The Liberalist Agenda: Purity at All Costs?

There's a wonderful editorial by Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal in which he describes the seeming paradox of European and American liberals' inability to act strongly against the Islamo-fanaticism of the Middle East. While on the one hand it has become their nature to stand for any and all races, creeds and cultures (perhaps the group-think here is that if you defend gay and black rights, you have to defend the right to blow yourself and countless innocent civilians up also), supporting the blend of Islam being taught by fanatics across Europe and the Mideast does run quite counter to their implicit desires to preserve the very rights they feign to protect. The question really should center on why liberals are willing to potentially and ostensibly sacrifice their own hard-won rights solely to sustain their polarized war with capitalists and conservatives? Maybe it's the media, the new century, or maybe nothing at all, but someone needs to open wide the eyes of the liberal who can't see past his own hate and realize how odd his actions seem to be these days. Mr. Stephens expounds below (emphasis added):

Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains -- namely, liberals -- are typically the most reluctant to fight it?

Yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left -- Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others -- understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all.

But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: "Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit -- that confronting evil is counterproductive," says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. "They think that by appeasing them -- allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools -- they will win their friendship."

A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. "Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them."

But the really "lethal mistake," she says, "is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity." Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, "are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, 'if that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.'"

A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost.

In the political battle between good and bad, left and right, conservative and liberal, it's important to hold fast to your thoughts and convictions in the daily gyrations that have become our lives in the US in order to effect the type of lifestyle and environment in which we hope to raise our own children. However, when that pursuit is thwarted by outsiders who seek only the elimination of those liberties, it is 'more' important to band together as one, as we are together in this nation, and show strength in mutual convictions for freedom and liberty.

Sadly, our partisan politics and constant bickering reinforce the image of the US as a paper tiger unable to rally to a common cause. It's a disappointment from the days of Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington when personal squabbles were set aside against the common interest of overthrowing an empire and starting a new nation.

The Hypocrisy of Politicians

Simply put, politicians will say virtually anything to get elected or remain in the public eye. While some of you may think that we at The Realist Party have exhausted this claim in our posts, here's a little more proof that will help to jade your perspective a little bit more, courtesy of Peter Schweizer at USA Today:

Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." To do otherwise, he says, will result in a cataclysmic catastrophe. [R]esponsible global citizens can follow Gore's example, because, as he readily points out in his speeches, he lives a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.

For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little.

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. Talk about inconvenient truths.

Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life?

Why, indeed.

Nuclear Power, Anyone?

It's time to turn to nuclear power and to spend the vast sums of money that are required to upgrade our decades old, and in some parts century old, electrical power grid to modern capacities. Otherwise, we are going to be hearing more and more about power failures and blackouts in Queens, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Burning fossil fuels is so 1800s. It's time to make the leap into the 21st country or we'll be reading more articles like this one from the New York Times about Los Angeles:

Unrelenting tropical heat and humidity has driven demand for electricity to record highs in California and other states. If people could not take the weather anymore, neither could transformers and other equipment, which sputtered and shorted out and left tens of thousands of people without power today.

Authorities in California warned that the high demand could lead later this afternoon to an emergency order for rolling blackouts, a dreaded term here that brings reminders of widespread blackouts in 2003 during an energy supply crisis.

and St. Louis:

Meanwhile, lighting from thunderstorms have compounded problems in other parts of the country, leaving more than 200,000 people in the St. Louis area without electricity since Wednesday. Utility officials in Missouri said they expected to restore power to most customers by the middle of the week.

That's right, the headlines about record temperatures are everywhere and our desire for 68 degree interior temperatures just won't be satisfied with ever growing populations, rising prices of oil, and antiquated energy provisions. We're well on into the time when we should be determining how to supply our needs domestically and pollution-free nuclear is the key.

