"It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them."
Left wing woman on welfare yelling at Mayor Lindsay of New York

“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know. If I help [Obama], he’s gonna help me.”
Peggy Joseph after Obama got elected

“The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul”
George Bernard Shaw

A Conservative is a Liberal who's been mugged

A Hawk is a liberal who's been targeted for death by al Qaeda
John Podhoretz referring to anthrax packages sent to the media in Oct, 2001

A Liberal is a man with both feet planted firmly in the air.
Winston Churchill

Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart.
Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.
Winston Churchill

A liberal is "so broadminded he won't take his own side in an argument."
Robert Frost

Today, a leftist in America is like an apologist for fatal diseases
Vijay Kumar

The adult citizen's dependent attachment to government comes at an enormous price: the constant growth of the politician's power to gratify his constituents is paralleled by a constant growth in his power to dominate them.
Lyle Rossiter in the Liberal Mind

In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security.  When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility; then Athens ceased to be free.
Edward Gibbon

Modern liberals and progressives have never been able to come to terms with the fact that some people just don't embrace their worldview--that is, that the state should be the primary instrument of social change. Advocates of limited government see centralized power as dangerous--not only in terms of threats to human liberty, but in terms of economic decline. Like Madison, we know that men are no angels. Progressives, on the other hand, cannot imagine a world without elites running things
Max Borders

Nature forms a hole to swallow money
Me.

   Most leftists regard right wingers as either bad or misguided or both.  The same can be said of how most right wingers view most leftists.  It's amazing how within the same family one often finds people at the opposite side of the political spectrum.  Does that mean one family member is bad and one good or one is a complete fool while the other has common sense?  My mother is a very bright woman who was accepted at Harvard and her sister is also a very bright woman who taught at Yale.  My mother is conservative my mother's sister is liberal.  They are both good and  bright people. 

    In order to generate wealth it is helpful to have money for investment.  Those that accrue wealth are often those best at creating wealth.  This is a fundamental inconvenient truth that liberals ignore when they try and redistribute the wealth from the haves to those who have less.  When wealth is redistributed the result is that those who generate wealth don't have the money to do so and the wealthy lose their wealth and the poor become poorer.

    Cass Sunstein, Obama's regulatory czar argued that the U.S. should move in the direction of socialism but the country's "white majority" opposes welfare since such programs largely would benefit minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics.  Since Cass refuses to see that the opposition to welfare comes from the poverty that it brings with it to the economy he needs to find another reason for such opposition and he finds a nefarious one, racism. 

    Cass believes that a good way to redistribute the wealth may be taxes on carbon dioxide emissions.  Those who pay the most taxes will be the big wealthy companies that emit the most carbon dioxide.  What he fails to see is that taxing such emissions will suck the wealth out of the companies so that there is little if any left to distribute. 

    It's an imperfect world.  If we try and make everyone have equal income than we destroy the incentive to work and to produce the wealth from which to provide money.  If we increase the minimum wage we reduce the  number of jobs.  If we increase welfare to provide more for the poor than we find that all of a sudden there are more poor enrolling for welfare.  If we increase industrial production to generate wealth we increase pollution.  If we cut back on defense spending in order to make more money available for the poor we increase the chance of aggressors taking military action against us or our friends.  If we increase government powers to insure moral behavior in the market government officials will siphon money off to themselves or their supporters.  If there is no government regulation than monopolies will arise that dominate the market and stifle competition.  The best we can do is try and find an optimal balance and that optimal balance will be far from perfect.  However that optimal balance will be a lot better than efforts to seek perfection by going to one extreme or the other.  

    Instead of trying to give everyone an equal income we can strive toward giving them an equal opportunity to make money.  Representative Bachmann of Minnesota when describing her political convictions said something that I think is very insightful regarding the dividing line between conservatives and liberals.  She said:

"I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of result, and that's the big dividing line between liberals and conservatives."

    Why does this dividing line exist?  Society naturally forms a dividing line between those who work hard to make a living and those who live off the public dole, those whose ambition is to be successful through working hard and those whose ambition is to collect as much money from the government as possible.  Those on the public dole are going to want equality of result which translates to having as much money as those who work hard.

    The goal of opportunity of result led leftists in Berkeley to propose that the science laboratories of Berkeley High school be abolished.  According to the East Bay Express:

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

    Notice how the leftists want to sacrifice the opportunity science laboratories presented to whites in order to equalize the achievement of blacks and whites.  If equalizing achievement meant reducing white achievement that is OK in left wing ideology.  The belief that pouring more resources into teaching the underperformers will make them perform better is also a left wing belief.  If it were true one has to ask why the whites are outperforming the blacks when they have the same amount of perhaps less resources devoted to them in the High School.  Every black person has the same opportunity to benefit from the labs as every white person.  In fact there were some blacks in the science labs, but it's OK to sacrifice their achievement also from the point of view of left wing thinking in order to get the majority of the blacks in the school to perform better.  The problem isn't resources its discipline.

    Previously I wrote there is an optimal balance between freedom and regulation.  Here is a hypothetical example that illustrates how  left and right thinking affect the optimal balance..  Lets consider a hypothetical company we'll call Hot Magazines that was started from scratch by a poor entrepreneur in a town called Little Pebble and that grew into a successful business that employs hundreds of people.  Hot magazines are hot but has a lot of competition from another company from another town that we'll call Cool Magazines.  Hot Magazines employees make average salaries but the owner and creator of the magazine has a much higher salary from the company than they do. 

    Should the government force the owner of Hot Magazines be pay higher salaries to his employees?

    Should all the employees of Hot Magazines have the same salary?

    Should the government force the owner of Hot Magazines to pay a higher percentage of his income in taxes than his employees?

    A person tilting to the left end of the political spectrum is more likely to answer yes to these question than a person titling to the right.  The left wing approach of forcing the owner to pay more to his employees and for all the employees to get the same salary and for there to be a higher tax rate on the rich owner of the company appears on the surface to benefit the most people and to be the most moral one but is it?

    Dr. Orly Taitz found out why giving everyone the same salary is a bad idea.  She was born and raised in Kishinev (also spelled Chisinau), the capital of the Republic of Moldova, a country in Eastern Europe that was formerly part of the Soviet Union.   She described her life in a communist nation: Markets were bare, people had no desire to work and the government forced young children into slave labor.

"We'd stop at the store, and the food stores were empty," she said. "I remember we had to stand in lines for hours in the cold. We were in a bus, going home and suddenly we'd see a line. We wouldn't even know what they were selling, but we knew something would be there – some food. We'd stand for two hours to buy maybe a pound of salami or a half a pound of butter."

As a young child, Taitz asked her father why the market shelves were empty.

"In America, they have everything," he would tell her. "The stores are full."

Her father explained that Americans were interested in working and received paychecks based on their productivity. However, in the Soviet Union, farmers were part of a socialist system of collective farming and were compensated equally – regardless of output.

He told her, "If a farmer is bright and hard working, at the end of the month, he will get 100 rubles. And if the farmer is a lazy bum and he does nothing, he gets the same 100 rubles."

Taitz told WND, "People had absolutely no incentive to do anything. They had no incentive to work. The best doctors were getting maybe 150 rubles. That's why the standards for medicine were so low."

    Why does Hot Magazines exist to being with?  It exists because a poor entrepreneur wanted to make money.  That drive to make money motivated him to work hard and create a company that in turn created all the jobs for the people he hired.  He didn't force those people to work for him, they chose to do so because he gave them better opportunities than they found elsewhere.  He created wealth, does anyone have the right to take that away from him?  Money is needed for investment that creates wealth.  Is it wise to take away that investment money and give it to people who just consume wealth?  That is the approach of the Obama administration which is taxes everyone making over 250K.  That means taking money away from businesses that would have created wealth and giving it to people who consume it.  What will be the consequence of taking away money from the creator of Hot Magazines?  He might have to raise the price of his magazine to pay for those additional costs.  People might switch over to the cheaper Cool Magazines.  Loss of revenue might force him to layoff workers.  The consequences might be that that more people are worse off than if the government had stayed out of it.  Once workers lose their jobs how much money should the government give them as unemployment benefits and welfare payments?  What about welfare payments to their children how high should they be?  What if to give that amount of money the taxes on the owner of Hot Magazines would have to be increased.  Should those taxes be increased when more and more people are now buying Cool Magazines as a result the taxes already imposed on Hot Magazines? 

    Earlier I wrote that the creator of Hot Magazines created wealth.  That is a view someone right of center is more likely to take.  A person left of center is more likely to regard the creator of Hot Magazines as someone who stole wealth by exploiting the people who worked for him.  Viewing the people as the oppressed and those with more money as the oppressor is characteristic of the left.  When a leftist acts against the perceived oppressor he sees himself as a compassionate hero fighting against oppression.  When he fights against disparities in wealth he sees himself as a selfless sacrificer for the wellbeing of others. 

    David Swindle a former leftist explained that he shed the

leftist delusion of the corporation as the malevolent antagonist of all "good, working people." I started to see how rather than a vision of class warfare the fates of the CEO and the worker bee at the bottom were knit together.

    When the government takes the money it is supposed to spend that money in a way that improves the welfare of the people.  What if the government keeps most of the money to pay higher salaries to government employees and siphons it off to personal bank accounts?  What if it uses the money for policies for which the owner of the company is opposed to? 

    A liberal is more likely to believe that more and more taxes should be imposed on the owner of Hot Magazine to support the burgeoning welfare needs of the ever increasing number of unemployed workers from the magazine.  These workers will have less incentive to work as their financial needs are met.  If they are payed child support they will be more likely to have children while unemployed and those children will have to be supported by those working at Hot Magazines. 

    Hot magazines might have invested and expanded if the government had not interfered and siphoned off its money.  More people might have been entertained and educated by it's fascinating columns.  More people might have been hired.  The owner might have donated some of the money he made to a deserving charity money that instead was siphoned off by the government and used to support policies that he opposed.  When the income from Hot Magazines is siphoned away the entrepreneur who founded it might decide that it's not worth the effort anymore or he might decide to go to the corporate friendly country where Sizzler magazine is and hire people over there.

   The liberal policy requires that money and thereby power be transferred from the once rich owner of Hot magazines to the government.  When carried to far it facilitates authoritarianism. 

   Does this mean that the more liberal policy is more unethical than the conservative policy?  What if the government doesn't intervene and Hot Magazine does so well that it can buy up Sizzler Magazine?  It could raise the costs of magazines because there is less competition.  What if it becomes rich enough to buy the local newspaper and local stores and becomes the predominant employer in the town of Little Pebble?  The owner of Hot Magazines as he became more and more wealthy and gained more and more control of the press and everything else would become an increasingly powerful man.  If he became the predominant employer he could lower wages without worrying that his employees would work for a rival company.  If the conservative policy of let the free market function by itself is carried to an extreme it too results in authoritarianism the only difference being that the authoritarian becomes the owner of the company instead of the government.  Of course the owner could start making payoffs to the government and donating the campaigns of those who will make him richer.  So the government would then become an extension of his authoritarian power. 

      Liberal policies are responsible to the disastrous financial crisis in the U.S. (2009).  The drive toward affordable housing and the government and activist pressure on lending institutions to make loans to those who could not pay them back were ostensibly supposed to help the poor and minorities but in fact have left them unable to pay for their houses.  Thomas Sowell in his book The Housing Boom and Bust wrote:

Few things blind human beings to the actual consequences of what they are doing like a heady feeling of self-righteousness during a crusade to smite the wicked and rescue the downtrodden.

     This truth may be a factor in making the left continue in its disastrous policies.

