One cannot teach an old dog new tricks, and one cannot teach an aging bigot the way to humanity and decency.
It seems that at that this rate, I might need an entire new blog just to detail the hate speech coming from an agent of tolerance of the Jewish Journal, Amy Klein.
When I use the word tolerance, I mean it the way a politically liberal person would mean it. One should show compassion for Gitmo detainees, Palestinian homicide bombers, and other terrorists, but republicans should be decried as evil at every possible turn.
I can understand making anti-republican remarks if one is a liberal debater on a talk show. Both sides spout their talking points, and move on.
What bothers me is when one engages in smears for no particular reason. Like the bully that steals school lunch money, there is no rationale. They do it “just because.”
When I go to the grocery store, I expect the checkout clerk to smile, offer me my change and my receipt, and ask me if I want paper or plastic. Assuming that my comments are equally benign, I would not expect the checkout clerk to then say, “Oh, and I hate republicans, especially George W. Bush.”
The above fictional situation is taking place in many areas across America. It is usually followed by foaming of the mouth, which is common in many liberals and other out of control rabid animals.
It is almost a disease, but then again our society treats everything from alcoholism to road rage as a disease. What it should actually be labeled is what society used to refer to it as…bad behavior.
This week, only one week removed from her previously bigoted comments, Amy Klein has struck again.
The basic substance of her column, and I use the word substance loosely, is that she desperately wants a husband. Like most Jewish liberals, she is angst ridden. This week she hemmed and hawed about whether or not to make a “list” of what she wants in a man.
She decided to make the list, and out of 25 qualities, 2 of them lunged out at me like a poisoned dagger.
2) Liberal.
This is fine by itself. She has every right to preach tolerance while excluding republicans. Yet further down the list is where her bile surfaced.
8) Empathy for the world (See # 2).
Had she just left # 8 without the parentheses, it would have been a beautiful character trait. However, by making # 8 conditional on # 2, she decided to offer a giant slap in the face to half of America, myself included.
This is another example of liberals claiming that conservatives and republicans are intolerant, when it is the left that possesses the hostility in abundance. The left will then claim that both sides do it, but the difference is that hostility on the right is from fringes, and it is quickly shouted down by the left and the right. Hostility and rage on the left is encouraged by the left, and even celebrated.
This can be seen in the venom being directed at Barack Obama for his support of President Bush’s faith based programs. Obama has criticized President Bush relentlessly, but the one time he says something remotely positive about a man he disagrees with on most issues, his most fervent supporters turn on him. One of them even threatened to castrate him. Folks, it is not republicans acting this way.
With regards to Amy Klein, let’s see how liberals have shown empathy for the world.
By banning DDT, liberals contributed to the mass murder of millions of Africans. Malaria is still killing them. This is liberal empathy.
By trying to ban all animal testing, liberals are delaying the ability to develop cures for diseases such as cancer and AIDS. AIDS activists are normally liberals. This is liberal compassion.
By caring about trees and animals more than human beings, liberals are putting many families out of work in the Pacific Northwest. Timber companies consist of blue collar workers trying to feed their children, but the various forms of the Spotted Owl matter more. This is liberal compassion.
Liberals support public school systems where kids go to die from drugs and guns, despite the fact that many black people in America, including liberal Barack Obama, support faith based programs (or at least claim they do). Black Americans want to send their children to religious schools, but the National Education Association would rather kids pray on their knees to the person about to shoot them than pray on their knees to the God at a religious school that loves them. This is liberal compassion.
Liberals want to ban all guns, while claiming that they only want “reasonable” gun control. Four liberal Supreme Court Justices believe that only criminals should have the right to own guns, leaving many people in poor neighborhoods, especially minorities, vulnerable at the hands of armed criminals. The states with the strictest gun laws have the highest rates of crime, but liberals will ignore this. This is liberal compassion.
So Amy Klein basically wants to kill all minorities. She wants black people to die especially violently from drugs, guns, and pestilence. This makes her a racist.
No, of course I do not believe that last sentence. However, It is that easy to slur a faceless individual.
I am a proud Jewish republican, and I absolutely have empathy for the world.
I have empathy for Afghani women who can now walk in the street without being beaten to death.
I have empathy for Iraqi citizens and their purple stained fingers, who are now free from the madman that was Saddam Hussein.
I have empathy for Israelis, 70% of whom supported President Bush in 2004, who at least now face homicide bombers not being funded by the deceased Mr. Hussein.
I have empathy for the woman who prevents somebody from raping her because she is allowed to own a gun to offend her attacker.
(Oh, and enough of these movies that show him taking the gun out of her weak and frail little wrists. That is sexism, or as liberals call it, compassion)
I have empathy for black republicans that have Oreo cookies thrown at them and the Jewish republicans that are called Nazis by “enlightened” and “tolerant” liberals, many of them Jews.
I have empathy for the surviving family members of a murder victim that cries out for justice when some liberal judge refuses to enforce the death penalty in the name of compassion.
One of the reasons that I despise the label “compassionate conservative” is because conservatism is compassion.
The highest form of Tzedakah (charity) according to Jewish law is the concept of helping somebody else become self sufficient, rather than giving them a handout. This is conservatism.
