Why I Am Not A Liberal

Why I Am Not a Liberal A Political Discussion between Conservative Sally Morem and Liberal Virrudh After 520-some posts responding to a wonderfully acerbic Ann Coulter column at Townhall.com some months ago, I ran into a series of posts by a liberal with the handle “virrudh” in which he really vented his spleen against conservatives and conservative ideals. I took the opportunity (handed to me on the proverbial silver platter and served up with the proverbial silver spoon) to respond. As I did so, Townhall.com readers and participants learned many reasons why I am not a liberal. I’ll republish this discussion here, with minor corrections of spelling and grammar. We begin with virrudh in italics and continue with my responses in plaintext. I also include outtakes and quotes from other sources to make my points more pointed. These are highlighted in boldface. Virrudh begins the freewheeling discussion of all things American thusly: And maybe that is because we are spoiled. We have not had to go through so much that other countries struggle with on a continuing basis, and so we can indulge ourselves with nitpicking. And the problem is? Why DON’T we have to go through the problems other countries struggle with? Is there something special about America and Americans? Something that has permitted us for generations to build up the kind of wealth and power that other empires could only dream of? Or is it because we Americans are merely lucky. “God protects drunks, fools and the United States of America.” That sort of Bismarkian snide derision combined (oddly enough) with frank admiration by European monarchs and intellectuals. (After you’ve read all my posts in response to virrudh, you decide whether we’re special or lucky.) Page 1

But I will state very clearly that I do not apologize for being a liberal even though there are many things that liberals (and others) do that pain me or infuriate me. What are those things? Showing disrespect to those who deserve respect? Showing ingratitude toward what we should be grateful for? Lying through their [liberal] teeth about their opponents’ actions and motivations? Attempting at every turn to shout down or criminalize conservative speech? Treason—aiding truly vile and vicious enemies of the United States while trashing America? Anything else about what liberals do that infuriates you? Anything else you want to get off your chest? I am tired of having people who believe that the earth began less than 10,000 years ago making pronouncements about our educational system. Do your really think Creationists control our school boards across America? Really? And these same people taking it upon themselves to decide who is a Christian or not. Christians have been doing that since Christianity was invented. Pay attention. And then telling us who should have civil rights and who shouldn't. The amazing gall, when you think about it. Christians have been doing that since civil rights were invented. Pay attention. I do not believe that we should make laws because they have a nice fit with what the Bible says, even though I have been a dedicated life long Christian Which laws have a nice fit with the Bible? Ones against murder or stealing? They fit. Of course our laws against combining church and state don’t fit so well. Perhaps you’re referring to those notorious American laws on sacrifice that mandate slaughtering an unblemished lamb at the temple on Holy Days. Or perhaps those other notorious American laws against worshipping golden calves.  Does Virrudh REALLY think we’ve become such a theocracy?

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And then he discusses geopolitics: Then along came the European Union. Its predecessors, of course, have been around for 50 years now, but it was only fairly recently that the EU itself has been gaining some real power. And that (presumably) was the beginning of the U.S. being demoted to just another country on the other side of the ocean. In actuality, that is an exaggeration. The Europeans know they need us when push comes to shove, but we have not yet admitted that we need them too or have ever bothered to find out what was going on over there unless it is some Muslim riot that we are thrilled to hear about. But as our dollar continues to weaken and their Euro continues to strengthen that may change too. This is the same European Union that could only stand by helplessly as the old Yugoslavia tore itself up and engaged in Hitlerian “ethnic cleansing.” The EU was born helpless. And it remains so. No state (and the EU is attempting in its bumbling way to become a state) can exist without mastery and use of the most lethal force necessary to “ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense.” As a result of 60 years of American protection against the predations of the Soviet Union and now Islamofascist terrorists, Europeans are in the situation described so well by Robert Kagan—they live in their (presumed) pacifist paradise (minus the Balkans), while America remains in the Hobbesian world of war. As long as this remains the case, and I see no indication that the Europeans are facing up to their situation and doing something about it, the EU will remain what it has been: an American protectorate, with as little real world power as that phrase indicates. Here is an outtake from that essay quoted in boldface: ...Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace...In fact, the United states solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only

