Are Liberals Immoral?

[Ogopogo]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/ ... moral.html

May 31, 2012
Are Liberals Immoral?
By Jeffrey Folks

Yes, liberals are immoral. The liberal power elite are selfish, hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and, worst of all, destructive of those around them. They are willing to saddle everyone else with rules and regulations that do not apply to them, and with higher taxes that they somehow escape paying. The Buffett Rule might sound like a great idea, but it would never apply to the Buffetts of this world. Or the Kerrys, Kennedys, or any other left-wing billionaire.

Liberal do-gooders are always coming up with lovely schemes for redistributing other people's money and managing other people's lives. The problem is that all of these schemes do more harm than good. Welfare, which redistributes wealth to those who cannot work but also to those who avoid working or underreport income, is funded on the backs of those who actually do work. "Saving the planet" costs jobs but never actually saves anything. Killing fossil fuels increases energy costs and triggers inflation across the board. Yet the liberal elite blithely support every cause that comes along with no consideration of the cost to ordinary people. In doing so, they pad their already inflated sense of self-importance, and at no cost to themselves.

Scratch the surface of the liberal elite, and you will find a monstrous contempt for those "beneath" them. Liberals like Barack Obama live and breathe in a realm of utter disdain for ordinary Americans, including congressmen who hail from what the president likes to call "Palookaville." It is not just that they are out of touch; it is that they despise what is normal and decent. They would no more live in the heartland or send their kids to a public school than they would forego an exemption engineered solely to save them money -- the same tax break for the rich that they publicly decry as soooo unfair. It's no surprise that several prominent liberal Democrats made their fortunes as slum lords and ambulance-chasers. Others just married their money.

There's nothing wrong with making money, of course. Mitt Romney earned every penny of his fortune, and to his credit he has never apologized for his success. But the liberal game -- the Kennedy game -- is to pretend to side with the poor and, by doing so, gain political power so as to further line one's own pockets. In all of this, the liberal elite are utterly cynical. I didn't notice any bottle-washers or cleaning ladies admitted to George Clooney's $40,000-per-person fundraiser for President Obama, nor any middle-class Americans, either. The liberal elite's contempt for the rest of us was palpable when Nancy Pelosi noted that "every week we don't pass a Stimulus bill, 500 million Americans lose their jobs," or when in 2004 Teresa Heinz Kerry called Elizabeth Edwards a "mother earth person" who still had a brain.

It's not just that liberals don't know much about those "500 million" Americans. They despise them the way they despise Walmart and NASCAR and the American Legion. What it all boils down to is an appalling contempt for life. As long as Obama can keep his nose elevated at a 45-degree angle, and get re-elected, he is happy. Happy, even if 25 million Americans remain out of work as a result of his environmental pipe dreams, happy if millions of seniors just go away and die, as his former Medicare director Donald Berwick suggested ("they just need the morphine and counseling that have been around for centuries").

The liberal elite appear callous even when the lives of those close to them are at stake. In a sad footnote to the Kennedy family legacy, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the 52-year-old estranged wife of Robert Kennedy, Jr., was found dead on May 16, an apparent suicide by hanging. One's sympathy goes out to Mrs. Kennedy's family and particularly to her four children. One can only imagine the degree of anguish that would lead an individual to commit such a horrific act. Daughter of a wealthy northeastern family, Mrs. Kennedy was part of the liberal elite culture from birth. Yet despite all her gifts and her privileged lifestyle, something went wrong, as it does so often for those in her social milieu. Reportedly, Mrs. Kennedy had become dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol. As for her husband, who lists no profession other than "environmentalist," there was a record of heroin possession, and there were rumors of infidelity during the years of his marriage. In many ways, the contrast between his selfless public persona and dubious personal behavior fits the mold of the classic liberal player.

I have no desire to single out Mary Kennedy as an example of the damage of the liberal elite. In any case, there are plenty of other examples, both within the Kennedy clan and beyond, of just how destructive the self-indulgent liberal ethos can be. There was the case of John Kennedy, Jr., killed along with his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette in 1999. Kennedy was piloting a small plane that went down with a probable cause of pilot error, according to the NTSB. There was Joseph P. Kennedy II, whose car crash injured his younger brother and permanently paralyzed his passenger Pam Kelly. Kennedy was cited for reckless driving. There was David Kennedy, who died of a drug overdose in a Palm Beach hotel in 1984.

And then there was Ted Kennedy, who left Mary Jo Kopechne in the water overnight while he debated whether to report the accident.

So why is it that the Kennedys of this world think they have the right to tell the rest of us how to live? That is clearly the implication of the frequency with which they run for public office, pass legislation regulating the behavior of others, and lobby for higher taxes on the middle class. Do they imagine that they actually inhabit Camelot (which, by the way, was an absolute monarchy, not a democracy)? Far from it, the Kennedys and the rest -- the Roosevelts, the Kerrys, the Clintons, and the Obamas -- are actually examples of how not to live.