Welfare is not empathy. Welfare is poison. It is the modern version of slavery. Welfare reform is compassion.
One need no further proof of what benefits the downtrodden than the violent reaction of Jesse Jackson towards Barack Obama. Jesse Jackson has built his career on exploiting human misery and exacerbating racial tensions. Barack Obama, while not my candidate of choice, wants to truly bring racial healing.
Jesse Jackson can rail against Barack Obama all he wants, but it does not change the fact that Jackson is a miserable creature resigned to being yesterday’s news, while Barack Obama, win or lose, has already surpassed Jackson by wide country miles. Jackson keeps grousing, and Obama keeps smiling.
This analogy is how I shall deal with Amy Klein. As much as her ideological bigotry is hurtful, she remains nothing more than an angry woman desperate for a husband, unable to see that her own hatred for people she has never met prevents her from a brighter future. I have plenty of single friends, but I would not let them near her.
As for me, I remain blissfully happy with the Chicago Cannonball. While there are no guarantees, one thing that we both agree on is that our political differences will not keep us apart. She does not have to care about my politics. She cares about me, and I am one of the luckiest men on Earth.
She is liberal politically, and she is “tolerant,” loving, accepting, and empathetic of all people, even those who are different from her.
Amy Klein can learn from this empathetic liberal who cares about the world we live in.
She could also learn from this conservative who does as well.
I suspect she will not learn. Oh, well. My keyboard has time to deal with her and every other person who spreads ideological bigotry.
eric
Editor’s note: Mere hours after I wrote this column, but before it was published, I became aware that Amy Klein is no longer with the Jewish Journal. Apparently the separation occurred on July 7th, four days after I wrote my original column dealing with her conduct. Unless I am presented with direct evidence to the contrary, I shall chalk this up to a coincidence.
Am I happy about this? No. Am I sad about it? No. What I hope is that Amy Klein loses the hostility she has towards republicans.
Quite a coincidence, isn’t it, Eric?
I finally was able to register with Word Press. I won’t go into all the gyrations I had to go through to do so, but success at last! :)
This is a great post and you are dead right. There are so many examples of left-wing intolerance. The Daily Kos’s comment thread is full of hatred for Tony Snow, for instance. He was so far above them, so positive and full of love for everyone. Unlike them, he never said a bad word about anyone, at least not in public word or print. An amazing person, those who would say such vile things aren’t fit to clean his shoes.
I know liberals in real life who are compassionate and I know conservatives in real life who are compassionate. We have political differences for sure, but we don’t hate one another. Ms. Klein sounds like a bitter and desperate woman. It is sad there are som many people like that out there.
The DDT issue is a terrible tragedy … malaria was almost wiped out as a disease of concen and then the tree huggers grabbeda hold a faulty data and put their political minions to work … Thomas Sowell has som egreat stuff about this.
If “Tzedakah” is truly for the poor it should be given to them. Giving the wealthy more money in a time when its obviously not making its way to the poor is a candle expected to feed the masses on its fumes.
JMJ
The ban initially came about because Rachel Carson (Al Gore’s environmental guru) wrote a piece of propaganda called Silent Spring. The case against DDT is, was, and always has been a bunch of crap.
Micky, have you ever had a garden?
JMJ
Yes, it made me 50,000.00 dollars on one year.
Just like Meryl Streep testifying about the incredible harm alar was doing to our apple eating children. Or global warming being responsibel for the bee population decline (it was a cyclical bee disease). The list goes on and on …
Yea, veggie weenie roasts and smores are going to be a big sin in Seattle if the greenies get their way.
They’re trying to push through legislation that outlaws camp fires because its bad for the atmosphere.
http://www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/environment/pollution/news.php?q=1213206192
Where will they sing Kumbaya ?
So, you have a garden, and if I’m not mistaken a child and a dog, right?
Would YOU spray DDT on your garden?
JMJ
“Cyclical bee disease”? Where do you guys get these loony rationalizations from???
JMJ
And by the way, “global warming” is probably not the only reason for the CCD, but rather a host of reasons including cross-breeding, mass domestication, pesticides, and so forth.
JMJ
Yea, I would spray DDT in my yard.
Its much safer than many of the pesticides on the market today.
Please, find me an account of one American child harmed bt DDT.
I have a file stored on this subject, credit to the appropriate contributors is whithin it.
Over half a century has passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns first began, and since then millions of people have been exposed to large concentrations of DDT. And according to every single scientific report on the subject, including that of renowned international health scholar Amir Attaran, “there has not been even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” In a 1956 study, volunteers ate raw DDT every day for two-plus years and showed absolutely no ill effects, then or now. “On the other hand,” says physicist Keith Lockitch, “abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the publics angry misconceptions against DDT fueled by Silent Spring and the growing environmental movement was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator at the time hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of all the facts and evidence. And then the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands … On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show ‘humility’ before its ‘vast forces’ and leave it alone. Carson wrote; We should seek not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead ‘a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.’ If the untouched, ‘natural’ state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.”
SO BE IT ?
