Day: January 15, 2011

Don’t you just hate it when they talk that way?

Official presidential portrait of Barack Obama...
He gave permission.

Here’s a new blog — Climate of Hate — dedicated to the proposition that hate lives! in political discourse in the U.S., especially on the left.

Clever indeed, and a blog whose time has come.

Seeing it, I am reminded of what I heard at a meeting of Oak Park leftists at the library in September of 2009, on the day after Obama had said, “The time for games [had] passed” in the matter of health care legislation in a speech to Congress.

“He gave us permission to hate the insurance industry,” said a Democratic Socialist, former Beye School parent (when my wife & I were Beye parents), former neighbor (a block over), who was busy at the time trying (without success) to get the village to enforce a “living wage” for its employees and employees of all who do business with or have received a subsidy from the village.

I’d been writing for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF, and his wife, also there to plan events etc., asked if I would be writing it in the Journal.  (I wouldn’t, having resigned as columnist.)  She clearly did not relish the idea, but he just wanted to be sure he meant health and not auto, etc. insurance.  In fact, he was looking pretty pleased with having said it in my hearing.

And nobody else at the meeting (of 10 or so) seemed to object to his saying that, though not all would have said it.  A fellow Dem Socialist (of America) seemed equally pleased, however.

Permission to hate, given by the president.  What do you know about that?

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Jesus saves

Jesus at the house of the Pharisean, by Jacopo...
At a pharisee's house, by Tintoretto

Forgiveness double-header today.  From Hebrews 4:

For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
So let us confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.

And Mark 2:

Some scribes who were Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with sinners
and tax collectors and said to his disciples,
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus heard this and said to them,
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”  (Italics added)

Tax collectors bought the position, then took tax revenue to cover their cost and make a profit.  So there you were, dealing with a middle man reporting to no one.  To sit with these people was to be one of them.  Jesus had something else in mind.  Good for him and good for us.

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Two colors of tyranny

Flag of the National Fascist Party of Italy. F...
Italian fascists' ties that bound

Reference to Yves Simon by Eugene Kennedy led me to this:

Communism and national socialism have come to resemble each other in so many respects that their historical diversity and their lasting opposition arouse wonder. In spite of common features that are profound and increasingly obvious, they prove altogether repugnant to effecting any kind of merger.

The task of fighting them would be greatly eased if followers, actual and potential, were led to believe that one system, i.e., the one which appeals to them, is substantially identical with the other, i.e., the one which they hate; but such identification never was very successful as a polemical instrument.

Conservatives in the 1930’s were given a fair chance to understand that naziism was but brown bolshevism;{1} yet many of them helped the Nazis. Today it seems that it should be easy for all concerned to recognize in communism the very features that they hated most in naziism; but not all do.

It’s from Simon’s Philosophy Of Democratic Government (Amazon). You can read it online here.

The Kennedy reference is to his and his wife Sara Charles’s 1997 book, Authority: The Most Misunderstood Idea in America, which I have even now waiting for me at the OP library.

As for the two-colors business, I wrote about liberalism as fascism for the Wed. Journal of OP&RF late in the ’08 campaign.  This horrified leftist Oak Parkers, fascism being a word the left reserves for its enemies.

I argued that excessive governmental power (authority) was common to fascism and, for that matter, socialism.  Will have to stay with Y. Simon et al. to see to what extent they back me up.  As Bob McClory says in his comment below, with “perhaps even enlightenment” for me.

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