And any Conservative couldn’t see this coming?
Power and control.
Leftists control Education. They are fighting to control SCOTUS. If they can control words by, therefore, controlling media — ?
The so-called culture and political “wars” in America only started when the Right decided to voice its stance. The Left had their voice carried for them in the Mainstream Media for years and, as the Left leaned farther left, the Right became increasingly frustrated. The true breakthrough did in fact come via AM radio when a little fuzzball was given a chair at KFBK in 1984 Sacramento. Oooh, 1984 — chilling!
Rush Limbaugh provided the voice and the venue for those of a Conservative bent and a movement was started. There are those who would credit the political process itself for the Right finding its voice — and certainly the Ronald Reagan years should not be discounted as it was during the temper of these times that RL worked his way to syndication in 1988.
From there the wars began. After literally decades of ruling all forms of media and, moreover, its content, liberals were most chagrined to discover AM radio shortly became the bastion of conservatives. It took literally years for the Left to even attempt inroads to AM radio via Air America — and we all know how solvent and powerful AA is currently.
From there, the internet blossomed. Conservatives took to the net like fish to water. This in turn led to various conservative magazines with links to the internet, Fox News and, most recently, to my venue — the blog. Conservatives are big in the Blogosphere.
As grew the voice of Conservatives, so the Left and liberals felt (because, let’s face it, they were) more challenged. Not everything they said and espoused was accepted by rote. Persons actually had, egads, the temerity to speak up and attempt to refute what the MSM said and wrote. And, egads, it was proven time and again that the MSM occasionally seemed to omit some very salient things from their stories — some people call them facts.
Liberals then, during that transition and now (witness this book and others) feature themselves the victims in this heinous and oppressive power grab by the Right.
What happened is this: common people found a voice. They found an outlet for their frustrations. People from the heartland. People from the working class who wanted to get ahead and didn’t want the government to do it for them. People who wanted to be left alone to prosper. People who believe in Capitalism and believe that hard work should yield benefits. People who believe in a higher being as did our Founding Fathers, who believed in justice, in ethics and morals.
So in truth, Conservatives haven’t “fought back” — they just had the gall to voice their beliefs and concerns in a way they never had before.
And that’s what’s threatening to liberals.
Make no mistake: Leftist dogma is every bit a religion; Leftists believe the greatest enemy is the United States, the epitome of Capitalism. Capitalism by its nature must exploit people, so a major country like America, as a capitalistic leader, must be overthrown just as any capitalist oppressor must be overthrown. Anti-big, anti-corporate. Anti-capitalist. Anti-success.
With my 2006 thoughts in mind, Fast Forward to today in 2011 when Simon Jenkins — a daft Brit, of course — writes in The Guardian:
Today’s culprit is freedom of speech, or at least the speech of the American right and its broadcast cheerleaders. Shock-jock radio presenters feed on biased television news to present a view of the world divided between goodies and baddies. The baddies are always on the brink of victory and must be confronted with virile aggression. Language that might not disturb a balanced mind can clearly stimulate and legitimise an unbalanced one.
The vitriol and inaccuracy of the campaign against Obama’s public health reforms last year were like those against abortion and homosexuality. To many Europeans, the echo across the Atlantic came from a people isolated from the outside world and unable to handle today’s social and scientific progress. The debate was infused with nastiness and xenophobia, as if the US was a land composed of tribes bred only to hate the outside world, and often themselves.
So freedom of speech is bad. And this from a country that guarantees no such rights as does the United States. To me, it sounds like opposition, dissension, is bad — is the True Culprit. But, of course, that would be My Biased Self being judgmental. Continuing:
Free speech is a Hobbesian jungle. It requires a marketplace where the trade in information, ideas and opinion has a framework of rules, including rules that maintain fair and open competition. Most will be voluntary, but others need enforcement. The US supreme court last year freed from control all political campaign gifts from corporations, on the grounds that this would be a breach of free speech. Ronald Dworkin’s rebuttal of this “devastating decision for democracy” in the New York Review of Books pointed out that freedom of speech was hopeless if vulnerable to the bullying of wealth. Obama warned that it would “open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections”.
Does Mr Jenkins really want to go here? Apparently, he does, in closing:
But sometimes, as Obama said, there is a yearning “to try to impose some order on the chaos”. If American politics is now going the way of wounding, not healing, it needs the tonic of order. It is the great paradox of democracy. Free speech cannot exist without chains.
Right. “Free speech cannot exist without chains.” And those chains — to be determined in their formation, and their application — by whom?
I’m sure you can suss that one out yourself.
Time to obviate my free speech. Your free speech.
Advocated from a nation that lords its own press in chains. Despite being a Western Nation. It cannot even see how its laws are being utilized against itself. It is being subsumed by Islam. But it is finally beginning to fight back; just a little. Budgetarily, to begin.
Leftists fear the murmuring taxpaying rabble. And they fear you are actually beginning to not just find your voice.
— but they fear that you are actually beginning to do what they do best: to ORGANIZE.
And, worse yet, you are beginning to organize not necessarily CENTRALLY, but you are organizing LOCALLY — meaning that there is no ONE central head to decapitate.
You bastards.
BZ
P.S.
Great news: Gabrielle Giffords’s condition has been changed from CRITICAL to Serious. Considering a direct gunshot wound to the skull, this is an absolute miracle. My prayers to her and her family and friends. Please send your own personal prayers. . .
