September 2005

[Imported from Whale Oil Beef Hooked on Blogger]

If you want to under­stand the Left, the best place to start is with an under­stand­ing of hys­te­ria. Lead­ing left­ists either use hys­te­ria as a polit­i­cal tac­tic or are actu­ally hysterics.

Take almost any sub­ject the Left dis­cusses and you will find hysteria.

So says Den­nis Prager at RealClearPolitics.

He goes on to say the fol­low­ing about;

The war in Iraq: It is not enough for left­ist oppo­nents of the war to argue that the war is a mis­take, was ini­ti­ated due to faulty intel­li­gence, or is being poorly pros­e­cuted. Rather they charge that Pres­i­dent Bush lied, that the war was waged for Hal­libur­ton, and that Amer­ica is engaged in a crim­i­nal and impe­ri­al­ist enter­prise. Each charge is a form of hysteria.

Risks to health: Not every­one who believes the hys­ter­i­cal claims of dan­ger made about sec­ond­hand smoke, baby for­mula, dodge­ball or Bex­tra is on the Left. But the Left leads the coun­try in hys­te­ria over dan­gers to health. That is why left­ist orga­ni­za­tions are gen­er­ally inca­pable of merely say­ing that some­thing is unhealthy. The dan­ger must be described as the killer of hun­dreds of thou­sands and often be ascribed to some mur­der­ous cor­po­rate conspiracy.

Envi­ron­ment: More peo­ple may be attacked by aard­varks in any given year than visit the remote and frozen region of Alaska known as the Arc­tic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It is the home, how­ever, of vast oil reserves and many cari­bou. Good peo­ple can dif­fer on whether or not to drill for oil there. But the rhetoric of the Left is hys­ter­i­cal. Lis­ten­ing to left­ist orga­ni­za­tions one would think that drilling would bring no ben­e­fit to Amer­ica and would ren­der the cari­bou vir­tu­ally extinct. None of this is true. It is all drama.

Like­wise there is largely hys­te­ria over global warm­ing and the charge that man — espe­cially Homo Amer­i­canus — is the cause of it. The great num­ber of sci­en­tists who claim that we are in a nor­mal warm­ing period or in no major weather change at all are ignored. Only the most hys­ter­i­cal sce­nar­ios are offered by the Left. Wit­ness the rea­sons given for Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. Yet even The New York Times reported that sci­en­tists are vir­tu­ally unan­i­mous in deny­ing that the hur­ri­cane has any­thing to do with global warming.

Racism: There is no worse charge than racism. Act­ing hate­fully toward peo­ple because of their skin color is among the most vile acts a per­son can engage in. Yet the Left throws that charge around as if it were the essence of the Amer­i­can peo­ple (which, come to think of it, is what many on the Left believe). Most of the time, how­ever, the charge of racism — such as when it is directed at oppo­nents of race-based affir­ma­tive action — is just another exam­ple of hysteria.

Chris­tian­ity: Most on the Left really believe that this coun­try is on the verge of a theoc­racy because George W. Bush is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, because the words “under God” are still in the Pledge of Alle­giance, and because most Amer­i­cans don’t think mar­riage ought to be redefined.

There are more exam­ples, but these are the ones most read­ily iden­ti­fi­able to New Zealanders.

Finally he con­cludes with

No event is free of left­ist hys­te­ria. On the third day after Kat­rina, civil rights activist Ran­dall Robin­son reported that blacks in New Orleans were resort­ing to can­ni­bal­ism. Indeed, most of the news media cov­er­age bor­dered on the hys­ter­i­cal. Not to men­tion the hys­ter­i­cal pre­dic­tions of 10,000-plus dead in New Orleans. [Real death toll is 1086, updated by Whaleoil]

None of this is to deny that the Right also gets hys­ter­i­cal. Some right-wing reac­tions to immi­gra­tion and Terry Schi­avo pro­vide such examples.