Leftism

Stefan Kanfer: Curb Your Dogma

Catholic Schools Matter by Stefan Kanfer

Apostate David Mamet confronts the secular religion of liberalism.
“I had my first conversation with a conservative at the age of 60.” On the face of it, that claim seems absurd: David Mamet must have dwelt in a hermetically sealed environment for six decades. But the playwright/director is telling the truth; he’s spent his career in show business, an ecosystem as airtight as academia.

Unlike so many of his colleagues, however, Mamet began to question the shibboleths and doctrines he had long taken for granted. In four years, the 64-year-old moved inexorably from left to right, like the hour hand on a clock. In The Secret Knowledge, his latest collection of essays, he confesses that “I examined my Liberalism, and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and time again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws.” But there was a profound difference; the gambler hurts primarily himself. “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.” [Read more…]

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The Post-Economic Age

socialism communism a failure by Bruce Walker –
The Left, grounded in the childish superstitions of Marx, views life as economics. One awful flowering of this dangerous silliness is the proliferation of victims. The resource-rich nations of long decolonized Africa and Asia, for example, remain poor because of imperialist exploitation by America and Europe. Women and racial minorities are still, officially, “exploited,” although how that can be taken seriously forty years after the Women’s Liberation Movement and fifty years after centerpiece Civil Rights legislation is never really considered. The Left needs victims and victimizers and the easiest way to invent these clumps of humanity is dreary socialism and its dull-normal offspring, like feminism.

Most of all, the Left needs all things to be, at their core, economic. Although many Americans and many Europeans face daunting problems finding work and paying bills, this is less the result of true economic problems and more the consequence of the awareness by Leftists that the full flowering of prosperity would end the need for their noxious hatreds and coveting. [Read more…]

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Shovel-Ready Punch Line

Obama Shovel Readyby Jonah Goldberg –
“Shovel-ready was not as … uh … shovel-ready as we expected,” Barack Obama joked the other day at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Republicans jumped on Obama’s comment as insensitive. “He joked about the wildly mistaken predictions he and others at the White House made a couple of years back about the job-creating potential of the stimulus,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “Well, I don’t think the 14 million Americans who are looking for jobs right now find any of this very funny.”

I’m sure they don’t, but the fact that the president laid an egg when he tried to be self-deprecating isn’t the scandal here.

After all, Obama has pretty much said the same thing several times. In a New York Times magazine profile last October, the president admitted he had to learn the hard way that there’s “no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” [Read more…]

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The ‘Achievement Gap’ Fraud

by John T. Bennett –
Our educational system is self-destructing because of a fraud known as the “achievement gap.” One result of that fraud is that public school bureaucrats are taking away opportunities from good students in a misguided effort to help underperforming students.

When the mainstream media reports on progressive social policies, the results can be astonishing. A recent Washington Post “Metro” section featured a stunning educational policy: a school policy that ruins opportunities for bright students in order to help the less bright students (“Dumping honors classes for AP,” May 22). The Post reports that honors classes are being abolished from the curriculum in Fairfax, VA, and many schools across the country. The purpose of abolishing the honors courses: to help “underrepresented minority students.” With that article, the Post unwittingly exhibited the core of the problem with education in this country: The flawed system and students’ low culture. Each factor combines in a downward spiral to give us the bad educational results we have today. [Read more…]

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Dalai Lama: ‘I am a Marxist’

Dalai Lama Marxistby Selwyn Duke –
There is no better way to proclaim your lack of spiritual and philosophical depth than by, two decades after the fall of communism, disclosing that you’re a Marxist. Yet this is precisely what Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama did during a speech before 150 Chinese students at the University of Minnesota this month. Journalist Tsering Namgyal reports on the story at Religion Dispatches, writing, “‘as far as socio-political beliefs are concerned, I consider myself a Marxist.’ ‘But not a Leninist,’ he [the Lama] clarified.”

Well, that’s a relief. Those Leninists can really kill ya’. Marxists will just murder you.

