You Might Be a Liberal

by C Edmund Wright

  “I’m sorry Mr. Smith, you can’t have your quadruple by-pass operation today. We have a major problem. The trash can in the hospital lobby is six ounces too heavy.”

  This is what happens when government bureaucrats get out of control. This is why I think politeness is sometimes a problem. This kind of stupidity on the part of the inspector did not happen in a vacuum, and it did not spring up over night. It’s the end result of citizens slowly ceding their freedoms in dribs and drams in the name of getting along or being polite. This is not about being polite. It’s about staying free. Sometimes you cannot do both simultaneously. Given the choice, we need to eschew politeness and remain free. If we don’t, we might one day lose the freedom to be polite.

  And nothing takes away our freedom as quickly and dramatically as a crushed economy. Like, say, our current economy. Under a confusing and intertwined maze of problems in energy and housing and mortgages and financials, our economy did indeed crash in 2008. While there are many causes, they are all related, and every one of them can be traced to government rules and regulations. John McCain, he of exactly zero experience working for any entity not named the Federal Government, blamed it all on “unfettered capitalism,” which, of course, helped seal his own electoral defeat. You and I know that capitalism hasn’t been unfettered around here for many, many decades. What we had was perverted capitalism, and it was big government doing the perverting. When McCain stepped into the trap of ignorance in blaming free enterprise, the stage was set for an even bigger government pervert to win and only make things worse.

  Which is what has happened.

  The problem in the first place, however, was the creeping liberal bureaucratic mindset. It is a cancer that is all over every government agency. It is grinding our very economy and engine of liberty to a halt in mountains of red tape. The kind of thinking that puts government between the common sense relationship that Mike Kelly had with his banker is the same kind of thinking that brought us the disaster of 2008. It’s the same rotten egg, only a bigger one.

  In the most underreported story of our lifetime, an aspect of the Sarbanes Oxley legislation called “mark to market accounting” is what made the balance sheets of certain banks look vulnerable in the first place. When sub prime mortgages – yet another bureaucratic bungle – started to push home values down, the balance sheet of banks started to suffer. Never mind that at this time most people were still paying their mortgages. Never mind that never in a million years would every mortgage stop performing simultaneously. Mark to market accounting meant that banks had to assume on their balance sheets that both things would happen, and at the same time. The “rules are the rules.”

  Thus, the balance sheets looked awful, even those of profitable banks. People panicked. Stocks tanked. Home values tanked further. The derivatives unraveled and we have the meltdown of 2008. It was the “rules” that made the banks look like they were about to fail and that led to TARP and all kinds of further bureaucratic bungling. And when the idiotic rules were applied, that phony failure became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  There are other longer books that describe this in detail, and I recommend them. But rest assured, it all stems from a liberal bureaucratic control-focused type of thinking that elevates technical rules and paperwork and those who enforce them above reality and those who drive it. And the consequences to our very way of life are devastating.

  Congressman Kelly unfortunately ended his great object lesson on the House floor by missing one major point. Perhaps trying too hard to appear fair, he stated that “this (burdensome regulations) is not a left or right issue.” Sorry Congressman, but that is precisely what it is. It is somewhat Democrat and Republican, but it is purely liberal and conservative. That’s the only way to properly define it, and the only way to stop it is to defeat liberals and Democrats.

  The type of person who will shut down a ballpark because the mirrors are a quarter inch off is a liberal Democrat. I’d bet everything on that. The type of person who would draw up such a rule in the first place is, too. The type of people who vote for politicians who will multiply and empower such people and such rules are likewise liberal Democrats. We know who these sick individuals are. They are liberals. And if you support shutting down the ballpark due to the mirror height, or your support the malignancy of mark to market accounting, you are one of them too.

  YMBAL’S #22

  If you have a closet dedicated to the storage of candles and partially completed signs that say “Free ______”…

  If you think Mitt Romney is so white he shouldn’t even address the NAACP…

  If you’ve ever ranted and raved on the Senate Floor about evil businessmen outsourcing US Olympic uniforms to China, and then found out that the guilty party is a big Democrat donor…

  If you think a million barrels of oil a day from ANWR will only lower gas prices by a penny but a million a day from Saudi will lower gas by 65 cents…44

  If you are publicly upset when a tree is chopped down but celebrate privacy when a baby is aborted…

  If Ebonics is your first language…

  If you look at the beauty and weather and agricultural soil of Cuba and think, “if only there were more liberalism”…

  If you need a teleprompter to talk to a class of kindergarten students and plan on campaigning in all 57 states…

  If you rail against the “global economy” while sitting behind the wheel of your Subaru…

  If you rail against the “global economy” while using your iPhone…

  If you rail against the “global economy” while wearing Italian shoes or French jeans…

  If you rail against the “global economy” period…

  If you are offended by what anonymous sources said about Herman Cain and his “not overtly sexual” advances, but think Bill Maher hoping for the rape of Elizabeth Hasselbeck is just fine…

