Sunday, March 19, 2006

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.

11 comments:

Poison Pero said...

Perfect example of the old saying: "It takes one to know one."

Ah, who cares......Let the Libs go after Bush. It'll get them no where.

How bout the Shockers. I told you they'd win today........Must be nice to return to the glory days of Antoine Carr and Cliff Levingston.

But that's it for them.....They're losing to NC.

Mark said...

More accurate to say, "It takes one to THINK they know one."

Should be an interesting match-up, Pero. WSU Coach Mark Turgeon coached under Roy Williams.

You left out Xavier McDaniel. He was on that glory team, too.

Eric said...

Uh... 1978 was NOT the Reagan administration. It was the CARTER administration.

...'head out of the sand,' and all that.

Thanx

Poison Pero said...

Clinton wasn't that bad??? Come on She.

You can't consider these golden accomplishments of the Clinton presidency: Giving North Korea nuclear reactors, China advanced weapons technology, sending our troops to Somalia for jack, and bombing the hell out of our dreaded enemy the Serbs.

I was in the Air Force during Clinton's presidency, and have many friends who are still in the military..........All of us would rather fight Bush's War, than the garbage Clinton sent us out for. At least now we're being sent out to fight a legitimate enemy.
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Also, Clinton was the luckiest SOB ever, because he took over a post-Cold War world, ran into the computer age and had a Republican Congress which didn't let him do much.
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Luckily, in this country the people have the opportunity to speak.....Not through polls but through the ballot.

If the people really don't want Republicans the 2006 and 2008 elections will show it........Or they will show the people do want Republicans.

Either way, it will be interesting.

tugboatcapn said...

Sheila, I have never said that there was anything wrong with foriegn Countries managing Ports, so it doesn't matter whether Clinton or Reagan was the President when the first ports were aquired by the Chinese.

My point still stands.

If there is a national Security problem with Ports being managed by foriegn entities, then Clinton did nothing to correct it, nad he even had a hand in arranging this latest disaster, by all accounts.

As to your "The truth is out there" hogwash, I would submit to you that if the truth is to be found, it is on a blog somewhere, not the Main Stream Media. (Fox News Included.)

My head is not in the sand, and neither is Mark's.

Truth is not subjective. It is not a matter of perspective.

It is or it isn't.

I'm actively searching for it, every day.

Anonymous said...

Mark,
Very good assessment of human nature. Keep up the good work.
Blessings
Timothy
PS Going on vacation for a week!

Dan Trabue said...

"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."

So then, by your logic, your supposition that the Dems are lacking moral standards means that you're lacking moral standards...?

Ya know, the notion that sometimes people don't trust others because the others have proven themselves untrustworthy is another totally logical assumption.

tugboatcapn said...

Pero, What I am afraid of is this.

I am not sure that the People really do want Republicans in the next two years.

I think that they (We) want CONSERVATIVES.

They are hard to find lately. (Sadly.)

Personally, I would gladly run to the polls and vote for Conservative Candidates in the next two Elections.

The problem is, we don't have any. All we have are Republicans and Democrats.

Both Parties are way too worried about what the Media thinks of them, so what we get is Democrats, and Democrat lites.

Conservatives win elections every time they run as Conservatives.

You'd think that this fact would sink in eventually...

tugboatcapn said...

And, No Dan.

Democrats are deathly afraid of Moral Judgements of any kind.

(This is why they hate the Religious Right so much.)

"Ya know, the notion that sometimes people don't trust others because the others have proven themselves untrustworthy is another totally logical assumption."

Exactly right.

Democrats have attempted (by hook or by crook...) to put the likes of John Kerry and Al Gore in the most powerful office in the World (even though they are both demonstrable lunatics), and have opposed every attempt by President Bush to insure that we stay ahead of Terrorism on U.S. Soil.

Democrats have more than proven that they cannot be trusted with power.

This is why we thinking Americans do not trust them.

Because they have proven themselves untrustworthy.

Thanks for making the point for me.

Dan Trabue said...

"Democrats are deathly afraid of Moral Judgements of any kind."

While no great fan of the Dems (I'm more of a Green guy myself), many, many millions of Dems have proved you wrong by our opposition to what we consider an immoral war. We all make moral judgements all the time, we just think that Bush's "morality" is an upside-down/backwards morality where torture is good, where lying is righteous, where bombing brings peace.

Many of us reject Bush out of hand as being anything but immoral.

And yes, Dems have proven they're not especially trustworthy. The only major party in the US to do worse are the Republicans.

At least, that's MY moral judgement.

Jim said...

Please demonstrate how Kerry and Gore are lunatics. One is a lunatic if one recognizes and speaks the truth? Is that it?

Gore or Kerry would have been twice the leader that Bush has been. Gore would never have been stupid enough to ignore the experience of most military and State Department veterans who warned against EXACTLY what has happened in Iraq. Under a Gore presidency we would not be raising our debt ceiling by nearly $1 Trillion.

Instead we have the presidency of "a simple screw-up, a small man in way over his head, a weak man who has succumbed under pressure to megalomania, an incompetent."