Washington Post opinion giver and scribe Richard Cohen writes about The Myth of American Exceptionalism. There may be no better example of why the liberal view of America is wrong.
Cohen calls it “smugness” that, as we sing in America the Beautiful, we believe ‘God shed His grace on thee.’ We Americans, after all, have no genetic or inborn moral superiority compared to Cohen’s citizens of the world. Certainly, God doesn’t pick winners and losers. Cohen sees conservatives as naïve, like so many sports fans who pray that God will grant victory for their team.
He cites as one of the failures of American exceptionalism “a dysfunctional education system.” Then he goes on to say: "Some of those most inclined to exalt American exceptionalism are simply using the imaginary past to defend their cultural tics — conventional marriage or school prayer or, for some odd reason, a furious antipathy to the notion that mankind has contributed (just a bit) to global warming"
Marriage, you see, is just a cultural tic to the Left.
What Cohen will never understand is that it is our system of freedom that makes us exceptional. It is freedom that allows us to maximize our potential, be peaceful yet respond quickly with strength to threats, to learn from failure, and succeed through personal responsibility, not because of the State. It is through freedom that individuals may reach their greatest potential, and that best benefits others. It is because of freedom that we are a prosperous and charitable people.
This also explains the difference between how conservatives and liberals view the Constitution. To conservatives, the Constitution is the law that protects freedom by governing government. Liberals see our system of government more as a way to control the People.
Conservatives believe freedom comes from God. We are therefore blessed by that freedom, not because, as Cohen would have you believe, we have deceived ourselves. We are blessed because we have a Constitution designed to protect that freedom. Exceptionalism is not handed out or taken from others; it is a result of individuals maximizing their potential.
The statist-liberal mindset is threatened by American exceptionalism. Statist liberals like Cohen, therefore, are willing to reduce freedom. That levels the playing field with others.
Rather than accepting American exceptionalism, Mr. Cohen and his friends would rather we share a global participation award like our “dysfunctional education system” -- run mostly by liberals, by the bye -- gives to children.
SOURCE
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How Ted Rall hates America
The further Left you go, the less the Leftist pretends to any kind of patriotism. And syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall lets it all hang out. He believes in violent revolution and despises even fellow Leftists who are not as extreme as he is. A cartoon above and some quotes below from him. Quotes courtesy of a reader. Quotes starting with what he wrote about the SEAL raid on OBL:
President Obama's Sunday evening announcement, timed to fill Monday's papers with a sickening orgy of gleeful triumph but little information, prompted bipartisan high-fives and hoots all around. "U-S-A! U-S-A!" chanted a mob of drunken oafs in front of the White House. Blending the low satire of two Bush-era classic send-ups of a nation allergic to self-reflection, "Team America: WorldPolice" and "Idiocracy," they set the tone for a week or a month or whatever of troop-praising, God-blessing-America, frat-boy self-backslapping. "So that's what success looks like," wrote New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley in the paper's special ten-page "The Death of Bin Laden" pull-out section.
More quotes from Rall's book "Anti-American Manifesto"
We must rid ourselves of our shitty,worthless, incompetent, evil-doing, planet murdering government and itscorporate and media allies. (Page 271)
Of course, nonviolent protest can effect change. But not by itself. We must understand that, in these cases, neither the demonstrations themselves nor their nonviolent nature is what prompts leaders to modify their policies or behavior. It is only the credible threat of violence,the possibility that opposition could escalate to the next level, that makes "nonviolent" protest effective. You don't have to hit someone if they believe you will hit them. Therefore, after a revolution runs its course and "normalcy" returns to the streets, it will be possible for people to demand and obtain changes. (Pages260-261)
The United States is the most efficient fascist state ever created - even more ruthless and effective than Nazi Germany. Think that is an exaggeration? Consider the most obvious point: It has no internal opposition. (Page 227)
America's form of government, masquerading as liberal democracy is actually more formidable a political adversary than a totalitarian state. We can see this clearly in post-Soviet Russia, where the authoritarian pseudo-democracy of Vladimir Putin cracks down with greater ferocity and efficiency on political dissidents than the Soviet State did. (Page 228)
"The illegal wars andoccupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats," the journalist Chris Hedges complained in early 2010. "The timidity of the Left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The Left stands for nothing."
