I Hate Liberals

I hate liberals. Well, no, not really! I am a liberal. Most of my friends are liberals. I just hate the reactionary purists who are trying to hijack the term "liberal" in the same way their rightwing counterparts hijacked "conservative."
I used to believe I was as liberal as they come. (My in-laws still think so!) But then I met the litmus testing reactionary purist-type liberals who, without trying, convinced me I'm a moderate. A moderate liberal, yes. A moderate Democrat, YES! But still a moderate. This blog entry was based on this post by William Pitt at the left's greasy truckstop, Democratic Underground:

I hate liberals

It's funny.

Find me a liberal cause and I'm probably behind it.

Save Social Security? I'm there.

Save ANWR? I'm with you.

Equal rights across the board for tax-paying freedom-loving American citizens who happen to be gay and want to get married just like every other tax-paying freedom-loving American citizen gets to do without a second thought from anyone? I'm there.

Find me a liberal policy initiative and I'm probably behind it. Health care is a right easily attained by each and every single American once health care no longer exists as a for-profit business? Yo.

The military and their sucker-fish defense contractors don't need eight billion gazillion dollars for a missile shield in space that can stop exactly no rogue airplanes in metropolitan airspace while millions go hungry all across the land? Yup.

Public schools need billions of dollars to stop the wretched fact that millions of children gratduate without knowing what the Supreme Court does for a living, to stop the push towards teaching our kids that creationism is the only truth, to stop the creation of stupid people as a matter of policy, said policy holding that stupid people make obedient consumers and compliant workers? Indeed.

Find me a cause, a policy initiative, a white paper, an idea, a belief, a theory or a protest that stems from the liberal philosophy. Chances are huge I'm on your side.

But man. Man o man. I hate liberals.

I agree with so much of what other liberals believe. All day, every day. But it seems like all I do is fight with liberals. I can't have a mildly divergent opinion on a matter of import without being called a Republican, or a Freeper, or a sellout, or a whore. If I'm a Christian, I empower the fundamentalist Right. If I'm an atheist, I'm bashing, period.

Two examples of this happened tonight, though I could give 200 examples if I felt like writing all night. These two will do. Example One: I was honored tonight to introduce Dahr Jamail at a talk in Boston. Jamail, if you don't know, got sick of the corporate news coverage of Iraq and went there himself. He got into Fallujah and let the world know what happened there. He is an amazing human being.

They gave me 15 minutes to say my thing and then introduce him. In my wee speech, I dared to forge beyond the self-righteous boundaries of 'Out Now!' to suggest the bare outlines of a plan on how to get out as soon as possible.

I used Howard Dean as a foil; he recently said we have to stay there, voicing the well-reasoned but argument-I-disagree-with 'Pottery Barn' argument. I think we can get out, we have to get out, but some kind of coherent plan/timeline is needed, because 'Out Now!' makes a good slogan but slogans don't make coherent policy.

I called Dean a hero before I went into this, because he is, but this is more to do with example two, to follow. The point for now is that I called him a hero before I said I disagreed with him. We need to get out of Iraq, I said. As soon as possible.

About halfway through my bare outline - somewhere between getting the Houston contractors out so Iraqis can actually work for pay and invigorate their economy, and get the UN and the Arab League to create a massive mostly-Arab force to take over security/police duty so the Americans can be cycled out en masse and sent home - I met the hecklers.

They were both white, both around my mid-30s age, both with those white-and-black Palestilian militatnt scarves wrapped around their necks. One of them yelled "Shut up with your pro-war bullshit!" Another wadded up the program and threw it at me. They kept this up for a while. As this wasn't my show, but Dahr Jamail's show, I worked through the last two minutes of my introduction of him without starting a shouting match with these two. It galled, yes, but wasn't appropriate to deal with it.

Example number two happened when I went out to have a smoke. A nicely dressed suburban fellow followed me out, and proceeded to scold me. Don't call people heroes, he said with index finger a-wavin'. I had called Dean a hero, you see. I had described the life and death of Marla Ruzicka in my speech, who went to Iraq to count the civilian dead and died there, and called her a hero. When I introduced Jamail, who went to the most dangerous place on earth so we could get the truth, I called him a hero.

Don't call people heroes, he said with index finger a-wavin'. It makes other people feel bad.

Liberals complain. They go to meetings with other liberals and listen to speeches filled with facts they knew before they got there, and complain to the person sitting next to them who already knows what they know and is ready to rock and roll with their own complaining.

All too often, liberals would rather complain and feel good about themselves than choke down the hard stones that sometimes have to be swallowed when seeking a solution that might actually work.

Liberals like to fight. They get into a room, either real or electronic, and wind up in huge, epic arguments about this or that while skating past the fact that the person they are arguing with and insulting agrees with about 90% of what they agree with. They forget the old rule: If you find yourself screaming in rage at someone who agrees with 90% of what you agree with, you might just be a zealot and therefore no good to anyone but yourself.

Conservatives used to be like liberals. They were out of power and fighting amongst themselves, the Birchers v. the Rockefellars v. the Nixonites v. the Reaganites v. the Fundamentalists v. the Internationalists. Somewhere along the line, they figured out how to quell all that, and whoosh! they were in power. I enjoy disliking conservatives and do not enjoy hating liberals, but since they both apparently share so many common characteristics these days, I am helpless before the tide.

I hate liberals. They do not get along, they enjoy disagreement for the sake of disagreement all too often, they are so hard to meld into a coalition that no one has ever, ever, ever managed to meld them into an effective coalition for any significant period of time. Liberals are the reason liberals lose elections nowadays.

I'm a liberal. I believe in the cause, the causes, the policy ideas. We ran the country for years once upon a time while winning World War II and salvaging the national economy by coming up with ways to help the helpless. Imagine it. The things we can do for the good of this country and the world positively boggle the mind.

But I hate liberals, because they won't let that happen. They make me absolutely crazy.