One of the despairing criticisms that is sometimes leveled at us and other right-wing blogs is that we are preaching to the choir, living in an echo chamber, etc., and that we have no effect on the larger world outside our own parochial corner of the blogosphere.
Rier’s email indicates that this is not entirely true. With his permission, the entire text is posted below:
Baron and Dymphna:- - - - - - - - -
I am a Canadian viewer who for the vast majority of my voting life (nearly 30 years now) has voted consistently on the Left. Nonetheless I have tremendously enjoyed your website because I have come to agree, especially in the last couple of years (although the background of my “conversion” goes back over many years), with many of the criticisms that you and other conservatives make of things like immigration policy and our governments’ inadequate responses to Islam and its Jihad against the world. I find the present Left in my own country and around the world deceitful and treacherous in attempting to deny, cover up, or simply ignore these issues.
Undoubtedly I do not always agree with your perspective — though I probably do more often than not these days — but I commend you and other conservatives for at least being willing to state the obvious. For that reason I was heartened to see the Social Democrats defeated in Sweden defeated a couple of years ago, and I have concluded that in the upcoming Canadian federal election I will be voting for the Conservative party.
I think that a good long period of Conservative majority rule in this country — and the re-election of the Republicans in the U.S. and the Right elsewhere in the West — may be the only thing that can reset the political spectrum by forcing the Left to reconsider its pathological policies. I mention all of this as a means of encouragement, as you, and other bloggers tackling these issues, may be having an influence in places where you don’t always expect to.
Regarding your own current election campaign in the States, a little while ago I watched some CNN analysis of the Friday evening presidential debate, in which someone (perhaps posing as an expert in this field but maybe just some reporter — sorry I have to be so short on specifics as I didn’t consider the important of these details until long after the fact) used analysis of body language and facial expressions to critique the performance of the candidates. Listening to this guy made my blood boil! His conclusions seemed highly questionable at best as far as I could see — at times clearly ridiculous, in fact — and definitely biased against McCain.
The commenter was using things like the set of McCain’s eyes when he was smiling to suggest that McCain was suppressing anger when that was clearly far from evident, and at one point the commenter accused McCain of “showing disdain” for Obama.
CNN portrays the two candidates and in their desperation to find whatever evidence that they can (sound or not) to discredit McCain and promote Obama. I note that in making his point about his vision of negotiations with Iran he referred angrily to McCain’s interpretation of his policy using the term “ridiculous”. This was the angriest language that I had noticed anywhere in the debate to that point. And again, CNN did not seem to comment on this surliness on the part of Obama, but only on McCain’s, regardless of how desperately they had to read things into his “body language” to pull it off.
Similar conclusions were being drawn about Sarah Palin based on (if I recall correctly) the tautness of the facial muscles around her lips. Ironic, isn’t it, considering that most liberals would probably condemn that kind of “behavioural profiling” as an “unjust intrusion on privacy” and tantamount to “police state” tactics?
CNN, and possibly other left-wing liberal MSM sources, seem to be trying dishonestly to use their reporting function to skew the real story — and not, I think, doing a very good job at it, I must say, assuming that viewers are observant — but it does concern me that gullible persons among the American electorate may fall for it.
I hope that American audiences will find ways to hold them accountable and work to destroy the “edge” that they are trying to give to the Obama campaign. To that end I have written this in the hope that I can alert you and, through you, others of like mind to something that hopefully the conservative blogosphere can respond to.
— Rier
10 comments:
"Rier" is aware of the fact that, what I as an American, but poorly under-represented in the populus as an ultimate reality understands, that the MSM is totally in the tank for Obama.
Just today, one of the most egregious examples of media bias in the US MSM came to light.
Gwen Ifill, the selected non-partisan "moderator" of the sole US VP debate has a genuinely pro-Obama book slated for a January 2009 release, in actuality, the next Presidential inauguration day.
Conflict of interest only scrathes the surface here in my estimation.
At this point, I commiserate even further (since I always have historically) with Europe's plight.
The fact of the matter is simple. I see no difference at this point in the MSM of America than I do with the government run, pure propoganda, rhetoric of Venezuela, than I do with the once mighty US.
Sad but true.
Link below:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/30/a-debate-%E2%80%9Cmoderator%E2%80%9D-in-the-tank-for-obama/
The leftists always focus on psychobabble nonsence when they get into a tight corner and cant explain themselves out. Hence focusing on misinterpreted body-language.