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solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. ... By providing security from outside, the United States rendered it unnecessary for Europe's supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace, and they do not need power to preserve it [due to unseen US power operating outside of Europe]. Those European leaders and intellectuals with a semblance of knowledge and rationality know all of the above. How else do you explain their decades-long, even centuries-long, obsession with America? They know that America matters in the world and to the world…and they don’t. The hostility didn't come (that I noticed) until the beginning of the Iraqi war. It hurts when your allies don't like you. It hurts even more when you start not liking your own country yourself. Now why do you suppose Europeans would care at all about what we did in Iraq? With the noble exception of Great Britain, the Europeans have only sent token forces or stayed out entirely. I don’t believe the furious venting of anti-Americanism recently is due to our efforts in Iraq. I believe it’s an excuse. And that it’s been going on a lot longer than virrudh noticed. Also, I’d question seriously if any of these anti-American activists are actually anything near allies of ours. At least I hope they aren’t. There are a number of sites addressing the problem of anti-Americanism. Check out for yourself. Learn the truth of what I say from the horse’s mouth. Here are outtakes from two such sites: During anti-war demonstrations in Britain left-wing marchers have unashamedly waved banners defending known terrorists, shouted abuse at American tourists and British pro-American supporters and described George Bush in terms usually reserved for serial killers. Banners decrying the attacks of 9/11 were nowhere to be seen. When Daniel Pearl was murdered there was no outcry from the left in Britain. Instead, leftist and liberal commentators concentrated their critical faculties on the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo.

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http://hnn.us/articles/9091.html Since September 11, 2001, the attitudes of Europeans toward the United States have grown increasingly more negative. For many in Europe, the terrorist attack on New York City was seen as evidence of how American behavior elicits hostility—and how it would be up to Americans to repent and change their ways. In this revealing look at the deep divide that has emerged, Russell A. Berman explores the various dimensions of contemporary European anti-Americanism. The author shows how, as the process of post–cold war European unification has progressed, anti-Americanism has proven to be a useful ideology for the definition of a new European identity. He examines this emerging identity and shows how it has led Europeans to a position hostile to any "regime change" by the United States—no matter how bad the regime may be—whether in Serbia, Afghanistan, or Iraq. http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1043 And then there’s some downright strange wingnuts in positions of real power: Her theory? It seems the U.S. had to do something to weaken the influence of the pope, who was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. Vollmer finds it all very suspicious that after the war, "Poland was made a top occupying power in Iraq, naturally to weaken the pope's hinterland. Or how then, of all times, the campaign against the Catholic Church and the pedophilia was started, which was, of course, totally justified, but at this point in time was definitely a tit-for-tat response." Vollmer found it somehow strange that the US presidents traveled to the Vatican despite the "tough power struggles." http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,350763,00.html Like a good conspiracy theorist, she doesn't point fingers directly, but lets her comments hang in the air so that others can piece together the message. In essence, with her bizarre ramblings she was saying that the US tried to undercut John Paul II's political influence in Poland by giving his countrymen an important role in occupying Iraq and instigating a pedophile scandal against the church as a sort of smear campaign against the Catholic leader.

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Clearly, Europeans have their own issues—the resurgence of anti-Semitism, a deep-seated (well-earned) fear of rising radical Islam, and an equally deepseated inferiority complex in response to the growing power of its American daughter. Wishing these problems away by calling for American appeasement of Islamofascism solves nothing. Instead, it very well may lead to our doom. ***** And then, virrudh cuts to the core of the differences between conservatives and liberals… Big government is not an evil concept for me. It is an evil concept for me. It means: 1. Its $2.5 trillion budget means that the Federal Government is doing way too many things, things that state governments, or local governments, or private enterprise, or individuals should be doing…or no one should be doing. 2. If the Federal Government stuck to its knitting, doing the things that it and only it can do and really needs to do, it would be able to specialize in those things, concentrating on them in such a manner that it would soon learn how to do them superbly. Instead, it spreads its energy and spends it micromanaging every aspect of our lives. And does so VERY BADLY. 3. By so doing, it deprives us of our individual freedom at every turn—the freedom to create, to invent, to succeed, and yes, to fail. 4. And by so doing, it deprives us of the full blessings of a truly decentralized, self-organized system of distributed intelligence as described by Fredrich Hayek. I have been to too many places where people would give their souls for a government… Which is precisely what they would have to do, metaphorically speaking, of course.

