ON NOT QUITE GETTING IT RIGHT:

I can't help myself: I have got to have a laugh at the follies of the Leftists instead of just letting them dig themselves into a hole. Take this article from beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon. The author looks at the map of "blue" counties and draws the correct conclusion that the Kerry vote came overwhelmingly from the big cities. But that's the last thing he gets right. He immediately jumps to the laughable conclusion that everyone in the big cities is like him and it is people like him who won the cities for Kerry. It is the old Leftist trick of claiming to speak for far more people than they actually do. They once used to claim to speak for "the worker", but they never did, of course. In this case the cities were won for Kerry not because of the Leftists there but because that is where minorities concentrate. It is minorities that are characteristic of the big cities, not bourgeois whites. Bourgeois whites are scattered everywhere these days. Material comfort and options in life are available to almost any American anywhere who is prepared to work hard in fact.

And the fact that minorities and Leftist whites vote for the same candidate does NOT mean that the two groups share the same values. The minority vote is a "bought" vote -- bought with the promise of welfare dollars. On social values such as attitude to homosexuals etc, the two groups have long been known to be poles apart. In a public-opinion-polling sense, then, "city values" would be just about the opposite of what our author claims. To put it vividly, you would almost certainly get a bigger vote in favour of castrating homosexuals in the big cities than you would get anywhere else. So our poor old Leftist would actually find more solace among the kindly souls of middle America than among a true random sample of his acclaimed big city Americans. His Leftist cities exist only in his imagination.

And another amusing point he makes is that the "raving neo-Christian idiots" of Wyoming got roughly twice as much per head spent on them by the Federal government as the good citizens of Washington State did. And he calls the Wyoming people idiots? They sound like the winners to me! What a fool the guy is.

And there is an article by Malanga which nicely detonates yet another common Democrat fallacy -- that the GOP support for basic cultural values has distracted the workers from economic realities. The underlying Leftist claim is that the economy is in a mess and poor people are going backwards and the Democrats would fix all that! If that were true it would indeed be foolish for working people to be seduced away from voting Democrat by issues such as abortion and homosexual marriage. The inspiration for the claim is Thomas Franks' recent book What's the Matter With Kansas? and the book claims that Kansas is an example of such folly. As usual with Leftist claims, however, this one is fact-free too. Kansas is in fact doing particularly well economically so sticking with conservatives who have helped bring that about is entirely logical and in the best interests of all Kansans.

But let Leftists believe all these silly explanations for their failure. Let them waste their energy fighting imaginary enemies! They will never cure their sickness if they keep misdiagnosing its cause.

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ELSEWHERE

Another laugh: The frantically Leftist Maureen Dowd of the NYT is now defending a senior Republican Senator to whom GWB gave his personal support in the recent campaign! Nobody is saying so but I presume that the price of that support was a promise from Senator Specter not to actually vote against any of the administration's judicial nominees.

An excellent defence of conservative policies from Australia's last Labor Party Prime Minister: "In a fiery defence of Labor's opening up of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, Mr Keating crowed that ordinary Australians now had cheaper cars, higher wages, near-full employment, and easy access to home loans and the stock market. "When the government I led abandoned general centralised wage fixing ... productivity went off," Mr Keating said. "Productivity went to 3 per cent through the 90s, the highest rate of any of the OECD countries." The result was a 20 per cent increase in incomes, or "the highest growth in real incomes in any decade of the 20th century", Mr Keating said. "You can't believe that we still have critics for this policy," he said.... Mr Keating scorned critics who have cast Labor of the 1980s and 1990s as "not really Labor governments" or "Labor fakers of some kind who passed the parcel on government and the markets". "You can buy a reasonable quality small car for under $15,000 today," he said. "(Before tariff reduction) that would have been nearer to $30,000." Materialism was under attack for hollowing out social values, however Mr Keating said: "One has to ask, will people have better values and be better put together if their car costs twice as much? "Is that extra call on their disposable income going to produce some astringent moral effect on them?""

Leftists still celebrate the Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925 in which fundamentalist Christians fought a rearguard action against the teaching of the theory of evolution in the schools. Evolution was considered a "progressive" or Leftist cause at the time and -- predictably -- had the overwhelming support of the press. It is interesting therefore that Jim Lindgren has recently put up some excerpts from the school textbook that the Christians were attacking and which the "progressives" were defending. The excerpts make a case for eugenics that could have come straight from Hitler himself. So it seems that those silly old Christians were not so silly after all and that the Leftists and the media were, as usual, on the side of depriving people of their liberties in the name of whatever theory might happen to be fashionable at the time.

Islamic primitivism: "Ironically, a cult of the warrior has defined the Muslim worldview throughout the period of Muslim decline. Muslims have had few victories in the last two centuries, but their admiration for the proverbial sword and spear has only increased. .Textbooks in Muslim countries speak of the victories of Muslim fighters from an earlier era. Orators still call for latter-day mujahedeen to rise and regain Islam's lost glory. More streets in the Arab world are named after Muslim generals than men of learning. Even civilian dictators in the Muslim world like being photographed in military uniforms, Saddam Hussein being a case in point. While the Muslim world's obsession with military power encourages violent attempts to "restore" Muslim honor, the real reasons for Muslim humiliation and backwardness continue to multiply".

Abortion worse than the KKK: "In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted than are born. A black baby is now more than three times as likely to be murdered in the womb than a white baby. Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Every three days, more African-Americans are killed by abortion than have been killed by the Ku Klux Klan in its entire history. Planned Parenthood operates the nation's largest chain of abortion clinics and almost 80 percent of its facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they submit to over 35 percent of the abortions."

There is a good Rothbard article here summarizing three major Papal encyclicals. It shows that the Popes have advocated economic authoritarianism to go with their religious authoritarianism and that they have been no friends of the free market. My reading of a more recent encyclical led me to similar conclusions.

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 have put up a man whose policies seem to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though they 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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