Category Archives: Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

They’re Coming For Your Kids!

Conservatism, Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Family, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, The State

“Imagine: One day you’re frolicking in the open air on a large compound, doing your daily chores, and feasting on hearty homegrown fare; the next you’re gagging on a diet of T&A courtesy of MTV, and fast-food compliments of your fat foster mom. As the makeshift mom hollers at you to swallow your zombifying meds—the Texas foster care system is notorious for pumping its charges full of psychotropic drugs—her flaccid live-in lover eyes you lustily.”

As I write, many of the kids kidnapped by Texas rangers from the Yearning for Zion ranch are being scattered across the state to far-flung group homes and shelters. In the land of the free and home of the brave hundreds of children can be rounded up and removed from their families based on a hunch or a hoax. No hue and cry will ensue—not from professional civil libertarians, nor from members of the unwatchful dogs in the media, or from presidential candidates vying to uphold—or is it just to hold—the Constitution.”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “They’re Coming For Your Kids!” The column leads the WND Commentary Page for Friday, April 25.

Updated: Deifying the Dalai Lama

Celebrity, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Reason

“… While the Dalai Lama seems a sweet enough fellow down to his conventional, simplistic, unoriginal quips, he is, nevertheless, a caricature, the creation of pseudo-spiritual, faux-intellectual liberal elites…”

More poignantly: “The story of Tibet is a story with more twists than a serpent’s tail. Unfortunately, most Americans are as unequipped as Lauren Caitlin Upton of the 2007 Miss Teen USA fame to locate Tibet on a map, much less preach about its politics…”

Read the rest in “Deifying the Dalai Lama,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column. (Readers of Barely a Blog will be familiar with the theme.)

Update (April 24): There’s an interesting new letter in our Comments Section from a skeptical (read: thinking) health-care professional who’s recently encountered the Lama.

Dalai Lama La-La Land

Celebrity, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pseudo-intellectualism, The West, The Zeitgeist

Ask the prototypical dumb bimbo—an American beauty queen, for example—who’s her most favorite person in the whole wide world, and she’ll reply: the Dalai Lama. (And then bare that mandatory big overbite.)

The Dalai Lama is the celebrity airhead’s “intellectual” ornament, every bit as essential a fashion accessory as the rat-like pooch, or the adopted African or Asian ankle biter.

On the surface, the DL seems a sweet enough old man down to his conventional arsenal of simple truisms. He’s no Aristotle that’s for sure, although when he says things like, “Peace good; war bad,” his followers react as though he said something revolutionary. Western liberals love to patronize exotic, foreign activists.

So, as sixty thousand pitiful pinkos flooded Qwest Field stadium in Seattle to feast on the Tibetan leader’s presence (flabby arms and all), it’s worth remembering that the man, and Tibetan Buddhism, was made hip by the likes of Richard Gere, who doesn’t always know a great deal. (I’m being charitable here.)

Indeed, the Dalai Lama is Hollywood’s cause celebre. When the Beatles were young, the rich and famous flocked to India to prostrate themselves before slimy gurus, who promptly took their cash in exchange for Lama-like fortune-cookie “wisdom.” Later, many gurus were exposed for their corrupt, un-abstemious life-styles. The left-liberals lying at the feet of the Lama should know that “during the half century of living in the western world, he had embraced concepts such as human rights and religious freedom, ideas largely unknown in old Tibet.”

The Lama’s wisdom is Western.

All in all, the Dalai Lama is a bit of a liar. He certainly never reminds his acolytes that the Tibetan exile community, lazy Lama included, was funded by the CIA (and George Soros). Michael Parenti, Ph.D has deconstructed the myths of Tibetan Buddhism and history in “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”:

“Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that “more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.” The official 1953 census–six years before the Chinese crackdown–recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000. Other census counts put the population within Tibet at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves–of which we have no evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese force in Tibet could not have rounded up, hunted down, and exterminated that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.

Chinese authorities claim to have put an end to floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment. They themselves, however, have been charged with acts of brutality by exile Tibetans. The authorities do admit to “mistakes,” particularly during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution when the persecution of religious beliefs reached a high tide in both China and Tibet. After the uprising in the late 1950s, thousands of Tibetans were incarcerated. During the Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization and grain farming were imposed on the Tibetan peasantry, sometimes with disastrous effect on production. In the late 1970s, China began relaxing controls “and tried to undo some of the damage wrought during the previous two decades.”

Needless to say, the history of the region is far more nuanced than Western liberals allow. Tibet was a slave, serf-based, old feudal theocracy under the Lama, and before the Chinese. “In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La. To denounce the Chinese occupation does not mean we have to romanticize the former feudal régime.” Or the Lama, who is a caricature, the creation of far-out left-liberals.