  If you’ll buy even more Bennetton products again after their “Unhate” kiss ad campaign with Obama smooching Hugo Chavez…

  If you liked the Benetton ad campaign where Obama kissed Hugo Chavez…

  If you believe Biden’s claim that Obama’s jobs bill will stop more murders than the death penalty…

  If you believe that Joe Biden’s psychic cops will stop more rapes than Americans packing their own heat…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen. “

  —Barack Obama

  “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”

  —Ronald Reagan

  23: SOCCER VERSUS FOOTBALL

  If you think soccer is a morally superior and really more popular than American football…

  The soccer/football analogy always gets people stirred up a bit, because frankly, a lot of conservative and liberals like both football and soccer. Many people like to play soccer but prefer to watch football. And others like to watch their kids play soccer but watch other adults play football. Some do prefer to watch soccer, though that’s a minority, for sure. Yet for some reason, people involved with soccer take anything said about the sport personally. Beyond that, many good conservatives have sons and daughters (especially daughters) who play in travel soccer leagues, and thus their entire family weekend schedule is dominated by those schedules. When you equate soccer to liberalism, then, it is unnerving, because they like soccer and they know they are not liberal.

  Fair enough. Nonetheless, I invite you to step back from any personal experiences with soccer and take a purely analytical journey through the rather funny political analogies to the rules and culture of soccer versus the rules and culture of football. If you do this, I submit that you will agree that there is a lot about soccer that is foundationally liberal, whereas football is foundationally conservative. Actually, the very essence of football flies i
n the face of much that good liberals hold as sacred and true. Yes, a lot of American liberals love football, play football and some even own NFL teams. This is just more proof that liberals can live a lie. They do this all the time, in every walk of life. No big deal.

  Actually, by examining further how football runs afoul of good American liberalism, we can expose how dangerous these folks really are when this same hypocrisy is applied to other areas of our culture. It also points to the flexible and situational application of liberal beliefs. And, in fact, in a story that is just gaining a lot of public notice and which may take years to play out, liberals who have greatly benefitted from the sport of football are threatening to kill it, starting with lawsuits against the National Football League. More on that later, too.

  As stated earlier, American football is the quintessential conservative sport. I use the term American football here so as not to insult the soccer community before we get started. Yes, football is aggressive and violent and it is brimming with all kinds of risk-reward, free enterprise type strategies on both offense and defense. Thus, with the violence and emphasis on competition and on risk reward, football is very much like two institutions liberals hate: The U.S. military and our free market economy. And make no mistake about it, the hatred liberals have for our military, our free markets and our success ends up manifesting itself in very dangerous and damaging legislation, not to mention insufferable political talking points on MSNBC and CNN.

  In football, scores can mount up quickly, therefore making sure that the losers in a one sided contest will escape without a shred of phony self-esteem. You know, a route in football is something like 35-0. That’s going to invariably leave a mark on someone’s self esteem. In soccer, 2 nil is a route. Come to think of it, saying ‘nil’ instead of ‘zero’ is another to way avoid hurt someone’s feelings. 2 nil? Meh. No big deal. Must have been a very close game. Can we all have our participation trophies now?

  And we know that liberals love those ‘no score leagues’ where everyone’s self esteem is protected because there is no official score registered on the scoreboard. These would not work so well in football, because registering the score or not on the board, the game would be played at one end of the field in a rout regardless.

  So let’s connect some dots to some more important issues. Is the psychoses behind participation trophies and keeping the score close really all that different from whatever psychoses Barack Obama has that inspired him to say that he is “not comfortable with the notion of victory” in Iraq? Can’t you sense that same liberal essence wafting through that mindset? It’s there. It’s the same.

  As the late comedian George Carlin famously said while making fun of baseball, football is full of strategies like the bomb and the blitz and other military sounding terms. I think it’s interesting that soccer meanwhile has something called ‘the off sides trap’ which, for some reason, sounds strangely like ‘IRS audit’ to me. No wonder liberals love this sport.

  Even the most offensive and aggressive sounding position in soccer is ‘striker,’ which, of course, appeals to the union mindset. Union thugs are just about the only folks liberals want to be overtly aggressive and successful.

  In fact, the more you analyze the very essential differences in the two sports the more obvious the conservative versus liberal thinking becomes. Perhaps the most basic difference is the way risk-reward is handled in football versus soccer.

  Without getting buried in minutiae, suffice it to say that the off sides rule in soccer is more or less like making the bomb illegal in football, or the fast break illegal in basketball. In this way, the rule makers of soccer are like American bureaucrats. Their job in soccer, much like a bureaucrat’s job in our economy, is to make sure that no one has too much fun or determines their own destiny with a risk. Can you imagine football without the possibility of the bomb, or basketball without the notion of the fast break?

