if we just call them ALL anti-American, then we cover the basis

the degree of their leftism or liberalism is irrelevant

whats important is that they are a cancer on sciety

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
if we just call them ALL anti-American, then we cover the basis

the degree of their leftism or liberalism is irrelevant

I see. So, in your opinion, anybody who dares not adhere to your belief system is, ipso facto, anti-American and a cancer on society. Is that right?

quote:

Originally posted by Modern Day Savage:

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
And none of that is what it means to be a classic liberal, in the 19th century sense. "Liberal" has come to mean leftist/socialist/progressive which leaves us no good term for what the word liberal used to mean. I prefer to call them progressives or leftists - to me it is a more accurate descriptor.

Fair point...and you are correct that when the term Liberal is used today it isn't used in the classical liberatarian sense that it once was. I'm always resentful when the original meaning of words is co-opted to mean something else, as I believe that words have meaning and definitions should be clearly understood. I believe we've had previous discussions on this topic.

Just as there are wings on the Right, I believe it's reasonable to distinguish between the wings on the Left. Liberals are the less extreme, more practical, civil, and principalled group of the Left...again, not that I agree with their views, only that I appreciate their more measured approach.

Leftists have become so radicalized that the 'liberal' camouflage doesn't fit anymore. I think that is why we see the #WalkAway movement back to simple liberalism which is to the left of libertarianism as I understand it. Leftism today has returned to it's fascistic totalitarian, potentially genocidal ways we've seen too often historically. It is a genie that will not stay in the bottle of civility for very long.

Alan Dershowitz Is Enjoying This

CHILMARK, Mass. — This is what McCarthyism evidently looks like on Martha’s Vineyard.

Alan Dershowitz is holding court on the front porch of the Chilmark General Store, talking to old friends and complete strangers, nearly all of whom stop to tell him, between sips of their iced coffee, to keep doing what he’s doing. A young girl compliments his T-shirt (“Kids and Guns Don’t Mix”). His cellphone buzzes constantly, mostly with calls from reporters. “Inside Edition,” the tabloid-style newsmagazine show, wants an interview. So does The New Yorker.

I did, too. I had called Dershowitz on Tuesday to tell him I was going to be on the island for a long-planned vacation, and I suggested we get together to talk about the stir he kicked up when he wrote, in a column for The Hill, he had been subject to McCarthy-like shunning tactics from people in his Vineyard social circles. For some of them, his aggressive questioning of the legitimacy of the special counsel investigation into President Donald Trump was indefensible and unforgivable.

He said I should come over to his house. I said I’d rather meet somewhere more public. I wanted to see firsthand how the Harvard University law professor emeritus who helped acquit O.J. Simpson of murder charges — with minimal apparent damage to his social or professional reputation — was handling the backlash to what some believe is his gravest offense: defending Trump.

“I’m enjoying this,” he told me. “It’s a red badge of courage.”

He said he believes political debate today has essentially degenerated into a fight over one question: Are you for or against Trump? “We live in a Red Sox/Yankees world,” he said. “And you have to pick a team.”

But whether there is any room for nuance in a conversation about one of the least nuanced presidents of our time seems unlikely — at least on Martha’s Vineyard. The local library, Dershowitz said, told him they can’t find the time for him to give his regular summer talk this year. And Thursday, a local paper, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, published the results of an informal poll that asked readers if they would invite “Dersh,” as he is known to friends, to dinner. Thirty-seven percent said they would; 63 percent said no.

The following is an edited and condensed version of our hourlong interview.

Q: You’re no stranger to defending people who are unpopular. Is this actually worse than when you defended O.J. Simpson?

A: Of course. Or Claus von Bulow or Leona Helmsley or Michael Milken or Mike Tyson. This is much worse than all that, because in those cases people were critical of me, but they were prepared to discuss it. They were prepared to have a dialogue. Here, the people that I’m objecting to want to stop the dialogue. They don’t want to have the conversation. It will upset people at the dinner party or on the porch. This is like safe spaces in colleges.

Q: Your issue on the island is tied into something broader. It’s this belief that one’s personal feelings are paramount. If you are offended, like the people who worked at the restaurant where Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave, that is paramount to her right to eat in that establishment. Is that the world we live in now with Trump as president?

