The left vs. American values
BEING A LIBERAL politician in America is more difficult than being a conservative politician for one simple reason. To get elected, liberals have to hide their contempt for so many core American values.
When Sen. Barack Obama explained to wealthy San Francisco donors that those small-town yokels in Pennsylvania “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4230 or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigration sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” he expressed a fundamental left-wing belief about non-urban America: It’s stupid and reactionary.
Sophisticated urbanites respond to economic hardship rationally, Obama was suggesting. But those unenlightened small-town folk, their response is http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4258. They turn to guns, God and nativism.
Obama did not misspeak. He misunderstands. He is not alone.Speaking in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2155 (there’s that city again) in 2004, Hillary Clinton said she supported higher taxes, admitting, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” That is the left-wing view of government in a nutshell. Those dumb American people cannot be left alone because only government intervention in and control of their lives promotes “the common good.”
That value was reflected recently by Rep. Carol Shea-Porter when she suggested that states can negate the Second Amendment by banning people from owning handguns. The core American value of a right to self-defense is entirely alien to her, as is the fundamental principle that constitutional rights cannot be infringed by government. Shea-Porter evidently believes that if it is for “the common good,” government can revoke the Constitution.
The list of liberals accidentally revealing their contempt for or disinterest in American traditions and values is a long one. To mention just a few: http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4142," mocked people “who have plastic on the furniture” and said she’d never in her adult life been proud of America until her husband ran for President. Sen. John Kerry in 2004 indirectly called U.S. military personnel stupid by saying smart people who stay in school don’t get sent to Iraq. In a 1993 tour of Monticello, carried live on C-SPAN, Al Gore could not identify images of George Washington or Benjamin Franklin.