Liberal Accuses Liberals Of Being Ninnies, Sell-Outs, Hysterics, And Poseurs

My kind of liberal!

The whole thing is worth reading, just for very red meat served up by an unlikely chef. I'll just selectively quote a little, the stuff about how much liberals suck and not the stuff about how liberals can de-suckify themselves (which is all kind of vague anyway -- hey, the writer is a liberal; he can critique but he doesn't know much about actually doing shit.)

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. [Emphasis mine; I'm glad someone on the left has also noticed his fellow-travellers' not-so-secret psychosexual craving for COINTELPRO Daddy-Time!] It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

...

What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression” escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word “Amerika.” Ebonics, Fanetiks, and other such insane institutional manifestations of white guilt. Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.

We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

Also noted: The fact that the supposedly pro-workin'-man left takes huge money from business interests and then, suprisingly!, votes for pro-business measures like the bankruptcy bill. On this score, I don't comprehend the lack of scandal: True, Republicans voted for it -- but then Republicans are ideologically (and, alas, often reflexively) pro-business and even pro-business-subsidy. What, exactly, is Chuck Schumer's excuse?

And related to that: The leaders of the liberal movement care not a whit about tangible economic progress for the lower classes, at least not beyond the level of shallow rhetoric. The issues they focus on are almost exclusively the concerns of the comfortable class, largely symbolic and/or fantasy-ideology stuff like gay marriage or liberating vaginas from The Oppressive Patriarchy.

The strange thing here is that even among liberalism's sworn enemies -- conservatives -- it's the forgotten blue-collar component of the coalition that gets the most respect, or at least provokes the least anger. I'm not pro-union in the sense that I think the government should pass a bunch of laws to give them an artificial advantage in labor negotiations, Lord knows, but I do respect a union's right to bargain (without artificial legislated advantages) for higher wages. I wish they wouldn't be quite so corrupt, thuggish, mob-friendly, or suicidal (they often seem to think workers' interests are not in sustainably rising wages, but in bankrupting their employers and reducing their wages to zero), but at least I comprehend the basic goal of unionism is at least something tanglible. They want more money; no posturing or hidden agendas there. As a Republican, at least I can understand that: I want more money too.

But the Friend of the Workin' Man Liberal Coalition will continue focusing laser-like on the very crititical problems of the workin' man, like preserving the delicate ecoystem of the snail-darter, seeking marital rights for 2% of the population which historically has not shown a great deal of interest in permanent monagamy, with or without state sanction, campaigning tirelessly for the poor and downtrodden Hamas terrorists, parental leave and collective-bargaining rights for closet and basement hydroponic pot farmers, and, of course, walking around on stilts wearing full-body Vagina Warrior costumes capped by a revoutionary-chic Che beret (or Cheret) while attepting so simulate the intricate mating dances of the Elaine Benes tribe of Guadalupe and banging (antirhythmically) on authentic replica African tribal drums bought from Crate & Barrel on an Amex Platinum card while trying to cover margin-calls over a deluxe beta-version iPhone with Fight The Power and Imagine ring-tones.

Thanks to several readers, but most recentlyPetiteDov.

Spoke Too Soon! Liberal Democrats work hard on behalf of unions... by denying actual workers' rights to vote on unionizing by secret ballot.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided to hold a vote this Wednesday on perhaps the most unpopular element of the Democratic agenda. The Employee Free Choice Act has already passed the House, but now it faces real hurdles in the Senate because, contrary to the name, it undermines workplace democracy.

Under the so-called card-check bill, a company would no longer have the right to demand a secret-ballot election to certify a union, thus stripping 140 million American workers of the right to decide in private whether to organize.

Republican senators, except possibly Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, are uniformly opposed to the idea. "We went to the secret ballot in the early 1800s in this country for a darn good reason: If somebody's looking over your shoulder, your ballot doesn't mean much," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says, noting fears of intimidation by unions should the bill pass.

But conservatives aren't the only ones concerned. A February survey of 1,000 likely voters by McLaughlin Associates found that 79% of respondents oppose the bill, with only 14% in favor. Even Democrats opposed the idea, 78% to 16%.

So why is Mr. Reid taking the risk of putting the bill on the floor, since even if it passed it would face a certain presidential veto? Simply put, the card check law is the No. 1 priority of union lobbyists in the new Democratic Congress.

Makes sense -- after all, it removes a right from actual workers, but gives power to those actually signing over those big union-contribution checks!

46 Democrats and Democratically-aligned Socialist Bernie Sanders are all co-sponsors of the anti-worker-rights bill. I'm sure this enthusiastic support for a wildly-unpopular measure is simply due to the dictates of each Senator's individual conscience; certainly donations from Big Labor has nothing at all to do with this.

Senator Total Labor Contributions/Labor Contributions Since 2007

Landrieu $919,300.00/$46,000.00

Pryor $436,000.00/$50,500.00

Baucus $1,062,402.00/$30,500.00

Harkin $1,680,086.00/$36,500.00

Biden $479,677.00 /$5,000.00

Durbin $882,225.00/$63,500.00

Kerry $51,556.00/$42,000.00

Lautenberg $1,253,764.00/$33,500.00

Levin $1,257,276.00/$51,500.00

Reed $718,900.00/$44,100.00

Rockefeller $983,728.00/$55,000.00

Cash-money "progressivism" -- Catch the Fever!

Ted Kennedy -- "Increase Workers' Wages? Who Are You Trying To Fool?!" The Liberal Lion defends the wage-depressing effects of amnesty-without-security by citing the great progressive leader, Judge Elihu Snails: "You'll get nothing and like it!"

Well, the unions get something -- a creepy Stalinist control over the workers who are, theoretically, supposedly empowered to vote (or not vote) for them.

The American workers get... well, dicked on both ends.

Oh: Also at that Kaus link, John Edwards kinda-sorta seems to come out against comprehensive immigration reform. No big deal, really; he's running as the most radically left candidate anyway, desperately needs to make news about something other than his haircuts and mani-pedi schedule, and besides, Obama isn't big on the Comprehensive Piece of Shit either...

Why, it's almost as if a solid majority of Americans on both sides of the political aisle oppose this bill, and yet our nonresponsive political class has their own agenda or something.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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