   One of the quotes I listed at the top of this article is "Nature forms a hole to swallow money".  What does this quote of mine have to do with differences between the right and the left?  When the government makes money available the services for which the money is made available have a tendency to become more expensive.  If the government makes money available to help students pay University tuition the University can raise its tuition for example.  In fact I read an article which said the money the government paid was proportional to the cost of tuition and so Universities had the incentive to charge very high tuitions so as to get more government money and then to give out aid to students in effect decreasing the tuition.  The students think they are getting a great deal and they think the University must be very prestigious if it is so expensive. Another example of where costs increase to meet the money available is in the adoption industry.  To adopt in 2004 cost usually about 25K.  The social workers get a large chunk of this money.  People are so desperate to have a child they'll mortgage their houses to pay these costs so the social workers charge.  The Left likes to throw money to help the unfortunate, one thing they need to keep in mind is that when you throw money at something the need will increase as the prices go up to meet the increased available money.

Ann Coulter wrote subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it.   Ann Coulter wrote:

For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.

The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

    Rolling back welfare benefits is dangerous.  It can lead to riots.  Welfare doesn't remove need.  Need grows to match the welfare.  The more outstretched hands that are filled with money, the more outstretched hands there will be.  When the time comes when those hands can't all be filled with money they will become fists and the violence that ensues will be proportional to the fists that are clenched. 

Lyle Rossiter in his book The Liberal Mind wrote:

Until the mid-1990s a single mother had to meet two conditions to get her welfare check; 1. she must not work, and 2. she must not be married to an employed male.  This arrangement, a classic example of the destructive effects of the liberal agenda, paid a woman to have children out of wedlock and discouraged her from creating and maintaining a two-parent nuclear family.  The resulting increase in births of children who have no fathers and who are psychologically and socially aberrant is a major source of the rapidly developing American underclass phenomenon.

 David Solway wrote in Frontpage Magazine that:

The root problem with the liberal mentality is that it has no viable theory of evil and little conception of its tangible presence in human affairs. However we may wish to define it—as a privation of being, the effect of an original sin, the condition of the natural world, a predilection for violence and domination inscribed in the gene plasm—evil is a reality, and it is in the world as it is in us...

In contending against a real enemy who has blood, infiltration and conquest in mind, liberals are at a loss. Let us sit down together, let us “talk” without preconditions to those who are dedicated to our complete destruction, let us assure them of our good will and our sympathetic understanding of their resentment and distress, let us offer them no end of incentives. Surely we will arrive at an accommodation, and disquietude will be banished to the history books—the very same history books, obviously unread, in which such outreach to thugs, rogues and moral degenerates has led inevitably to disaster.

The belief that “talking” can solve intractable problems with irrational foes is the panacea of losers or the hope of the desperate. Talk, in such situations, is just talk. In a recent video, Taliban kidnappers are shown conversing with their latest hostage; then they behead him...

From its perspective, the hurdle to peace and understanding is the result of miscommunication. The liberal-left has taken aboard wholesale the trendy theories of one its most revered mentors, German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who argued, under the lemmas of “communicative action” and “explicative discourses,” that world conflicts stem from poor communication modes. Accordingly, the generic Left says talk, unperturbed by the fact that its enemies say fire!

One thinks, in this connection, of the film Cool Hand Luke where the naďve protagonist tells his pursuers, “What we got here is a failure to communicate,” and is immediately shot.

   I think that liberals do have an idea of evil and that is that that the U.S. is evil.  After Obama agreed to put restrictions on U.S. policy regarding its nuclear weapons Ralph Peters wrote:

The left has never been willing to accept that deterrence works. In the left's world-view, hostile foreign actors aren't the problem. We are. If we disarm, surely they will . . .
 

I had an epiphany regarding what makes the left the left after  reading about a left wing graduate student named Tal Nitzan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who claimed that the absence of any history of rapes of Arab women by Israeli soldiers proves that Jews are racists, because they do not even regard Arab women as sexually desirable. The student at the Mount Scopus campus and her “research” were then awarded a university honor for these impressive “discoveries.”

     The fundamental assumption underlying Tal Nitzan's accusations is that we are no better or worse than they are. "They" can be criminals, terrorists whoever. The left believes that if we think we are better than "they" are we are racist. The fact that Muslim soldiers rape Jewish women and Jewish soldiers don't rape Muslim women creates a disturbing cognitive dissonance in the mind of the left wing kook. If everyone is equally nice and equally bad how can the behavior of one religious group be so evil and the other be so good? Tal Nitzan solved the problem by explaining the good behavior of the Jews as the product of evil racism.

     This kind of reasoning explains the support of the left for the peace process. They think that if we are no better than they (the Palestinian terrorists) then something we are doing wrong is making them fight us and if we stop doing that wrong thing (withdraw from settlements) they will stop attacking us.  Anyone who points out that withdrawals lead to increased violence is labeled as a racist.   The way the left deals with evil is going to be different than the way the right does, because the left doesn't see the other side as any worse.

    Bruce Thornton sees this moral equivocating as a product of self loathing.  He wrote:

Only a toxic self-loathing could put the views of such people ahead of our own security and belief in the justice of our cause. This same pathology explains why we take seriously charges of imperialistic aggression coming from practitioners of a faith that ignited one of the most aggressive and destructive imperial expansions in history. It explains the suicidal double-standard whereby Muslim attacks on Jews and Christians, or Muslim desecration of Jewish and Christian holy places, are ignored in the West, at the same time we wring our hands and apologize over innocuous cartoons whose publication expresses our cherished right to free speech. Behind this lunacy lies the notion that we have it coming, that we are guilty, that our motives are impure, that we are the arch-demons behind all global misery––when by any objective reading of history America has been, and still is, the greatest force for good in history.

    I see this moral equivocating as a way to avoid the belief one has to fight and a way to divert money that should be used for military defenses to people who want it.  It's a good way to get their votes for politicians.  Norman Podhoretz in an article in Commentary wrote:

Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.

     Unwillingness to see one's own culture as good or better than another culture when it is can have very harmful consequences.  One example is how it prevents action against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)   Jamie Glazov wrote:

Thanks to the Left’s policy of multiculturalism, where no value can be said to be worse or better than any other (except, of course, if American society and culture is the subject of discussion), FGM is now being widely practised on Western territory. A study estimates that 66,000 women living in England and Wales have suffered FGM, most of them before emigrating from their home country. More than 7,000 girls in Britain alone, meanwhile, are at a high risk of being victims of the crime. At present, we know that more than 500 girls in Britain are being mutilated every year.

This horror show demands a certain question: Where are the leftist feminists in the West crying out in opposition to this crime against their sisters being carried out on their own shores? In what pages, in what demonstrations, are they denouncing the theology that serves as an inspiration to this crime and calling it to account? Where are the Women’s Studies Departments on Western campuses demanding that Islam be confronted on these grotesque elements of misogyny? Where are the columnists of the Nation Magazine, the supposed leader of the humanitarian Left, repudiating this practise and the texts on which is based?

The Left’s cries of indignation are not to be heard because admitting the inferiority of an adversarial culture might very well legitimize Western civilization, a recognition that no leftist can allow if he hopes to retain his identity and social belonging.

     If one sees the enemy as not so bad one is less likely to attack him.  It may be that a motivation for not seeing the enemy as so bad is to avoid getting into a military conflict with him.  The left is not a monolith, the Russian left and Chinese left are very violent, but if we look at the left in the United States and Europe their primary goal above all else appears to be to avoid military conflict with the enemies of the United States.  (There are exceptions such as the bombing of Serbia to help the Muslims in Europe).  That becomes a motivation to not view the Arab world and Russia as bad and to whitewash any evil actions that they do and blame the victim for enemy actions.  After Russia invaded Georgia Ralph Peters wrote (Russia's Georgia Win, New York Post 8/16/08) :

Georgia has been raped. In the West, journalists and politicians rushed to blame the victim, suggesting that the hussy deserved what she got for brassy talk and bare knees.

Knocked off balance politically, American leftists rushed to blame both America and democratic Georgia. Their hypocrisy rivals Putin's...

When Russia's invasion began, commentators who knew nothing of the issues and less of the region nonetheless felt the need to leap on a mike or rush into print.

Heartbreakingly, they parroted Moscow's line about Georgia's alleged misdeeds - under deadline pressure, they couldn't be bothered with research or serious analysis.

The greatest allies Russia has had in this savage invasion have been Western journalists eager to say something. While Russian-backed Ossetian death squads executed Georgian civilians and looted Georgian cities, the press continued to argue for moral equivalence between tiny Georgia and the Russian Moloch...

Why was our press so outraged over the mistreatment of a dozen prisoners in Abu Ghraib but indifferent to the massive suffering of the Georgian people - who weren't just photographed in embarrassing positions, but murdered, raped, tortured and driven from homes that the Russian army and its local henchmen destroyed?

A great example of the difference in the way the right and the left view the enemy is the difference in former deputy assistant secretary of State Liz Cheney and Barack Obama's view on Russia.  Liz Cheney wrote in the Wall Street Journal that:

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful."

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

     In order to make friends with Russia Obama took a pass on missile defense. He sold out our Eastern European allies, dumping a desperately needed missile defense plan for Poland. Did this policy endear the U.S. to Russia?

   The following video is powerful evidence that Obama's approach to making friends with the Russians is not working.

The desire to avoid conflict by blaming the victim increases the chance of conflict as shown by the cycle diagram below.

	Enemy Strikes
Enemy realizes that the West won't fight back.		European and U.S. left blame the target of the strike, in part to minimize the chance that they will have to counterattack the enemy and get dragged into a conflict.

    Neville Chamberlain made it clear that his goal was to avoid conflict but his actions paved the way for Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia and then to World War II.  Mr. Chamberlain said:

We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.  I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with the dictators.

   The conception that all we need to do to avoid war is appease our enemies by reducing our defenses and abandoning our friends including Israel  and India is one that Barack Obama appears to have.  In the case of India he is favoring Pakistan a country full of Islamic radicals and terrorists and he is favoring China which has overtaken Tibet and is threatening to take over more land from India.  One analyst observed that Democrat administrations tend to favor Pakistan while Republican presidents favor India.

    The radical left sees their conservative opposition as the real enemy and the cause of what it sees as legitimate hostility in the world toward the U.S..  Steve Forbes wrote a letter on behalf of the Heritage Foundation in which he quoted such thinking.  He wrote:

Can you believe how outrageous the left has become?  This post on a leftist blog is typical of their attitude:

"I am far more afraid of being falsely imprisoned by Homeland Security than I am of being attacked by terrorists."

Another leftist writer, Eric Alterman, had this to say:

"If Bush is not the Manchurian President, then perhaps he is in the pay of Satan... has evil ever had a better time of things than under this guy?"

And George Soros, billionaire funder of radical causes said this: "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany... We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."...

according to a Rasmussen poll taken last year, more than a third of Democrats believe that President Bush knew about he 9/11 attacks in advance. 

George Will in an article titled "Obama's Dubious Crime Excuses" wrote:

Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.

   One of these conditions was the existence of Guantanemo Bay which Obama ordered closed as president.  A family member of a 9/11 victim had this to say about this:

With his shameful order to close Guantanamo Bay, President Obama has perfectly filled the stereotype of the classic clueless ultra-Liberal - the one who can generate great passion for the rights of the guilty defendant and none for the innocent victim.

     Treating terrorism as a crime means giving terrorists a podium in which to spread their propaganda and the ability to remain silent about their information regarding future terrorist attacks and to negotiate for reduced sentences so they can get out and blow up more bombs. 