A: Today the passions are so strong that if I do anything that is perceived as helping Donald Trump, I am an evil conspirator. I go back to the 1950s, when I was one of the few people at Brooklyn College standing up and defending the right of communists to speak and to teach. I hated communism. They would say, “You can’t defend communists. They wouldn’t defend your rights. They would take away your civil liberties.”

And that’s absolutely true. Every generation I’ve lived through, there has been an excuse for taking away civil liberties. “Trump is going to destroy the country; you can’t defend his civil liberties.” Anything you do to help this man is villainy.

Q: You reject the label “Trump supporter,” don’t you?

A: Absolutely. I’m a Hillary Clinton liberal Democrat who’s trying hard to restore Congress to the Democrats, who will help finance Democratic candidates all over the country. I’m a liberal Democrat. I haven’t changed one iota in 50 years. I am not a Trump supporter. I’m a supporter of civil liberties. Calling me a Trump supporter is like calling me a communist supporter in the 1950s. I was not a communist supporter. I defended the communists’ right to speak and to teach.

Q: And here, you’re defending Trump’s right to …

A: To be treated fairly. Not to have it considered a crime when you fire, when you exercise your Article II powers under the Constitution.

(He has said he believes a special counsel never should have been appointed to look into the legality of the president’s campaign activities. Instead, Dershowitz has called for a nonpartisan, independent commission.)

Q: You enjoy being provocative and contrarian.

A: I’m a teacher and a professor. My job is to provoke and stimulate conversation. The thing I hate most is people who want to shut off conversation.

Q: People only hear one word: Trump.

A: That’s what reminds me of McCarthyism, when you couldn’t speak out on certain issues. I’m not comparing myself. (Pauses) First of all, I’m enjoying this. So understand that. For me, it’s a red badge of courage.

You have to pretend to be dumb. Because once you get sophisticated and nuanced you’re politically incorrect. There’s no nuance. There’s no sophistication about this. Don’t try to slice the salami thinly. This is just baloney. I grew up in New York, and I’m a Red Sox fan. So I understand nuance.

Q: People often talk of these moments as overcorrecting and then correcting. At what point are we in that cycle now?

A: I think we’re there on university campuses. When I speak on university campuses now, a lot of moderate conservatives and liberals come up to me and say we need to restore the center.

Q: What’s it been like for you on the island? It seems like no one is throwing things at you. No one is hissing. It seems pretty civil. You’ve got a nice life here.

A: The perverse result is that the shunners are shunning themselves because people have been supporting me. People come to me and say, “Look. Alan, I have to talk to you. What you’re doing is wrong. And you have to do this, do that.”

Everybody has advice. “Go on television, defend his civil liberties but say he’s the most horrible president in the history of the world.” But only about 10 people have decided that it wasn’t just that they didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted to expand it, to get other people not to talk to me. This was …

Q: An act of hostility?

A: An act of hostility. An active hostility. And it failed.

Q: Do you think with Trump, and some of the things he has done that people find indefensible — like refusing (at first) to disavow David Duke — that the “both sides” construct is too reductive for this political climate?

A: Look, I’ve spent 55 years teaching nuance. That’s what I do.

Q: During Vietnam, in the 1970s, you had thousands of people dying every month, a president who had so clearly broken the law. How is that somehow not as bad today? Because people seem to think today it’s worse.

A: With Trump it’s personal. His personal style is so confrontational. He provokes. He’s a brilliant politician, and let me tell you why. He is pushing Democrats to the left. Because extremism provokes extremism. And the Democrats can’t win from the left. They can only win from the center in a national election. So his fondest hope is that somebody from the left gets the nomination against him.

Q: The reaction to him is seen as such an overreaction at times.

A: And then he overreacts. Overreaction causes overreaction, which causes overreaction. And the parties split further and further apart, which is good for Trump. The more divided we are, the more his base comes to his support. These articles in The Times and The Globe may hurt me on Martha’s Vineyard, but they help Trump. If there’s one thing you quote me on, I want it to be that.

Link

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
[Dershowitz] These articles in The Times and The Globe may hurt me on Martha’s Vineyard, but they help Trump.

He's 100% on the money, IMO. I've written essentially the same thing to leftists in other social media venues.

<crickets>

They can't argue it, because the evidence is irrefutable, but they're apparently incapable of stopping themselves from doing it.