Therein lies the opportunity. Hedge's solution - supporting the Green Party and other third parties - is bullshit. No one thinks that will work. Revolution will. What matters is that Obama has exposed the two-party system for what it has always been: ineffective, disconnected, and removed from the people. Populist rhetoric aside, both parties serve the rich. Now everyone can see that. The next step is to convince people that the answer isn't new parties, but a different political system. (Page 129)
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Creating Poverty Through 'Social Justice'
If it were justice, it would not need the "social" in front of it. In Christian and post-Christian societies, there will always be official charity: A degree of support by the taxpayer for low-income people. But calling charity justice just encourages abuses
We have been hearing a lot about “social justice,” during the tenure of the Obama Administration. From Eric Holder to John Holdren, Lisa Jackson to Van Jones to President Obama himself, the goal of social justice appears to be at the forefront of Mr. Obama’s agenda for the country. But while the term sounds innocuous enough, the goal itself is quite sinister and the road to getting there creates havoc and waste but for the chosen few.
A recent San Francisco Chronicle article proves this point beyond doubt:
“San Francisco’s much-heralded ‘social justice’ requirements for city contracts are costing local taxpayers millions of dollars a year in overcharges, according to workers in departments ranging from the Municipal Transportation Agency to the Department of Emergency Management.’
“In one case, a Muni worker said the city paid $3,000 for a vehicle battery tray. Such parts can be found online for $12 to $300, depending on the type of vehicle...’
“Other city purchasing policies, if followed, would mean paying about $240 for getting a copy of a key that actually cost a worker $1.35 to get done at a hardware store on his break, the employee said. Another city worker called the use of catalog pricing for supplies ‘Pentagon-style purchasing.’
“Markups from approved vendors range from 10 to 150 percent, employees said, with one calling the city’s requirement that contractors provide health care benefits for domestic partners ‘the expensive white elephant standing in the middle of the room (that) no one wants to mention.’
“Some vendors are suspected of being little more than middlemen who comply with San Francisco’s very specific requirements for contractors - like disclosing historic ties to slavery and providing domestic partner benefits, a provision known as 12B because of its chapter in the Administrative Code - then turn around and buy the products from companies that don't meet the restrictions, city officials acknowledge.
“An analysis by the General Services Agency found that in the last complete fiscal year, 2009-10, the city paid $9.8 million to ‘possible third-party brokers’ - vendors that may be pass-through companies.”
Imagine that, a city with a $306 million budget deficit, from a state with a $15.4 billion deficit, justifying the over-payment of taxpayer dollars to what is essentially special interest affirmative action groups in the private sector by claiming it satisfies the quest for “social justice.”
If this is the path to social justice, then we have to conclude that social justice and free market Capitalism are not compatible. But, then, this should be no surprise seeing as social justice is a product of the Progressive Movement; a movement founded in the ideology of socialism derived from Marxism.
One of the Four Pillars of the Green Party, an ideologically Progressive group, social justice is defined as:
“...based on the concepts of human rights and equality and involves a greater degree of economic egalitarianism through progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution. These policies aim to achieve what developmental economists refer to as more equality of opportunity than may currently exist in some societies, and to manufacture equality of outcome in cases where incidental inequalities appear in a procedurally just system.”
The key words here are “progressive taxation, income redistribution, or even property redistribution” and “more equality of opportunity than may currently exist.”
We are all familiar with the evils of the Progressive Tax. It unfairly and inequitably taxes the citizenry based on “classes”; that understood, it is fitting that it is named the “Progressive” tax system. One of the effective tactics of the Progressive ideology is the divide and conquer tactic, or at Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
By creating a tax system that divides the citizenry into classes, it is easier for the Progressives to demonize “the rich.” Once that is accomplished, the rationale is that “the rich” can afford to pay more in taxes. It becomes irrelevant that “the rich” are also “the productive” and “the job creators.” So, too, it becomes irrelevant that “the rich” are expected to pay a much greater percentage of their income so as to subsidize the class that is not productive; that contributes little to society.
