For the first time ever, I was recently reading the Daily Kos website (link not included), a leftist blog that is set up quite like a leftist society would be: a council of supreme leaders (top contributors who post directly to the front page) and the teeming masses (individuals who posts “diaries” or simply comment). While they call themselves a “Democratic Party” blog, the majority of their content is from the leftist perspective, so a leftist blog it is. To my conservative friends, I would recommend taking a glance once in a while at what delusional rants and campaigns of distortion blogs and sites like this have to offer because as Sun Tzu said: “Know thy enemy.”

Their Great Leader

In general terms, it looks like the writers seem to cherry-pick the news and twist the truth beyond recognition in order to satisfy their liberal audience in a behavior I have heard people refer to as a “circle jerk.” For example, on December 24th, Jed Lewison (fine, I’ll provide the link) took time out of his busy day to criticize “right-wing activist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com” for demanding that the Attorney General “investigate Rahm Emanuel for… corrupt practices involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” First, Jed says that it was not, in fact, Freddie/Fannie, other government sponsored enterprises, and the government itself that created the conditions for the financial collapse by pushing for the financial industry to originate riskier and riskier loans (and by keeping capital reserves low) but rather it was all the banks’ fault. He tops this accusation by saying “[right-]wingers love it [the idea that gov’t intervention created the recession] because it not only absolves the financial and real estate industries of responsibility for the financial crisis, but it puts the blame squarely on the backs of blacks and Latinos.” This man is not only dead wrong about the causes of the recession but he is also a class/ethnic warfare antagonizer for characterizing all “right-wingers,” which I assume applies to me (a “Latino” according to this leftist class/ethnic warfare-monger), as “in love” with blaming blacks and Latinos for the recession. Both of his assertions are just plain wrong. The proof that government intervention was the principal cause of the recession is clear as day, not to say that Wall Street didn’t play its part… but the simplistic answers generated from the simplistic minds of these leftist liberals who assert that a kumbaya-singing, moral-relativistic, wealth-redistributionist socialist utopia would be the pinnacle of human development continue to ignore facts in order to satisfy their own limited and grossly distorted worldview. [Catches breath]. There is zero profit motive in giving away money to people who are expected to default on their payments, e.g. people with bad credit… that is, unless the riskiness of issuing those mortgages were lessened somehow: enter the federal government. That said, here’s an interesting video about government’s efforts to get financial institutions to loosen lending standards by using Freddie and Fannie:

The speaker here, Peter J. Wallison, had written a piece in 2005 about the need to regulate Freddie and Fannie and of course it is clear that he was right. You may say that he is a conservative and therefore his opinion is skewed, but facts are facts regardless of one’s political leanings; prior to government intervention under the Clinton and Bush administrations, no financial institution with sound business practices would make such risky bets on subprime mortgages.

Of course, the author continues by insisting that Republicans are racists because of a comment by Norquist that “Obama is John Kerry with a tan"… Obama is a liberal and he is darker than Kerry, it’s obvious! Is it racism to point out a fact like this, referring to visible physical characteristics of a person objectively? So if someone in public life his big ears or big eyes, should those observations be off the table? When it comes to certain “protected groups” it seems that PC standards have gone from don’t speak ill to don’t even mention. I believe that a nation where its citizens can no longer speak plain objective truth because of the hyper-sensitivity of other citizens is a nation with the wrong value set. What ever happened to freedom of speech? Since when was having a tan a bad thing? Who does this comment hurt? No matter, the liberals have ruled that one cannot say such things and we, the poor plebeians under their care, must comply.

Ultimately, Jed concludes that liberals should not be attacking the administration or Freddie/Fannie because… it distracts from “progressive goals.” He may be correct but this concern is not restricted only to conservatives or wingers, as he playfully refers to us, it is a national issue that affects everyone. With a rising national debt, how with liberals be able to accomplish all of these “progressive goals?” The truth is that regular Joes who happen to be liberal still see these programs as a sort of safety net for the less fortunate and when they see mountains of debt and the US government and Federal Reserve pumping money into Freddie and Fannie, they start to worry that these programs will disappear. The far left liberals are more focused on the forest rather than the trees and understand that the ultimate goal is not a “safety net” but rather a “spider web” that will trap a majority of individuals and put us on the path to a society where wealth is “evenly” distributed and individual achievement is punished or outlawed. So to liberals, conservatives, and independents who care about the behind-the-scenes corruption, unsustainable spending, and irresponsible behavior of any administration, it is your God-given right and duty to call for an investigation of such practices… just don’t expect the big government leftists to be on your side.

All in all, blogs like DK showcase leftist America, unfiltered… something that may help conservatives understand how far removed from reality their perspective is… and maybe even give us a clue about how to reach out to them because at the end of the day, we need all Americans to preserve freedom and bring prosperity back to our country.

-AG