THE SPITEFUL LEFT

Taranto yesterday led off with some comments about the dubious motivations of the antiwar Left. Keith Burgess Jackson has taken that thinking one step further as follows (excerpt):

"James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal refers to the Left as "The Angry Left." I'm prone to calling it "The Hateful Left." But perhaps we're both wrong. I'm starting to think the best label is "The Spiteful Left." A spiteful person, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., is one who is "Full of, possessed or animated by, spite; malicious; malevolent." "Spite," in turn, is defined as "A strong feeling of contempt, hatred or ill-will; intense grudge or desire to injure; rancorous or envious malice."

Spite, along with envy, jealousy, and spleen, is one of the green emotions. A spiteful person is so bent on harming another that he or she is willing to pay a personal price to do it; hence the expression, "cutting off your nose to spite your face." Lawyers talk about "spite fences," which are fences built solely to prevent one's neighbor from seeing what's on the other side. Even the lowly expression "in spite of" incorporates this meaning. If I say that I like you in spite of your many defects, I'm saying that my liking for you has a personal cost to me, or that I like you grudgingly.

Having listened to leftists for the past five years, I'm convinced that many of the positions they take have less to do with the merits of those positions than with the fact that taking those positions harms President Bush....."

Keith also has another go at the contemptible Brian Leiter. Keith concludes: "The man is twisted. I am honored to be called "odd" by such a cretin. Now I know what Jules Coleman meant when he told me, in correspondence, that Leiter is "complicated." It's a polite (and plausibly deniable) way of saying he's nuts".

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Report: Last Five Years Highest Immigration in U.S. History

And Illegal Aliens Are Almost Half of New Arrivals

As the nation considers immigration proposals from Congress and the President, a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of new Census Bureau data shows that the immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a new high in 2005. The data, which the Bureau has not yet analyzed, also show that 2000-2005 is the highest five-year period of new immigration (legal and illegal) in American history. Almost half of new arrivals are estimated to be illegal aliens.

The new report provides a detailed picture of the socio-economic status of immigrants, including estimates for illegal aliens. States with the largest increase in immigrants are California, Texas Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee, Minnesota, and Nevada. Embargoed copies of the report, ''Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of American's Foreign-Born Population in 2005,'' are available to the media. The study will be posted to the Center's site at http://www.cis.org on December 12.

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ELSEWHERE



What Britain's new Conservative Party leader stands for is listed succinctly here. Like John Kerry he apears to want to be everything to everybody. It may even win him an election but whether it will do Britain much good is doubtful. I think Britain has a long hard road ahead.

Bruce Bartlett points out that cutting the top income-tax rate has always INCREASED the share of total tax paid by the rich. Yet the envy-driven Left still avocate HIGHER taxes on the rich -- just the opposite of what they need to do in order to get the rich to make a bigger contribution. Bartlett concludes: "At some point, those on the left must decide what really matters to them -- the appearance of soaking the rich by imposing high statutory tax rates that may cause actual tax payments by the wealthy to fall, or lower rates that may bring in more revenue that can pay for government programs to aid the poor? Sadly, the left nearly always votes for appearances over reality, favoring high rates that bring in little revenue even when lower rates would bring in more".

The death penalty saves lives: This is old news to economists. Papers of similar import have been coming out since the 70s. Excerpt: "The most dramatic finding comes from Joanna Shepherd and a team at Emory University in Atlanta. They have taken advantage of the fact that some parts of the US don't execute murderers, and only a handful of states execute them consistently. (One of those states, Texas, accounts for more than one-third of the executions in the US since the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976.) After taking account of other regional variations thought likely to influence murder rates - among them the mix of races and the resources devoted to policing - they found that executions explained most of what was left. As they starkly report their central finding: each execution results in an average of 18 fewer murders. Or, to present the finding in an even more unsettling way: any state that refuses to impose the death penalty for murder is condemning 18 or so innocent people to death."

Lottery wins show that money doesn't solve the problems of the poor: "Mack and Virginia, if press accounts are to be believed, were textbook cases of how dysfunctional values cause problems of people. It is often believe that people like Mack and Virginia have problems because they are poor. This is the premise of the redistributive state. If money is taken from those who 'have too much' and given to those 'less fortunate' the increased wealth of the poor will eradicate the problems in living that they experience. The Left assumes that such problems are the result of poverty. But what if these problems did not result from poverty? What if poverty and these problems both were the result of the values they had embraced?"

Robert Hayes has just done a fisking of Barbara Streisand. She really is mind-bogglingly dumb.

The Carnival of Vanities is up again with much to read.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here).

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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