So, we see that the Progressives have “picked” the class they identify as “rich” (by the way, who decides what “rich” is?), “frozen” it in the public eye, “personalized” it through demonization and effectively “polarized” the country using an “us against them” narrative that literally depletes the pool of job creators and the productive.
Where income and property redistribution is concerned, we need only look at the above scenario to understand why these two goals stand as intrinsic threats to a nation whose economy is based of free market Capitalism. By the government – through the Progressive Tax System – literally taking from “the rich” (by their definition) to subsidize “the poor,” our government is essentially redistributing wealth. As wealth – or earnings, or the property of earnings – is essentially property, we see that through this redistribution of wealth also comes redistribution of personal property. Remember, property doesn’t have to be presented as an object; it can be financial, intellectual, etc.
In the story about social justice not working in San Francisco, we witness the creation of special interest groups, via legislation and regulation, which are literally inserted into the free market process to create wealth for entities that would otherwise not be needed in the free market Capitalist economic system. By virtue of San Francisco’s social justice legislation and regulation, wealth has been extracted from the taxpayers, unnecessarily, via the process of government procurement, to reward the unproductive.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is Progressive, Socialist, Marxist, wealth redistribution fashioned for the Capitalist economic system. It’s here and it is happening...right now.
But perhaps the most egregious perversion of our system of government at the hands of “social justice” comes in these words, “more equality of opportunity than may currently exist.”
“More equality of opportunity than may currently exist”? Doesn’t that equate to one group receiving “more opportunity” than another? Doesn’t this equate to providing more resources – resources derived from the taxpayers – to one group over another? How is this equal treatment under any definition but the perverted rational of moral relativism and the wealth redistribution ideology of Marxist Progressivism?
In the Declaration of Independence, one of the country’s founding documents, included in the Charters of Freedom and just as important to Americanism as the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, we are guaranteed:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...”
What we are guaranteed by birthright, as Americans, are three things: Life, Liberty and the pursuit Happiness. Life and Liberty are self-explanatory, although the issue of Liberty, in the scheme of things today, is under siege. But Happiness, the pursuit of Happiness, means we are all born with an “opportunity” in life to pursue Happiness, to pursue our dreams, as human beings. We are not guaranteed “equality” in anything but those God-given unalienable rights; unalienable rights granted by the Creator to every man, woman and child on the face of the planet, not just to Americans.
Regardless of the rationale used, the government’s providing of anything but a level playing field for all, regardless of skin color, regardless of gender, regardless of any variable that allows Progressives to successfully Balkanize the nation into classes for use in their divide and conquer class warfare agenda, is for government to enter into the realm of social activism and that literally destroys the guarantee of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness for everyone and to no one’s exclusion.
Quite frankly, what stands in the way of everyone’s “opportunity” to be “equal” are Progressives, their elected toadies, their labels and their intrusive anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda. Social justice...you can keep the change.
SOURCE
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Islamic Hospital
No charity and certainly no bothering about social justice among the Left's Islamic friends
Reality in Islam is often more shocking than any horror story. The newspaper Asr-e Iran reported that passersby spotted two patients in a field outside of Tehran. The two patients were hospitalized in the state funded Khomeini Hospital. Despite being public and allegedly free, they were loaded in an ambulance and dropped in a field for not having the money to pay the bills.
Prior to the revolution, Muslims were very generous in Iran. They made free delivery of groceries to the poor families. The objective of Islamic charity is to win the hearts of the people and recruit them as their soldiers. Once the objective is achieved they are no longer needed. Unless they can continue supporting the regime, they become a burden.
Millions of Iranians live below poverty line with no hope for their future. Protests will be met with bullets. It is not possible to overthrow a regime that has no qualm butchering any number of people. These pictures only reveal the tip of the iceberg. Most of the atrocities are not reported.
More HERE
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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" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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