The following quote also comes from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: “The town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been (present) for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone, too. . . . ‘Will they ever come back?’ the children ask, and I do not have the answer.”
Apart from being an embarrassingly overwritten line of crap, this is just pure fiction. The Audubon Society that was sympathetic to Carson’s claims, has stated that no extinctions or significant loss to bird populations came about through the use of DDT. “Of 40 birds Carson said might by now be extinct or nearly so, 19 have stable populations, 14 have increasing populations, and seven are declining.” (Easterbrook 1995, p. 82.) It should be noted furthermore that the seven listed as “declining” declined only slightly and not through any demonstrable link with DDT.
On the other hand, a malaria-fighter named Fred Soper, who supports the use of DDT, describes malaria in Egypt in 1943 this way:
“Whole families lying on the floor; some were just too weakened by illness to get up, and others were lying doubled up, shaking from head to foot with their teeth chattering and their violently trembling hands trying in vain to draw some dirty rags around them for warmth. They were in the middle of the malaria crisis. . . . There was hardly a house which had not had its dead, and those who were left were living skeletons, their old clothing in rags, their limbs swollen from undernourishment and too weak to go into the fields to work or even to get food.”
It is the environmentalists who have routinely protested hydroelectric dams, no matter the consequences, forget the fact that hydroelectric dams provide clean electrical energy and clean water. It is also environmentalists who have repeatedly campaigned against genetically modified agriculture, even though this agriculture is remarkably resistant to drought and disease. So it seems only fitting that it was also environmentalists who banned DDT creating a malaria resurgence which, in the form of millions of Third World residents, is killing and killing up to this very day.
Earth First! founder Dave Foreman:
“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”
That is a tiny taste of the humanity of environmentalism at work for you in the real world.
Here’s some more:
Robert W. Tracinski, former editor of The Intellectual Activist:
“Environmentalists seek to protect their de facto ban on logging by preserving the red tape that makes logging on federal land nearly impossible. But more than that, the purpose of the existing system, developed over the past two decades, is not just to bury loggers under paperwork. It is also intended to generate the kind of paperwork that stacks the deck against anyone who wants to put the forests to human use. As a San Francisco Chronicle editorial puts it, in ‘balancing the many competing demands on the forests,’ the existing system ‘puts a premium on protecting old-growth trees and sustaining fish and wildlife.’ That’s a pleasant way of saying that when it comes to deciding who has a right to make use of federal lands, regulators make sure that trees, animals and fish are first on the list. Humans are last.”
“But the most nefarious aspect of these existing rules is that they have been imposed with little meaningful public debate or discussion and little direct control by Congress. Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation.
“This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as ‘worker safety’ or ‘environmental protection’—things no politician will want to go on record voting against. When the legislation is passed and a new regulatory agency is created to enforce it, that’s when the actual decisions are made about what specific restrictions will be imposed and which lands will be removed from human use. Governmental power is passed down to an army of minor bureaucrats who are not accountable to the people and only vaguely accountable to Congress and the president.”
“Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise ‘oversight’ by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees? I doubt it. By its nature, the federal decree-issuing mechanism cant be controlled, and it has only one tendency: to impose more regulations and, by filling the register with such restrictions, to make private activities like logging come to a halt.
“These campaigns are proof of the greenies real motives. They want to stop development and keep the third world in povertywhile they work to bring the same ideal of poverty to industrialized nations. Most environmentalists embrace this goal, but few dare to admit it openly so they push a variety of ruses to hide their meaning ranging from ‘sustainable development’ to ‘shrinkth,’ a term suggested by the editor of Earth Island Journal as a less negative-sounding ‘antonym for growth’.”
I have much more on this subject if you would care to continue.
But as you can see I have educated myself to a level on the subject that goes past the tear mongering left,
Micky, I really don’t care what an Objectivist loony (Tracinski) thinks, but even Soper knew that DDT would never completely eradicate malaria, and it didn’t. Continued use would have simply toxified the environment and killed off countless other species LIKE THE FISH THAT THOSE SAME PEOPLE RELY ON FOR SUSTANANCE THAT EAT MOSQUITOES AND THEIR LARVAE. But many Third World countries continue to use DDT (now produced in India and China), and no one is stopping them, and First Worlders simply don’t need it anymore. So this whole thing is the usual pointless conservative drivel. You guys have no issues, so you make up silly psuedo-issues like this.
JMJ
“First Worlders simply don’t need it anymore.”
No its about an example of how environmentalism killed millions in the “past”.
True, we have other products toaday. But that is not the point
The point is that in the face of death for millions of people the environmentalist took the side of fish and a few birds.
Once again Mr. McJones.
I present verifyable fact and documentation when all you spout is opinion.
You basically have no case.
Psuedo issues ?
Like global warming where the science is still debatable but the left hammers it down our throats everyday as truth ? And you say that the death of millions is a psuedo issue ?
Also, I would like to see a report of fish dying because of the lack of baby mosquitos.
Objectivist ? Nice try but all that word does is describe every human on earth.
Also, sopher never claimed that DDT would completely wipe out malaria.
What he was saying, and the point that you miss again, is that millions could of been saved.