Evans: Why I'm still a liberalMay 22, 2005
I am, in most things, liberal because to my mushy eyes, the American "welfare state" has been (mostly) a success. Not a big fan of government, but a believer that some things are best done together, rather than individually.
History is quite clear about what happens when the "haves" don't bother to take care of the "have nots," or even the "have somes": Rule by the rich, the few, who will, eventually, lose control, often violently.
But as diehard conservatives insist we move from America's New Deal ethic into Ayn Rand Adventure Land — minimal taxes; everyone out for themselves — I can't imagine why they think our (far from perfect) system has been so awful.
After all, since Roosevelt, the United States has won the only war that really mattered, blasted into the economic stratosphere, raised standards of living, cultivated the middle class (that powerful antidote to pluto-oligarchy), become a technological Godzilla, and built the most dominant (if excessive) military in history.
Gee, what a trainwreck.
But people like change, I guess, and these days we seem to be demanding it regardless of the likely consequences.
In Missouri, Gov. Matt Blunt piously declares that raising taxes on "hard-working families" is immoral even as he strives to eliminate Medicaid services for the poor. This Christian politician seems to have missed one of Jesus's most oft-repeated messages: Take care of the poor.
In Kansas, the state board of education proposes redefining science as "a systematic method of continuing investigation" that does not limit its inquiry to the natural world. Under such Dark Ages claptrap, the "supernatural" would be fair game in Kansas science classes.
The supernatural they are after, of course, is God. But thousands of years of inquiry have not brought "naturalistic" proof of God, and good, old-fashioned faith has had to suffice. And once you open the door to the supernatural, what's to stop a kid from writing a biology paper on werewolves, unicorns or Oz?
I keep wondering if these people even "believe" in science, and if they are willing to eschew the medicine and technology — produced by "naturalistic" science — that has granted them such cushy lives.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is in high dudgeon over a Newsweek item about alleged "Quran abuse" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A small item, since retracted (though it's bolstered by substantial evidence), "caused" Muslim riots in Afghanistan, according to the Bush spin.
Now the White House, ignoring the undisputed abuse and murder of Muslims by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, is playing the schoolmarm, telling Newsweek it has blood of 16 Muslims on its hands.
No mention of the tens of thousands of Muslims killed in ill-advised military actions, or the 1,622 U.S. troops killed (and more than 10,000 casualties) in Iraq because of much more egregious "errors" by our elected armchair gladiators.
And if we are to believe Newsweek is to blame for these deaths, then why aren't we blaming loudmouth ideologues in Congress for the dangers faced by judges who don't rule as some think they should? Following the tragic Terri Schiavo case, for example, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) suggested that we can hardly blame wackos for going after judges when they don't like their rulings.
Chicago Judge Joan H. Lefkow, whose husband and mother were murdered by a lunatic who didn't like her dismissal of his malpractice suit, chastised the agitators last week. Such rhetoric, she said, "can only encourage those who are on the edge ... to exact revenge on a judge who displeases them."
But our outrage is now selective, directed by people drunk on their vision of an America unfettered by collective responsibility, a society ruled by belief over facts, a judiciary beholden to party politics, and a foreign policy that may make us feel like kick-ass warriors from afar, but in fact makes the world more dangerous.
Call me what you will, but what, exactly, is so appealing about that grand vision?
Contact Clay Evans at (303) 473-1352 or evansc@dailycamera.com.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Why I'm still a liberal
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5 comments:
Blah, blah, blah. Entertaining, but really just a pile of partisan crap designed to get our blood up. "The Republicans are coming the Republicans are coming!" - whatever.
I already know there are Christian wackos out there but I don't think this means that Republicans want to eliminate taxes and create "Ayn Rand" world. If anything taxes are going to go up the way they're spending...
It sad to see you debase off hand what I thought was a very well written and thought out piece. Your discount shows the stink of modern politics. Create a lot of emotive bombast but little substance on one side of an issue, create a lot of noise to confuse people and eventually they’ll give up trying to understand and just say everyone is being partisan. But what he is saying here has been talked about by republicans for some time. They have talked about making government so small you can drown it in a bath tub, they call what they are doing starving the beast. Now you may just call that rhetoric but I'll take them at their word since they have been doing such a good job of doing what they said they’d do up to this point.
From http://www.wordspy.com/words/starvethebeast.asp
The starve-the-beast doctrine is now firmly within the conservative mainstream. George W. Bush himself seemed to endorse the doctrine as the budget surplus evaporated: in August 2001 he called the disappearing surplus "incredibly positive news" because it would put Congress in a "fiscal straitjacket."
Like supply-siders, starve-the-beasters favor tax cuts mainly for people with high incomes. That is partly because, like supply-siders, they emphasize the incentive effects of cutting the top marginal rate; they just don't believe that those incentive effects are big enough that tax cuts pay for themselves. But they have another reason for cutting taxes mainly on the rich, which has become known as the "lucky ducky" argument.
Here's how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There's a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don't pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these "lucky duckies." (Yes, that's what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as The Journal said, to get their "blood boiling with tax rage."
—Paul Krugman, "The Tax-Cut Con," The New York Times, September 14, 2003
I'm not sure he's a liberal... not with the current spin on words. It's sort of like the paint things: you don't move the brush, the canvas moves, it twirls and voila "spin art"... you just squirt instead of paint.
"liberal" now is taken to be "profligate" an in to bestow "liberally" onto others in a careless, wasteful way. And indeed, the "liberal" as link to "comminist" is simply marked, as on aircraft "Not a Step". No, this man is a conservative, seeking to slow change, stay with things that have worked and not be stampeded.
As to the Republican eliminating taxes: that's just an ad absurdum ploy. That they have reduced revenues to a point that the government is NOT sustainable, run up a huge deficit as far as the eye can see, and further concentrated wealth, antithetical to the democratic process is simple fact, and unarguable.
Fact: the entire Iraq misadventure is financed by debt. Thus, future revenues are committed to current expenses. Enron called that "book to market". Enron, "the smartest guys in the room" is a creation of Texas oil interests and the absence of government oversight.
But you simply cannot be a liberal anymore. In the words of Pogo "the gummint tore it down and built a milk bar." No, we are conservatives. And the Republicans of Bush are simply assholes, but that does lack the panache they seek.
But it is fun to substitute "asshole" for "conservative" when listening or reading the so called news.
Movement afoot to get "intelligent design" into local schools. It is not a theory, it is propaganda.
My kids were allowed to disagree with teachers on matters of fact, and this is one.
They could say, quite within the range of polite and honest discourse, that intelligent design is not a theory, any more that god itself is a theory, and that to teach it and TEST for it in school is brainwashing and propaganda.
Kids get propaganda all the time, so I don't know that I would yank the kids on this one alone.
Time was when the kids that decorated the Xmas tree would beat the Jewish kids for killing Christ and who could say they didn't deserve it?
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