Oh yes please note, most South Africans are extremely in favour of Obama. The media going as far as to misinterpret McCain. And I came hear and read differently. Thanks for the other side of the coin. The third side is reserved for my view.
Rier's story is pretty much my story as well. I, too, was a long term left voter. I've been voting for our socialist party ever since my first election (some 16 or so years ago). But not anymore. I've come to the conclusion that our socialist party (together with the one party that is supposed to be conservative) has been working against the people. 2006 we had general elections, the socialists had a little majority over the conservatives. Then, the leader of the social party broke EVERY single promise he had made during the campaign and simply laid himself on the floor during coalition negotiations with the conservatives, completely bent to their will... and only to be chancellor.
The coalition held not even 2 years. Now we had general elections last Sunday. I decided to vote against the socialists and their minions. I dared to vote what is called "right wing extremists" in Europe these days. Both big parties, the socialists and the conservatives, got a good spanking (the extremely leftist Green party (who wants to let everyone, who wants us to hide illegal aliens from the police) as well), and suffered major losses.
Then, shortly after it, the mayor of Vienna, where I live right now, who's a socialist, went on a stage and screamed murder at all those who dared to be pissed off with the politics by the socialists (and thus voted against them). He called us "idiots" and "shit" and called for a new fight against, what he called, "right wing populism and extremism".
Needless to say that, with this action, mayor Häupl just lost my vote in the next elections in Vienna. I'm not going to vote for someone like that.
The international Left will not accept its being voted out of power. In Europe this problem has been 'solved' by a stealth dismantling of democracy, by the simple expedient of having 90% of laws in EU states being drafted by the unelected, unaccountable, unremovable Council of Europe in Brussels, followed by rubber stamp passage in the EP. National legislatures in Europe are just window-dressing now. There is zero reason for their existence. Thus, democratic accountability has been removed, which was always the Left's objective.
The Left in America wants the same authoritarian control. If Obama is elected, this may very be the penultimate election in the US. The Democrats will simply find a way to remain in power 'for the good of the country'. This will be Obama's hidden agenda. The Left is dismantling democratic processes all over the world. At this stage it's an Islamosocialist axis, providing much-needed cover for Islamists. In the future this axis within will work to further the interests of other authoritarian (Fascist, in fact) states like China and Russia. Already the only criticism of these two states is by conservatives. Obama is the seminal catalyst for a profound deterioration in American democracy, all supported and advanced by the media, Hollywood, and academia. We live in the waning days of the western democratic tradition.
While I am happy about Rier and Takakaze's conversion ( I could only hope for more) I must confess it still leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Combined they have 46 years of supporting disastrous parties and policies which has put us where we are. Why oh why does it take things to get so bad before people see clearly? sorry, but recent converts always get under my skin a little.
Spackle:
“Why oh why does it take things to get so bad before people see clearly?”
Perhaps because when things are not particulary bad the issues are not apparent. Keep in mind that hindsight is always 20/20. Those who, 46 years ago (to use a number you may recall) championed the introduction of Universal Health Care Insurance in order to ensure that those in need of health care in Canada could afford it - something that private medical insurers in Canada had failed to do - could never have foreseen any ties to an agenda, decades later, of mass migration, religious accomodation and Sharia law. One would have needed a very powerful crystal ball indeed to see that coming, and frankly I still don’t see any necessary connection between those issues.
Although I do think that its fair to hold the Left more blameworthy for the rot in our culture and the threats we face within because of its insistent polices of political correctness and multicultural fantasizing, these policies did not exist at that time so it was not possible to envision the damage they would cause today and, in any case, not all of the policies that have put us where we are today are those of the Left. To use an example called to mind by some issues in today’s GOV posting on the Scottish National Party, the internationalism of the Labour movement is mirrored by the internationalization of Capital, which preceded it. If you’ve read Bat Ye’or’s book “Eurabia” you know, for example, that the pursuit of cheap oil that was at the root of opening Europe’s borders to Arab immigration and influence in the late 60s and early 70s, and has been a major policy objective of the Bush administration - and the same could be said of the pursuit of cheap labour that accounts for the migration of so many blue collar jobs from advanced Western nations (including the U.S.) to the Third World are not the preoccupation of the Left but of players on the Right, which has its own sins to account for in many of the resulting evils - including Islamicization. Please consider the recent events at Tyson Foods and the background to that situation.