  Yep, it’s a lot like American business under the oppressive Obama-Reid-Pelosi government spreading the wealth around. Especially with Obama Care. You may laugh at the notion of soccer referees and rule makers as American government bureaucrats, but it is exactly the same diseased mindset that runs through both. Anyone who’s run a business can tell you that, when a government gives the power to ruin your enterprise to nameless, faceless, and unaccountable bureaucrats, it is no laughing matter.

  You see, in soccer, it’s not fair that you might take a chance to weaken your defense in order to spring a man deep downfield behind the other team’s players with a clear shot at the goal. That would be unfair in a free-market, venture-capital-type way. No, no, no! You must allow the defense to stay between you and your goal. You cannot simply use talent and daring to beat them downfield until you have the ball. That would be unfair and, no doubt, mean-spirited. Probably racist, sexist and homophobic as well.

  So ingrained is this perversion of risk/reward into the soccer psyche that many of the world’s best defenses in this sport actually employ the aforementioned ‘off sides trap.’ In other words, they use the socialist rules to the hilt. In the off sides trap, a defenseman will get beaten downfield on purpose to get a call against his opponent. This is like your average liberal employee who gets fired on purpose so he can sue the employer for some kind of discrimination, or perhaps a workers comp claim.

  Think about that analogy for just a second. It works. The off sides trap defense is just like an employee getting fired on purpose so he can sue the employer for discrimination. It is also just like getting injured on purpose so the employee can lay out and collect workers comp and sue for pain and suffering. This is akin to the thinking behind rules of engagement we force on our soldiers. You know, our soldiers have to be fired upon first before they engage the enemy. This is why liberals are just as dangerous as they are amusing. What they believe, when put into practice in the real worlds of business or national defense, will necessarily have devastating effects on our economy and our security.

  This could also explain why liberals can always ‘fail their way up’ the ladder of success. Christina Romer totally failed as Obama’s Chief economic advisor and retired to a life of luxury and security by teaching the same crap that did not work to others paying fifty grand a year to be a student in the Ivy League. Jimmy Carter, the second worst President we can think of off the top of our heads, becomes a revered elder statesman in the Democrat Party. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have more to do with our economic collapse than any other folks in either house of Congress, so naturally we have Dodd-Frank legislation to clean up the mess. Jamie Gorelick assists the 9-11 hijackers by putting up “a wall of separation” between the CIA and the FBI, and then she’s given a seat on the 9-11 Commission. After that, she helps Dodd and Frank bring down the economy as Vice President of Fannie Mae, giving herself tens of millions of dollars in bonuses along the way. Yes, I realize there are a lot of Gorelick references, but she is the liberal object lesson that keeps on giving.

  This is the ‘off sides trap’ mentality of soccer brought to bear on the real world. It is devastating. It allows someone like Gorelick to fail her way up to positions of real consequence where—shock shock—she fails again.

  Contrast this mentality with football, where getting beat downfield leads to six quick points for the other team and in all likelihood an end zone dance accompanied by a spiked football. And of course, this is magnified by replay on network or cable TV and in most cases some kind of jumbo-tron. Each and every play in football is filled with all kinds of risk reward calculations by both the offense and the defense.

  Should we blitz and leave our secondary exposed? Will we be vulnerable to a screen pass, too? If we go with the dime package will they run it down our throats? If we call the bomb, will we risk our QB getting hit? And so on. Every decision in the sport has a huge competitive calculation, which makes football much like the private sector in a free market economy and the real world in national defense.

  Should we hire more employees? Should we expand the
fleet? If we don’t open that market, will we lose share forever to our competitor? And so it goes. This, of course, is anathema to the liberal mindset, where there is an obsession and a control freak desire for nanny government to remove all risk and to insure the same outcome for everybody.

  Football is very like the private sector while soccer is like socialism. That’s why many liberals instinctively think soccer is morally superior to American football. Now ok, you’re saying it’s ridiculous that liberals thinks soccer is superior to football. You say that football is so popular that there is no way liberals can think that . Well, you’re somewhat right. Keep in mind, however, that liberals are always enjoying the fruits of the very pursuits that are totally opposed to liberal doctrine. When your default template world view is, itself, a lie, this is not a problem.

  Liberals, as demonstrated by Occupy Wall Street, hate free enterprise while depending on the tax revenues it produces. They love to exploit free enterprise for the right kinds of industries like movie making and software development while hating the wrong kinds of industries like drilling for oil or delivering goods with diesel fleets and just about everything else. They love the free market for the jobs it creates, as long as they are union jobs. That is, unless, liberals themselves happen to own the businesses. Then non-union labor is fine. You have Michael Moore making his movies with non-union crews and Madam Pelosi tending her vineyards with non-union and largely non-American labor, and of course ultra rich Apple makes it products in non-unionized China and ships them with non-union Federal Express.