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…that could and would give them clean air and water, build highways for them, make transportation safer, could pay their public servants a living wage so that bribery would not have to be a way of life, so that half their children would not die before they reach the age of five, so that their children could go to school, so that there was some semblance of infrastructure within their society that would actually help their society survive. All of these good things are developed and built only by wealthy societies. You can’t have a clean environment without wealth. Ask any citizen of a Third World nation—or a former Communist nation. You can’t build highways and the rest of a nation’s infrastructure without wealth. You can’t pay government employees without wealth. You can’t buy your children a happy, healthy, carefree childhood without wealth. You can’t build, supply, and staff excellent schools without wealth. It may be necessary for local, state, or Federal government to do some of this work, but they can’t do any of it without a robust national economy to finance it. The creation of wealth by necessity precedes spending by government. Wealth is not hand-me-downs from a kind and compassionate government to its client-citizens. It is the creation of a free and inventive and knowledgeable people. Wealth bubbles up. It doesn’t flow down. And people who are blessed with growing abundance always, Always, ALWAYS live in and participate in free enterprise systems. Those are the only systems that can manage scarce commodities and skills efficiently and make them grow, not to mention managing the immense dataflow of large Hayekian Extended Orders. Government CAN NEVER create wealth. It can only spend it. Wealth can’t be mandated into existence by law. It can’t spring forth from the business end of a gun. Why? Because government by dire necessity is a society’s enforcement arm. It retains a monopoly over the most lethal forms of physical force. As such, it can’t create; only confiscate, normally in the form of taxes, sometimes in the form of eminent domain. Statists seem to believe that government can create wealth. They are in error —the most fundamental error of liberalism. This is one of the most important reasons I am not a liberal. The assumption that government and only government can build and maintain civilization is what Hayek called

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the Fatal Conceit. It attributes to government the kind of power and insight no government has ever had or could ever hope to have. In the Broadway musical, Camelot, King Arthur woos his soon-to-be wife, Guinevere by singing the title song about ‘happy-ever-afterings.’ The most amusing line to this Minnesotan was “And there’s a legal limit to the snow here in Camelot.” We know that the character King Arthur didn’t really believe that. He was trying to charm Guinevere with his wit. But there are large numbers of liberals who do believe that sort of thing. What else can explain the absurd belief that human activity can cause climate change and that government mandates can stop it? This line in Camelot stands as the purest statement I’ve ever read or heard anywhere of the sloppy sentimentalism of statism. The establishment of individual freedom as America’s core principle is far more kind and caring than statism can ever hope to be because it is in essence a bow to Reality, an acknowledgement by those who would lead us and those who follow that everyone can know something, do something, say something, think something that is of great importance at some time. The fact that we can never be sure which insight will turn out to be important in the fullness of time requires us to be open to innovation from anyone at any time. This openness to the insights of everyone is as different from statism as a thing can be. It explains our love of individual freedom. I thank God for those things. I don’t. I thank the American people who had the wisdom over the generations to “let it alone”—the most direct English translation of that notorious French phrase, “laissez faire.” As a result, millions of people by freely interacting produce those things. And I beg Him to help me not be so angry with people who shout "it is every man for himself; that is what makes us strong." ROT. It is community that makes us strong. And it is community that gives us humanity. No man is an island, and no man is meant to be an island. Every man (and woman and child) IS an island—to the following extent: We are limited by our own perception and our own experiences. We can only live in our own bodies and minds. We don’t do Vulcan mind-melding. However, we islands are part of an enormous archipelago—of social intercourse with our fellow islands, er, humans. We can tap into others’ Page 8

