Man bites dog; liberal finally owns up to the truth:

I’m not stunned that conservatives oppose President Obama’s economic policies. Actually, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

El Rushbo didn’t stop there, of course. Limbaugh went on at CPAC to suggest that liberals opposed to the war in Iraq wanted the war to fail. Oh, shock and outrage!!!

Well, guess what? You’re damn right I wanted the Iraq war to fail.

Yeah, I said it.

Not because I hate our country or hate the troops but for the exact opposite reason – because I love my country and I value the lives of the people sworn to protect it. If you opposed the war, I bet you feel the same way. Now, fasten your seatbelt while I go a step further.

“I value the lives of the people sworn to protect it” — just so long as those sworn to protect it are never called upon to actually, umm, protect it. At that point, everything changes, depending on which party the President belongs to, and all bets are off. Just more of that good old super-nuanced patriotism and support for the troops we’ve all become accustomed to.

I believe that Limbaugh wants the President to fail because he loves the country, too.

Let me explain with a specific example from the war: torture. I didn’t want torture to succeed. That’s not because I pray for a world populated by terrorists devoid of fear or the ability to feel pain.

Maybe not — but that’s the end result when you root for Muslim fanatics and Pan-Arabist tyrants to win a war against your own people that we had actually gone far out of our way, over 11 eleven years of cease-fire violations, ignored UN resolutions, and attacks against our pilots, to avoid.

And there’s the whole problem: liberals may mean well — some of them — but their policies don’t work, and more often than not, produce results exactly the opposite of the stated goal, because they’re based on unreality and emotion rather than a sound analysis of what actually works. Capitalism, being the most successful engine for creating prosperity and advancing humanity the world has ever known, works. Socialism, being a tool of enslavement based on theft from the productive and government control over decisions rightly left up to free individuals, doesn’t.

Meanwhile, let’s see just what it is Rush supports that liberals so virulently hate, fear, and oppose, shall we?

Aside from the bastardization of the Constitution that the Obama plans are…Aside from that, where is the evidence that the people offering all of this have ever succeeded in any similar plans before? There’s none. There is no evidence it works (and loads of incontrovertible evidence that it doesn’t – M).

Freedom — freedom is the natural yearning of the human spirit as we were endowed by our creator. And the United States of America is the place in the world where that yearning flourishes, where freedom is expected because it’s part of the way we’re created.

I loved it when the Soviet Union went down and the wall went down and the liberals in our country said you know they may not be ready for freedom over there. They’ve been oppressed — yes, liberals will gladly tell you who can have freedom and who can’t. And that’s what the pieces of legislation are all about, folks, freedom, liberty, economic prosperity, they’re all entwined here.

This notion that I want the President to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we’ve got. That’s nothing more than common sense and to not be able to say it, why in the world do I want what we just described, rampant government growth, indebtedness, wealth that’s not even being created yet that is being spent…What possibly is in this that anybody of us wants to succeed?

And I can’t tell you how appreciative I am and proud to be in a movement with the same passions, desires and core beliefs that all of you have, because we know that it’s right for the country, and we know it’s right for people. It’s not something that has to be forced on them. It’s not something that has to be authoritatively pressed on them…The people that do want control look at us as the enemy. We’re always going to be — don’t ever measure your success by how many Drive-By Media reports you see that are fair to us. Never going to happen. Don’t measure your success by how many people like you. Just worry about how they vote. And then at the end of the day how they live, but that’s really none of your business once they close the doors.

And there you have it. Liberals — progressivists, socialists, statists, whatever term of art you prefer — oppose freedom and support government control. For them, there are no “closed doors;” your whole life is subject to inspection, review, and adjustment to get your actions more in line with what they decide is the right thing for you to be doing. Conservatives — true conservatives — want government to stay out of your way and let you make those decisions for yourself. In the end, that really is all there is to it.

