How Progressives Work

Image by Zooomabooma via Flickr

By Derek Hunter at Townhall

As hype around the general election ramps up, it looks like progressives again will do anything to hold on to power and advance their agenda. Events this week gave us a peek behind the curtain into the mind of the honest, “tolerant” class and exposed how they work. Let’s take a look.

The Shell Game

One thing about political lefties: They assume the general public is even dumber than their ideas. Surveys repeatedly show Americans are not liberal, that the word evokes a negative reaction from a large percentage of people.

So what do they do? They start calling themselves “progressives” and continue to push the exact same left-wing, anti-liberty agenda people have roundly rejected in the past. But a turd sandwich agenda with a fancy wrapper and a focus-grouped name (one whose history is fully and devastatingly exposed by Jonah Goldberg in his best-selling Liberal Fascism) won’t make a turd sandwich any more palatable. That’s why they have to mislead and obfuscate about who they are, what they’re doing and why.

This week, the day after asking for another trillion dollars in spending, President Obama gave a speech about how he wants to shrink government. His plan to combine several departments within the Commerce Department, shrink the federal work force by about 1,000 and save an estimated $3 billion over 10 years, was hailed as “bold” by progressives and an example of how seriously he takes our current fiscal mess.

They were counting on, and got, compliance by the media in not reporting that this “bold initiative” save approximately 3/4 of one day’s worth of the deficit Obama has racked up ($4 billion). That means that if the president’s plan were enacted, by 6 p.m. today, the federal government will have added the same amount of debt as this “bold” plan saves over 10 years.

Progressives play a constant game of three-card monte with their intentions, couching their goals in sad, worst-case scenarios presented as the norm, always with accompanying anecdotes about those who suffer or will suffer without some expansion of government.

They will raise and spend millions to publicize the suffering of one person from wealthy donors who wouldn’t give a dime directly to aid the person being exploited. It’s always the same – their big government, one-size-fits-all solution is always the only way to address some problem that never will confront the vast majority of Americans.

You’ll hear plenty of examples of these in President Obama’s State of the Campaign, er, Union address later this month.

The Hypocrisy

Aside from exploiting the less fortunate, Progressives also are hypocrites – they have to be. There’s no way Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann or any of the media elites who routinely go on TV to lament “greed” would dare live the lives they seek to impose on others.

There are no negative consequences to progressive’s hypocrisy. They rail against capitalism and wealth by engaging in, ahem, capitalism to amass wealth. Michael Moore doesn’t work for free – or even for a reasonable price.

This embrace of hypocrisy allows Democrat National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to decry the incivility of political discourse one minute and imply the Tea Party is responsible for the tragic shootings last year in Tucson the next.

It allows President Obama to give a speech that complains about Republicans’ unwillingness to work with him one minute, then create unconstitutional powers to bypass Congress and claim Republicans want to poison the air and water and starve children and the elderly the next.

When you’re neither bound by reality nor held accountable for your words and actions by your bedfellows in the media, there become simply no limits on what you can seek to impose on others.

The Silencing

Progressives will exploit anything and anyone to advance their agenda. Individuals are props; groupthink rules.

This week a video of Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters surfaced. Why they did it, I have no idea. Actually, I imagine it has something to do with that odd less-than-friendly feeling you get toward someone who has killed your friends and tried to kill you. I have had a tiny bit of experience with this. Years ago, someone pointed a gun at me from a car driving through a gas station in Detroit. Even though this person didn’t shoot, I continue to have these less-than-friendly feelings. I can’t imagine how I would feel if they did shoot and I did survive.

Should these Marines have done this? No. Is it the moral equivalent of harboring those who murdered 3,000 civilians in our country, filmed themselves beheading prisoners or strapping bombs to children and sending them into crowds? Absolutely not. But don’t tell that to progressives.

Progressives saw an opportunity to attack the military and those who support them, and they couldn’t resist.

My friend, Dana Loesch, after having had enough of the Left’s attacks on the military over this, took to her radio show and said, “Now we have a bunch of progressives who are talking smack about our military because there were Marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses. Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from countless active duty military members who can’t say so publicly and by veteran and Congressman Allen West, R-Fla., who said, “Unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth. War is hell.”

Keith Olbermann, Media Matters and just about every fascistic progressive organization jumped on Dana’s comments in the hope of getting her fired from CNN. These leftists, who defend using tax dollars to pay someone to dip a crucifix in urine and call it art, claim freedom of speech as sacred, as long as you agree with them. But they failed miserably on this one as CNN backed up Dana’s right to her own opinion.

But it’s the latest example of people who will fight to defend someone’s right to urinate on the U.S. flag, unless they’ve set it on fire, or ignore an Occupy Wall Street mutant defecating on a police car because they agree with them but will actively seek to silence anyone who dare speak something with which they disagree. It’s the progressive way.

The End

Progressives won’t tell you their true intentions because they can’t. They know how unpopular they are. For a group who continually espouses “democracy” as a virtue, they routinely ignore the clear will of the majority. It’s “agenda über alles” for them, period.

But that agenda doesn’t apply to them. They’re the smart ones, our betters. With only positive consequences for hypocrisy, and so many lemmings willing to give them millions of their dollars to tell them how evil money is, it pays to be a hypocrite.

With an army of vacuum-headed, non-thinking flying monkeys waiting for attack orders at their disposal, progressives have become their own modern Stasi – relentlessly harassing those with whom they disagree. Opposing ideas aren’t engaged. Those who hold them are to be personally destroyed.

The more they are rejected the more militant they become, so as the election approaches expect to see more anger, more hatred, more hypocrisy, more personal attacks and all the other things for which these “tolerant” progressives are known.