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| Bush Attacks Excess Dem Spending | Education Fatties Won't Diet |
Is DailyKos Really Rush for Liberals?
by Christopher Chantrill
August 03, 2007 at 5:09 am
WE RIGHT-WINGNUTS and hatemongers look at the output of the DailyKos with bemusement. Because conservatives are sensitive, with good reason, about seeming negative and hate-filled and mean-spirited. We expect to be pilloried for hate-filled rhetoric.
Yet the writers at the DailyKos (forget the commenters) spew out hate and conspiracy theories on a daily basis, observes blogger John Hawkins.
OK. There are always wing-nuts out there in the tall grass. Yet mainstream Democratic politicians are going to the YearlyKos convention.
[W]hen someone like Harry Reid writes a diary on the Daily Kos or when Hillary Clinton goes to the Yearly Kos convention, it indicates that they’re comfortable associating with people who hold those sort of radical views.
Mainstream Republicans would be terrified to have their names associated with far-right websites. So why are the Democrats so comfortable with left-wing virulence? Hawkins writes:
Ten years ago, a liberal website that featured diarists who thought American soldiers were "morally retarded," that called for revolution, and that speculated that the President was going to declare martial law to retain power, would have been considered to be on the farthest fringes of the Left.
Yet now they think it is OK?
A conservative and Republican is bound to think that with the Kos connection the Democrats are cutting themselves off from the moderate middle that every candidate needs in order to win election to national office.
So why do they seem so comfortable with the Kossacks? Do they know something we don’t know? E.J. Dionne calls the Kos phenomenon the left’s answer to Rush Limbaugh. Rush mobilized people on the right, he writes.
Democrats and liberals realized they needed a mobilizing force of their own but could not match Limbaugh’s reach on the radio. Enter the Internet, and Markos Moulitsas.
But are Democrats really short of a mobilizing force? And is the relentlessly optimistic Rush Limbaugh really the right-wing version of the much more negative Kos community? According to Dionne:
Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They’re paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O’Reilly at their own game. No wonder O’Reilly is so annoyed.
But there’s a basic difference here. Rush Limbaugh was the first publicly partisan conservative voice on the general media. People used to call up and wonder that he dared to say such things because they knew that you weren’t allowed to criticise and make fun of liberals in public.
On the other hand, Democrats have never lacked for partisan voices to get their message into the public square. After all, everybody in the US in 1980 knew that Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor who had appeared in a movie with a chimpanzee. How did the Democrats manage to get that partisan message out without Mark Moulitsas and DailyKos?
Here’s my two cents worth. I think that the Kos phenomenon is going to hurt the Democrats. I think it is going to balance the party too far to the left and it is going to offend a lot of Americans, particularly moderate women.
Most average Americans are reflexively patriotic. The relentless and often unanswered anti-Bush propaganda has had the effect of demoralizing them. But when a Republican presidential candidate comes along and remoralizes them next year, then the political sands are going to shift.
And Democrats may be surprised to find that the Kos connection has cut them off from the American people.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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