Liberal bite-size morsel. The Internet has freed political discourse. The voters can now see that Kerry had several conflicting viewpoints, no center, and would blow wherever the wind blows. He couldnn't tell one thing to the home district, and one thing to the Congress, and another thing to the nation. He got caught being what he is: a conflicted, indecisive politico. W is charged with being a cowboy, and the voters liked being told one harsh fact over a dozen smooth lies.
>>>I wish I had an answer. While I swing between poles of cynicism and idealism, at heart I am usually willing to believe in hope. But I don't know how much hope I can draw from last night.
Unless your leaders realize that the world has changed, that evil people want us and our way of life dead, that the military protects us and is not evil, that fewer and fewer people like what you have to say, you can't draw the hope of a snowball in Hell. (Whups, sorry. That would be a religious term, offensive to the Democrats and their lawyers. Make that “a snowball in a very warm place.”) Ask Zell Miller what to do, child.
>>>My father tells me that when I was a child, my first steps of political activism were charmingly naive-I was calling up stores in the mall at 10 years old to say that they shouldn't sell fur because it killed animals, because I was so sure that if I could just tell them, they would change. I just assumed that people did bad things because they didn't know that what they were doing was wrong, and if I showed them, they would stop.
You made the basic assumption all Liberals make: You know better than anyone else, and if they don't do as you say, they are foolish idiots. If I had a dollar for every time a local Democrat issue failed at the ballot box, and I had to listen to a talking head say, "Well, we didn't get our message out." Lord, what arrogance! Michael Moore, who probably lost the election for you, said that "Republicans are better storytellers." (That is, by some miracle, the GOP is made up of better liars than Hollywood, where they pretend to be somebody else for a living.) Voters are not idiots. If your party continues to believe this, you are doomed to the ash heap of history along with the Communists. We in the Red States understand what you want for the nation completely...that's why you lost.
>>>I don't know when it finally came home to me that sometimes people do the wrong thing because they didn't care about injustice, or that they hold values that make an unjust result seem to them worth striving for.
I thought that the Left was constantly preaching about how there are no moral absolutes? When I say that right is right, and sin is sin, I am being a "closed-minded, bigoted, foolish, bible-thumbing, hate-filled Christian." Under that value system, how in the world can you define something has being "wrong"? That's not very tolerant of other cultures or systems of belief, is it? How can anything be termed "unjust"...unless your views are supposed to be superior to mere Red-State mortals such as I?
>>>But it motivated people last night. Arguments about making abortion illegal again
Never said. Implied, but never said.
>>>and ending all gun control,
Never said. Never.
>>>and continuing and intensifying the oppression of homosexuals
Nope. 11 states said that a judge in New York or California can't force our state to grant financial compensation to them on our land because of sexual choices they make in those two states. You want to make polygamy or bestiality legal in YOUR state? Fine. These states said that you folks can't make it legal in OURS. Just as legal as outlawing smoking in public places...if you can get a majority to vote for it. They did. And the "homosexual community" did it to themselves by trying to force the issue.
What if here in Ohio we passed a law that said, "Everybody has to eat meat at every meal"? And through some judges that were sympathetic to the carnivore-rights lobby, we decided that it would apply in YOUR state as well. If you try to object, you are carnivphobic. You are going to have to go thorough some state mandated re-education until you acknowledge that we, the people who eat meat, are right. Clearly, since I was born with sharp teeth designed for ripping flesh, I was made by God to be a carnivore, and you were too! We can't change, because we were born this way, so you should just accept your carnivorous tendencies and stop complaining. A judge in my state says you HAVE to eat meat, and if you don't like it, something is wrong with you. Would you like that? We don't either.
>>>provided a rallying cry for the right,
You speak as if "the right" is some tiny island somewhere. Look at the voting map. You have dragged the Left so far into your party’s core that everybody else is now the Right. You have been abandoned by everyone else who realizes that you are no longer the defenders of what most of us think. FDR must be spinning in his grave to see what the Democrats have become. I guess it all just depends on which rich, powerful white guys you defend.