My guess is that every member of the little church where I hang out here in Palookaville knows more about the virtuous life and how to live it than does any member of the liberal elite. My Baptist brothers and sisters -- as our president has said -- "cling to" their religion, and their religion nurtures and protects them. It teaches the importance of fixed opinions, clear moral values, respect for others, and, above all, faith in a loving and redemptive God.

I have yet to hear the Kennedys, the Kerrys, or the Obamas, or any member of the liberal elite, speak with anything but disdain for the faith-centered life. I wish it were not so, but that is why it really does not surprise me that so many of them come to a bad end. If allowed to continue governing, they will bring the country to a bad end as well.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/ ... z1wkYuiAUe

[WestViking]

No, liberals are amoral - without any ethical standard.

[Edward Kennedy]

If you want to see how intolerant, hateful, and despotic lieberals are, look at ara/arc.

[goldhound]

If you want to see how intolerant, hateful, and despotic lieberals are, look at ara/arc.

I really do not believe that they even bother to self identify as liberals, no politics there, they are quite simply attention wh*res and drama queens trying to get famous by any means. Amoral at the least.

[Edward Kennedy]

If you want to see how intolerant, hateful, and despotic lieberals are, look at ara/arc.

I really do not believe that they even bother to self identify as liberals, no politics there, they are quite simply attention wh*res and drama queens trying to get famous by any means. Amoral at the least.

...but pissing into the wind and flatulating through their mealy mouths will not make them famous

[WestViking]

If you want to see how intolerant, hateful, and despotic lieberals are, look at ara/arc.

I really do not believe that they even bother to self identify as liberals, no politics there, they are quite simply attention wh*res and drama queens trying to get famous by any means. Amoral at the least.

...but pissing into the wind and flatulating through their mealy mouths will not make them famous

Some of those who lack the talent to achieve fame are content with notoriety. The school bully cannot gain the respect of his peers and turns to creating fear in a few classmates. The reward for a bully is perceived power. Remove the power and the bully becomes the dirt-bag he or she is in reality.

[BlawBlaw]

No, liberals are amoral - without any ethical standard.

That's pretty much how I see it.

[Number 6]

From a grammatical point of view, (and since grammar must be rightly grounded in an objective reality to have meaning) liberals can be both.

Amoral - lacking moral sense, unconcerned with morality

immoral - Deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong

Libbies are guilty on one or both charges before the Almighty Judgement Seat.

[WestViking]

From a grammatical point of view, (and since grammar must be rightly grounded in an objective reality to have meaning) liberals can be both.
Amoral - lacking moral sense, unconcerned with morality
immoral - Deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong
Libbies are guilty on one or both charges before the Almighty Judgement Seat.

I will accept that liberals can be immoral the day that they admit there are accepted principles of right and wrong. So far, I have seen no evidence of liberals admitting that ethical standards exist in our society.

[The Devil's Advocate]

From a grammatical point of view, (and since grammar must be rightly grounded in an objective reality to have meaning) liberals can be both.
Amoral - lacking moral sense, unconcerned with morality
immoral - Deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong
Libbies are guilty on one or both charges before the Almighty Judgement Seat.

I will accept that liberals can be immoral the day that they admit there are accepted principles of right and wrong. So far, I have seen no evidence of liberals admitting that ethical standards exist in our society.

Except the law, of course. They haven't all broken one of those, yet.

I'm curious though, would someone who identifies as say, a pro-life liberal, be amoral but a pro-choice conservative still be moral? What about one a conservative has broken the law? Can they still use the term to describe themselves? Are actual specific positions important in this case, or is it simply a matter of painting all of "them" with the same brush, both positive and negative? Would it be reasonable to say that moral people are, by necessity of definition conservative, and vice versa, and that liberals are therefore amoral, by their self-identity alone, regardless of their history or actions? Can a self-identified liberal ever earn "moral" status by their behavior, or are they doomed from the start?

[GreyBowel]

There is an old saying that liberals are just conservatives who haven't been mugged yet.

If liberalism comes from the niavete of youth, a lack of experience, and an inability to see the world as "harsh" than I'm fighting for my children to be liberals as long as possible.

Sun Tzu said: "If you know you're enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a 100 battles." IMHO, the attempt to label liberals as immoral, not only doesn't fit into the conservative worldview (every healthy person works for the betterment of their community for their children), it contributes to the mindset that makes "learning about the enemy", in a real sense, impossible.

[BlawBlaw]

I think the saying was that it takes the three Ms to make a conservative: a mugging, a mortgage and a marriage.

[NeoLuddite]

Liberals are more properly defined as Libertines - WIkiPedia definition follows:

"Libertine" is defined today as "a dissolute person; usually a person who is morally unrestrained".