     Liberals as I have mentioned in the beginning example of this article want want to equalize the wealth and spread it around.  A belief that they can use to justify this is that poverty breeds violence.  Liberals like the idea that poverty is the root of radicalism and violence and that if only we give money to those in need they will stop being violent.  It doesn't occur to them that rewarding violent actions with money will just encourage more violence.  This also goes along with the belief that they are no worse than we are.  So they pour money into the coffers of Palestinian thugs and the violence of the Middle East escalates.  A great example of this kind of thinking occurred in Riverdale after terrorists who plotted to bomb synagogues there were captured by the FBI.  Jonathan Mark wrote (6/3/2009):

There was an interfaith celebration, with plenty of politicians, on the Friday after the capture. Even though the FBI saved the very synagogue where the gathering was taking place, scores of Jewish leaders were among those applauding Imam Talib Abdur Rashid when he scolded the FBI, saying, according to the Amsterdam News: “We are against being probed, against having our houses of worship surveilled, and against the use of our weak-minded for these set-up operations.” None of the Riverdale rabbis challenged him or walked out.

The problem wasn’t imported jihad, agreed the rabbis of the two targeted shuls. No, Rabbi Rosenblatt told the The New York Times, “We can’t dry up any kind of homegrown terror without first drying up poverty.”

The problem was “socio-economic,” Riverdale Temple’s Rabbi Judith Lewis told The Jewish Week. The antidote, apparently, was stimulus packages and social workers for future terrorists, but the $25,000 in Homeland Security money for each synagogue’s security system was welcome, too, just the same.
It was unclear why Riverdale Temple was even taking the money. Rabbi Lewis said, “I really don’t think that anyone feels that this was the result of some organized Islamic radicalism. Do we have general security concerns? Yes. Fear of some sort of Islamic attack? No. The anti-Semitism is coincidental, or incidental to it. It certainly looks like a case of people who have not had a lot of equal opportunity in their lives.”

We can see the difference in the approach of the left toward evil in a clip from the Hannity and Colmes show, in which incitement of children to hate by using cartoons of lovable creatures is discussed.  Lagnado posed the question of how to deal with the incitement by Hamas. 

LAGNADO: Because I guess I keep thinking, how do we deal with it?

HANNITY (right wing): How do you deal with it? I think you go to war with them. With people like this, I think you've got to go to war.

COLMES (left wing) : If you go to war you're only creating more hate and continuing the cycle of hate.

     The left wing attitude was not they are the source of hate but rather than we are creating the hate which is a cycle caused by both sides. 

Can Hamas hate Israel or the United States any more than it already does?  Does war only create more hate?  Is it possible that if those doing the inciting or hatred are thrown in prison that the result might be less hate?  The result of the war of the United States against Germany and Japan in World War II was to turn two enemies into two allies.

    Further listening to the discussion reveals that left wing Colmes attitude is to minimize how evil it is by saying it’s a known procedure that others use and that the approach should be to talk to Hamas about it in order to stop them.  Right wing Hannity’s approach is to say that anyone who does this is really evil and talking won’t do any good and we should fight them.  I think that underlying these attitudes is the left wing attitude to avoid fighting at almost any cost as opposed to the right wing desire to fight evil.  The desire to avoid fighting leads the desire to believe that the evil isn’t as evil as it seems and that talking will solve the problem.  This difference in outlook between right and left has been perceived by others.  Jennifer Lazlo Mizrahi of the Israel Project in a speech mentioned how the left looks at the Middle East as something that can be solved by Dr. Phil i.e. talking whereas the right wing does not.  It is important to note that attempting to avoid fighting at any price may actually increase the probability that there will be a fight whereas being willing to fight evil may decrease the chance of a fight or minimize the fighting.  If England and France and the United States had gone to war with Nazi Germany early enough, millions might have been saved and a great deal of fighting might have been avoided.

    John Perazzo in an article titled Whistling Past the Graveyard wrote that:

America’s military might has been offset by a weakness of spirit that has become a hallmark of the modern Western world. It is a frailty that derives entirely from the leftist worldview that has infected America over the past half-century. This view identifies Western (especially American) culture as a uniquely evil, exploitative player in the story of mankind, and depicts all acts of barbarism against the U.S. as wholly understandable reactions to American transgressions. It is a mindset that has gradually, incrementally, and inexorably made its “long march through the institutions,” -- the schools, the seminaries and churches, the media, the entertainment industry, the courts, and the political sphere

     This weakness may well lead to the destruction of the United States since leftist opposition to sealing the border with Mexico may have allowed Al Qaeda to smuggle in nuclear weapons.  John Perazzo wrote:

In other words, while the Left, ever since 9/11, has argued passionately against sealing the southern U.S. border on grounds that such an initiative would constitute “racism,” “xenophobia,” a violation of “human rights,” a repudiation of “American values,” and a “threat to the environment,” bin Laden has quietly and happily exploited our national insanity and set the stage, from his cave somewhere in the remote mountains of Pakistan, for the cataclysmic end of the most powerful nation in world history.
 

    A basic difference between the right and the left in the explanation they give to criminal and hostile behavior.  The right wing is likely to see the criminal as responsible for his actions and those who are hostile to them as being evil, the left wing is likely to see the criminal and those who are hostile as being victims of their society who if only given more money, food and in some cases land, will become good.  It's no wonder that felon's more often vote Democratic than their peers.  John Lott in his book Freedomnomics wrote that

"After accounting for all these factors, I found that felons were 36 percent more likely than non-felons with the same characteristics to have voted for Kerry over Bush and 37 percent more likely to be registered Democratic."

   Left wing thinking on the innocence of criminals goes a long way to explain Norway's policies to criminals.  Rita Karlsen wrote:

Criminal foreigners who serve more than a year in jail will henceforth automatically qualify for welfare.  After three years in prison, they will have a right to a government pension and to health coverage. 

This left wing mentality goes a long way to explain Jimmy Carter's words of support for anti-American dictators, or Clinton's attempt to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons with financial aid.  The right wing outlook would be that financial aid props up the evil regime of North Korea and should be stopped in fact all financial transactions with the regime should be stopped which is exactly what the Bush administration was trying to do with North Korea (2006).  The left wing is likely to see sanctions as antagonizing North Korea and being the reason North Korea developed nuclear weapons in the first place.  The right wing is likely to believe that North Korea would have developed nuclear weapons even without hostile statements by the United States.  Similarly in the war with radical Islam the left sees U.S. military actions against radical Islam as antagonizing the Muslims whereas the right wing sees the radical Islam as hostile whether the U.S. fights them or not.

    When a Republican and a Democrat see a beggar on the street they both have different views as to who he is and how he got there.   The Democrat is likely to view the beggar as an innocent victim of social injustice and the Republican is more likely to view him as someone who is to lazy to work and who is living off the hard work of others. The liberal is more likely to see the beggar as equal morally to the man with money and equally deserving of money.   The Democrat is likely to think giving money to the beggar will help him get fed whereas the Republican is more likely to believe that the money he gets will be spent on liquor and prostitutes.  The Democrat is more likely to think giving the beggar money will make the world a better place whereas the Republican is more likely to think giving him money will just encourage him to avoid working for a living and will make the world a worse place.  In other words what the Democrat believes to be compassionate policy the Republican may see as ultimately hurting people.  

    The left tends to see the weak as good and the strong as bad.  Zev Chafetz said in regard to leftists like Jimmy Carter that:

“People like Carter, liberal Christians, they really identify virtue with weakness, and they think they have an obligation to do justice by being on the side of the weak. They never entertain the notion that the weak can be, say, Fascists.”

    I came across an anti-Israel poster who held up a sign which had written on it 13 Israelis and 14000 Palestinians dead.  I believe she was referring to the attempt by Israel to eliminate the terrorists in Gaza who were firing rockets at them.  I pointed out that Palestinians exaggerate their dead for propaganda purposes but she refused to accept that her numbers could be wrong.  The implication of her casualty comparison was that if more Palestinians died the Israelis must be the bad guys.  By that logic since more Nazis died in the bombing of Dresden  (135,000) than in the Nazi Blitz against England (43,000), the Nazis must have been the good guys. 

    Lloyd Brown in an article in the American Thinker wrote about the weak are the good guys logic of the liberals:

In his letter explaining why he voted against the confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Barack Obama gave us a fascinating glimpse into the wonderful world of liberal logic.

The reasoning boiled down to this: Roberts was a highly qualified judge. But in some cases, he sided with the "strong" instead of the "weak."

"The bottom line is this: I will be voting against John Roberts' nomination . . .," Obama, then a senator from Illinois, wrote.

    Dennis Prager, in an article published in frontpagemag in 2006 wrote:

[O]ne way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and leftists is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and leftists blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

We Americans are used to this. For decades, leftists have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists, and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals...

Since examples of leftists refusing to blame criminals and terrorists for their behavior are legion, let's try to figure out why this moral inversion is so common.

Here are three hypotheses:

One is that leftists tend to blame outside forces for evil. This emanates from the secular humanistic view of people as basically good -- and therefore human evil must come not from the bad choices and bad values of the evildoer, but from the unfortunate socioeconomic and other circumstances of the person's life.

The second explanation is that as you go further left on the political spectrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to blame the "weak" for any atrocities they commit. The Left does not divide the world between good and evil nearly as much as it does between rich and poor, and between strong and weak. Israel is stronger and richer, so Palestinian terror is excused. White America is stronger and richer than black America, so black violence is excused. The West is stronger and richer than the Muslim world, so Muslim violence is explained accordingly.

And third, liberals tend to be afraid of the truly evil. That's why the leftist newspapers of America refused to publish the Danish cartoons, probably the most newsworthy cartoons ever drawn, but have never had any hesitance about showing cartoons and photos that mock Jewish and Christian symbols. Christians and Jews don't kill editors.

We don't know who will be the next target of Islamic or other murderers from poor or non-Western or non-white groups. All we can know is that liberal and leftist thought will find reasons to hold the targeted group largely responsible.

   The problem of Dennis Prager saying that the left identifies people as being basically good is that they do identify villains.  The left is generally against Israel and the United States who they see as oppressors. 

    Heather MacDonald in an article titled "A Crime Theory Demolished" provided evidence that crime does not correlate with the economic situation of those committing it.  Crime probably does correlate with the size of the welfare roles.   Growing welfare populations present a growing threat.  In France they burn cars to celebrate New Years though New Years is not the only day they burn cars.  They are doing this despite or rather partly because of government concessions made to them during previous riots.

    The belief that the weak are good results in a desire to prevent badly performing childrem from feeling bad when outperformed.  Lloyd Marcus in an article titled Liberals Wolves in Sheeps Clothing wrote:

Liberals frown upon individual achievement. I heard a news story about a kid banned from Little League pitching because he threw TOO hard. Rather than welcoming an opportunity to raise the game of the batters, Liberals chose to force the gifted pitcher to lower his game. Many schools even ban the keeping of score at sporting events. Typical, touchy, feel-ly, let's not cause anyone to feel bad, liberalism...

Some of you may be thinking, "Why is Lloyd always ranting about liberalism"? Folks, I have witnessed the devastating effect of liberalism in my own family. A forty something drug addicted cousin is a serial "impregnater" with several out of wedlock children. And yet, he enjoys a new townhouse, food stamps, free health care and methadone all funded by working taxpayers. In essence, the government is enabling and funding my cousin's irresponsible lifestyle.

   Ralph Peters wrote an article about the Obama administrations thinking and it illustrates the blame America mentality.  He wrote:

  Rush Limbaugh also explained Obama's views at the my fault doctrine.  He wrote:

  Jamie Glazov gives many examples of left wing identification with enemies of the U.S. in his book United in Hate.  One example he gave was the leftist reaction to 9/11.  He wrote:

In the blink of an eye after the twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with repentance for their own governments supposed crimes an characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered as a form of karmic justice.  From Noam Chomsky to Norman Mailer, from Eric Foner to Susan Sontag, the Left used 9/11 to castigate America, informing the world that the three thousand innocent people who died in those attacks were merely collateral victims of the world's well-founded rebellion against the evil American empire.