But naturally there’s more. Namely, an examination of the confusion and self-contradiction at the core of progressivist thought:

The second objection is philosophical and was voiced in 1850 by Frédéric Bastiat when his philosophy of liberty was attacked by Alphonse de Lamartine because it did not include equality, and so, Lamartine argued, could not proceed to fraternity. Bastiat replied that the second part of such a program would always destroy the first, making the third impossible.

Wolfe’s brand of liberalism is something else. He asserts that “as many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take,” and that “if this requires an active role for government, then modern liberals are prepared to accept state intervention” (in the economy, moral life, sexual life, family life, regulation of speech, education, hiring, affirmative action, and many more domains). So there is the plain and simple —very simple—and quite contradictory, equation: government direction (that is, coercion) will make you free.

Hence, our Wolfian “libertarian socialism,” by now a condition in which most moral and sexual issues are considered under a libertarian standard of total privacy and freedom, while matters such as social security, medical care, income distribution, welfare, material standards of living, and the like are considered public objectives to be secured by the state. Another way of putting this is to say that we now have a polity in which citizens are assumed to have all the rights and governments, all of the duties. This is, alas, our world, and in defending the indefensible Wolfe amply illustrates its moral and political confusion. Let us turn to just a few examples from the hundreds in his book.

The first irony arises when Wolfe asks us to remove our individual rights and to

imagine a world in which religion (or irreligion) is coerced, freedom of speech curtailed, economic activity directed and controlled by the state, and no one [he means unions] allowed to organize and bargain collectively to improve their economic condition—and you have a political system that can only be called illiberal…

Well, I took his suggestion and did try to imagine it, and, with the exception of the bit about unions, I recognized illiberal Canada, where I live, and much of the United States, which, for decades, has been trying to catch up with Canada’s headlong embrace of libertarian socialism.

To wit: Christianity, the religious and moral foundation of both nations, has been all but forced from the public square, and secular humanism is mandated by law and edict in its place (irreligion is coerced). All Canadian provinces and the federal government now have “Human Rights Commissions” that specifically, and with considerable zeal, curtail all speech that is not deemed sufficiently “liberal.” The embarrassing, illiberal public prosecutions of the well-known author Mark Steyn for his critiques of Islam and of Ezra Levant for republishing the Danish cartoons are cases in point.

As for economic activity, the history of both nations over the past century has been unidirectional: increasing control over enterprise by way of massive centralization and regulation of economic policy and law—over states/provinces, municipalities, individuals, and corporations—combined with tax regimes (and public debt) so onerous and punitive that neither country can be said to be economically free in any original sense of the word. I sold my first business because the government was telling me whom I had to hire (under policies of affirmative action, feminism, and multiculturalism), what wages I had to pay (under “pay equity”); it was even dictating the maximum allowable price of my product. I surrendered and got out. In terms of total tax burden (all forms of tax, obvious and hidden, from all levels of government), the citizens of both countries are now working for their governments almost six months of the year. I don’t have to “imagine” Wolfe’s illiberal world, because millions of us have been living in it for some time, and it is structurally and morally dangerous to true liberal values.

Structurally, we are endangered because many of the Western democracies are becoming tripartite states in which one-third of all taxpayers are employed by government at some level, one-third of the people are crucially dependent in some way on government support (welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, and a gazillion other untrackable support programs), and one-third produces the income (the tax base) paid out in supports for the first two-thirds. Anyone can see that, as this develops in a mass “democratic” system, the first two-thirds will always gang up on the last.

With all that in mind, let’s get back to our PuffHo poster:

No, I wanted torture to fail because I can’t bear the idea of a world where America tortures people because ‘it works.’ That’s not America to me.

Ah, but what if there is real-world evidence to suggest that it does work (and like it or not, there is at least some, leaving aside for the moment the debate over whether waterboarding is actually torture)? There’s the rub: liberals are perfectly willing to risk violent death for thousands of our own citizens just because they “can’t bear the idea” that something they find distasteful — that we all find distasteful, truth to tell — might actually work. Their unrealizable utopian fantasy is important enough to them that, if necessary, reality itself must be denied. This psychic tic does not just apply to torture or the Iraq war alone; it cripples every liberal attempt at “solutions,” right down the line.