insights indirectly and engage with them through spoken and written language. Community is not a gaseous abstraction; it is individual “islanders” in aggregate. As we participate in Hayekian Extended Orders, vast catalytic chains of exchange permitting huge numbers of people to freely cooperate in all areas of life, we create, often without meaning to, extraordinarily complex and utile social structures. I am tired of having a whole group of people think that the US is better off with the rich getting filthy rich and the poor getting poorer, with the help of the lowest minimum wage in the western world and an absolutely niggardly attitude about helping the poor and needy. In case you haven't discovered this –members of the upper management in big companies take care of themselves first, the stockholders second, and the worker last (if they keep him at all). And these are the guys you are so busy protecting!!! Let's build yet another Wal-Mart. Forget the benefits. We wouldn't want that stock to take a dip. And we would certainly be embarrassed if one of our most prized companies wasn't led by a multi-billionaire. Amazing! We assume that if a human system exists, some one specific human being or group of humans must have deliberately designed it, and by so doing, deliberately left in any weaknesses or immorality we perceive. Perhaps the mythic Lawgiver—a Moses or Hammurabi. Perhaps a scientist—a Galileo or Newton. Perhaps a captain of industry—a Carnegie or Gates. This is manifestly false—a wrong assumption on all levels. These people did create their own specific part of systems we now enjoy—jurisprudence, modern science, capitalism. But they did not create these systems qua systems. They participated in their creation as each of us does. We are misled by our in-built prejudices inherited from hundreds of generations of hunter-gatherer ancestors who by necessity lived very close, intense, communal lives into thinking that’s how human societies work today. Statism is our natural default position when we attempt such erroneous explanations of very complex human systems and institutions. Religion inherited the same default position. It tends to attribute statist characteristics to their god(s) and by extension, religious dogmas and structural characteristics of religions. Theology may mislead us; experience must be our guide. There is simply no way any human can know what tens of millions of people know in an Extended Order or monitor what all the many and varied things Page 9

those people do. We ignore the existence of Extended Orders and their tendency to catalyze unanticipated consequences at our peril. So, when we blithely take the statist default position, we naturally assume that whatever systems “evil” people “deliberately” foster, much more kind, compassionate and caring people (socialists, government bureaucrats) can fix. The history of the 20th century stands as witness to the horror that results when powerhungry ideologists play with human lives, driven by their earnest belief in Dear Leader, the Party, or the Internationale—in a word, statism. Here are some key words and some sites that explore the concept of selforganizing systems of growing complexity, the ones Hayek and von Mises described so ably. Friedrich Hayek Ludwig von Mises Leonard Read Extended Order Spontaneous order Growing complexity Distributed intelligence Networks Feedback loops Autocatalysis Chaos Theory Complexity Theory Free markets Wealth Once you develop a feel for self-organization, you’ll find it everywhere— AND you will, at least partially, free yourself from that statist bias that lies within all of us. *****

Virrudh begins to show his liberal cultural snobbery:

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I am tired of having to go search for people who have actually been to a fine arts museum, a symphony, or an opera. Apparently, you need a new set of friends. Americans are far more sophisticated culturally than given credit for by snobbish Europeans and disdainful American Leftists. Check these outtakes: The U.S. now has 125 professional opera companies, 60 percent of them launched since 1970, according to the trade group OPERA America. The U.S. has more opera companies than Germany and nearly twice as many as Italy. In the most comprehensive recent study, the National Endowment for the Arts found that between 1982 and 2002, total attendance at live opera performances grew 46 percent. Annual admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006–07). In part, this reflects a shift toward seeing opera domestically. “Foreign opera destinations like Salzburg and Glyndebourne are more expensive, and more Americans are staying home—and probably feeling safer for it,” says Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. http://www.american.com/archive/2007/july-august-magazinecontents/america2019s-opera-boom With almost endless choice of music at one’s fingertips, one may well wonder about the audience that remains for live music in America today. Among adults, 41% said that they attended a live musical performance within the past 12 months. This finding is drawn from a study completed by Leo J. Shapiro & Associates this July, with 450 adults interviewed by telephone in a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. The study finds that increasing electronic accessibility to music of one’s choice has not done away with desire to hear music performed live. Most Americans are taking time out to hear music performances often paying admission substantially higher than the cost of hearing that music on disk or tape. Nearly one-third of American adults – 30% – have attended a popular music concert in the past 12 months and 27% have attended a performance of classical music, including 22% a symphony concert, 9% a chamber music concert, and 6% an opera performance. Page 11