   The left even defended the Somali pirates who are attacking shipping and taken hostages. 

James Taranto wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Then there's the piece that showed up yesterday on the Puffington Host  under the title "You Are Being Lied to About Pirates." The author, Johann Hari, actually takes a pro-pirate line:

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains--and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals.

If yesterday's pirates were champions of the oppressed, today's, Hari claims, are just looking out for the environment:

They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia--and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters. . . . We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."

    An interesting aspect of this last rationale is that the U.S. ships being attacked were delivering food to starving Africans.  When Somalis take hostages they don't demand an end to dumping they demand money.  You don't hear of that money being spent cleaning up toxic waste.  On the other hand there has been a lot of toxic waste dumped off Somalia, it was with the agreement of the Somalia government but still after the tsunami that waste has sickened a lot of Somalis.  Maybe there is something to the Europeans being the real pirates.

     I wonder if the left has a need to see itself as heroic defenders of oppressors and if that is part of the psychology.  The problem with that theory though is that the real oppressed people are the Israelis who are under constant attack by the Muslims yet the left insists on identifying with the Muslims.  Perhaps they mistake of assuming that the more powerful side in a conflict must be the oppressor.  The rationale given by the group QUIT (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism) fits the idea that the left sees the weaker side as being oppressed by the stronger one.  The web site of QUIT proclaims (Glazov, J United in Hate):

As queers, we are part of an international movement for human rights that encompasses the movement for Palestinian liberation, and all other liberation movements. 

There is a cognitive type error that the left make which Jamie Glazov calls "The devil made them do it".  The reasoning is that if the people the left identifies as the oppressed engage in violence it must have been justified by the oppression they face and the more violence they do the more oppressed they must be or the more noble their cause must be to justify that violence.  This is delusional rationalization made to hold on to a belief.  If one decides that group A is the evil oppressor and group B is the virtuous oppressed and group B engages in horrific violence against group A one can either change one's opinion and admit one was wrong (most people hate to do that) or rationalize that one is right with the rationalization that the "oppressors were so horrible it was the right thing to do".  Jamie Glazov wrote in United in Hate:

Here again we see the model of the devil made them do it.  With every violent act committed by Palestinians, the Left blamed Israel - while the Untied States served as a convenient demon in the background.  As Berman notes, if Palestinian violence was monstrous, that surely meant, to the leftist psyche, that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians was monstrous... Berman explains

The protests against Israel, by putting the onus for suicide terror on Israeli shoulders, served a rather useful purpose, from this point of view.  The protests explained the unexplainable.  But when the Israeli response had grown sufficiently severe to stifle at least some of the suicide attacks, the need to defend the rationality of world events was no longer as great - and the impulse to drape Israel with images of Nazism, apartheid, and the hatefulness of Judaism consequently subsided. 

    Obama used the Devil made them do it rationale with India and Pakistan telling the Indians that their refusal to transfer control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir provinces to Pakistan inspires Pakistani terror against India. 

  Dennis Prager wrote another article titled “If It’s Bad For America It’s Good for Democrats” (frontpagemag.com 8/14/07) in which he showed that the better off people are and the more they identify themselves as Americans the more likely they are to vote Republican.  This make sense when one considers that the reasoning of the Democrats leads them to support groups who are not well off and who are hostile to the United States.

   Ed Koch in an article called "Democratic Defection" (Forward 1/12/04) explained that he was a lifelong Democrat and he wrote that the Democratic philosophy is:

If you need a helping hand, we will provide it.

and that the Republican Party's philosophy, can be summed up as:

If I made it on my own, you will have to do the same.

    It is interesting that this is the same Ed Koch who said something to the effect of, "The more money you put into outstretched hands the more outstretched hands there will be."  That is why the welfare system ballooned into a crime ridden dead weight pulling the economy down. Also when Koch said the Democratic philosophy is "If you need a helping hand, we will provide it, he did not say how we will provide it.  Perhaps the democratic philosophy could be better stated,

If someone needs a helping hand we will put our hand in your pocket and provide it.

    The liberal ideology is that all people are equally deserving and that therefore there should be equality in wealth and that they should enforce that equality of wealth.  Dennis Prager wrote an article titled The Left Hates Inequality, Not Evil, about this. 

   A large component of people who support the left are people who are on the public dole since the left is more likely to dole out more money.  They develop a sense of entitlement as demonstrated by the woman I quoted at the beginning of the article who said

"It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them."

 It seems to me that the leftist mindset partly consists of "I can do whatever I want and I don't have to do whatever I don't want to do and I shouldn't have to suffer any consequences of my actions and it's your job to support me".  In defense of his pro-abortion stance arch-leftist Obama said in regard to his daughters:

But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.

    Why isn't Obama worried about punishing his granddaughters by aborting them?  This is an example of the left wing mindset of not wanting to have to suffer the consequences of their actions.  Obama wants to transfer money from the rich to the poor regardless of whether the rich worked hard and the poor didn't and regardless of the consequences to the economy which will make everyone poor.  Obama is cutting defense spending.  The last thing a leftist wants to do is go to war in defense of their country.  It's much easier to blame their country for the world's ills and rationalize that making nice with the world's power mad extremists and sacrificing friends to them is enough.  That then makes extra money available for the so called "victimized" classes in the minds of leftists such as Obama.

Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a psychiatrist wrote a book titled, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness".

He wrote: "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."  "A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do," he says. "A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do."

Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

1) creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;
2) satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;
3) augmenting primitive feelings of envy;
4) rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

He said that:

 "The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind.  When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

Dr. Rossiter  described liberal thinking thus:

With the power of laws passed by The Modern Parental Legislature, I and my liberal comrades will overwhelm Big Business, Big Corporations, Big Military and all the Big Men who pull the levers of power.  We, the original little guys, will conquer these big adults and regulate everyone else.  With the power of the state, other radical liberals and I will be victorious in the classical oedipal drama: as we vanquish the oppressive and dangerous father/king, we will free ourselves and others to enjoy whatever sexual, aggressive and acquisitive satisfactions we please.  The strict rules of traditional conscience will no longer bind us like shackles.  Acting like snotty spoiled brats will become legitimate..  Instead of an authoritarian and punitive father, the new state will be a permissive and indulgent mother who urges us to do whatever feels good to us.    A new gratifying morality, that of the radical liberal agenda, will replace the old restrictive morality: under the entitlements of positive rights, the State will ensure everyone's material welfare, provide for everyone's healthcare, protect everyone's self-esteem, resolve everyone's envy and jealously, excuse everyone's bad behavior, eliminate life's risks and responsibilities correct everyone's social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, eliminate all class distinctions, and create a society of universal love...  In my and my colleagues identification with this grand collective architecture, we will feel as noble and superior and powerful as the State.  In that affiliation, we will find out true identity.

   Dr. Rossiter has written how liberal policies reduce autonomy but notice the desire for freedom shown in his description above of liberal desires.  They want to be able to do and make the state support them.  The state in turn would force others to support them.

   George Will wrote an article about the consequences of the sweet compassion called Bye, Sweet Jobs (New York Post 2/12/2004).  In this case the Republican Bush Administration as well as the Democrats, in order to protect American jobs supported an import quota on sugar.  One consequence of the sugar quota is the cost of sugar in the United States is higher than elsewhere leading candy makers to move their factories outside of the United States with the resulting loss of jobs. George Will wrote that:

Saturday, Valentine's Day, sweets will be showered on sweethearts - a bonanza for candy makers.  But the very next day all 242 Fannie May and Fanny Farmer chocolate candy stores will be closed. 

    This is one example of sweet compassion leading to a bitter aftertaste. 

    Another example of compassion that hurts is the subsidies the U.S. gives to American farmers.  Those subsidies makes farmers from poorer countries less able to compete so that their countries remain poor.  In addition they take money away from taxpayers.

    Yet another example is the subprime crisis.  The subprime crisis is in part a result of pressure from the U.S. government on banks to make risky loans to minorities in order to help them.  As a result as of March 2008 there is a huge economic crisis that hits who the most, you guessed it, minorities.

   If a country is hostile to the United States, left wingers are likely to take the view that the U.S. is responsible for their hostility because they oppressed them in some way and that the leaders of the hostile country are just as good if not better than the U.S. government.  Right wingers are more likely to see the hostile country as bad people who hate the U.S. because they're evil. 

   Senator Kerry's plan to deal with the impending threat of mass production of nuclear weapons by Iran was to offer to give them nuclear fuel in return for a pledge that it would not be used for weapons production and in return for inspections.  If that failed he would go to the security council.  Bush's approach was not to view the United Nations as a good group that the U.S. can rely on and to develop nuclear bunker buster bombs that could destroy hardened targets.  Senator Kerry said that he would end the nuclear bunker buster bombs.  His idea was that the U.S. should not be developing nuclear weapons while asking other countries not to.   The right wing outlook is probably that Iran will develop those weapons anyway and if the U.S. is to have any chance at preventing terrorists from setting off  Iranian nuclear weapons in American cities they better preemptively destroy them and not wait for a hostile U.N. to agree to such a preemptive strike an agreement that is unlikely to ever happen.

    Bill Clinton addressed his view of the differences between the left and right in a speech he gave at the Democratic National Convention in Boston (7/27/04) in which he said:

Democrats and Republicans have very different and deeply felt ideas about what choices we should make. They're rooted in fundamentally different views of how we should meet our common challenges at home and how we should play our role in the world.

Mr. Clinton gave the following examples:

Now -- now, at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons, which they say we might use first...

For the first time when America was on a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us...

Now, look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs, while withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind. (Cheers, applause.) They chose to protect my tax cut while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job- training programs, 100,000 working families out of their child-care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school learning, going to college and having a good life!  They chose, they chose to protect my tax cut while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans, and while weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the protection of our forests.

On homeland security -- on homeland security, Democrats tried to double the number of containers at ports and airports checked for weapons of mass destruction. It cost a billion dollars. It would have been paid for under our bill by asking the 200,000 millionaires in America to cut their tax cut by $5,000. Almost all 200,000 of us would like to have done that, to spend $5,000 to make all 300 million Americans feel safer. The measure failed. Why? Because the White House and the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives opposed it. They thought our $5,000 was more important than doubling the container checks at our ports and airports.

   Clinton in his speech did not mention the vast support of the Bush Administration for the Leave No Child Behind Act and the Bush Administration's proposal for large scale funding of job training programs.  Clinton did not mention in his speech the reason Bush proposed cutting after school programs.  That reason was the results of a federally commissioned evaluation of the after schools programs which found that test scores of federal program participants were no better than those of students not involved in the programs and that student behavior appeared to worsen among program participants. Clinton didn't mention the environmental measures that the Bush administration has taken.  Clinton didn't mention that the  Container Security Initiative that he argues the Bush administration does not fund sufficiently was launched by the Bush administration.  So what can we learn from President Clinton's arguments?  His argument basically is if we Democrats won the election we would tax the rich more and give that money to important programs. 

