Lake Placid Tolerance

Liberal tolerance is like Lake Placid: a mile wide and one foot deep.Basically, the Left thinks diversity is wonderful ... unless your opinion becomes a little too diverse for them. Then they attack you like zombies from I Am Legend

Think of the hysterical reaction after Prop 8 passed in California: the Stalinist show trials, the lawsuits, the naked bigotry directed at Mormons, the sullen and suppressed bigotry directed at African-Americans. Or think of the hysterical reactions to any non-white, gay, or female conservative. Just take two examples: Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas.

• Sarah Palin. In 2008, she didn't say or do anything that Mike Huckabee hadn't already said or done in the campaign, but she engendered so much hatred because she wasn't following the script. She was deviating from the Left's tolerant and accepting views for the opinions women should have. When I asked my Liberal friends why they had such visceral loathing for her they said, "Well, she says such stupid stuff." Which isn't true for the most part, but even if it was that's no reason to hate people. Dan Quayle was pegged as an idiot but you saw little loathing for him. No. The hatred was of an existential nature.
• Clarence Thomas. As a conservative, Clarence Thomas gets all kinds of hate from the Left. It's not the kind of "Your opinions are fascist!" hate that his buddy Scalia gets, though. It's more of the "You're a race traitor and a house ni**er!" atomic hatred that only gets leveled at non-whites who "step out of line" and hold opinions that the Left deems unacceptable. At first derided as a second-rate intellect by Liberals, Thomas is now angrily lauded by them as the originalist lodestone on the Court and the one laying the intellectual foundations for conservative jurisprudence for the next generation. And they hate him. Oh my, how they hate him.

Well, now you're seeing more of the Left's Lake Placid Tolerance directed at Chic-Fil-A, an openly religious company whose CEO let it be known that he favors traditional marriage. Well, you'd have thought that he was a convicted child rapist and serial killer or something from the full-throated denunciations by many on the Left. (Well, serial killer, anyway. Liberals seem to be okay with child rapists.) Tom Menino, the mayor of Boston, vowed that Chic-Fil-A would never do business there and denied them a business permit. The Muppets have severed ties with the company. NYU is looking to kick them out of the city.

Homosexual rights are the new frontier of Lake Placid Tolerance in America. The message, as always, is the same: do what we want and we will accept and love you, but do anything else and we will crush you.

To be a Pyrrhic victory, you need an actual victory.

It looked the WI Democrats could at least claim the barest fig leaf in their epic failure of a perpetual campaign to oust the people responsible for returning the state to fiscal sanity -- er, stripping public unions of the right to collectively bargaining for benefits. Sure, they'd blown tens of millions of dollars on failed efforts to oust the state supreme court justice, on a special election to retake the state senate, and -- in their most spectacular failure -- on the recall of Scott Walker. But in that final failed recall, the state senate flipped! Democrats had control of half the legislature ... for the only six months when the legislature doesn't meet ... and they'll probably lose it in the November elections this year. But hey -- they won something for that colossal error in judgment and waste of resources.

Oops. Guess not.

So, to recap, for all their money, effort, expenditure of political capital, and racking up ill will among the electorate, WI Democrats got pretty much nothing: not the state supreme court, not the governor, not even a functioning majority in the state senate. When you think about it, they got even less than that. Every dollar spent in this recall is a dollar that can't be spent for Obama in the general election. Plus, it gave the WI GOP and Tea Party a wonderful test run for their spectacularly successful GOTV (that's "get out the vote" for you non-political nerds) operation. Not only did they aid their opponents by energizing them and allowing them a test run for the general election, they actively harmed the President's campaign by sucking millions of union dollars it looks increasingly like the Obama campaign will desperately need come the fall.

Usually, when you destroy yourself so thoroughly in pursuit of your goal you at least have the benefit of calling your efforts Pyrrhic. But to have a Pyrrhic victory still requires ... you know ... a victory.

This almost works too well

Neo hiding from Lumbergh. Mixing The Matrix with Office Space. It's freaky how well this mishmash scene works.

I didn't build this post

President Obama is frantically walking back his "You didn't build that!" claim from a couple weeks ago. It may be that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put this humpty dumpty back together again.

As the Reverend Doctor Pat Sajak has pointed out, political defining moments, "take hold most devastatingly when they confirm what a large portion of the electorate already believes. ... [W]hen voters are able to nod and say, 'I knew it,' these moments stick and do terrible damage."

This gaffe would just be a gaffe if it wasn't of a piece with so many anecdotes, policies, and actions that together paint a picture of a president who is actively hostile to free markets and small businesses. Given that context, however, it has confirmed in a neatly packaged quote a lot that so many people in America haven't been comfortable with about Obama but haven't necessarily been about to put their finger on.

"People don't stop killers. People with guns do."

An important truth to keep in mind in light of foolish calls for increased gun control in the wake of the Aurora mass murders on Thursday night.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers. ... That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

Read the whole article here. It was written in response to the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, but its points are obviously still very valid.

Mark Steyn paraphrases Garth Brooks

"I'm much too young to feel this damn old." -- Garth Brooks

"We're [much] too broke to be this stupid." -- Mark Steyn

What a fantastic article by Steyn. He just crushes it.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work ...

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. ...

That works for a while. ... When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want.” Sir William and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: to be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes.

When Michelle Obama turned up to serve food at a soup kitchen, its poverty-stricken clientele snapped pictures of her with their cellphones. In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it.

Now, I work with (or on behalf of, usually) men who, from a Western perspective, are destitute. They're homeless, they've suffered all kinds of abuse for year, and they lack the skills to escape their poverty through most kinds of jobs.

And yet I realize that a huge reason why they remain in their poverty is due to their poor choices: what they do with their money and how they act. They're about as off the grid as someone can get in modern America, but if they behaved differently their situations wouldn't be as dire as they are.

Whose fault is that, and who should be responsible for remedying it?

Love hurts

Apparently, the press has finally started to wake up to the fact that the Obama administration is thin-skinned, controlling, and takes their allegiance 100% for granted.

Current White House press corps members -- who recently endured 8 years of antagonism with W & Co. -- are quoted in the linked Politico article as calling the relationship between the Obamists and the press as one of the most contentious in recent years.

Will it make a difference? I'm with those like The Anchoress who say probably not.

I’ve seen a few comments that the press might “turn” on Obama. I doubt it. The press needs an intervention – a few people to force them to confront this sick relationship. Lacking that, they will continue as they are.

They’re griping because their feelings are a little hurt, but the press knows that – ideologically – they are all on the same page with Obama; they understand that he will put into effect the policies they desire.

So, they embody the sick delusion: “my boyfriend smacks me around, but then he buys me this fur coat! We can work it out, I know we can!”

All Obama has to do is crook his little finger and smile at them and they’ll come running back, like a battered wife who apologizes for “forcing” her husband to kick her and then hurries off to make him a steak dinner and Crepes Suzette.

[snip]

It reminds me a little of that scene in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, when Ferris opines that Cameron will marry the first girl who has sex with him, but “She won’t respect him,” Ferris says, “’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work.”

Ouch.