This isn’t the first time the Lama indicated that his soul is as red as the robes he wears. During a lecture in NYC on May 19, the Tibetan leader credited “capitalism” with bringing new freedoms to China but then said, “Still I am a Marxist”; he then explained that Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits.” That’s some deep thinking right there. [Read more…]

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Obama and the End of Western Civilization

by Steve McCann –
The global and domestic landscape is one of turmoil, indecision, and uncertainty. Everywhere one looks there is chaos and potential disaster, whether in the financial, economic, or political sphere. Since the beginning of the post-World War II era there has been one constant that has been the stabilizing force in the world: the stature, power, and influence of the United States. In a matter of a few short years the Obama presidency has deliberately and overwhelmingly eroded America’s pre-eminence, which has resulted in global instability and domestic unease.

Barack Obama assumed the office of the presidency as a man brought up and steeped in 1960’s radicalism, which advanced the doctrine that America, as the lone Western superpower, represented the evil nature of colonialism and capitalism’s exploitation of the masses — whether there was any truth in this assertion or that the United States was guilty of these sins was irrelevant. [Read more…]

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Another Devastating Jobs Report

Obama Marxist Communist Radical by Jeffrey Folks –
As every economist outside the White House and the New York Times now recognizes, a healthy recovery is not just around the corner. Economists have been racing to lower their second quarter and full-year GDP estimates to below 2%. There is growing apprehension that the economy is slipping back into recession. And all of this is happening because of the President’s intense hostility toward capitalism.

With the exception of Obama’s evil twin (aka Jimmy Carter), we have never had a president this antagonistic toward the free market. Obama arrogantly refuses to accept even most fundamental law of free-market economics: the fact that businesses must be allowed to make a profit if they wish to expand and hire new workers. [Read more…]

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It’s Official: The Left Is Out of Ideas

by Peter Heck –
With a little over a year to go until the next national election cycle is complete, it has become apparent that from an economic standpoint, the SS Liberal has officially run out of steam. Hull weighted down with the barnacles of false promises and rudder crippled by the reckless mismanagement of a spendthrift captain from Chicago, she sits there floundering in a sea of unemployment and malaise not experienced since Jimmy Carter was at the helm.

And despite all the rosy window dressing provided by the beaming ship attendants of the mainstream media, who pretend to be shocked every time another leak opens up, we passengers are fully aware of our surroundings. [Read more…]

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Hope and Change, the Communist Way

Hope and Change Communism by Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh –
I am in Washington, D.C. surrounded by expensive SUVs, Hummers, Mercedes, and “environmentally friendly” Priuses sporting stickers with Hope and Change, Socialism 2012, advertising socialism and communism, to the detriment of the “evil” capitalist system that afforded them those cars and a luxurious lifestyle.

A few beat up cars are liberally covered in communist slogan stickers, phony empty words that promise “redistribution of wealth” and a nanny state. I ponder for a moment if progressives are still waiting for their free gas, housing, day care, jobs, education, medical care, endless vacations, and a chunk of paradise from the “filthy, rotten rich” who deserve to be stripped of everything they own. I still do not understand why they call themselves “progressives” when they are really longing for regression to a life of slavery to the government.

Ardent Democrats and some Republicans believe the rhetoric that a socialist/communist state will bring Shangri La because it will be delivered by a community organizer who has a sonorous voice and reads speeches well. Is it futile to remind them that many countries who have tried the communist model have failed miserably? Millions have lost their lives in re-education camps due to famine, persecution, or refusal to comply with the daily communist indoctrination. [Read more…]

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Economics 101

Economics 101by David Solway –

It’s really very simple. One does not need to take a graduate course in Economics to figure out why a productive society prospers and how it can be destroyed. As Tim Harford explains in The Undercover Economist, “Economics is partly about modeling, about articulating basic principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects.” The key word is “seemingly.” The other part of Economics is plain common sense—the part which all too many economists refuse to practice since it deprives them of shamanistic status as delvers into realms of mystical complexity. Paul Krugman comes immediately to mind. “[I]ncreased government spending,” pontificates The New York Times guru, “is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.” One may be pardoned for thinking that it is Krugman who should be put on hold. [Read more…]

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