Liberals progressive? Nope!
It amuses me that liberals label themselves “progressive” when their policies are anything but. Former President Jimmy Carter’s thoughts on preemption exemplify progressives’ inability to adjust to the modern world:
Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis.
Isolationism was an option when the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected us, but the oceans no longer give us the time and space to be reactive. Modern weaponry, like North Korea’s missile program, shortens our ability to react from months to minutes. Additionally, today’s weapons are far more lethal. A nuclear strike in LA would kill thousands instantly.
President Carter should update his thinking. Waiting for 100s of thousands of dead Americans before we react should be our last option, not the first.
Archived in: Jimmy Carter, Liberals, North Korea, ProgressivesAugust 18, 2006 at 1:39 pm | Trackback
3 comments
With respect, you miss the point. Mr. Carter was our President when an act of war, by any standard of international law, was deliberately done to this nation. The taking of our embassy in Tehran in 1979 - by law, an invasion of the territory of the United States - and the taking of American diplomats as hostages, was nothing less than an act of war. And Mr. Carter, and his party - at the time in firm control of both houses of Congress - did . . . absolutely nothing. I can live with declared passivism, not because I could ever agree with it, but because it’s at least honest, but a man who could not, and evidently still cannot, perceive a threat to the security of this country when it sustains an act of war by a belligerent party - who, indeed, can see no threat to the security of Israel when Hezbollah rockets are falling by the thousands from its skies, intended to kill as many citizens as possible - is simply a poseur, not worthy of any respect. From anyone.
Carter is very disturbed. Review his past and you find a pattern of craven subservience to dictators relieved only by periods of wicked scorn for free men. The man is small, nasty and dishonest in ways seen only in “progressives” and crypto fascists.
The word “progressive” appeals to the left because of its man-the-barricades luster; it’s nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth century romanticism. Trouble is, it’s alway interlocked with some crazy, faddish liberation philosophy. And running out of new liberation ideas and things to protest, progressives who could once claim Martin Luther as their own, end up with jackasses like Michael Newdow, Trotsky ends in Pol Pot, and the the courage of Upton Sinclair ends in whimpering derision for WalMart.
There’s no escape from the retrograde impulses of progressivism. They’re the most reactionary people in American life.
Progressive politics have played a role in our country since the turn of the last century. Carter is one of the latest fools to believe in it.
Go back to Wilsonian isolationism and how that brought about the 7/30/1916 Black Tom explosion. Every attempt to keep us out of the Great War resulted in fouled policy, sabotage around the country and finally our entry into the war.
Move ahead to the 1930’s. Hitler came to power through progressive appeasement. Most of the moonbats crying, “Peace in our time” have no idea of the origin of that statement. This country, before Pearl Harbor, once again hid behind two oceans. Termination of this policy was WWII.
Carter’s foray into this idiocy produced this corollary: the disaster in the desert, 444 days of begging for release of the hostages and the encouragement of Iran to adopt a hard line in future dealings with us.
Now the Democrat choir is using the same tattered sheet music. Safety through conciliation produced the 1993 WTC bombing, the Cole attack, Kobar towers, numerous hostage situations and 9/11. Progressive pacifism appears to be a stillborn future.
Next, they’ll be suing their mothers because they were born without a safety helmet.