VDH:
Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.
The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.
Proof of that fact are the serial reliance of their supporters on deception, and the erosion of language on campus and in politics and the media. The progressive movement requires both deceit and euphemism to mask its apparently unpopular agenda.
What the Benghazi scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the Iran Deal all had in common was their reliance on ruse. If the White House and its allies had told the whole truth about all these incidents, Americans probably would have widely rejected the ideological premises that framed them.
In the case of Benghazi, most Americans would not fault an obscure video for causing scripted rioting and death at an American consulate and CIA annex. They would hardly believe that a policy of maintaining deliberately thin security at U.S. facilities would encourage reciprocal local good will in the Middle East. They would not agree that holding back American rescue forces was a wise move likely to forestall an international confrontation or escalation.
In other words, Americans wanted their consulate in Benghazi well fortified and protected from seasoned terrorists, and they favored rapid deployment of maximum relief forces in times of crises — but, unfortunately, these were not the agendas of the Obama administration. So, to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video, and endangered Americans far beyond the reach of U.S. military help.
Ditto the Bowe Bergdahl caper, the American deserter on the Afghan front. Aside from the useful publicity of “bringing home” an American hostage, there was an implicit progressive subtext to both his earlier flight and eventual return: Young introspective soldiers are often troubled about their nation’s ambiguous role in the Middle East and so, understandably, sometimes err in their search for meaning. When they do, and when they perhaps “wander off,” the government has win-win resources to address their temporary lapse — in this case, killing two birds with one stone by downsizing the apparently repulsive Guantanamo Bay detention facility and returning punished-enough Taliban combatants to their families.
What Susan Rice (ostensibly the go-to consigliere in such deals) could not say is that the Obama administration released five dangerous terrorists in order to bring home one likely deserter, whose selfish AWOL behavior may have contributed over the years to the injury or even deaths of several American soldiers tasked with finding him. Instead, we got the lie that Bergdahl was a brave solider who served with honor and distinction and was captured in mediis rebus on the battlefield, with the implication that his personal odyssey inadvertently led to the bonus of returning in-limbo foreign detainees and reducing the population of an embarrassing gulag.
We keep learning about all sorts of disturbing and leaked secret side agreements to the Iran Deal. Without them, the progressive agenda underlying the concessions was bound to be unpalatable to the American people: secret nocturnal cash ransoms to obtain American hostages (hostage-taking is an Iranian theocratic specialty), secret side deals with international agencies to define down on-site inspections, and secret “flexibility” on Iran ballistic-missile development.
But on a deeper level, the Obama administration apparently either did not believe that Iran was a truly belligerent, anti-American theocracy bent on a baleful Middle East hegemony through acquiring nuclear weapons, or else assumed that Iran’s regional ambitions were understandable and morally equivalent to any large nation’s desire for such strategic influence. Either way, the results were deception and lies rather than honesty about these assumptions.
No one wishes to discuss candidly that universities are no longer free bastions of inquiry but are descending into would-be boot camps to train progressive shock troops.
The foundations for the unspoken, progressive faith in catastrophic man-caused global warming are self-evident. Many Western elites believe that modern, free-market industrial growth and consumer capitalism endanger the planet. They bring out the worst in both the bourgeoisie and the undereducated, victimized poor: greed, acquisitiveness, and shallow material values. The remedy and indeed duty for reflective and enlightened elites (who alone have transcended the rat race and by their very success have grown immune from, and wise to, the contradictions of capitalism) is to change the economic foundations of modern Western life — in a radical fashion akin to the 19th-century romantic yearning for a pre-industrial, less environmentally exploitive past.
The catch, however, is that most Americans believe that oil wells, mines, freeways, dams, cars, reservoirs, and factories — and the granite counters, stainless-steel fridges, and big-screen TVs that derive from them — are largely godsends, ensuring a good life undreamed of by their grandparents.
You see its not Progressive, at all it just took a word and appropriated it. Progressive is a nice word to progress to get ahead, gain, grow. It isnt at all what the ideology of the Progressive movement is about at all. It may not be as attractive if they called it what it actually is. The maximum control and enslavement movement.
We all know by now the news media deceives us all the time they lie 24/7 all one has to do its watch,read or hear the so called news from the vast controled leftists news media to know what im squawking about