Bottom line, Americans should be convening to protest the Iraq war, with its 4 million refugees and tens of thousand dead. As little as they know about that recent atrocity, Americans know even less about Tibet. More material, Iraq is an American mess. Americans, most of whom cheered the war when it was launched, have an obligation to expiate and make amends for that mess. Until you’ve done that, shut the hell up about Tibet.

And do read “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” in its entirety.

Updated: Obama Slimes Small Town America

America, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

As Huffington Post reporter Mayhill Fowler tells it, at first, she didn’t want to report what she’d heard from the mouth of the messiah.

“I was not initially going to write about Senator Obama’s remarks about Pennsylvanians. Because, frankly, I didn’t want to bring down the campaign,” Fowler told CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim (one of the few sane women on that channel).

Then she thought better of it: “I gave it more thought and I decided that the remarks bothered me enough that I wanted to write them up.”

Fowler follows Obama around in her capacity as a roving reporter. Here’s what she overheard and recorded, as Obama attempted to “explain” rural Pennsylvania to “a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday”:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Against the clucking and cooing of the Obama groupies at CNN (also known as “the best political team”), William Schneider, CNN Senior Political Analyst, and a rarity on that channel for rendering an objective, unbiased, close analysis, said this:

“Well, it’s certainly true that a lot of voters are angry and bitter over the war, over trade, over the economy. But he got into trouble for one precise reason, and that is because he said that people turn to religion and guns, by which I assume he means things like hunting, and that they criticize trade and illegal immigration because they are bitter and frustrated with their lives. Now that’s a causal assertion: religion, guns, and criticism of trade and illegal immigration because they are bitter and frustrated with their lives. (My emphasis)

Schneider continued:

“A lot of voters are going to find that statement untrue and insulting to their values and condescending. So I think to be fair we have to hear a fuller explanation from Senator Obama of what he meant. Maybe an explanation and maybe an apology would be in order. But we need to hear more about what was his intention in making that causal statement.”

In response, the Obama campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, changed the subject:

“Senator Obama has said many times in this campaign that Americans are understandably upset with their leaders in Washington for saying anything to win elections while failing to stand up for [sic] the special interests and fight for an economic agenda that will bring jobs and opportunity back to struggling communities. If John McCain wants a debate about who is out of touch with the American people, we can start by talking about the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that he once said offended his conscience but now he wants to make permanent.”

As Schneider then pointed out (in the face of the furrowed faces of his CNN female colleagues) that the Obama response fails to explain “the assertion that people’s bitterness and frustration are causing them to turn to religion and anti-trade sentiment and criticism of illegal immigrants… a lot of people are going to find that condescending and insulting.”

Let me depart from Schneider, who asked merely that Obama furnish “a fuller explanation.”

What you just heard was Obama unplugged. This is the real Obama. Why would anyone who cares about truth want an apology or a retraction? Obama finessing his visceral alienation from authentic America is Obama lying. Why would anyone wish to be lied to? Obama saying he’s sorry is Obama simply vowing to keep a lid on his disdain for traditional patriotic Americans, so that the high farce of electioneering can continue.

This value judgment, like the saga of Rev. Wright, is extremely significant for what it tells us about who Obama is and what he disdains: guns and God—not the God of Rev. Wright, but the God white, rural, gun-toting America carriers close to its heart.

Update (April 13): I notice a tone of contempt for rural, economically unsuccessful Americans has crept into a comment below. The pejorative “Archie Bunkers” for this segment of the population is of a piece with Obama’s slamming of the same people. There is no difference between such comments from my valued reader and the stance of contempt toward “Those People” taken by Obama—the observations are coming from the same “place,” except that our commentator is an economic conservative.

Here’s the issue that utterly evades most who’ve been making light of Obama’s bad-mouthing of God-fearing, white, rural, gun-toting America: These Reagan Democrats or protectionist Republicans are first and foremost wedded to God, guns, and small-town existence. Their lack of success and adaptation—looked down upon by my valued commentator—is secondary to who they are. Obama’s attack was leveled not at their failure to adapt economically—that’s government’s shortfall, in his worldview. Obama assailed these people for their “outrageous” fealty to a God that is not his (I remind you, I am irreligious, but sympathetic to faith), and affinity for their own (they dislike the invasion of their country).

Conservative or left-liberal, if you’re with Obama—justifying his viscerally hateful comments—you’ve been indoctrinated in a hatred of the people of this country (and I don’t mean the new-arrivals).