General Motors vs. The New York Times

These are actually fantastic blogs from a GM worker talking about the recent article in the NYT by Tom Friedman:

The GM Blog's initial post in response to the Times' op-ed piece
The GM Blog's reaction to the Times' subsequent response

One of my favorites lines from the first post follows:

"Don’t get me wrong. Toyota's a fine company. But like GM, Toyota offers a full range of cars and trucks to satisfy all their customers across this nation, not just what New York and Washington journalists who ride in yellow cabs think the rest of America should drive."

Fantastic! For how long do you think that corporate America has been waiting to stick it to the Times' editors like that? Simply priceless.

Anyway, the links at the end of the second post highlight the actual dialogue between the Times and GM. I don't know why the NYT even bothers publishing any more. They clearly have an agenda against anything and everything American, as well as against the consumer's choice in a free market. Add the NYT aversion to capitalism also. Maybe it's because their subscription numbers have been falling for years.

Language Lessons

It's tough to understand people when they speak in different languages. Accordingly, I have put together a helpful little guide when you find yourself in a tight spot and don't know what someone 'means' to 'say'. For example:

When a Frenchman says, "Bon jour. Comme ca va?", he is saying, "Good day. How are you?"

See how simple it is? Let's try another one.

When a Mexican says, "Feliz cinco de mayo. Que pasa?", he is saying, "Happy May 5th Day. What's happening?" Cinco de Mayo is a Mexican holiday commemorating their victory over the French. Yes, Mexico follows a long list of countries that have claimed victories, and often their only military victories against any nation, over the French.

But we're getting sidetracked. Let's try one more. This one is going to be really tough, but I know you can do it.

When transparent, self-serving, partisan Republican senators (ah, that'd be Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley and Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) say that lifting the tariff on ethanol "would be counterproductive to the widely supported goal of promoting home-grown renewable sources of energy," what they are really saying is that lifting the tariff on ethanol "would be counterproductive to the narrowly supported goal of promoting their own reelections on the coattails, dollars, and backs of the domestic farming and agriculture lobbies."

Class dismissed.

Quote of the Day

"In a poor country like ours, the alternative to low-paid jobs isn't well-paid ones; it's no jobs at all."
-Jesús Reyes-Heroles, Mexico's Ambassador to the USA

Regulate Immigration, Don't Ban It

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Mark Steyn, a columnist from the Chicago Sun Times, has this immigration problem solved: deport our politicians who spend more time quick fixes and sound bites than lasting solutions to legal immigration. In the interim, let's all remember that immigrants, who slave away for a chance to improve their lives, are a part of the engine that drives economic growth in this country. They key to immigration is not to stem its flow; rather, we should focus our efforts on ensuring that it proceeds at an acceptable flow in order to harness the strengths of all those that would hope to make this country better for their efforts while in the process not bleeding our coffers dry in efforts to support the untold millions of undocumented workers. Check out the following excerpts. -EBO)

No Easy Answers on Immigration Conundrum
BY MARK STEYN
The Chicago Sun-Times
Monday, April 9, 2006

Say you've got two kids under 5, and you'd like to bring over a nice English nanny to look after them. Name of Mary Poppins. Good references, impeccable character. If you apply now, there's a sporting chance the process may be completed before your children's children are in college.

All developed countries have immigration issues, but few conduct the entire debate as disingenuously as America does: The president himself has contributed a whole barrelful of weaselly platitudes, beginning with his line that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." True. They don't stop at the 49th parallel either. Or the Atlantic shore. Or the Pacific. So where do family values stop? At the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. If you're an American and you marry a Canadian or Belgian or Fijian, the U.S. government can take years to process what's supposed to be a non-discretionary immigration application, in the course of which your spouse will be dependent on various transitional-status forms like "advance parole" that leave her vulnerable to the whims of the many eccentric interpreters of U.S. immigration law at the nation's airports and land borders.

How about "the jobs Americans won't do"? Most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won't hire Americans to do -- that's to say, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one's employees has become one of the easiest means of controlling costs. I see no reason why this would change, and given that, as a matter of policy, U.S. illegal-immigration law is not enforced by the U.S. government, it's hard to know why private employers should do it.