Monday, March 17, 2008

Ugly American

The Daily Kos is a major liberal web log, perhaps the biggest blog in the country in terms of traffic. Thus we can learn much about the liberal mind set as well as the Democratic party, which is strongly influenced by the Kos site, from what is posted there. What we find is often not very pretty. One of the diarists recently posted a piece in which he argues that America is no longer a compassionate nation and that what we need is to be invaded and occupied, to have our children slaughtered, and then maybe we'll wake up.

You might think that this was taken from a left-wing version of a Three Stooges script, but you can check it out yourself. This is the sort of thing many in the mainstream left believe:

As a nation the United States no longer has the remotest idea about what it really feels like to be part of a war zone. Americans have lost the empathy that is necessary to make an informed, meaningful, compassionate decision about whether or not war should be waged. While candidates fight over who has the required experience to properly oversee our republic's international interests, none realize that none of them have ever felt what it is like to have war waged in their neighborhood and occupied by intruders. While they may claim to know when to wage wars and to know the horrors of war, they only know them intellectually. They can't claim that they have emotionally felt them. No one who was born and raised in the United States can claim that and none can really feel it. We have allowed a Congress and an administration to encourage hate and to hi-jack our compassion. In fact, as a nation we have lost our compassion.

Unfortunately, America is at a point that to be able to really feel again, to regain that compassion, it needs to be invaded and occupied in the same way that we have invaded and occupied Iraq. Then there might be a greater chance that Americans will be more reluctant to accept the invasion of another country. Maybe seeing and feeling the same level of destruction that we have inflicted on Iraq, at least the American public will understand why invading another country is unconscionable except in the most dire circumstances - which means after that country has directly attacked the United States. And that has not happened since World War II.

Talk about a lack of compassion. Unfortunately, compassion isn't the only thing this guy lacks. Reading this does help us, though, to understand how Barack Obama could sit under the tutelage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright for twenty years. To a man of the left, like Obama, Wright probably sounded pretty moderate.

Maybe somebody should invite the Kos diarist, and Rev. Wright, for that matter, to read this piece by lefty rocker Bob Geldof. It'd teach them something about American compassion.

RLC

Man in a Hole

The Easter season seems a good time to note that courses in comparative religions sometimes go an entire semester without pointing out the essential difference between Christianity and all the other belief systems on offer. This video does it in three minutes:

Too bad one of the passersby wasn't an atheistic materialist. It would have been interesting to hear what he would have to say to the man in trapped man. Perhaps it would've been something like: "Sorry you're trapped, but life's tough and there's really no hope. Good luck."

RLC

Second Amendment

"Today the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the most significant gun-rights case of our lifetime," writes the Washington Times. The Times goes on to say that:

District of Columbia vs. Heller promises to settle the constitutionality of the District's handgun ban and others like it, laws which we've long considered to be unduly restrictive. Here are the 27 words of the oft-interpreted, and oft-misinterpreted, Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The editorial concludes with these words:

In practical terms, it is a signal injustice that the District of Columbia has deprived law-abiding citizens of gun rights as the drug wars raged and as violence escalated before, during and after the D.C. gun ban's imposition.

D.C. residents should resist the more fevered predictions of mayhem in the event that District law is overturned. The court is not ruling on the wisdom of background checks, the prohibition of arms possession by dangerous persons or restrictions on certain very dangerous types of arms. The court would merely be ruling that a municipality may not strip its law-abiding citizens of an inalienable right. Since 1976, this law also has served to deprive those citizens of appreciable means of self defense while murderers and other criminals simply disobey. The Supreme Court must step in to protect their rights.

I'm not sure when the decision will be handed down but it will surely be front page news when it is.

RLC