Liberal See, Liberal Do

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion: What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us, An’ ev’n devotion!" ~ Robert Burns

I was going to discuss this topic anyway, and then I read, over at Daffy’s place, my good friend Tug’s assessment. Sometimes it’s downright frightening how much alike we think.

Tug said, “One reason that America, and the Left especially, are so willing to believe that the President would be willing to sell America off to the highest bidder is because of the example that the former President Billy Bob Clinton set.

He let the Chinese buy ports, both on the Left coast, and at both ends of the Panama Canal, and he sold missile technology to the Chinese which allowed them to construct Nuclear Missiles capable of striking the American homeland.

Watch very carefully.

EVERYTHING THAT THE LEFT ACCUSES PRESIDENT BUSH OF DOING, BILL CLINTON DID, AND THEN SOME.

He used the IRS and the Justice Department to illegally spy on his political enemies.

He put cronies and former business partners in charge of Government agencies.

He lied to the American public.

He started Wars on foreign soil for purely personal reasons.

He took campaign donations from inappropriate sources.

He sold his Presidential influence. (To the highest bidder.)

If you want to see what your opponent is capable of, just watch what he accuses YOU of.”

Now, I’m no psychologist or sociologist, but I have observed throughout my 54 years on planet Earth, that people generally expect others to think and behave the way that they themselves do. What I mean by that is we all tend to measure the actions of others by whatever standard we possess ourselves. For instance, if I tend to be distrustful of people, I expect others to be distrustful, also. If I immediately like people, I expect others to immediately like me, too.

It is simply human nature.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I believe I can offer a pretty good example:

When I lived with my family in Kansas City, Kansas, we owned our own home for a while. It was a very nice home for the price but it was in a less than favorable location. Our home was broken into several times. One of those times, I caught the perpetrator in my house, and held him until the police arrived. But, the damage had been done in a previous robbery. We had $1,000 deductible insurance and the total losses were approximately $1,000.00. So, we were out a television set, and the best stereo I ever had, and my daughter had lost some cash, that she had earned working at Cracker Barrel.

Still, having been raised in a Christian home, I trusted people, overall.

Then, I lost my job, and it took a while before I finally found another one, and consequently, we lost the house. Then we had to either move into the projects or under a bridge somewhere.

We chose the projects.

It was while we were living in the ghetto that my observations of human behavior was modified into a hypothesis, to wit:

I began to notice that almost all of my neighbors removed the license tag from it’s place on the back bumper to inside of the car, facing out the back window. Why? Because they didn’t want their tag stolen.

What made them think someone might steal their tag?

Simple. If they had found themselves in a position where they needed a tag and couldn’t afford to go purchase one right away, they thought nothing of stealing a tag from someone else’s car themselves. If they would do it, they reason, so would everyone else. Generally speaking, they were almost all extremely distrustful of one another. Not that there is anything wrong with that attitude, given the environment in which it is fostered. It is, as I stated, human nature to adapt to one’s environment accordingly.

In contrast, I had grown up in a home in which I had been taught that stealing is wrong. It never occurred to me that someone might steal my tag. On the contrary, I reasoned, because stealing is wrong, no one would attempt the theft of my tag.

I wouldn’t do it, so others wouldn’t either.

I actually had my tag stolen once, and I immediately contacted the police department, filled out the appropriate reports, and paid for a replacement tag. And then placed it in it’s proper spot on the back bumper. Still believing in the honesty of people.

Naïve?

Yes. But that is human nature. We measure the actions of others by our own standards of behavior.

Which brings us back to Tug’s assessment of the Democratic mindset.

They keep talking about President Bush committing high crimes and/or misdemeanors, and about impeachment or censure. They say he is unequivocally guilty. Yet, they have no concrete evidence of any wrongdoing.

In some cases, they even mischaracterize the alleged “crimes”. They keep calling the NSA surveillance program “Domestic surveillance”, for instance. Of course, it is not that at all, and they are fully aware of that fact. They just choose to use semantics to intentionally misconstrue what the program really does, in a calculated effort to misinform the mostly naïve sector of American people.

And it’s not hard to trace this mindset back to it’s origin.

Bill Clinton committed high crimes and misdemeanors while in office. That fact is not in dispute. Democrats equate what they allege Bush has done with what Clinton really did.

They say, for instance, that Bush lied about the reason for invading Iraq, and while there have been charges alleging that the intelligence was wrong, there is no evidence that it was, or that he intentionally lied to the American people. At worse, we could concede that he may have been mistaken, but there is no evidence that he lied.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Clinton lied, both to the American people, when he stood before the nation and looked into the cameras and said, with a straight face, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky”, and when he made the same statement in front of a Grand Jury, which constitutes perjury by all definitions, especially legal.

So, when the Democrats accuse Republicans of deception and malfeasance, etc, it is only because they measure them with the same standards, or lack of standards that they themselves possess.

It is human nature, but it is still inexcusable.