The audience for live music is substantially greater than attendance at major league baseball games. In the past 12 months, 19% of adults attended a major league baseball game, compared to 27% attending a classical music performance, and 30% a pop concert. Nearly one-third of adults (32%) say they have attended a theatre performance of either a play or musical in the past 12 months. This exceeds the 27% attending a performance of classical music, and the 30% of adults attending a pop concert, but is below the combined live musical audience of 41%. While popular and classical music performances are often considered to be worlds apart, the popular and classical musical audiences overlap. More than half of adults who have attended a pop concert in the past year have also attended a classical music performance (51%). Conversely, 58% of adults attending a classical music concert in the past year have also attended a pop concert. http://www.ljs.com/Americas%20Live%20Music%20Audience%20(8-305).htm I’ve not been able to find comparably comprehensive overall figures for American attendance at art museums. But, I did note a survey made in the Nineties showing 40 % of American adults claiming they visited an art museum in the previous year. Even if many were actually “lying to the pollsters,” this would still indicate tens of millions of Americans had attended. I am sick to death of being surrounded by a whole bunch of mean little gnats who believe that the poor are poor only because they are lazy, too stupid to make good choices, and/or drug addled and if we must punish the kids for their parents' sins, too bad. The poor aren’t poor only because they’re lazy, stupid, or drug-addled or even largely because of those attributes. They are poor because they were lured and trapped into those Great Society’s programs from which there is no escape: As we survey the plight of these unfortunates, we are usually unaware of the role we have played in creating their poverty. For example, we fail to Page 12

notice that when minimum wages go up in a particular region of the country, welfare payments increase to the newly unemployed. Without such awareness, we repeat our mistake of using aggression as we try to help the destitute. As a result, we used the aggression of taxation to support a massive "War on Poverty." Two "wrongs" don't make a "right." Welfare, which is charity by aggression, ensnares the poor in a never ending cycle known as the poverty trap. In the 1970s, welfare payments and other forms of aid available to poor families (e.g., food stamps, medical care, etc.) increased to such an extent that total benefits exceeded the median income of the average U.S. family! In 1975, working heads of households needed to make $20,000 to give their families benefits equivalent to what they could have on welfare. Only 25% of U.S. families earned this much!3 In 1979, the median family income was $1,500 less than the potential welfare benefits for a family of the same size. In the 1970s, two working parents had to make more than the minimum wage to match what they would receive on the dole. (4) A young working couple with children might find that their net income after child-care costs would be less than what they could receive on welfare. In these circumstances, accepting aid instead of working would seem like the smart thing to do. Opting out of the work force at a young age has grave consequences later on, however. While a working person might start out with less than those on aid, experience would eventually result in raises and a higher standard of living. On welfare, however, little progress is made over time. Since most welfare benefits can be used only for food, medical care, and shelter, saving is almost impossible. When their working contemporaries are ready to buy their first house, those on welfare are still unable to afford a car.

The attraction of the short-term gain encourages many individuals to choose poverty for life. One study estimated that one-sixth of aid Page 13

recipients could have worked but chose leisure and the other benefits of being supported by tax dollars instead. (5) An elaborate study involving almost 9,000 people documented the deleterious results of a guaranteed income. One group of subjects, who served as controls, received no benefits. An experimental group was told everyone would be given enough money to bring total individual income to a specified target amount. Those in the experimental group who worked would receive less money than those who didn't, so everyone would have the same income for three consecutive years. http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/chap11.html James Nuechterlein, editor of the religious periodical, First Things, wrote an essay on one of his favorite philosophers: Edward C. Banfield. After reading his scouring critique of the Great Society, The Unheavenly City, published in 1970, Nuechterlein gave up his wishy-washy moderate views and became a true-believing conservative. The Great Society is the poster child for disastrous unintended consequences, the kind that happen when you don’t account for what people really do when offered financial support with nothing given in exchange, as opposed to what you hope they do. After you read what Banfield said about the Sixties welfare state, you may well join Nuechterlein in his conservatism. The really sad thing is that the welfare state is much worse now: The Unheavenly City could not have gone more radically against the grain of the conventional wisdom on the causes and cures of the intertwined issues of race, poverty, and civil unrest. In the wake of the Detroit riot, the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) blamed the continuing outbursts on "white racism." Banfield did not, of course, deny the existence or malign influence of racial prejudice, but he insisted that the fundamental cause of black poverty was based more in class culture than in skin color. It was important to distinguish, he said, between the historical and the continuing causes of black disadvantage. Banfield marshaled a vast array of evidence to show that for most blacks, conditions of life had improved across the board. But there remained, especially in the central cities of the nation, a significant minority whom progress had passed by. The problems within the black Page 14