    There is a price however to taxing that Clinton does not mention.  If you tax the rich, the rich may leave to other shores where they are taxed less.  Those that don't leave may lose incentive to work hard and build up a money making business because of the increased taxes that would result. Rich people buy goods from others less fortunate than them and if they are taxed more they buy less good and the less fortunate have fewer customers.  One example I read about was boat builders many of whose businesses drowned when the taxes on wealthy clients were increased. Wealthy companies usually make a lot of money because they are efficient and produce a good product, taxing them will reduce their money available for investments in research and development and other money making projects that benefit consumers as well as the company employees.  If the companies make less money than even if they are taxed a higher percentage the end result may be less and not more taxes available for needed social programs.  Another price is that when the government taxes it is taking power away from the wage earners and giving it to itself.  Equalizing and totalitarianism go together which is one reason communist regimes have historically been totalitarian.

    Floyd and Mary Beth Brown wrote in FrontpageMagazine that:

John F. Kennedy had the belief that  “A rising tide lifts all ships.” Meaning, when people are free to be productive and prosper, the pie is growing and we are all better off. The liberal view, is that the economic pie is fixed and we need to rob Peter to pay for Paul’s mortgage.

    Don Feder wrote an excellent article about liberal policies that were not mentioned at the Democratic convention called (What the Democrats Won't Tell You, frontpagemag.com  8/5/04)

    Andrea Peyser wrote a column in the New York Post 6/7/04 about her conversion from a liberal to a conservative and in the process revealed a lot about liberal thought.   She wrote:

It hardly seems conceivable today.  But back in 1980, I was an eager, uncompromised leftist - or so I thought...In many political lives, there comes an epiphany in which your nonsense rises to the surface and laughs in your face.  War.   Injustice.  For me, it came down during a Women's Studies class at SUNY Albany where, each week, I dutifully indoctrinated myself into the methods by the patriarchal, capitalist society to disenfranchise women and people of color.  One day, the professor decided to give virtually every student a failing grade.

Why?  I'd worked hard on a paper detailing how our consumerist culture negated the gifts of females and nonwhites, taking care to omit the pronoun "he" from each sentence.  But the the professor was disappointed because, during a group project - something about the rape mentality behind rock music - two students became too busy or lazy to participate in this important work.

The no-show students were granted "A"s.  Then the professor laid a tear inducing guilt trip on the rest of the class, declaring that those who actually did the work had clearly failed to bring our recalcitrant sisters into the fold.

   Underlying this professors thinking is the liberal assumption that all people are morally equal (except Republicans) and that if someone does wrong he is no worse than we are and we are equally responsible for his actions.   If we apply this thinking about criminal behavior than the liberal view would be that society made the criminal who he is and so is guilty for his crimes.  A conservative would view the criminal as responsible for his crimes.  A Republican would want the criminal punished and kept off the street.  A liberal is more likely to want to release him since it wasn't his fault that he committed the crime. 

   There is no question that injustices in society can contribute to criminal behavior just as there is no question that individuals have responsibility for their behavior.  So in a way both the conservatives and the liberals are right.  The question is in a particular case how much is the responsibility of the criminal and how much isn't.  Clearly Andrea Peyser's professor had extreme views in this regard.  The professor rewarded the students who did no work with the likely consequence that they didn't do their next assignment.  In fact I wonder if any of the students did their next assignment.

    Recently there was an election in my home town.   I looked up the records of the various candidates and found that both the left wing (liberal) and right wing (conservative) candidates were campaigning to lower taxes.   They had different approaches however.  The liberal's plan was to ask the state government to provide more funds.  The conservative's plan was to audit spending in the town and find programs that could be cut.  It seemed to me unlikely that asking the State Government for money would result in the state government being overwhelmed with charitable impulses.  Also in the unlikely event that the state government was overwhelmed with such impulses in order to support a mayor from their party, it occurred to me that money that they would fork over would have to come from somewhere and that somewhere was the taxpayer.   The conservative's plan seemed more realistic and since my town was paying the second highest taxes in the county I decided to support him.  I had a liberal friend and I told him my reasons and his reply I think was revealing about what liberalism is about.  He told me that he never concerned himself with taxes.  He said that if the conservative made cuts it would be in needed social programs.  He felt that conservatives cut money from those who really need it and that conservatives supported the powerful at the expense of the weak.   

    His arguments showed one clear difference between the left and the right.  That difference is that the left focuses more on obtaining support from the poorer segments of society than the right.   The left does this by supporting legislation that transfers money from the middle and upper classes to the poor.  The term "Tax and Spend Democrat" comes from this tendency. 

    One can get an idea of the differences between right and left from the campaign accusations that candidates level against one another.  The general accusation by the Republicans against the Democratic candidates are that that the Democrats raise taxes.  The general accusations of the Democrats against the Republicans are that the Republicans cut funding for needed social programs for the elderly, the poor and the sick. 

    Liberalism has at it's heart, compelling the haves to fund the have nots.  Liberalism is an equalizer that forces the haves to make sacrifices to help the have nots. 

    On the surface this is wonderful.  Certainly those who really need help should get it.  The rich who don't really need the money should help those in need.  What could be wrong with that?  I think the answer is that certainly assistance to the poor is necessary but one carry that too far with destructive consequences to both the haves and the have nots.

    The answer to what could be wrong with liberal ideals comes from examining what has gone wrong with programs that fund the poor such as welfare.   In the United States increased funding of welfare did not solve the poverty or crime problem.  The welfare roles increased as did crime.  People lost the incentive to work.  Often they were better off financially when they were on welfare.   Ethical hard working people tend to stay off of welfare on the whole.  Those who take advantage of the system are more likely to be crooked and raise crooked children.  Mothers on welfare had more and more babies since each baby bought in government money.  Often that government money was spent on crack and the babies grew up in a violent criminal environment and turned to crime.  As welfare and overcrowded prison costs drain society, corporations have less money to invest and eventually there is less corporate money to tax.  So in the end liberal policies may lead to less funding for the poor.

    The explosion in the Islamic population in Europe and the U.S. may be in part due to welfare.  Many middle class families struggle just to support themselves and pay taxes to support other people on welfare let alone a baby.  Day care is very expensive.  If you are on welfare you don't have to worry about that.  In fact you make more money each time you have a baby.  Vast numbers of Muslims are on welfare in Europe and France.  These countries are likely to become Islamic countries that are governed by Sharia law thanks at least in part to welfare.   As the number of people on welfare grows the number of voters who vote for it grow as well.  Of course one would expect that some voters who see the amount they are paying go up constantly will start voting against it.  However it is very difficult to cut off welfare and leave people without money.  That is likely to lead to a revolution.  I think it is likely that such a revolution is inevitable since at some point society will not have the money to support the ever growing welfare roles.  The riots and car burnings in France by Muslims who demand more welfare are well known.

   Democrats overlook that taxes hurt the elderly and sick since they also pay taxes.  In my home town taxes have gone up so much that elderly townfolk complained to the liberal mayor that they couldn't afford living there any more.   The mayor said to them "So leave."  The liberal mayor's compassion to the elderly vanished when it came to reducing their taxes.

    The left wants to build safety nets to protect those who have trouble finding jobs etc. The right focuses on providing incentives to people to work by not providing safety nets since safety nets encourage dependence and reduce the incentive to work. The right wing approach has the problem that if there is no safety net those who don't find work could find themselves in a very difficult situation.  The left wing approach has the problem that the safety nets encourage growth of the number of people relying on them. As this population grows so does the number of voters who support the laws transferring money into these nets. This can lead to self reinforcing cycle of increasing spending. Eventually the safety nets may not be able to protect the increasing burden so that more people are at risk than if there had been less of a safety net to begin with.

    The left and right differ on how to deal with discrimination.  It is likely that this discrimination led to crime which in turned led to more discrimination thus creating a crime discrimination cycle.  Should the government intervene in these situations to force employers to hire a certain percentage of minority groups?  What if these minority groups don't have the skills.  What if these minority members already had criminal records?  The left wingers are  likely to say force employers to hire them anyway.

    The left are much more likely to promote forced social engineering such as school bussing.  The idea of school bussing is to bus children from poor areas into more well to do areas so they get an equal education.   The result often is that the people in the better areas get poorer education's as a result of the violence and strife introduced by the children who are bussed in.  The Democrats probably oppose school vouchers because they want an equal opportunity for all children and are concerned that vouchers will allow more talented children or children with richer parents to go to better schools than poorer or less talented children.   The Republicans favor school vouchers because that would create competition among schools for students and is likely to lead to better standards for schools.  My own experience has been that I have worked harder and come closer to reaching my potential when I've been in a more competitive environment.  There are two consequences of keeping students of different levels of ability and motivation in the same class.   One is that the students with the higher levels of ability don't work to live up to their potential and get a poorer education.  The second is that the students with the lower levels of ability don't have their needs met as the teachers strive to challenge the motivated students.

    The left is more likely than the right to sacrifice the wellbeing of the middle and upper classes in order to promote the wellbeing of the lower classes although often the social engineering involved doesn't help the lower classes either.  Increased welfare spending may result in increased drug use and crime and worse conditions for the poor. 

   There is a fundamental difference between the way the left and the right view crime.  The right winger is likely to divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys and the left winger is more likely to see the world in terms of moral equivalence and to believe in moral relativism.  The right is likely to see a criminal act as the responsibility of the criminal and to believe that the appropriate response is to lock up the criminal.  The left is likely to see the behavior of the criminal as the fault of society.  The left is likely to believe that society is responsible for the conditions that created the criminal.  The response of the left to criminal behavior is likely to be efforts to improve the environment in which the criminal lives.  For example the left might want to increase welfare payments so that the poor would be less likely to turn to crime.  The left is likely to improve the conditions in prisons and even to release dangerous criminals from prisons to avoid overcrowding. 

    This attitude toward the left toward individual criminals also extends to countries that engage in criminal behavior.  For example after news broke that the Palestinian authority had spent money donated by the Europeans on luxury apartments (November 1998) the left wing president of the United States (Bill Clinton) offered 100 million dollars of further assistance to the PLO.  Mr. Clinton probably believes that poverty is what has caused Arab animosity toward Israel and even the criminal tendency to embezzle funds.  He probably believes that giving more money to the Arabs will improve their conditions to the point where they will no longer wish to destroy Israel. 

   Another example of this is a Democratic scheme to become popular in the Muslim world by throwing money at it (USA Today 4/27/04).  Since Muslim morality is at least equal to ours according to the liberal mindset that other cultures our equal to our own, they must be doing bad things only because we have done bad things to them.  The liberal conclusion is that we must not be giving them enough money.  If poverty is the source of Muslim hatred toward the U.S. than why does the London Arabic-Language Daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat report that Iran is providing Iraqi insurgents 70 millions dollars worth of military aid every month to fight the United States? Any country that can provide that kind of aid is certainly not poor. If the Democratic assumption that money will buy Islamic love is correct, than why, inspite of receiving over 100 million dollars in annual U.S. aid, did Palestinian Arabs celebrate on Sept 11, 2001? Why inspite of the 1.3 billion of annual aid to Egypt by the United States, does the government controlled Egyptian newspapers write that "Rumsfeld is a new Hitler" and write that "Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld are the Axis of Evil" and claim that American planes over Afghanistan dropped "genetically treated food" into areas full of land mines in order both to lure the population to their deaths?