I‘ll split the difference with you on the matter of my own culpability for today‘s crises. Your comment leaves me with the impression that you are incorrectly assuming that the Left is monolithic. I point out that the Left, like the Right, covers an enormous spectrum of thought and ideas ranging from the moderate and centrist to the most extreme. The policies and principles that I supported over the years - and I was always right out in the open about this in discussion with other members of the party I supported - were moderate, oriented toward very modest and limited goals that respected the fundamentals of the free market and national sovereignty, and prompted by an intention to remain anchored to the center and in constructive and friendly dialogue with the moderate and sensible Right, and the values championed by its adherents. My party is another story. It has become clear that it has not been successfully held by me and other like minded persons to a moderate and sensible course. Hence my abandonment of it for the Conservative alternative.
Like you, I could easily wish that I had awoken to the sad reality of these things sooner than I did. Believe me, it would have saved me much aggravation and heartache. But I think it important that we avoid wasting time pointing the finger of blame. We have important matters to discuss in the national interests of our respective countries, and the Left and the Right alike need to awaken more frankly to these and begin coming to agreement about what is to be done about them, and working together to resolve them. I hope that my own movement to the Right will, in its own small way, help to provide some impetus for that kind of action.
Rier-
"But I think it important that we avoid wasting time pointing the finger of blame."
I agree. I agree somewhat that some things could not be foreseen quite clearly. But the philosophy that you supported for 30 years was rotted to begin with. And all the signs were there as to where it would all lead. One only had to look across the Atlantic to see where it would go. That was clear to most on the right from the very beginning. Otherwise there would be no right. Granted, according to you you tried to move that philosophy but were unsuccessful. I just wish you came to your awakening 25 years earlier. As someone who voted for Reagan when he turned 18 it just rings a little hollow.
I am not trying to insult of belittle you. And I am in no way way trying to claim that I am a "purist" whose political thought has always been the same and perfect. Just that my foundations were always there. Lets put it this way. Think back to when you were at your most ardent leftist thought. Then pretend a Conservative individual (for 30 years) embraced the left and discarded all his old ideals. I have a feeling you would feel the same. Believe me. I dont lose sleep over recent converts. It just irks me a little.
Spackle:
Thanks for your response. Don't worry about making me feel belittled, because I don't regard it that way at all - I don't take any of this personally. In fact (LOL) I understand very well how you feel as someone who has been, in many ways, fighting the good fight from the beginning, and I take it all in stride. I’m not sure that the thirty years of rottenness that you mention is entirely accurate though. It seems to me that until much more recently than that, Sweden, the paradigm of Social Democracy, has continued to be widely praised for providing a “third way” between communism and capitalism, and it has only been in about the last decade or so that the most evident cracks in that system have begun to appear. Of course, I know that there have been criticisms of Sweden's system for many, many years - probably going back as far as the earliest days of the Social Democrats' governance of the place - but what I think you need to consider about that is that this has been regarded by most of the world as a mainly American phenomenon based predominantly on a peculiar cultural aversion to government - and downright hostile suspicion of it - that is more or less unique to the U.S. Moreover, I know, from a conversation I had very recently with someone who went there to attend a friend’s wedding, that if one remains unaware of the criminality in places like Malmo that we get our information about thanks to sources like this site, it is still possible today to visit Sweden and come away with the impression that the place is some sort of paradise. I did what I could on the spot to bring her up to speed about the social and economic strains Sweden is under, and the activities of militant Muslims there and elsewhere in Europe, but I could tell that that was the first she’d heard of any of this.
You mention Ronald Reagan. Now, there's a figure around whom we could have some very interesting discussion. Reagan is someone who, with hindsight, I have come to admire a great deal. I think there were two things that made him, in his day, such a lightning rod for the Left. There has always been a large swath of moderates on the Left who were generally supportive of Reagan’s goal of containing Communism. In fact there were some influential Social Democrats in the West, such as David Lewis, the leader for several years in the early 70s of the NDP, traditionally Canada’s third party and the one that I wasted so much of my life on, as well as the Prime Minister of the UK at that time under the Labor Party, Harold Wilson, who even supported U.S. goals in Vietnam, accepting that, in principle at least, that war was necessary and justified. That was, of course, a very unpopular position within their respective parties at that time, but I think the subsequent history of Vietnam and the region in general vindicate it. Much of this was owing to the fact that many of these leftists, as in the case of Lewis, a Polish Jewish immigrant, had personally experienced -and fled - the appalling violence and repression that the Bolsheviks brought about in Russia, or were friends or political collaborators with those who had, and so they knew from direct experience that Communism and other hardened forms of revolutionary Socialism provided no answer to the social and economic problems they were trying to remedy. And I’m afraid that the passing of that generation of Social Democrats in the West may have, in diminishing the force of the historical memory of those times, which may be why the Left today is being taken over by its worst elements.