>>>and they clung to it even as we sink further into a morass of military casualties, a tanking economy,
You are delusional. We have the fastest growing economy in 20 years, the stock market is headed back to 11,000, unemployment is down by record numbers, and my wife has the best job she's ever had (to put in on a personal level.) This was done, though it will amaze you, by cutting taxes. Bush had the Clinton recession to start, and was faced with a double-war brought about by the terrorist destruction of two landmarks on American soil, and the annihilation of a banking district in our most major city, events brought about by the fact that Bill Clinton insisted on treating terror not as a war that threatened us, but as some kind of lawyers game. (Even to the point of turning down Bin Ladin three times because he "didn't think we had the legal right to take him." His words!) But just like JFK did (the real one, not the new upstart), he cut taxes, and got America working again. Drudge today says the Dow is at the highest point in 3 and a half years. You need to read some history, and start showing up for Econ 101. You are disconnected from reality, probably from reading Dem talking points without actually questioning them.
>>>and systematic destruction of the social programs that progressives fought so hard for fifty years ago.
And there's the secret code word, "progressives." What this means is "Liberal", but of course, when you honestly run as liberals, you can't get elected. This is the kind of Alice-in-Wonderland wordplay that makes "sin" come out "lifechoice."
>>>As a friend (that most rare of creatures, a Democrat in Alabama) put it,
Once, the South was planted knee deep in Democrats. Why, my grandfather knew hundreds of them. And now, they are all gone. Do you know why a Democrat is rare in Alabama? Nope, you don't. But Zell Miller does. Ask him, and your people might win another election someday. On second thought, don't.
>>>...people care more about one person's position on abortion than whether their own children have health care.
I must be a right-wing idiot. What are you trying to say here? (English 101 might help clarify that.) Why would someone not care about their own children's healthcare? I sure do. That's why I have a job, and work hard to provide for my own family. And yet, I still think that puncturing a baby's skull with scissors until the almost-born child's brain leaks out is wrong. I must be an intolerant, small-minded person to think this!
>>>People care more about preventing a loving, monogamous couple from having the same legal rights as everyone else than stopping transnational corporations from exporting their jobs.
I know you respect all value systems as being equal, so you will be tolerant of me and supportive when I say that my Bible says that it's a sin, and we are to hate it, and love the sinners. (In the agape, sense, of course.) Transnational corporations became that way by being successful. Unions that temporarily enriched themselves in a world where jobs had to stay here contributed to their own destruction in a world where jobs could go somewhere where the workers enjoyed being employed. Look at the numbers of people in unions today, as opposed to forty years ago, and see how popular they are.
>>>People care more about injuring the "others" they hate than helping the "us" we should love.
I have crazy, dysfunctional people in my family, who are dead set on doing things that harm themselves. I love them greatly. But I'll take their keys if they want to drive, and I won't lend them money so they can do harm to themselves. I would never want to injure them. But I won't help them destroy themselves and smile like everything is fine, and I won't do the same to friends I haven't met yet, either. I suppose this is just as arrogant on my part as it is for you to assume you know what is best for me, so we are totally equal!
>>>So I don't know how to move on from this. Progressive politics has never really been a discourse of hate-
My God! (Can I still say that, or will the ACLU come over to my house and wash my mouth out with soap?) Have you be slightly dead for four years? "Progressive politics" has done nothing but slander, bash, and spew venom for ages now! Hate of Bush, hate of Rumsfeld, hate of Chaney...you people ooze hate! You are the most un-tolerant "tolerant" people I have ever met!
>>>the closest we ever come is towards the rich white plutocrats oppressing the rest of the country,
Like Bill Clinton? When he lied, like we can't, and screwed on my tax dollars? When he oppressed women, and women of color? When he screwed around on his wife, and you turned your heads? Rich white plutocrats like that?