   Lawrence Auster wrote in (frontpagemag.com, 8/11/04, How To Oppose Liberal Intolerance) about how the left wing belief in equality translates itself into whitewashing of Islam.  He wrote:

the belief in equality requires leftists to be indifferent or hostile to Western culture, regardless of its virtues, and to excuse and celebrate non-Western cultures, regardless of their vices, because Western culture is currently the successful and "dominant" culture. Indeed, under the inverted moral order of leftism, the more backward or even savage a non-Western culture happens to be, the more we must puff it up, cover its sins, and blame its catastrophes on ourselves. Thus the glowing, celebratory documentaries on the history of Islam, such as "Empire of Faith" and "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" (described by National Review Online as a "whitewashed commercial for Islam"), that have become a staple on Public Television over the last three years, during the very period when the totalitarian and murderous nature of a significant section of the Islamic community has become horribly apparent. Thus 9/11 Commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton's statement that Moslems blame us (justly, he implies) for their poverty and backwardness, and that to win their trust (!) in the war on terror we must create a giant welfare state for the whole Islamic world—providing new kinds of schools for them, ending their poverty, giving them democracy, and so on. It follows from Hamilton's thoroughly "liberal" premise that if the Moslems continue to distrust and hate us despite our massive assistance, that would only show that we have not yet done "enough" for them and must do more.

    The left does not only whitewash Islam, it allies itself with Islam.  The following is an excerpt from an Iraq News Network interview with George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament which demonstrates that.

Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha: "You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally. How far is it possible under current situation?"

Galloway : "Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture. And whose only role in life is to consume the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations. And the progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims." 

David Horowitz has written a book called Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, and has created a web site www.discoverthenetworks.org demonstrating the links between radical Islam and American progressives.

Daniel Pipes in a debate with Ken Livingstone the mayor of London that took place on 1/20/07 discussed the Islamic leftist alliance:  He said:

George Galloway explained in 2005, "the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies," which he then went on to indicate were Israel, the United States, and Great Britain.

And if you listen to the words that are spoken about, say the United States, you can see that this is in fact the case. Howard Pinter has described America as "a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics." [big applause and shouts] And Osama Bin Laden [stops … ] I'll do what I can to get an applause line. [laughter] And, get ready for this one: Osama Bin Laden called the United States, "unjust, criminal, and tyrannical." [applause]

Noam Chomsky termed America "a leading terrorist state". And Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a leading Pakistani political leader, called it the "biggest terrorist state." [scattered applause]

Such common ground makes it tempting for those on the Left to make common cause with Islamists, and the symbol of this would be the [huge, anti-war in Iraq] demonstrations in Hyde Park, on the 16^th of February 2003, called by a coalition of leftist and Islamist organizations.

At other times, the Left feels a kinship with Islamist attacks on the West, forgiving, understanding why these would happen. A couple of notorious quotes make this point. The German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen termed the 9/11 attacks "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos," while American novelist Norman Mailer, commented that "the people who did this were brilliant."

Such attitudes tempt the Left not to take seriously the Islamist threat to the West. With John Kerry, a former aspirant to the [U.S.] presidency, they dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."

   Melanie Phillips in an interview with frontpagemag.com (5/12/2006) commented that:

It’s remarkable, to put it mildly, that the left – with its obsessions with issues like gay rights, equality for women and sexual license – should have forged an alliance with radical Islamists who preach death to gays, the subjugation of women and the stoning of adulterers. It is an eye-opener to see, on the streets of London, so-called ‘progressives’ marching shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists under the metaphorical banner of human rights and the literal banners of Hamas. Both the left and the radical Islamists have put aside their differences because they recognize the value of using each other in pursuit of their common objective, the destruction of western society.

   Professor Paul Eidelberg, in an article titled: The Cultural Left: Islam’s Ally (Freeman Center Email Broadcast 2/19/2007) wrote that:

In 2004, a leading critic of the Bush administration, published a stinging criticism of the U . S . government’s war on terrorism .  He found Bush’s conduct abhorrent from the time the president was informed about the 9/11 attacks .  He impugned Bush’s motives for the war on terror and for the invasion of Iraq .  He said Bush knew Iraq posed no security threat, so that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was made because of “oil and more business for his private companies . ”  “Black gold blinded him and he put his own private interests ahead of the American public interest . ”  “Bush’s hands,” said his critic, “are covered with blood, and Iraq has become a quagmire . ”  Moreover, while Bush pretends to promote liberty abroad, “he has brought tyranny and the suppression of liberties to his own country” through “the Patriot Act, implemented under the pretext of fighting terrorism . ” 

The name of the critic is not Michael Moore or Nancy Pelosi .  He is none other than Osama bin Laden!  Bin Laden simply cited and even commended the writings of the American Left .  In his 2004 missive to America, bin Laden said his message would be better understood if Americans read westerners like author William Blum, a former State Department employee, who calls on America to withdraw from the Middle East and “give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those that were tortured” by American troops.

    The left in the United States tends to share communist ideals more than the right and so tend to be more sympathetic to communist regimes.

    The American left tends to oppose military spending more than the right.  One reason is the greater sympathy of the left for the Communist and or Islamic regimes which the military spending is designed to defeat.  Another reason is that military spending reduces the money available for beloved left wing social programs.  Yet another reason is the liberal belief that the way to deal with hostile countries is to give them money.

    Don Feder spoke about the beliefs of the New York Times and in so doing captured the beliefs of the left.  He said:

The Times believes that America’s foreign enemies are either imaginary or created by our “imperialist policies.” It rationalizes the moves of monstrous and potentially cataclysmic regimes, such as those in power in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, the Sudan and the West Bank and Gaza.

It believes in butter (social spending) over guns (military preparedness).

    The opposition of the left to American military spending should not be mistaken for being compassionate and peace loving.  Jamie Glazov wrote a book called United in Hate about the causes behind the leftist and Islamic alliance.  He wrote:

This is where the Western Left and militant Islam (like the Western Left and Communism) intersect: human life must be sacrificed for the sake of the idea. Like Islamists, leftists have a Manichean vision that rigidly distinguishes good from evil. They see themselves as personifications of the former and their opponents as personifications of the latter, who must be slated for ruthless elimination."

"We'll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution?  Are you for it or against it? If he's against it, we'll stand him up against a wall."

   The recent gift of 900,000,000 to Hamas controlled Gaza by the Obama administration is an example of leftist support for Islamists.  Jamie Glazov wrote a powerful article about this which he started with:

The image is a disturbing but totally expected one: Islamofascists doing the Nazi salute and Western leftists prostrating themselves before them and, sadder yet, sending them money.

    Al Gore,the democratic candidate for president, gave a speech in Aug 2000 at the Democratic National Convention in which he said the Republicans were the party for the powerful  implying that he was for the weak.   An interesting exception to that is Gore's and the Democrats stand on abortion.   When Gore announced his support of abortion a loud cheer went up from the floor of the convention.  Yet abortion is the destruction of the weak and helpless.  One would expect that the Liberal ideal of helping the weak and helpless would be extended to unborn babies.  The liberal explanation for this is that it can be more compassionate to the unborn to kill them than to allow them to live a miserable life.  The truth is though that there are many people who want to adopt children and who would give these children a good life.  Another liberal argument is that they are supporting the right of women to choose.  The feminist ideals of the liberals in conflict with the compassionate ideals toward the unborn and those ideals are stronger.   Why are they not more concerned about the rights of unborn women? 

    There is a conflict between leftist compassion for the week and the leftist belief in their own entitlement to not suffer the consequences of their actions.

   Several letters were sent to the New York Post on August 31, 2000 in response to Gore's promises which are instructive about the pitfalls of liberalism.  I paraphrase them below

Al Gore promises cheap or free prescription drugs for everybody ("Steal Al's Issues! - It's Bush's Best Bet to Win," Dick Morris, Opinion, Aug. 24).

Wow, what a deal! I'm going to vote for Gore. How nice of him. Where has he been all these years?

Wait a minute. There must be a reason why some drugs are so expensive. Could it be that drug companies spend a fortune on research and are seeking to recover their costs? ...

If Gore's idea wins out, then we might have lower drug costs. But we might also find ourselves having to accept lower quality drugs.

Another reader wrote

Al Gore repeatedly preaches that he will fight "Big Oil," HMOs, and greedy pharmaceutical companies on behalf of "working families."

What about those "working families" now employed in these very industries?

   Another reader pointed out that higher taxes hurt working families.

   The left favors affirmative actions policies to force schools to lower their standards to help blacks graduate.  Thomas Sowell, a brilliant black professor from Stanford University, in an article titled Left Wing Friends Hurt Blacks (Townhall.com 4/28/04) revealed the problem with this approach when he wrote that:

My own experience as a teacher was that black students would meet higher standards if you refused to lower the standards for them.

An interesting distinction between the right and left was made by Professor Stanley Rothman in an interview with frontpage magazine 5/23/05) 

FP: Why do you think the Left thrives on conflict and why are conservatives such a failure in fighting political war? Why don't they know how to stand up for themselves? It took David Horowitz, a former leftist, to do what conservatives should have been doing years ago.

Rothman: Part of the answer to that, it seems to me, lies in the nature of radicalism. The left is persuaded that collective political action can remake the world, and political action gives meaning to their lives. To many of them, human beings will be perfectible once the reactionary forces of evil are destroyed. Theirs is a Manichean view.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to believe that love, work, family and culture are the stuff of which life is made. They turn to politics reluctantly and, only as a last resort, to defend themselves. They are also persuaded that civility plays an important role in the preservation of a decent community, and are reluctant to violate the rules of civility. While radicals also believe that they can achieve immortality by remaking the world, conservatives do not believe that immortality is possible except through religion and/or their children.

   Keith Thompson wrote an article Leaving the Left 5/23/05 in which he explained a key difference between the left and right.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

     Eric Alan Beltt wrote an article titled Liberalism is a Psychology, in which he argued that Liberal beliefs stem from what makes the liberal feel good and avoid feeling bad.  It stems from wanting to feel moral noble unique and to avoid being ostracized.  Certainly it feels better to believe that we don’t have to arm and fight an enemy, just give them money.  It feels much better to talk about peace. Certainly we feel better and noble when we insist on money for the poor.  Eric Beltt’s theories are consistent with Liberal thinking.  Dennis Prager wrote an article in frontpage magazine 8/28/07 that argued that the desire to be loved drives liberal thinking and gave examples of how doing the moral thing and doing the popular thing are not always the same thing.

       When either the left or the right become extreme they are usually wrong though not always.  There are situations when the centrist point of view is wrong.   When the left and the right take on extreme point of views they are usually distorting reality.   The left wing way of distorting reality is usually to make those who have the villains and those who have less the good guys.  The right wing way of distorting reality is to view all those who belong to a group as being the evil enemy if the group is different in some way.  The extreme left and extreme right often view each other as evil and as "the enemy".

    The extreme left is unlikely to view the right in terms of moral relativism though, the extreme left is likely to view the right as the bad guys.  Extreme left and right are both likely to believe in taking the law in their own hands and in forcing their utopia on everyone else.  There is thus convergence of ideas between left and right extremists.  This concept is illustrated in the diagram below:

    The far left and right both believe in conspiracy theories.  “If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist demonstrator told the online Russian publication Pravda. “But if I told you who I thought the capitalists and corporate bosses were (the Jews), you’d say I was far right.” (Anti-Capitalist Anti-Semites, Mark, Strauss, Frontpagemag.com 10/29/03)

   The left wing is more likely to be pacifist than the right although there are segments of the right that are likely to be isolationist which can translate into avoiding military intervention.  Extreme left wing pacifists ironically often show support for terrorist groups, The Quakers for example are sympathetic to the PLO.  Dr. Paul Eidelberg in an article titled The Cultural Left: Islam’s Ally (Freeman Center Email Broadcast 2/19/07) wrote:

Orwell saw that pacifism and defeatism were rampant among the English intelligentsia, especially the very young intelligentsia .  He notes that people who started by renouncing violence often ended up supporting Hitler .  The opponents of war simply lacked the intellectual courage to think through the practical consequences of their anti-war position: their opposition to the war made them objectively pro-Fascist .  (One may say the same of today’s Cultural Left in America , whose opposition to the presence of U . S . troops in Iraq is objectively pro-terrorist, despite any antipathy they may feel toward terrorism . )

    There is an alliance between neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists.  Daveed Gartenstein-Ross wrote in the Weekly Standard that (The Peculiar Alliance, Weekly Standard, 9/6/05):

Such an alliance seems unlikely on its face; after all, neo-Nazis view most Muslims as racially inferior, while Islamic extremists believe that neo-Nazis are just another flavor of infidel. However, a closer examination reveals that many white-supremacist groups have expressed solidarity with Islamic terrorists recently, and in turn some white supremacists and far-right Holocaust deniers have found newfound supporters among the Islamists.

