Self-composed

Time and again I keep spotting examples of how liberals function in politics on the emotions and whatever fits the moment rather than facts and principles.

Remember the election of 2004? To listen to the political liberal talking points at the time you’d think having served in Vietnam was the top qualifier for the office of the president. Mind you, Democrat John Kerry was in Vietnam about four months.

In 2004, military service of Democrat and Republican candidates for president was a political issue

President Bush was evil “because he avoided service in Vietnam.” Kerry dragged as many Vietnam vets as he could find on stage with him, and the liberal peanut gallery learned the term “chicken hawk” and John Kerry’s Democrat supporters regurgitated it at every opportunity.

Kerry Hams for the camera with Vietnam vets at a political event

Robert Poe wrote a tedious article for Salon.com where he was all over the liberal talking points at the time:

“The more veterans appear in political settings, the more neocons will find themselves facing the kinds of questions they’ve managed to dodge for most of their adult lives.

… If you believe that patriotism should be wholehearted, and should transcend politics and selfish concerns, what does it say about your patriotism that you didn’t volunteer for Vietnam? … Or, as a vet might be tempted to put it: If you’re such a great patriot, why didn’t you go fight like we did?

Bush and Co. have been enormously successful in avoiding such questions. We know that Dick Cheney famously “had other priorities,” but that’s no answer. What does the public know about John Ashcroft’s reasons for not serving in Vietnam? Richard Perle’s? Paul Wolfowitz’s? Not to mention all their comrades in Congress and the right-wing media. … The central question is not whether they did anything illegal to avoid military service. It is how they justified their avoidance in the first place.”

Doesn’t that just take you back? Throughout John Kerry’s entire presidential campaign if there were a microphone within shouting distance, you could bet he’d start yammering about serving in the Vietnam war, and the moonbats supporting him drowned him out with their echos.

Democrats and liberals loved to talk about John Kerry’s Vietnam experience when he was running for president

I just did a google search of The Daily Kos and Huffington Post for pages that mention “Kerry” and “Vietnam.”

2500 hits

3300 hit Huffington Post

Daily Kos: 2500 hits. Huffington Post: 3300 hits.

Pages upon pages where you find deep thinker “Kos” saying things like “While Kerry was taking incoming, Bush was playing “all-day water volleyball games” with “ambitious secretaries”.”
Needless to say, I could go on and on demonstrating how the left exploited Kerry’s four months in Vietnam for everything it was worth.

Now that John McCain is running for president in 2008, Vietnam experience is no longer a political issue

Since John McCain began running for president I can remember hearing him mention his service on one occasion – at the Saddleback forum. He’d been asked about the most gut-wrenching decision he’d
ever made and how faith had worked in his life.

John McCain while prisoner of war

What have liberals to say now about service in Vietnam? In response to the one occasion, where personal questions on things like faith were asked, where McCain described his experiences at the request of the moderator, former president Jimmy Carter said McCain is “milking every possible drop of advantage from his status as a POW.”

Kerry spent four months in Vietnam, McCain spent more than five years.

Kerry needed a band aid or a few stitches for his Purple Heart injuries – McCain needed surgery and still suffers from the resulting disabilities.

I’m not sure how often Kerry faced the enemy – McCain faced them every day and withstood torture.
Kerry got to go home on a technicality after a few flesh wounds, McCain refused the offer to leave the POW camp on principle.

Four years ago, to qualify as a patriot you had to have served in Vietnam, not just any military service would do. This election, that’s all gone – you get your taxes raised – that makes you a patriot.

Old news: Republicans think and do. Democrats feel and react.

The point to all this is this is what the left has to offer. Where conservatives are always strongest is when they are appealing to people’s common sense. The left appeals to emotion. Conservative Republicans try to get people thinking, liberals try to get people feeling. It doesn’t matter what they feel, as long as it makes them feel like putting liberals in power.

Double standards abound. How many times have you heard people criticize President Bush for his decades-old DUI? How sick did everyone get over seeing his record in the National Guard raked over the coals? Recall how detestable it was for Democrats that Dick Cheney had connections in the energy industry.

Democrat political strategy: if you can’t beat Republicans, smear them

This election, the Democrats have made Sarah Palin’s daughter’s boyfriend’s Myspace page an issue for national scrutiny. We’ve had to get to the bottom of whether Sarah Palin’s religious activities may have included speaking in tongues. The list goes on.

The same people making an issue of all those things condemn questions – even the mere mention of Obama’s 20-year associations with a mad man who cavorted with Louis Farrakhan in Libya visiting Muammar al-Gaddafi, said our country deserved 9/11, and cried “god damn America.” Off limits also are his choice of associates like the America-hating terrorist Bill Ayers. All the sudden things that were happening around the time George W. Bush served in the National Guard took place too long ago to matter.

Now that Cheney is on the way out, we are no longer allowed to be concerned about how associates like Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright might influence someone’s agenda. Andrew Wilkow made the point the other day: imagine if John McCain had a relationship with someone who had bombed an abortion clinic comparable to Obama’s relationship to Ayers.

Make damn sure when you refer to Barack Obama you use his name, but make doubly damn sure you don’t use his full name. It is ill-mannered to use his middle name. Ever heard a liberal of any import call for some decorum when discussing George Bush? Heard any of the things they’re calling Sarah Palin?

Democrats like Barack Obama value control not consistency, power not principle

If liberalism had an ideology that would sell – that people would embrace having thought it through, then liberals wouldn’t embarrass themselves with these double standards, the appeals to emotion, and the endless internal inconsistency and self contradictions that follow. If the media weren’t heavily biased the left would be called to account for their dishonesty and inconsistency.

What the left has is an agenda no one in their right mind wants and an insatiable appetite for power along with the support of the national media who agrees, at least implicitly, that rules of logic, facts, and decency are a small sacrifice in exchange for contol.