>>>and apparently we can't point them out as the enemy to the electorate because everyone is too busy wanting (hopelessly) to be them.
You must have been too young to speak during the eight years Bill was in office. I don't recall a single weblog or newspaper article slugged to you pointing out his misdeeds in those years. I was there. I stood in the cold when his limo went by the working people standing in the weeds as he went, warm and chuckling and slick, to a fundraiser in my town. "I will explain my relationship to Ms. Lewinsky, sooner, and not later," he lied. That was six years ago, ma'am. He never explained it, unless under oath to a closed room, and then he lied, and he NEVER admitted guilt, or apologized to me. He smirks today, and nobody complains. Does this upset you, too? If this doesn't upset you, you are a hypocrite, willing to maintain two separate value systems; one for people who disagree with you, and one for people who pander to you.
>>>I've always been a stereotypical leftist, beating my breast about fighting for those who can't fight for themselves.
Like the innocent babies killed by men doctors because their moms couldn't be troubled to raise them? Like the people whose careers were ruined by Hillary when she tossed Billy Dale and his workers out of the White House Travel Office? Like the women Bill groped? Like the blacks and Hispanics he didn't put in the Cabinet? Like that?
>>>But this is going to be a whole lot of fighting for people who we can't even get into the voting booth.
Who is this? The obese? NOBODY was turned away from the voting booth. The Civil Rights Commission found no more than ONE person denied the right to vote in Florida in 2000, it that is where you are fixated? And show me one documented case in this election. You will never be able to move on if you don't confront the truth...you ran a man who was everything the Democratic party has come to stand for. Abortion, anti-war, Blame-America-First...and you lost. Voter turn out for this election was higher than any point in years. If you are talking about the lack of people who voted for you, the point isn’t that they stayed home. It’s that they wanted no part of the views you bring to the table. Wake up!
>>>I guess that's our modern dilemma. Sell out into apathy, or once more into a yawning, murderous breach? Gird up, folks. This is going to be a long, hard slog.
Alright, we are supposed to be superior storytellers. Try this one:
Suppose I sold cans of beans. I have invented a new flavor, "Liberal Beans." They have the rich tang of lemon juice, bitter as the tears of the working masses. They have tiny bits of sand, gritty as the grizzled Union members of a hundred years ago. And they have a special ingredient, tiny iron fillings, sharp as the wit of our elitist, arrogant Democratic leaders.
I mount a multi-million dollar ad campaign, paid for by George Soros, through a dozen legal 527 funds, and hyped on Air America, to let people know about our great beans! Hooray!
We sell about two dozen cans, and word of mouth takes over. By God, they're horrible! They made me puke, and cut my mouth and intestinal tract! The major networks ignore the problem (they're Liberal brand beans after all) but the news gets out on the Internet, and sales disappear. Nobody wants the product. (Lawsuits would be filed, but the lawyers turn them down out of professional courtesy.) Nobody wants "Liberal Beans."
Now if you were a Republican businessperson, you would say, "This is a stupid product! We need to dump it, and market something else that people want to buy." But since these are "Liberal Beans", the obvious action must be taken...
You immediately issue press releases decrying your customers as homophobic, racist, small-minded, Bible-thumping, inbred morons, with no taste at all. Something must surely be wrong with THEM if they don't like your beans. But just to make sure, you craft a cunning plan! You will go right on selling Liberal Beans, but you will re-print the label as "Progressive Beans!"
That's where you are. The people have shown they don't want to buy your beans. You lost in the marketplace of ideas. But in four years, I know you, you're going to re-label the same old beans with a new name, because, in your heart you know, your customers are idiots. Well, we have the Internet out here in flyover country. The bumpkin has been de-bumped, and the blacks and Hispanics who have started small businesses with the checks George W Bush sent them have 401K's now. Listen to Zell Miller and live. Or get out of the way.