   Mr. Gartenstein Ross writes that in 2005 August Kreis, the head of the Aryan Nations, told a CNN interviewer regarding al Qaeda:

 "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters."

    I remember reading once the statements of a leader of a right wing anti black, Neo-Nazi group who said he shared some of the beliefs of Farrakhan the leader of the black anti-white nation of Islam.  Osama bin Ladin said on 2/14/03 that:

    "The interests of Muslims and the interests of the Socialists coincide in the war against the Crusaders."

Jamie Glasov wrote in United In Hate about joint demonstrations between leftists and Islamofascists.  He wrote:

The demonstrations themselves took on eerie and horrid manifestations.  Leftists didn't schmooze just with the Islamofascists who supported the Ba'athists in Iraq, but also with Nazis who hated Jews and dreamed of future Final Solutions.  Leftists marched side by side with Islamist fanatics who despised democracy, modernity, and individual freedom; practiced misogyny and homophobia; and supported theocracy and dictatorship.  American "peace" protesters waved placards with pro-Islamist slogans and chanted "Allahu Akbar." 

    The problem with allying oneself with the Devil is the Devil will not then become one's friend.  Jamie Glazov in his book United in Hate wrote:

Leftist gay groups actually attend "antiwar" and "peace" rallies to denounce Israel and support the Palestinians - only to be roughed up by those they support.  In May 2004, in Trafalgar Square in London, Islamists attacked members of two British gay-rights groups, OutRage! and the Queer Youth Alliance, when they tried to participate in a rally for Palestinian rights...  They were called, among other things, "racists," "Zionists," "CIA and MI-5 agents," and "supporters of the Sharon government." 

    The alliance of gays with the Palestinians is bizarre since as Glazov wrote:

gay Palestinians live in perpetual fear of arrest, detention without trial, torture, and execution at the hands of Palestinian authorities or other terrorist groups and factions. 

Glazov points out that:

Israel is the only nation in the Middle East where homosexuals enjoy equality and rights and do not live in terror.

Respect, a left-wing party founded by former Labour MP George Galloway, aims to unite Muslims and socialists around opposition to American foreign policy and globalization. (Britain's Defiant Islam, Christian Science Monitor 7/14/05)

    David Stolinky wrote an article for frontpagemag.com (Bin Laden and Marx, Strange Bedfellows, 9/29/04) in which he listed similarities between radical Islam and communism.  Here is an excerpt of what he wrote:

How can I compare communists, who are militant atheists, with Islamic extremists, who are fanatically religious? True, they disagree on theology, but they agree on many other things:

• They both believe that people’s behavior is governed by their environment, which therefore must be rigidly controlled.

• They both believe that people have no inalienable rights, and must be regimented by harsh rules that govern all aspects of human activity.

• They both think people can’t be trusted, and must be watched by a vast police apparatus.

• They both attract unhappy, angry, alienated people. Remember John Walker Lindh and the Beltway snipers?

• They both use schools to brainwash young people – Muslim schools in the case of radical Islam, universities in the case of Marxism.

• They both dehumanize nonbelievers. Marxists call their opponents "capitalist pigs," "racists," "oppressors" and "Nazis." Islamic extremists call their opponents "infidels," "sons of pigs and monkeys" and "followers of Satan."

• They both claim that nonbelievers should be converted by force, and those who resist should be persecuted without mercy – or brutally murdered.

• They both believe their role is to create a perfect society, so they are justified in using any means, including mass murder.

• They both hate Judeo-Christian civilization in general and capitalism in particular. The 9/11 terrorists could have destroyed a cathedral or a synagogue. Instead, they destroyed the World Trade Center. That tells a lot about their priorities.

• They both refuse to take responsibility for their backward, poverty-stricken societies. Instead, they blame others for their own failures.

• They both take the anger that should be aimed at their corrupt, incompetent rulers, and misdirect it at the West, and America in particular.

• They both believe they are entitled to control the world, and they hate America for standing in their way.

    An interesting parallel in extreme left thinking and extreme Muslim thinking is the view toward Music of Lenin and the Ayatollah Khomeini.  Lenin refused to listen to music.  He explained:

"It makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell."

   The Ayatollah Khomeini said:

Music, corrupts the minds of our youth. There is no difference between music and opium. Both create lethargy in different ways. If you want your country to be independent, then ban music. Music is treason to our nation and to our youth.

    The extensive antagonism toward music of Muslims is dealt with in more detail here.

Evidence of the extreme left/Islamist alliance surfaced when the Freedom Center which David Horowitz founded organized Islamo-Fascism awareness week for Oct 22-22 07.  In a fundraising letter Mr. Horowitz wrote:

the left is also organizing - to kill Islamo Fascism Awareness Week and silence the vital truths it will tell. The powerful American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is intimidating university administrations all over the country into canceling the events our campus coordinators have set up. The Muslim Students Association, campus arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, is planning disruptive actions to drown out our message. And most alarming of all, the Revolutionary Communist Party and other radical groups have promised violent confrontations that put our speakers in physical danger.

    Interestingly enough there is an alliance between the left and radical Islam.  The Soviets have been supporting Iran's nuclear program inspite of the threat of Chechen terrorists someday igniting an Islamic nuclear weapon in Moscow.  Phyllis Chesler in her book, The New Antisemitism wrote the following about the similarities between left wing and right wing radicalism:

Today we are dealing with at least two kinds of racism.  One is right-wing, neo-Nazi, and traditional; the other (and here's where it gets complicated) is left-wing, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, and ostensibly antiracist, but also pro-Islamofascist...

What's new about the new anti-Semitism is that acts of violence against Jews and anti-Semitic words and deeds are being uttered and performed by politically correct people in the name of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, antiracism, and pacifism.  Old fashioned anti-Semitism was justified in the name of ethnic, Aryan, white purity, superiority, and nationalism.  Many Nazi-era Germans and Americans viewed Jews as inferior racially and biologically.  The new anti-Semite cannot, by definition, be an anti-Semitic racist because she speaks out on behalf of oppressed people.

   Phyllis quotes Jochnowitz about the mystery of the left wing Islamic alliance:

This is the great mystery of the left.  Leftists are totally silent about the excesses of radical Islam.  They are equally silent about the fact that Israel allows dissent... the most fundamentalist of Americans does not believe in executing women who have been raped although such things happen in Islamic states.

    Phyllis writes:

The American and European Left have made a marriage in hell with their Islamic terrorist counterparts.  The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over its devotion to communist dictators who murdered millions of their own people in the service of a Great Idea has now finally, fatefully joined the world jihadic chorus in the call for the end to racist Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid state.

   Melanie Philips in an article titled Return of the Old Hatred (frontpagemag.com 3/1/04) wrote about the left wing, Islamic alliance as follows:

The outcome is that an astonishing axis has developed between Islamic Jew-haters and the Left, marching behind the banners of 'human rights' on demonstrations in Europe producing chants of 'Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas'.

   One reason for the leftist/Islamofacist alliance is that they are both against the United States.  The communist revolutionary Carlos the Jackel's  2003 book, "Revolutionary Islam" called on "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists," to accept the leadership of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden in order to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into

"graveyards of American imperialism."  

He wrote:

"Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States,"

   Noam Chomsky after meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s “secretary general,” announced his support for Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm. Then, in an echo of Nasrallah’s recent declaration that President Bush is the world’s top “terrorist,” Chomsky pronounced his own fatwa on the United States calling it one of the “leading terrorist states.”  (frontpagemag.com 5/15/2006) 

    The left hates the right a lot more than the right hates the left.  An article about this was written by Dennis Prager.  The left although often pacifist is more violent than the right.

    Vijay Kumar witnessed the transformation of Iran from a modern nation to a fundamentalist repressed state.  In July 2008 he was running for Congress and was interviewed by Frontpage Magazine.  He was asked why the left refuses to stand up for those who suffer under Islamic despotism and replied:

The Left and Islam share many of the same values. Both deny that individuals have a personal ethic. A central authority should control all things. Both insult and denigrate their opponents and see themselves as victors in the movement of history. Both hate the native cultures and individual efforts.

The mindset of the Leftist is one of deliberate ignorance. I was a Leftist, a bleeding heart liberal until a few years ago. I came from a Marxist family in India. The Left, by its silence on the issue of radical Islam, has betrayed its own professed ideals, if it has any.

The fight against Political Islam should have been led by the liberal intellectuals in our universities, but instead they deliberately and systematically support a seventh century totalitarian ideology that negates all forms of rational thinking, intellectual pursuit, and pluralism - the very ideals which are supposed to be central to the philosophy of the Left.

The Liberals have become the lackeys of Islamic imperialism in their words and deeds. They fail to mention the 1,400 years of Jihadists' terror in this world. How can we cry for the genocide in Darfur and ignore the cause?

The media only has a concern for white oppression and white evil. If the source of evil is non-white and non-Christian, they don’t care. Our Leftist media is forcing us to fight this ideological struggle with both hands tied behind our backs. To them, saying anything negative about other countries or cultures is not telling the truth, it is racism. To them, portraying America’s values and accomplishments in a positive light is propaganda – and God forbid they indulge in anything so base as pro-American propaganda.

Another aspect of Leftist thought is that there is no absolute morality. Everything is relative, every kind of behavior and belief should be tolerated, and therefore the American system isn’t better than any other. How can we engage in a battle of ideologies when you see all ways of life – even those that preach an end to tolerance and an end to intellectual freedom – as acceptable?
 

  Of course there is a set of beliefs that according to the left that should not be tolerated and that is those of the right wing.  Ralph Peters wrote an article titled Thought Police about this. 

   The left in Sweden is aligning itself with Islamic radicals.  In an article titled Sweden’s Unholy Alliance, Nima Sanandaji wrote: (frontpagemag.com 5/19/06)

Indeed, as the September elections draw closer, it seems as if the Swedish left are openly embracing radical Islamic groups. Recently, Swedish public television revealed that the leading Social Democratic party has started fishing for votes with the help of radical Muslims clergies. For several years the Christian wing of the Social Democratic party, called The Brotherhood, has been working with the influential Muslim leader Mahmoud Aldebe, president of Sweden’s Muslim Association.

But the new ally of the Social Democrats is anything but democratic. Already in 1999, Aldebe went on radio proposing that Sharia – the Islamic law – be introduced in Sweden. In addition, Aldebe has in a letter to the Swedish minister of Justice in 2003 involved himself in a heated debate regarding an incident of honor-related murder where a Kurdish girl was murdered by her two uncles, shot several times in the head. Aldebe did not condemn the murderers – rather he forcefully defended the perpetrators. Aldebe sees the entire debate regarding honor-related murders as an attack against the Islamic religion and claims in his letter that a public debate regarding these acts of murder risk to “encourage immigrant girls to revolt against the tradition of the families and their religious values.”