I've seen the exact same thing in gun control/rights discussions. I tell gun-grabbers "Have you ever noticed that when you start beating the gun control drums again, gun and ammunition sales skyrocket? Has it never occurred to you that if you'd just STFU about it, there'd actually be fewer guns and less ammo on the streets? That you're actually defeating your own alleged purposes?"

<crickets>

It's really quite astonishing, to see that you can tell somebody, clearly, that they're digging themselves deeper and deeper and they ought to stop digging, but they keep digging, anyway.

Well, used to be astonishing. Now I've come to accept that leftists really do be crazy.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
[Dershowitz] These articles in The Times and The Globe may hurt me on Martha’s Vineyard, but they help Trump.

He's 100% on the money, IMO. I've written essentially the same thing to leftists in other social media venues.

<crickets>

They can't argue it, because the evidence is irrefutable, but they're apparently incapable of stopping themselves from doing it.

I've seen the exact same thing in gun control/rights discussions. I tell gun-grabbers "Have you ever noticed that when you start beating the gun control drums again, gun and ammunition sales skyrocket? Has it never occurred to you that if you'd just STFU about it, there'd actually be fewer guns and less ammo on the streets? That you're actually defeating your own alleged purposes?"

<crickets>

It's really quite astonishing, to see that you can tell somebody, clearly, that they're digging themselves deeper and deeper and they ought to stop digging, but they keep digging, anyway.

Well, used to be astonishing. Now I've come to accept that leftists really do be crazy.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." - Napoleon Bonaparte

quote:

Originally posted by 2BobTanner:
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." - Napoleon Bonaparte

The point I'm making is that with leftists it apparently does not matter. They are so utterly convinced of the correctness of their positions they are not deterred even by irrefutable facts placed directly in front of them.

(Btw: The quote being attributed to Napoleon is apocryphal.)

quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
Leftists have become so radicalized that the 'liberal' camouflage doesn't fit anymore. I think that is why we see the #WalkAway movement back to simple liberalism which is to the left of libertarianism as I understand it. Leftism today has returned to it's fascistic totalitarian, potentially genocidal ways we've seen too often historically. It is a genie that will not stay in the bottle of civility for very long.

Even Dershowitz gets it to a degree-

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
He’s a brilliant politician, and let me tell you why. He is pushing Democrats to the left. Because extremism provokes extremism. And the Democrats can’t win from the left. They can only win from the center in a national election. So his fondest hope is that somebody from the left gets the nomination against him.

I don't agree that Trump is "pushing" Democrats to the extreme left, they simply have no other logical place to go. They are not the party of Clinton, they are the party of Obama, and to a lesser degree, Sanders. This is all their doing, their own destiny. But Dershowitz is spot on that Trump/we all hope and perhaps expect an extreme leftist as the Democratic nominee.

They are not liberal. Nor are they progressive.

Synonyms:
Leftists
Authoritarian Leftists
Totalitarian Leftists
Genocidal Leftists
God Damn Commies (GDC)
Enemies of the Constitution of the United States

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
And none of that is what it means to be a classic liberal, in the 19th century sense. "Liberal" has come to mean leftist/socialist/progressive which leaves us no good term for what the word liberal used to mean. I prefer to call them progressives or leftists - to me it is a more accurate descriptor.

I'm in agreement with you, except I only call them Leftists, or fascists, or totalitarians. I cannot bring myself to call adherents to failed, 100 year old ideas "progressive."

I consider myself a classical liberal, in the mold of our founding fathers.



.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TigerDore,

"handling the backlash to what some believe is his gravest offense: defending Trump."

He isn't really defending President Trump. He is defending the Constitution.

-------------------

"He has said he believes a special counsel never should have been appointed to look into the legality of the president’s campaign activities."

The author betrays his Leftist bias.


.

quote:

Originally posted by TigerDore:
"handling the backlash to what some believe is his gravest offense: defending Trump."

He isn't really defending President Trump. He is defending the Constitution.

-------------------

"He has said he believes a special counsel never should have been appointed to look into the legality of the president’s campaign activities."

The author betrays his Leftist bias.
.

The left does not believe in the constitution or the rule of law. Only in the party interests and power.They thought Clinton was a shoe in and now their world is crumbling around them.

Merely the collision between party discipline and free thinking. The Leftists works mightily to maintain party discipline, a unified attack, that's why there were gulags. Climb out of the trench and off with you. Ask Trotsky.

All is the Party,
The Party is all!