ONLY POWER MATTERS TO THE LEFT

I know I shouldn't be, but I was slightly surprised that my considerable efforts to point out that party politics in modern democracies are essentially centrist were totally lost on the Leftist bloggers (calling themselves "One Good Move") who have been criticizing Keith Burgess Jackson for some fairly ordinary statements he made about the sources of ideology. Who, for goodness sake, disputes that aging makes you more conservative? Practically every conservative intellectual there is (including Keith and including the dreaded Neocons) started out on the Left! I am a considerable rarity in being a lifelong conservative intellectual.

But the fact that a centrist such as GWB is hated with a passion by so-called American "liberals" (really Leftists. Liberty is a very low priority for them) is itself instructive. If you look at the legislation and policies that Clinton and GWB have supported and implemented, it would be a hard task to say which was the more Leftist. With his support for all sorts of expansion of government, I would definitely say that GWB is the more Leftist but the fact that the matter can be reasonably debated shows just how centrist both men are. So why do the Left loathe GWB? I know of nothing directed towards John Kerry by conservatives that remotely approaches the rage and hate that is routinely directed towards GWB by the Left. Contempt for Kerry's dishonesty is common among conservatives but that is about all. So why do American Leftists take their party politics so seriously? Why were the "One Good Move" bloggers so completely incapable of taking on board the simple fact that a vote for the GOP is NOT automatically a vote for conservatism?

A vote for the GOP is SOMETIMES a vote for conservatism but American politics are essentially interest-group politics. Each party has its client groups (mostly minorities in the case of the donkeys and particularly New Testament Christians in the case of the GOP) and it is speaking for them that brings in the great majority of votes -- which is why lots of GOP supporters who deplore GWB's expansion of government will still vote for him in the next election and which is why American blacks who are conservative on lots of social issues almost always vote for the donkeys. It is only small minority of centrist (swinging) voters who decide which candidate will win or lose and that is a major part of the reason why both candidates themselves have to be centrist.

So it all boils down to power. Does your team occupy the top positions or not? Are people you can identify with in charge? And for Leftists, politics is NOTHING BUT power. They have no principles and openly ridicule (particularly via postmodernism) the idea that anything could be right or wrong. Policies that were once popular but which have become unpopular (such as eugenics) are abandoned so completely by Leftists that only historians know that such policies once had large-scale Leftist support. And with the way antisemitism is surging on the Left, the time will come when people will have forgotten that Leftists were for a time anti-racist. So for Leftists it is only party that matters and conservatives such as myself and Keith who take ideas, principles and ideology seriously are simply incomprehensible.

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ELSEWHERE

I must say that it does rather surprise me how many bloggers depend on blogging software. I use blogger.com for this blog because of the permanent free blogspot hosting and to save a little bit of time but all my mirror sites are hand-coded. Basic html is very easy. I have never so much as opened a book on html or looked at a FAQ on it. I just see how other people have done things and copy that. So the only blogging software I use for my mirrors is a text editor plus what is in my noggin. I am rather moved to comment on the matter at the moment because of the loud grumbles coming from the MT people over recent price rises there. And some people pay for separate blogrolling software too! It all seems a bit sad to me when learning a tiny bit of html would enable people to do their blogging for free. I decided last night that I should put up some permalinks to the various parts of my online book about Leftism so I now know how to hand-code permalinks too -- dead easy! And hand-coded html loads twice as fast as the mass of junk produced by html editing programs. Here is a useful sample of my new permalinks (or here if that site is overloaded).

"A major poll of 1,388 American Roman Catholic voters shows Catholic presidential candidate John Kerry getting only 20% support among America's 51 million Catholics on issues where he opposes the Church's position -- with his support on some issues dropping as low as 6%."

Melanie Phillips on a "blame America" and "blame Israel" letter to The Guardian by Canon Paul Oestreicher of the Church of England: "This letter illustrates how the toxic combination of vicious prejudice and astonishing ignorance combine to produce an astounding inversion of moral values. These occupations [of Iraq and Palestinian areas] are not illegal. There is no brutal repression of civilian populations, but a defence against terror and mass murder in an attempt to restore order and respect for human life. As for his convoluted last thought, he appeared to be equating the deaths of Nazis during the occupation of France with the deaths of Israelis, Americans and British now, and proposing that Islamist mass murderers are the moral equivalent of the French Resistance."

Your government will protect you: "Australia admitted that its top spy agency ignored repeated attempts by convicted terrorist Jack Roche to warn it of the activities of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network two years before the Bali bombing".

Duplicitous translation: A Swedish speaker of Arabic compares mosque sermons to their press coverage: "America rapes Islam," the Imam roars in Arabic from the platform. The interpreter translates as: "We condemn USA's torture of Iraqi prisoners."

Don't laugh: The latest list of FBI Al Qaeda suspects includes a man raised on a goat ranch in Riverside County, Calif. He converted to Islam as a teenager after moving to Garden Grove, Calif. (presumably he was homesick!)

Slattery has picked out a nice selection of quotes from America's Leftist "celebrities". It certainly shows out of their own mouths what a nasty lot the "celebrities" are.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left cannot face the fact that the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is fundamentally humanitarian. The most effective response to the 9/11 events and the one in America's own best interests would have been a retaliatory strike using nukes to take the whole of Afghanistan off the map -- followed by a threat that Mecca would go sky high if there were any further Islamic attacks on the USA or its allies. That would have made Islam a religion of peace overnight. But GWB rightly rejected that easy road because it would have involved the death of millions of innocents. He chose instead to go after just the bad guys -- an extremely difficult task. And its difficulty is causing continuing American deaths in Iraq to this day. But Americans have always given their blood in order to be humane. They did it in two world wars and in Vietnam and they are doing it now in the Middle East. The only alternative strategy that the Left have is to do nothing -- thus inviting more and more attacks.

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