One might ask how a democratic party can justify co-operating with Sweden’s Muslim Association. During the above mentioned documentary the Social Democrat Ola Johansson referred to the book Social Justice in Islam by the Islamic ideologue Sayyid Qutb as proof that the social democratic ideology could find common ground with Islamic ideas. As the Swedish paper Expressen has exposed, Sayyid Qutb was not only a social thinker; he was also inspired by the German Nazi movement. He was an important figure in the Egyptian Islamic movement in the 50's and remains an inspiration for Muslim Extremists.

    It is interesting that according to British government reports (Middle-Class Muslims Joining Ranks of Killers, New York Post 7/10/05)

Most al Qaeda recruits tend to be loners who come from liberal, nonreligious Muslim backgrounds and convert to Islam as adults

    One would expect that people with liberal ideals would be the last to join Al Qaeda but on the contrary most Al Qaeda recruits come from liberal non-religious Muslim backgrounds.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is the identification of feminists with Moslems.  Phyllis writes:

For some time some feminist marchers have waved the Palestinian flag and worn Arab headdresses in various demonstrations.  (They don't have it right, though, because they wear Arab male keffiyahs.  Were they marching anywhere between Cairo and Kabul, they'd be wearing burqas, headscarves, veils.)

Robert Spencer in an article in frontpagemag.com (Consummated in Cairo 1/16/2004)  wrote that at the 2003 Cairo Conference held in mid-December by

The International Campaign Against U.S. & Zionist Occupations, high-profile anti-war left wing activists got together with radical Muslims in a quest to join forces to gain their respective objectives.  Robert Spencer wrote:

The Cairo Conference demonstrated that Socialist anti-war activists don’t mind sharing a podium with radical Muslims who want to establish Sharia states in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the peace movement has betrayed a taste for totalitarianism and brutality before. Today’s radical Muslim terrorists are worthy heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and all the rest who filled the Gulag for the sake of peace. Evidently nowadays as long as the struggle against “imperialist aggression” is won, a few amputations and stonings along the way will be just fine.

Evan Coyne Maloney when asked why the left sides with totalitarian ideologies by Jamie Glazov replied:

That's what boggles my mind. Women are second-class citizens in a large part of the world, treated as property, and it is not only acceptable for their husbands to beat them, but it is expected. Rape victims are stoned to death in "honor" killings while gang-rapists face no punishment. And yet the West’s feminists are silent. In a large part of the world, gays can be jailed and subject to chemical treatments in an attempt to change their gender preference. They are hanged and beheaded simply for being gay. And yet the gay rights activists in the West are silent.

I really don't get it. There are very severe offenses against humanity occurring all over the world, and yet the left ignores them. It seems they are constitutionally incapable of recognizing any injustice unless they can somehow blame it on the West, on white males, on Christians or Jews, or on the United States.

     After Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumor the right wing opposition expressed a lot of sympathy.  Ben Johnson, in Frontpage Magazine, contrasted this with the way the left responds to deteriorating health of people who opposed them.  He wrote:

As Ted Kennedy’s recently diagnosed brain tumor demonstrated, Right and Left are also divided based on whether they display basic human decency when misfortunes befall a member of the other side. The American people seem to be fundamentally cleft about how they treat news of an opponent’s impending death in a conservative manner – with prayer – or a leftist one – with champagne and hate mail.

    Ben Johnson's article gives many examples of this.

An excellent article about the problems of liberalism is called PC and the Crisis of Liberalism.  George Will has an interesting article about the attitudes of the left.  

The Incentive Model For Differences between the Right and the Left

    An interesting way to explain the differences between the right and left is by taking a single issue that separates them and about which they feel strongly and to examine how it leads to opinions about other issues.  Lets start with the fundamental issue of redistribution of wealth. 

     The left wants money to be redistributed from those who have more to those who have less.  The right wants society to generate wealth which will then trickle down to the poor. 

This creates the incentive to view the poorer parts of society as entitled to the money of the wealthier parts of society.  How can one justify such a view?  By believing that the poorer parts of society are victims of the wealthier parts of society.  The incentive is created to believe that the wealthier parts of society have unjustly taken away the money of the poorer parts of society and by are oppressing the poorer parts of society.  Corporations are a target of the left partly because they are seen as having money that the poor should have.  This leads to demonization or paranoia creation toward the corporations.  The left wants to tax them as much as possible.  The left doesn't want to see them as the job providers that they are and does not want to recognize that taxing them will hurt the economy and does not want to recognize the wealth they have may have been earned by hard work. 

     The left supports policies that give the same benefits to illegal immigrants as American citizens have.  So what if American citizens wind up shouldering the burden of supporting their emergency room visits.  The have nots should be given money from those who have in the liberal mind.

     The right is more likely to not believe that humans are responsible for global warming than the left.  Perhaps this is because the right recognizes that taxes on CO2 and electricity will hurt corporations and the economy.  The left wants taxes on those nefarious corporations to go to the poor and underprivileged and is so likely to want to believe that global warming is a looming catastrophe that must be avoided at whatever cost to the rich corporations.  More than wanting to believe is the incentive to want to convince others.  During the Obama administration the U.S. Export-Import Bank issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount.  If Obama is afraid of global warming due to CO2 why did he do that that?  The reason is that he wants to make money and redistribute the wealth at the same time. 

The global warming issue is also tied to the general issue of protecting the environment.  The Left constantly has come up with excuses to stop development of energy resources with the argument that it is damaging to the environment.  The right sees the contribution to the economy of corporations as more important than if some fish can't make it upstream to spawn.

    The concept of helping the fish that can't spawn at the expense of the economy goes along with helping those who have less (the fish) at the expense of those who have more. 

The desire to give more money to the poor creates an incentive to believe that money should not be spent by the government on other programs such as the military.  That in turn creates the incentive to view the actions of the military as unnecessary or evil.  Combined with hatred of the corporation the incentive is created to see American wars as simply a product of corporations wanting to sell military hardware.  The desire to shift money from the military to the poor creates the incentive to rationalize that the threats to the U.S. can be dealt with by talking and negotiation and appeasement.  Obama for example believes that he can talk Iran into becoming a friendly nation.  It leads to the incentive to view those who the U.S. is defending as the guilty party who should be thrown to the wolves rather than defended with expensive weaponry.  The threat posed by Islam for example leads to the left wing wishful belief that all would be well, Islamist hostility would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply disappear.

It creates an incentive to view the world through the lens of moral equivalence.  If we are just as bad as they are or worse the reasoning goes than if we reduce our military strength we are less likely to do bad things that will make them hate us.

It creates an incentive to see threats as smaller than they actually are.  After 9/11 it occurred to the Bush administration that the idea of mutual assured destruction would not work with Muslims who are eager to kill themselves as long as they take down a lot of infidels at the same time.  It occurred to them that terrorists or radical Islamic nations armed with nuclear weapons might not worry about a nuclear counter attack and might actually use nuclear weapons on the U.S..  Newt Gingrich tries to warn anyone who will listen about the threat of nuclear attack and the need to defend against it.  On the other hand the Obama administration talks about protecting Iran's neighbors with a nuclear umbrella.  The assumptions underlying the nuclear umbrella is that the threat of a U.S. attack will deter Iran from using nuclear weapons on its neighbors.  This assumes that the Iranian leadership is less religiously fanatic than the 9/11 hijackers were.  It also ignores the fact that the Iranian leadership could use terrorist proxies to carry out nuclear attacks against the United States.  The left tends to minimize the threat.

    Once the poorer classes are seen as victims of society then those of them who are arrested are seen as victims of discrimination or circumstance and not responsible for their criminal behavior.  Giving them money is seen as a way to reduce their criminal behavior.  Here again there is an incentive to believe in moral equivalence.  If they are simply innocent victims of society than society should compensate them and society is just as bad if not worse than they are.

    One would expect that those who have concern for the poor do so because of concern for the weak.  One would expect such people to be against abortion because of concern for the fetus.  The left however supports abortion.  That suggests that the fundamental driving force of the left isn't concern for the vulnerable and the weak but a desire to take whatever one wants and a sense of entitlement.  According to that type of reasoning if the poor want money they are entitled to it if a woman wants to abort she is entitled as well. The fetus who can't vote is not entitled however.

Lyle Rossiter in his book The Liberal Mind wrote that:

the rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted form the fact that the people of western societies have irrationally demanded that governments take care of them

    Fidel Castro told Cubans that they could take down their pictures of Jesus because he would take care of them.  This helped him gain power.  He took care of them by oppressing them. 

 This could extend to the international arena.  If a group of people demand independence they are entitled to it and if they are violent they must be that way because they are oppressed.  Left wing support for Palestinian demands for statehood comes to mind.  It doesn't matter how many terrorist attacks the Palestinian Arabs launch against Israel the left sympathizes with them and thinks they should have yet another independent state.  When one considers how many states the Arabs already have and how much the areas they occupy dwarf the area of tiny Israel the distortion in this reasoning becomes blatantly obvious.

   The desire to be able to abort a pregnancy because of the inconvenience involved leads to a desire to justify such behavior.  It creates the incentive to see the embryo as just a mass of cells and not a living creature.  It creates the incentive to formulate the issue as one of the freedom of the mother to choose.  We all want freedom don't we?  It creates the incentive to argue that a baby born in poverty will have a bad life even though there are many well off people eager to adopt such children. 

    If one believes that one group of people is entitled the money of another group of people then one has the incentive to force the people with the money to give it to the people without the money.  That creates an incentive for liberals to be limit freedom and take control of the money of other people.  Lyle Rossiter in his book the Liberal mind wrote:

If for example, I become a government entitled welfare recipient and you are a taxpayer, we are no longer political equals.  The liberal politicians that I have voted for have passed laws that override your natural right to be let alone.  Under these laws you no longer have a right to refuse my demands for your money.  The state can now compel you to assume the burden of my welfare because I am now lawfully entitled to some portion of what used to belong to you alone.  Empowered by the liberal agenda's "compassion" for my needs and desires, I am politically your superior: I can see to it that you do as I wish and not as you wish...  The law now permits me, however indirectly, however deviously, to use you, exploit you and subjugate you for my purposes.  ... With the power of welfare and regulatory statues behind me, I can intrude forcibly into your life in violation of your sovereign right to live in freedom and in violation of your right, if you so choose, to have nothing whatever to do with me.  If you do not surrender to my demands, the government that takes care of me will punish you by imprisonment or fines or both. 

     Welfare is very dangerous because it leads to growing dependent populations that instead of being grateful to society feels that society owes them and that they have the right to force society to give to them.  It becomes especially dangerous when the burden is so great that society tries to limit welfare payments and can lead to riots and violence as those on welfare attempt to force society to continue and even increase payments to them.

While conservatives see the need for taxes they try and minimize those taxes and make the taxes as flat as possible.  Steve Forbes is famous for his idea of a flat tax.  Liberals try and tax the wealthy as heavily as possible.  An exception on the surface is Obama who supported tax cuts.  His stimulus plan however involves printing huge amounts of money which causes inflation and so takes money away from everyone.  In addition his package involved borrowing which takes money away from future children who will have to pay it back.  His stimulus plan gives that money to  welfare type programs so in effect he shifted the wealth from one group to another and got the votes of people who wanted less taxes in the bargain. 

    Lyle Rossiter in his book the Liberal Mind summed up the role of government this way:

With an incomparable record of flawed analysis, faulty solutions and destructive consequences, liberal government grandly proclaims itself indispensable and presumes to regulate and administer our lives from the business office to the bedroom.

   One problem with liberal policies is that they create a self perpetuating and growing dependent class.  When you give handouts people become depending on the handouts and will vote in the politicians who give them those handouts. 

     Left wing policies tend to shift a government toward authoritarianism since people don't want their wealth redistributed so to do so requires taking money away from people against their will.  The money has to pass through the government during redistribution which increases the governments power.

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