LAKOFF AGAIN

A message has come down from an ivory tower in the People's Republic of Berkeley in the form of an article in The Nation by linguistics professor George Lakoff. He is trying to do what he calls "framing" -- what others might call "agenda-setting". He has seized on the survey results that show moral values to have been important to some people who voted for GWB in the last election. He wants to convince Democrats to campaign on moral values too -- but different moral values. He wants Democrats to proclaim that their moral values are better and truer and more American than those silly conservative moral values.

Nice try, George! But it won't wash. Why? Because one of the most consistently proclaimed assertions of Leftist intellectuals like George is that there is no such thing as right and wrong and that all values are arbitrary. So who is going to believe that all these preachers of moral relativism have suddenly become committed to high moral values? George is trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Sudden conversion to morality will be seen for the hypocrisy that it is.

And I have to laugh at George's first sentence: "We are the 55 million progressives who came together in this election, voted for Kerry and rejected the Bush agenda". Is that a Royal "we" George? The presumption of a Berkeley professor pretending to speak for 55 million diverse Americans is hilarious -- and his claim that the 55 million were all progressives certainly strains beyond breaking point the meaning of that much-abused word. The vast majority of the Kerry voters were minorities who think the Dems will give them more handouts. And a lot of those minorities have very punitive views on many things -- such as wanting homosexuals to be castrated. Is that "progressive"? If you say so, George.

In reality, of course, the only thing the Left of politics believe in is power -- as I pointed out yesterday. They may claim to have such values as "tolerance" but as Christ said: "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20) and never has there been such an outpouring of intolerance and hate-speech from the Left as what we have seen recently. As this Australian writer says: "It's amazing the amount of vitriol that has been launched by people who paint themselves as "tolerant liberals" against evangelical Christians in recent months. There are pages of this stuff in the Sydney Morning Herald's "Webdiary". In almost all cases these critics have not spent two minutes actually investigating what Family First Party or evangelical Christians actually support. Is this not the very definition of ignorant prejudice?" And we all know how much "tolerance" Christians and conservatives get on American university campuses. Read here if you don't.

Dennis Prager is also good on the divergence between normal American values and what the Left do and advocate. One excerpt: "To most Americans, Michael Moore is a Marxist who has utter contempt for most of his fellow Americans, who goes abroad and tells huge audiences how stupid and venal his country is, and in his dishonest propaganda film, portrays the American military as callous buffoons. Yet, this radical was given the most honored seat at the Democratic Party convention in Boston, next to former President Jimmy Carter. To most Americans, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are race-baiting demagogues. Yet they are heroes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans do not see their country as the bigoted and racist nation regularly depicted by both black and white Democratic leaders. To most Americans, a man who wears women's clothing to work is a pathetic person in need of psychotherapy. To the Democratic Party, he is a man whose cross-dressing is merely another expression of multiculturalism. The California legislature, controlled by Democrats, passed a law prohibiting employers from firing a man who shows up to work wearing women's clothing."

I have more on Lakoff 's Mommy/Daddy theory of values here. (Hint: In Lakoff's predictable Leftist world, Daddies are hopeless unless they become like Mommies. Maybe Lakoff's father used to beat the tar out of young George and every Daddy in the world now gets the blame. Given Lakoff's talent for overgeneralization, I would not be at all surprised).

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ELSEWHERE

There is another article here (and a previous one here) which portrays GWB as very much his own man who bows to nobody in the pursuit of his agenda: Not all a puppet of the "neocons" or anybody else. The Left portray GWB as a puppet of Karl Rove or the neocons because they cannot admit how smart and capable he is beneath his relaxed Texan manner. And some conservatives portray him as a puppet because they don't want to face the fact that their guy is more realistic than they are about such things as immigration, Iraq and how to use government. Both groups are kidding themselves and would do a lot better to face reality instead of indulging in puerile conspiracy theories.

A blog I particularly enjoy is Blithering Bunny. He has up at the moment some quite amazing stuff about the EU. It is hard to decide which is more corrupt: The EU or the UN. The EU certainly shows that the great European tradition of authoritarian government (e.g. Bismarck, Hitler, the Tsars and various Kaisers both Austrian and Prussian, Lenin, Stalin, Napoleon, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Papadopoulos, Horthy etc etc) is still alive and well. And why am I not surprised to read this: "Jose Manuel Durrao Barroso, New president of the European Commission, former Prime Minister of Portugal: As a young man, he was an activist in the extreme left-wing Maoist Party"? And they have the cheek to criticise the great Republic, the USA!

The Iraq insurgents are undoubtedly organized but by whom? "There is a growing conviction among some foreign observers and American intelligence experts - though apparently not yet in the Pentagon - that what is happening now in Iraq is not just the reaction to the American occupation by a small group of "dead-enders" (as suggested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) or a spontaneous insurgency. Indeed, these observers believe that the suicide bombers, the roadside bombs and the attacks on Iraqi police and other so-called "collaborators" in Mosul and the Sunni towns in the Tigris valley are part of an organized guerrilla war... The events of the past few weeks do seem to point to a well-organized and -planned campaign against the coalition forces. As soon as American troops smash resistance in one place, such as Fallujah, it pops up elsewhere. Hundreds of well-armed and organized insurgents attacked the key city of Mosul earlier this month and took nine police stations; the stations have been recaptured, but the attacks caused mass desertions among the police force".

"With the absentee votes in California and Washington finally counted, it appears that overall turnout was up 12 percent. John Kerry's popular vote was also 12 percent above Al Gore's. But the popular vote for Bush was up a stunning 20 percent. Before the election, some liberal commentators were claiming that Bush would win no votes he hadn't won in 2000. Not quite: He won 10 million more".

Wayne Lusvardi has an article up which asks: Did we have to destroy Falluja to save it?

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions

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