The trick here is not to jump to conclusions. This is where so many fail, both liberal and conservative. They can’t just accept a person’s statement as it stands. They need to embellish it with accusations of treason. It’s wrong to leap from “I oppose policies that I’m opposed to” to “I want people to suffer and die.”

I wouldn’t call it embellishment if the end result of adopting liberal policies is that people, y’know, suffer and die. And it demonstrably is. Just ask the people who survived the first WTC bombing, saw the feeble Clinton non-response to it (consisting mostly of bluster and empty threats), and then watched in horror as the WTC came crashing down on them a few years later. Just ask any out-of-work European subject struggling under double-digit unemployment and economic stagnation how efficient and successful state-run economies really are. Just ask the survivors of the Soviet gulags and the Cambodian killing fields what progressivism and an all-powerful state — the result of a philosophy that rejects the primacy of individual liberty, similar enough to current progressivist thinking to make any freedom-loving individual blanch as he sees it trampling the American system underfoot — inevitably leads to.

But just because accusing our political opponents of treason is a tactic that Republicans have used with glee for years doesn’t mean it’s something that Democrats should adopt. It’s wrong and it’s counterproductive.

It’s not wrong if the political opposition is lending aid and comfort to America’s enemies, as plenty of liberals surely have been for the last eight years. It’s merely accurate, and true. But truth is to progressivists what water was to the Wicked Witch of the West.

I have no problem stating the simple truth -conservatives like Limbaugh love America just as much as liberals do. That’s not the issue. The real problem gets lost in all the sound and fury – we just have different ideas of what America means.

Exactly right. Conservatives believe that America “means” exactly what the Founders, and the timeless documents they produced to organize and frame the structure of this nation, said. Progressivists see that framework as hopelessly flawed; outdated, in need of reworking, overhaul, and rebuilding from the ground up. In short, the liberal vision of America bears little or no resemblance to what America ought to be, and in fact was until they began the project of remaking it decades ago — with Republican/RINO assistance, regrettable, unconscionable, and intolerable as that sad fact is.

We’re complicated. Deal with it. The thing we can do to get along better isn’t to expect to agree on things. Forget that. But we can agree to disagree without the pointless added bullshit playacting of pretending disagreement is treason.

As far as agreeing to disagree goes, he’s perfectly right about that too. BUT…nobody that I know of ever has said “disagreement is treason.” Rather, we have said, and will continue to say, that treason, as it has been historically defined and understood, is treason.

During the eighteen-month “rush to war” in Iraq, vigorous debate raged throughout the country. Midterm elections were held, a vote was taken, and war to remove Saddam Hussein from power — the stated policy of the US government since 1998 — was approved overwhelmingly by Congress. The decision to continue the war, even after Democrats had tried to construct a case for having been intentionally “misled” by intelligence that, while imperfect, had been universally accepted for years, was overwhelmingly approved in the ‘04 election. Seeking to undermine American success in that war was, and is, treason by any rational standard. Full stop.

The liberal side lost that long and fractious debate, and rather than accept that and move on with legitimate means of expressing their disagreement, they tried yet again to make reality conform to their misguided vision by pushing spurious claims of deception and skullduggery by the Bush admin purely to aid their sinister oil-and-industry co-conspirators; dismissing everyone who supported destroying the threat posed by Saddam’s regime as fascists, racists, warmongers, and neo-colonialists; attacking recruiting centers and even harassing soldiers; and slandering General Petraeus as a liar, in at least one case before he’d uttered one word of testimony to Congress.

It’s not necessarily dishonorable to oppose this or any other war. Trying to redefine treason as mere “disagreement,” though, is about as dishonorable as it gets. It’s self-serving and unscrupulous. And so is seeking election as a supposed “centrist” and then, once elected, attempting to remake the country according to a many-times-failed Leftist model that will lead inevitably to impoverishment, weakness, and the repudiation of our American birthright of liberty, independence, and Constitutional government.