underclass (as it later came to be called) relating to crime, unemployment, poverty, and education stemmed less, Banfield said, from external discrimination or indifference than from a dysfunctional way of life endemic among lower-class people everywhere. He cited an earlier sociological study of white lower-class behavior-A. B. Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth (1949)-to demonstrate his point. Banfield quoted Hollingshead at length to show that the behavior attributed ("more or less correctly") to lower-class whites-disrespect for law, disregard of the future, laziness, promiscuous sex, indifference to education-and the disapproval of that behavior by the larger society had obvious correlates with the current situation of the black underclass and of attitudes toward it. The culprit in the situation was culture, not race, and cultural patterns of behavior were notoriously resistant to change through public policy. Improvement was possible, Banfield arguedespecially through general economic expansion-but it could only be incremental and would mostly have to come from inside the black community itself. The response to The Unheavenly City by liberals was instant and unforgiving: Banfield was "blaming the victim." For those who were persuaded that the essential, even the sole, black problem was white prejudice-and that that prejudice was so pervasive and over whelming in its effects as to leave poor blacks helpless to succeed in America so long as it persisted-reference to behavior patterns in the black community was but a diversion and an evasion. Racism was the problem, its elimination from the white psyche the only solution. In the meantime, amelioration would come for blacks only from "massive" government programs of aid and support that might to some degree circumvent the all-devouring prejudice that doomed reliance on private initiatives, white or black, to inevitable failure. The liberal response could not have surprised Banfield. Indeed, he had anticipated it. Among the causes of urban discontent, he said, was precisely the altruistic bias of middle-class opinion leaders, seized by the urge to "do something, do good." But, Banfield insisted, we cannot solve fundamental social problems simply by exertions of social will. It was unfortunate, he thought, that the old urban political machines had been supplanted by liberal caucuses. The smoke-filled room had been superseded by the talk-filled room, and too much of that talk consisted Page 15

of unappeasable righteous indignation. The "moral shrillness" of liberal opinion, caught up in fantasies of transformations in the "hearts and minds of men," had weakened the consensual bonds of society-had, indeed, invited the urban outbursts that liberals now used to assault the nation’s conscience. Banfield’s conclusion was mordant: “Faith in the perfectibility of man and confidence that good intentions together with strenuous exertions will hasten his progress onward and upward lead to bold programs that promise to do what no one knows how to do and what perhaps cannot be done, and therefore end in frustration, loss of mutual respect and trust, anger, and even coercion." As this passage indicates, Banfield’s conservatism was rooted in a refusal of sentimentality and a resolute anti-utopianism. Having read him, I simply knew that he had urban policy right and the Kerner Commission had it wrong. He saw people and situations as they were, not as, were the world a different place than it is, they might be. Edward Banfield taught me (more precisely he reminded me) that the wisest social policy-and yes, the most compassionate-begins in an utter disdain for illusions. To do good we must be undeceived. http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3245 *****

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And then virrudh harshly critiques some conservatives’ style of political discourse: I am sick to death of the lack of intelligence and wit and originality of the types who come up with descriptions like libtards, dumbbuttcrabs, dimmocrats, hitlary. I mean, really. The first time it is written is bad enough, but then it gets repeated over and over and over by people who apparently think it's a cool thing to say. I feel as though I have walked into an unsupervised room full of junior high boys trying to outgross each other. “Why do you feel that this open hostility is so necessary?” Pure frustration. For most people, that’s the only way to express their pure frustration at elites who don’t have a clue as to the needs and desires of ordinary Americans. They may not have the political philosophical background to express and explain what they believe is wrong, so they enter the land of expletive deleted. This also explains why Rush is so popular. It’s not, “Oh finally, I now know what to think about political issues.” It’s more like, “Oh finally, someone’s saying what I’ve thought for YEARS, and better than I could say it.” Which was exactly my reaction to Rush and precisely why I am not a liberal.

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Sources Here’s the link to the original column and the resulting discussion thread: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2007/08/08/absolutely_fabulist?page=f ull&comments=true#1b5eed76-8773-4070-b06c-e8377dc5dffd Check out Robert Kagan’s original essay, “Of Paradise and Power,” which was later turned into a book. Here’s the link: http://www.vinod.com/blog/Books/OfParadiseandPower.html Here is information on Kagan’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Power-America-Europe-World/dp/1400040930

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