Liberalism used to be a respectable position for intelligent, well-meaning, and informed people. That was a long time ago. No longer.
Today the “liberal” faith requires an extraordinary act of ignorance, purposeful forgetting, and constant spinning. To be a faithful “liberal” today you have to forget the whole 20th century, and its 100 million victims of the radical left — that is, victims of Obama’s brand of leftism. You have to shut out of your mind the fact that Obama hails from today’s Chicago Machine, the most storied and undemocratic political machine since Boss Tweed.
You have to ignore the bloody history of black nationalism in America, where Obama’s hero Malcolm X was assassinated by the followers of Elijah Muhammed. You have to ignore the racial blackmail that has controlled American politics since the rise of the post-MLK “civil rights” movement, when all the heroic actions of a few civil rights campaigners like Martin Luther King, Jr., was taken over by dangerous racial demagogues like Rev. Al, the Rev. Wright and the radical left.
All those facts have to be sunk into your capacious black hole of memory, along with the history of the Soviet Union and its 100 million helpless victims. The Nazis only had 13 years to kill six million Jews, and even more Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, democratic Germans, and of course, the religious. The Soviets and Chinese had seventy years or longer, and killed correspondingly more millions of victims with the same style of sociopathic control freakery. North Korea is the biggest Communist museum piece today, but nobody on the liberal side seems to take any responsibility for it — just as they deny their alliance with Muslim fascists all over the world, who are agitating for another century of mass murder.
My thought is that liberals suffer from the condition of cognitive dissonance. Now, everyone, at many points in their lives, will suffer from this condition, even if it is only temporary. The difference between liberals and normal people is that normal people tend to follow the conventional theory on it, and change one or more of the cognitions that are in conflict, thereby eliminating/reducing the conflict. Liberals, on the other hand, seek to introduce new cognition(s) to the already established conflicting ones, believing that this will reduce, or eliminate, the conflict. In actuality, what happens is that the initial conflict is still present, only masked by the new cognition(s), and the person becomes angry over the surprise and embarrassment of still having the dissonance present. I believe that liberals are incapable of reconciling these dissonances, or conflicts, and invent, within their consciences, new possibilities in their cognition(s) in order to reach a state of cognitive equilibrium. The inventions they come up with do two things; Consciously, they allow the liberal mind to “fake itself out” into believing the dissonance(s) have been reconciled, and subconsciously, prevent the still remaining dissonance from being realized, but allowing the emotions from it to be realized in the conscious mind. Hence, the liberal will say and do things that the average, normal mind sees as irrational, or destructive, and will not truly change any of their cognitions, because that would mean they were wrong about something, and for them, to admit to being wrong is impossible.
JG we are somewhat in agreement. I tend to take the same view of the left as Dr. Sanity and other professionals. Cognitive Dissonance is a symptom of what they say about the left.
IMHO they are driven by narcissism and pathological denial of reality.
A recent example of the cognitive dissonance and selective memory of liberals….
A congresswoman slugs a Security officer on her way into the Capitol building. She’s a DEMOCRAT.
A Kennedy (in elective office, too) uses his ”I’m on my way to do official business in the Capitol” as an excuse to get out of an obviously drunken/drugged driving offense. He’s a DEMOCRAT.
Obama SIDES with the TSA today against Senator Rand Paul who was taken into custody because he opposed being patted down on his way to DC. He’s a REPUBLICAN.
Carney: “I think it is absolutely essential that we take necessary actions to ensure that air travel is safe.”
And Rand Paul is a terrorist threat????
Love to see wingnuts point to Liberalism with that which they are guilt of. Talk about ‘cognitive dissonance?’ You guys aren’t even rooted in reality not to mention facts about…. everything, Now, I have to agree with most that the right does have a market cornered on good old fashioned racism. Lol!
James Lewis’ essay forces you to remember how there were Che posters in a few of Obama’s 2008 election offices.
When James Lewis writes: John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and even LBJ and FDR would be running against Obama if they were living today, it is totally true!
JFK hated Che with a vengeance!
He would never have allowed a toe-hold in Venezuela by Iran, but Obama has.
I would have registered this comment with the original source, American Thinker, but like several right-wing blogs, I am banned from doing so—presumably because they do not like critical, opposing views.
James Lewis’ article shows his own ignorance of liberals, or he’s just propagandizing—the bulk of his comments deserve no more discussion that that.
Yeah liberal#2, you were banned for disagreeing (roll eyes). No, you were banned for being a troll. Lucky for you and scumbag mann your kind is tolerated here.
Here’s look into the mind of the left and what drives them.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2004/08/psychiatry-101-defense-mechanisms.html
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2004/11/psychology-of-bush-hatred.html
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/04/narcissism-and-society.html
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/11/intellectual-and-moral-bankruptcy-of.html