How Many Liberals? By Edward L. Daley (5/22/04)

(Mr. Daley is the Owner of the Daley Times-Post.  To view more of Mr, Daley's writings please visit his site)

Books of Interest

Q: HOW MANY LIBERALS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB?

A: It doesn’t matter because they’ll still remain in the dark.

Sound like a joke? Perhaps it is, but while conservatives may get a chuckle out of it, the basic truth underpinning those words is anything but funny. Just take the 2000 post-election tumult in Florida for example. Liberals still bring up the issue during debates and speeches, once they’ve run out other things to complain about. “Bush stole the election!” “Blacks were disenfranchised!” “The president was selected not elected!” “We didn’t get to count all the votes!” Yadda yadda yadda...

If there’s one thing you can count on from leftists, it’s that once they’ve been proved wrong about a particular issue, they’ll arrogantly refuse to admit it and continue to flaunt their contempt for objectivity and sound judgment endlessly thereafter. Their inevitable reaction to being confronted with the accusation that their actions and words are indeed unreasonable, is to become even more unreasonable.

Attempting to explain something to most liberals that the average twelve year old can understand with little effort is often a maddening prospect, primarily because they just don’t seem to want to understand anything that non-liberals have to say. It’s often been said that there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but whoever thought up that expression obviously never met a devout liberal. Either that or he was a liberal himself.

Take, for instance, the question that’s been asked again and again by liberals everywhere in a feeble attempt to undercut the president’s arguments for invading Iraq. “Where are the weapons of mass destruction we’ve heard so much about?” It’s this sort of query which makes most thinking people shudder in disbelief. The rational view of the matter is that Saddam Hussein is a vicious, even psychotic man who not only possessed WMD but actually used them on innocent people. Every reputable intelligence source on earth knew he had them, including that of the U.N., which is considered sacrosanct by most liberals. The justification for the invasion was that Hussein failed to explain what he did with his weapons even though we gave him every opportunity to do so, and we couldn’t very well wait around forever for him to live up to his obligation to come clean. The fact that we have found little in the way of actual, physical weapons of mass destruction since the war began is, therefore, irrelevant, but just try to get a liberal to follow that simple line of reasoning.
While a reasonable person might well ask what has become of those weapons out of genuine concern for the future safety of innocent people, a leftists’ motive for asking this question is purely political in nature. We simply have to find those weapons, and if we don’t then Bush is a liar, case closed. This assertion is, of course, nonsensical, but they repeat it over and over again anyway. It never occurs to them that a person can be wrong about something without being a liar. I’m not suggesting that Bush was wrong in this case, in fact, recent developments in Iraq strongly suggest that he was not, I’m simply pointing out that being mistaken and lying are two different things.  Liberals also overlook all of the obvious explanations as to why we aren’t finding huge stockpiles of WMD in that country, and leap directly to the most unsound conclusion for no other reason than they hate the president and everything he stands for.

That hatred allows them to feel justified in embracing the most untenable of positions simply because they are the exact opposite of what conservatives believe. Oftentimes the causes they champion are as harmful to them as they are to other people, but they seem to be perfectly willing to endure pointless suffering just as long as everyone else suffers along with them. I guess that’s their idea of “shared sacrifice”.
Just look at the way liberals have undermined our nation’s forest management efforts. Any credible forestry official will tell you that allowing vast regions of timberland to overgrow to the point they often do without thinning them out from time to time and putting in fire roads is a recipe for disaster. Yet, in spite of this common sense perspective, liberals still fight tooth and nail against anyone who tries to cut down a few trees. Their success in this regard has contributed to some of the most devastating wildfires in the history of this country, but do they ever take a step back and reevaluate their position in the face of evidence of its destructiveness?

Not only do they not, but when challenged on such issues, they tend to become even more sanctimonious than they usually are, reverting to divisive rhetoric and then regurgitating the same old tired arguments that most people dismissed as ridiculous long ago. The truly distressing aspect of their behavior is that they exhibit no shame or humility whatsoever, no matter how outrageous their arguments get. Once it becomes clear that they are about to lose a debate over a particular issue, they simply shift gears and “move on” to the next subject, even though their credibility has been badly tarnished.

They almost never admit to being wrong, yet during that rare moment in which you find one of them actually doing so, you can be confident that he or she will immediately qualify that acknowledgment with some rambling monologue which effectively waters down the admission to the point at which it becomes unrecognizable. It’s as if they are afraid that saying they’re sorry and really meaning it, even one time, might breed further apologies later on and unavoidably lead to gasp the appearance of fallibility. Allah forbid that they should be seen as imperfect!

Note: I was going to use the more common expression ‘God forbid’ in that last sentence, but it suddenly occurred to me that liberals hate the word God almost as much as they hate Republicans. They don’t seem to have a problem with the word Allah though, so I decided to go the less provocative route there. After all, I certainly wouldn’t want to aggravate anyone with politically incorrect language.

By any means, one should never underestimate the ability of liberals to immerse themselves so deeply into a state of denial that their grasp on reality becomes weaker than Charles Manson’s defense strategy. After all, these people really believe that the government is more trustworthy and responsible than private businesses are, that most news reporters are not predominantly left-leaning, and that prohibiting private gun ownership reduces crime. I don’t know about you, but just considering those three positions alone is enough to make me start looking around for a white jacket with extra-long sleeves.

How a person’s cognitive abilities could become so degraded that he actually adopts viewpoints like the ones above, when he hasn’t even been slammed in the head by a blunt object or fallen prey to some debilitating mental disease, is beyond me. I know that drugs can warp a person’s perspective, but you’d have to be perpetually stoned to think the way liberals do, so merely being dopers doesn’t explain their troubling thought processes. Frankly, I just don’t know what makes liberals tick, or why their minds work the way they do, but I do know that trying to convince them to see reason is almost always a futile endeavor. I mean how can anyone ever hope to get through to the likes of Michael Moore, the babbling left-wing nincompoop who wrote the following words in January of this year?

“I would like to apologize for referring to George W. Bush as a deserter. What I meant to say is that George W. Bush is a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar and a functional illiterate.  And he poops his pants. In fact, he shot a man in Tucson just to watch him die.”

I rest my case.