But the first problem that they saw with Reagan’s approach was that his strategy of challenging Soviet power with a predominantly military policy centred on a massive buildup of arms, including a nuclear hairtrigger, put the world at enormous risk of accidental nuclear war. The second was that they regarded his faith in the free market as a bit naïve and one-sided in that it seemed to effectively ignore the need to have some measures in place to alleviate the harsh edges that capitalism sometimes creates. On the first point at least (and I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I reject the free market or capitalism, since I freely admit that is, without doubt, the greatest instrument for the creation of wealth and the improvement of the quality of human life in spite of needing a few controls to guard against exploitation of the environment and of the poorer classes that it has sometimes been caught up in, but I don‘t want to dwell on that here) while I think that their wish for some caution in the matter was reasonable, there is no doubt that Reagan’s strategy was a brilliant success, that there are important lessons to be learned from it, and that it was a grievous moral and political mistake for the Left in the West to put itself in the position of being a wedge between the Evil Empire and the U.S., especially given Europe’s unwillingness to maintain its own conventional defence at levels adequate to deter the threat against the Continent that the Soviet Union constituted at that time. Sometimes a mistake though can help one learn a lesson better than one would have otherwise. Having learned the lesson only too well, I can say that I will not repeat the mistake of my youth. So if I had the opportunity, I would vote for McCain for the presidency precisely because I am convinced that he is the one who is more likely to find the policies that will help protect America - and hopefully the rest of the free world - from Islamic Jihad.
I do think that there are many honest people in today’s Left who continue, as they did in earlier years, to mean well, but most of them still naively fail to recognize that the elites who control the leadership and the policies of their parties are completely corrupt and compromised. My own hope - and my own embrace of the Conservative Party of Canada is meant to help in its own infinitesimal way to contribute to this - is that the present parties and ideological program of the Left in the West will collapse through massive electoral defeat, prompting the Left to redesign itself beginning from scratch - entirely new parties, entirely new leaders and entirely new ideologies, programs and policies. This, however, is going to be some time in coming. I hope you’ll take some time to watch our upcoming election, as I’ve been watching yours. If you do, you’ll see that, unfortunately, a number of polls indicate that the NDP may be in a position to replace the Liberals as the Official Opposition, which would make them, essentially, a potential government in waiting if the Conservatives are defeated at some point in the future. There’s the possibility that the Conservatives might form a majority government, which would mean that they’d be able to govern relatively unhindered for four years, but that’s quite a long shot at the moment, and even if they do, it will make no appreciable difference if they follow an incremental approach to Conservativism such as the new Swedish government has, rather than standing up squarely against multicultural idiocy, wide open immigration - an ongoing flaw in McCain’s policy - and suicidal cultural relativism. And, unfortunately, I‘m even less optimistic about McCain’s prospects at this point. So we’re both going to have to be in this for the long haul. Good luck to both of us.
I have to say that Reagan was the last non-psychopath to run as a U.S. presidential candidate for either of the two major political parties, and he will most likely prove to be the last such candidate that the U.S. will ever have.
Should the U.S. break apart after the fashion of the former Soviet Union, some state or region may have an honest election at some time in the future, with at least one decent human being with a conscience in the running. Maybe. But I can just about guarantee you that the U.S. as a whole never will.
Since the end of Reagan's presidency, the U.S. primary election/party caucus system has proven itself one hundred percent efficient at weeding out anyone other than psychopaths and/or their immediate stooges.
It amazes me that everybody worries so much about the 2008 presidential election being stolen or cancelled. It's too late to make any difference, given that the general election outcome has been rendered irrelevant and moot by the fact that all candidates who were not planning to sell out the American people have already been eliminated.
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