Hitchens: Sob-sister Tripe

"It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe
pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why
bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say
plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them
on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria
is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask:
When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the
surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am
certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though
the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors.
Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of
consideration." Christopher Hitchens, "A war to be proud of" in The Weekly Standard.

If the template of Marxism weren’t already on the shelf, then a Progressive Democrat would have invented it.

A mother ‘honors’ her own dead son by using his death to promote precisely what he gave his life fighting against. She claims to ‘honor’ him by using his death to fight against what he gave his life fighting for.

She ‘supports our troops but doesn’t support the war’. She supports the troops but she devotes her life to aiding their (our) enemies and bringing down our country in wartime. She says “this country isn’t worth dying for.”

In the rhetoric of the radical left, ‘subversion is the highest form of patriotism’. And they love their country (or their vision of what they would have it become) so much they want to transform us into France.

The progressive elites tell us that our culture, values, morality and that stuff are all just relative. There are no “rights” and no ‘wrongs’, except two: (1) They are right, and (2) We are wrong.

Is there no end to the doublespeak and semantic trickery?
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Cindy Sheehan has become the poster girl for the radical left.

In the last half century, the progressive liberalism of the liberal wing of the Democrat Party has evolved into an anti-liberal throwback to Marxism. It has become what the liberals of John Kennedy’s day sought to protect us against. Today, though they’re a minority within their own party, Progressive Democrats are at the helm of the Democrat Party.

Progressive liberalism is neither progressive nor liberal. It is an expression of emotion and personality more than a statement of political philosophy. Progressive Democrats stand for nothing substantive, but stand against everything, as expedient to get what they want.

Like Marxism, progressive liberalism is used to energize underlying alienation, risk-aversion, envy, resentment, despair, bitterness and hate. It uses emotional negativity, instead of idealism and rational policy, to foment and mobilize discontent throughout society to gain power in government. It groups people by fortuitous traits such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference, and pits these groups against each other in a class struggle for entitlements in a statist society.

If the template of Marxism weren’t already on the shelf, then a Progressive Democrat would have invented it. Misfits and malcontents need a cozy place to hang out, and there’s always an aspiring elite nearby, eager to use these unfortunate people to gain control of government.

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That said, God bless the seemingly few elected Democrats who remain true to their classical liberal foundations. May you some day take back your party, reassert your lofty idealism on behalf of our country, and resume your leadership in bringing out what’s best in America.

Not you, John Kerry, nor other throwback progressives like you, Hillary or Teddy or Chuck, Harry, Dick, Chris, Howard, and ilk.

But decent liberals, like Joe Lieberman and Christopher Hitchens, need to start holding other people in their party accountable for what they say and do.

Meanwhile, as a former John Kennedy Democrat, I’ll fight the ‘progressive’ wing to the death. It’s indeed the enemy within, and it endangers our way of life at least as much as any threat from abroad.