Often in the media and talking to liberals one is struck how some people cannot see the hypocrisy of their own actions.  Quick to criticize others based on their own false assumptions but blind to their own mistakes. Using a paraphrase from the Bible, they seem all too eager to point out the sliver in other’s eyes but totally ignore the 2×4 sticking out of their own.

The treatment of the Tea Party in the media verses the treatment of OWS is a prime example.

The Tea Party was attacked repeatedly as being a racist movement and even likened to the KKK.  The media would attend protest looking for any signs of racism they believed must be at the heart of the protest and plaster any examples from sea to shining sea.  The fact that any gathering of thousands will have fringe elements was lost on them.  That the Tea Party endorsed black, Hispanic, and white candidates with equal enthusiasm was completely ignored, it was damn the facts full speed ahead with the predetermined narrative.

With OWS the reaction has been quite different. Virtually all negative actions within the protest were reported as the actions of fringe elements within the movement.  Violence was from anarchist, thefts and rapes were from opportunist and anti-Semitic signs and slogans were ignored as the opinion of just a few.  Even now as the arrest continue, the damage from vandalism soars, the cost to cities mounts and some local businesses are pushed to bankruptcy, the excuses continue.

What is the source of this, why is the hypocrisy so blatant?  If you ask those in the media and those with similar opinions you will get a blank stare.  That stare will soon be followed by nonsensical liberal gibberish.  There reaction seems incomprehensible; facts do not matter neither does reality.  The saying often brandished on T-shirts “do not confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made up” seems to have been written with them in mind.

Progressive liberalism and socialism like all left leaning ideas are, at their heart, attempts to make intellectual exercises reality.  Like the revolutionaries in France sought to bring to fruition the dreams of their philosophers the left today continues the same fight.  Theirs is an idealism untempered by reality.   The dreams are always so beautiful and the objectives so inspiring, that to oppose or even question them is unthinkable.  To them only the most brutish and uninformed mind could possibly oppose their ideas and therefore those that oppose them must be uniformed brutes.  They have no time to waste understanding those for whom they have so little regard and who they also blame for all that is wrong with the world.

Their view is so clouded by ideology that facts are blurred out.  Like someone looking at a surreal impressionist painting, they see what they are looking for and nothing more.  Facts are blurred into the background.  The forest is discernable but the trees are a blur to them.  To point out that the trees/facts do exist and they do not align with their ideas, is often futile.  The idea they wish and strive for is too important, too needed, too beautiful, to let things like facts and experience stand in the way.

In a twisted way they are like the developers of a new shopping mall dealing with people protesting the trees being cut down.  Except in this case they are the ones setting on the bulldozers and the trees represent the experience and knowledge that makes up the foundations of society.  As conservatives protest and try to stop the destruction the liberals keep talking about the beautiful dream they want to make reality.  The dream is everything, the destruction and its consequences just the price to pay for progress.  The problem is their plan is undeveloped, their ideas incomplete and their engineering is faulty.  Even they have no idea how it will all work; the logic seems to be that if it works in their dream world it will work in the real one too.

Idealism is great and can be harnessed to great ends.  It is also the road to ruin if not tempered with reality.  Winston Churchill once said “if you are not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if are not a conservative when you are forty you have no brain”.  In other words it is okay to be young and foolish but it is dangerous to be old and foolish.  In the last two hundred years or so we have come so very far.  In science, wealth, living conditions and individual respect we have advanced far more than all the societies before us.  A wise man would want to build on this success and spread it to those who have yet to experience it.  Only a fool would waste it chasing after dreams. Of course that is exactly what is happening.

Today the advancements of our society are being squandered by those who dream of a better way.  They are not the first of their kind; history has been filled with dreamers and their followers.  Most ended up either in turmoil and death for the followers or despotic rule for the few that succeeded in over throwing the status-quo.  Those trying to implement the liberal dream today have forgone the armies and revolutionaries of the past for a more sophisticated approach.  They preach societal and economic justice and work to redistribute wealth in evermore sophisticated ways.  They undermine the rule of law for a more “compassionate approach” and work to implement more and more controls (also called regulations) on society.   In short they have abandoned the revolutionary approach for an evolutionary one.

With the new liberal strategy we do not see piles of capitalist bodies like in Cambodia or the iron fisted control of a Lenin but the cost has still been high and getting higher.   In Europe the very foundations of their society is near collapse due to the desire to “lift up” the poorer Europeans at the expense of the richer.  For them there was no need to worry about the messy business of addressing people’s level of productivity when loans, government entitlements and wealth redistributing taxes could do the job.  Now as they are at the verge of collapse all they can think to do is accelerate some of the actions that got them into the mess in the first place.  In the end more loans and more taxes may stave off disaster but only at the expense of making a collapse even more dire.  With each now loan and bond sell the amount of austerity measures and tax collection needed increases.  Hanging all their hopes that austerity measures and new taxes can somehow cover an ever increasing debt.  Like climbing ever higher up a tree that is on fire they are making an eventually fall worse and worse.  Damn if they damned if they don’t they are caught in a trap of their own making.

It is not as if this end result of European Socialism and the welfare state was unknown.  Conservatives have been pointing out its unsustainability for years.  For liberals it has been damn the facts, the dream is all that counts.  Forget about the trees, they have a forest to create.  Now as Europe stands at the edge and is scrambling to discover a magic pill to get out of a situation that was all too predictable America is on the verge of suffering the same fate.

With regulations stifling business and entrepreneurship, taxes going only up and entitlements that are driving an already debt ridden government to the breaking point one has to wonder what the heck are liberals thinking?  The fact is they are even today still too focused on their achieving their dreams then to worry about anything else.  The national debt is only a sideshow to them, medicare going insolvent a passing fancy.  The real goal of creating a society that could only exist in their dreams is all that matters.  A fairer world run on green energy with free healthcare and where everyone rides public transportation or drives electric cars is all  they care about.  A world they seek to create no matter what the cost.  Like European socialist, the progressives in America are taxing, borrowing and regulating all our forefathers built out of existence.  For years conservatives have been trying to reason with them; explaining the facts, pointing to statistics, showing charts and begging them to understand.  All they have gotten is insults and an ever worsening situation.  Not that there have not been small victories or those that have seen the light.  It is just the situation is too precarious and the cost of failure too unthinkable to let it continue any further. The time for compromise is past.

Ronald Reagan once said freedom is never more than one generation from being lost.  This has never been truer then today.  Committees designed to fail and lofty words are of no use. There is no back room deal that can solve the problems facing us or central bank that can bail us out.  The threats are real and the problems too great to ignore.  It is time to remove from power the wealth redistributors and the social engineers and reintroduce sanity into government.  It is our generation’s time to stand up; if we fail God help us all.

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The Conservative Mind