Once More...Into the Breach!

This post is a response to a discussion Kevin Baker and I have been having down in comments. He put a longer comment up on his blog, which you can find here, so I thought I would bring my reply out into a full post as well.

I would like to start off by saying that I appreciated the support of everyone who came to my defense down below. I think I am probably a little bit less as skilled of a debater as some of my defenders made me out to be but posting on Kevin's blog has certainly made me tougher, no doubt.

I also want to make it clear, before I respond to what Kevin wrote, that, even thought I may not post again on his blog, I do plan on continuing to read it everyday. In fact, it will probably be the only blog I read everyday, other than my own of course. Many people here think I am nuts for doing this but I have always thought that you can't be intelligently critical of someone's point of view unless you fully understand it. I'm not sure I fully understand the conservative/neo conservative/classical liberal/whatever mindset yet but life is about the journey after all and this journey will most assuredly continue. Why spend that journey reading blogs like The Huffington Post or the Daily Kos who basically give me information that I already know?

At the end of the day, I think all 200-300 of you that read my blog should read his as well. It is informative in more ways than I can possibly count. When I made comments there, I always found myself thinking, man this would make a great column on my blog. So, if I see something that sparks my interest there, more than likely, I will comment on it here. And with that thought, here is my commentary on the post he entitled "All Markadelphia All The Time." I will pull some quotes here and there for this post but if you want to read the full text, I urge you to go to his site.

Let's start out with an oldie but a goodie

Do it again only harder

I have to admit that this has always struck me as being a terribly wrong and short sighted way to characterize liberals/progressives but I couldn't really figure out why....until today. When one suffers from groupthink, as Kevin et al do in regards to libs, they cannot possibly conceive of them as being anything other than a walking monolith of a single thought. One of the reasons Hillary Clinton is doing as poorly as she is in this primary season is that people don't want to hear the same old bullshit anymore. Kevin and company see Obama as no different than Hillary so it is no surprise that the word "again" is in this phrase. It is a mistake that they will regret come November. They will be flabbergasted after the first year of an Obama presidency when they realize that many of their dire predictions never came to pass. I look forward to that moment.

The correct phrase, if they took the time to actually understand where Obama is coming from, is:

DO IT DIFFERENTLY AND WITH ACTUAL THOUGHT BEHIND IT.

Kevin fails to see the effect that Obama style politics can have on an area like....the South Side of Chicago, for example. If he took the time to talk to people there, as I have, they would tell him how Obama helped them out and (Gasp!) did it without the socialism/pile of skulls/boiling pit of sewage propaganda that Kevin's dogmatic belief system predicts.

that little factoid must explain why history doesn't appear to be taught in school much anymore

Actually, the reason why history isn't taught in school anymore is because it is not part of high stakes testing so schools remove it from curriculum at the grade school level. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, all of the focus must be on math, reading, and writing. I have a column coming soon on this topic. The reason why your daughter doesn't know about Pearl Harbor is due to the homogenized hoo rah version of America that has been taught in schools. Again, see Loewen's book. Speaking of which...

So Wilson was quite happy to use the Constitution as toilet paper, too.

Your long analysis of Wilson serves to prove a good point: all history should be looked at from a wide variety of angles and that is the job of educators. The bone I pick with you is that I do it and you don't. I am fully aware of how awful Communists regimes around the world were and still are. I am also aware of how horrible we have been and still are to this day. You aren't. Our government, throughout our entire history, has lied us into war after war. We killed four million people in Vietnam, Kevin, and you say that they were the ones who held the exclusive right to the title "monster" because they were....communists? If you were going by pure body count alone, those dirty commies might have the edge. So what? We have still killed millions ourselves in the name of our ideology. Does it make us better because we killed less people? Sheesh...

You almost grasp that there is no "Third Way" you bend it to suit whatever situation comes up, but it's a system you apply daily.

Yes, it's true. I do bend to various situations and I am terribly sad to report that I do not set my feet in stone regardless of how much the world changes. The major reason we have fallen behind in the world is because we aren't malleable enough. This is the fault of people like you, Kevin. You refuse to change to a world that demands it. For some insane, illogical reason you take that to mean that the world is demanding that we become socialists. That is never going to fly here. We have to become more fluid and I'll tell you why: OUR ENEMIES ARE!!! They bank on us reacting the way you are and plan on us never changing our strategy, maintaining a shoot first, ask questions later policy.

then I suggest that we not darken each others doorsteps again

That's a little flowery, isn't it? Even for you, dude. I hope that won't be the case. You are always welcome to post here and I will be commenting here on ideas you throw out on your blog. As I have said before, I have learned a lot from our debates and hope to learn more.

Personally, I'm against government trying to make people... better.

So am I. But I am also against the government preventing people from becoming better. And that is why Obama is different. At the end of the day it really is going to be up to us, not him. Do you think the people on the south side of Chicago get any help from him anymore? No, he put some programs in place, removed some restrictions and cleared out some dead weight. There is less crime and more people back at work there. It's not perfect but it is better.

And that's what we are really talking about here. Pay attention to what the new wave of Democrats are saying. Take a closer look. They are not advocating a nanny state. That's what Hillary and John McCain are advocating. We are talking about an effort to bring this country back from the disaster that has been the last eight years. A large part of that effort is going to be centered around a return to good capitalism and a rejection of the "free market at gun point philosophy" we have now. Only in America, as Senator Obama says, can we have the freedom to pursue our dreams.

He is a living example of someone who took individual liberty and self reliance and succeeded. He didn't have anything handed to him on a silver platter and he certainly doesn't think that people are entitled to anything....other than to have a government that does not go out of its way to fuck them over by creating economic enemies around the world.

So, I am left wondering with what will happen if your predictions of the direction our country will take are wrong? You say you have history on your side but it is a history that strangely does not include an honest look at our foreign policy starting with the Monroe Doctrine and continuing through to President Bush's Iraq War today. Time and again, history has shown me that our enemies are born out of an abrasive and violent US policy that is little different than their own.

I see good in this country, too, Kevin. Unfortunately, those good people have been, for the most part, demeaned, mischaracterized, and slandered by people like YOU who do the bidding, consciously or unconsciously, of the men in this country who have the most to lose if we actually become decent for a change. Fortunately, most of the American people are pretty much done listening to this crap and they are beginning to see what it truly is going to take to get this country back on track.We are going to hear their voices in November.

It's going to be many voices and they are going to be loud.