How many people on the left compare Timothy McVeigh, as a "Christian terrorist", with Islamic terrorists.

Look, Dennis, leftists couldn't care less about the truth when demonizing their opposition is more important. Exactly as they'll call you a racist, or me a bigot, or George Bush stupid, so will they call Timothy McVeigh the Terrorist a "Christian terrorist", or Adolph Hitler and the entire German regime "Christians".

Expect no less.

Dennis is on vacation again

Prager's commentary is always worth listening to. But I'm off. Gnight.

"Liberals think conservatives are bad, conservatives just think liberals are wrong."

I saw this when I was in college. Liberals have been demonizing conservatives since the 60's. I remember the 1964 election pretty well, and saw how Johnson demonized Goldwater. The entire campaign, from my position as an eleven year old, was based on rather foolish accusations. Goldwater was a racist, Goldwater was going to get us into World War III, if you like a-bombs (or maybe it was h-bombs by then, I do forget that part) you'll love Goldwater. Quietly behind their hands they whispered to one another that Goldwater was a Joo and the Joos were taking over the world, but they didn't say this very loudly, just loudly enough for the whispers to get round to the rest of us. Oh, and let's not forget, Goldwater was stupid. All Republicans are stupid.

Dennis has said this kind of trashing is to avoid an argument. I say it's to win the argument. When you trash your opponent and continue to trash them for the next fifty or sixty years, sooner or later you're going to have a majority of your audience supporting and agreeing with you (and voting for your candidates and putting your party in power). The work is done. All you have to do is invoke the nasty appellation "Conservative" and it's no different than if you had called him a Nazi. And who the hell wants to agree with a Nazi?

On the other hand, the left have been calling themselves "the good" since the 'Twenties. Same shortcut: who needs reasons when we're JUST PLAIN GOOD ?

Oh, well, nuff said.

Definition of "socialism"

Thank you Dennis, everyone "knows" the functioning definition of socialism isn't the technical definition. But people with no wisdom like to pick on their opponents if they dare refer to socialism within the "spread the wealth around" idea that we all understand when we use it. First, the definition is so narrow that no one could ever use it if we were only allowed the economics definition. Second, that's their way of discrediting anyone who would like to argue against "more government, more control, more equality, cradle-to-grave nanny state."

In short, throwing this definition at people is a new trump card for winning the argument, not having to present contrary arguments, and shutting up the opposition.

CEO says "you can't make jobs here thanks to Obama Admin policies"

I'm glad someone is speaking up to reinforce what everyone else (everyone who is not a leftist, that is) already knows.

There is a general principle that the more the country's money flows around, the better the economy. There are, of course, other factors contributing. To a leftist, though, this means also that the more money there is to move around the better (so print a lot, that's good for the economy). As well, the left can't see any difference between the money flowing into your hands and out again, into your hands and into your bank, into your hands and into some investment--or out of your hands, into the government's hands, and into someone else's hands. If there were ever any kind of flowing money that the left love, it's the last kind of flowing, and they don't have a clue what's wrong with it.

"Truth is the least important commodity in the Frank Rich column"

...and in every other leftwing discussion of anything.

As you said, the prime item is to demonize the opposition.

That way, fewer people will give their arguments a hearing and no one will want to be one of them. It's the only way leftists could ever get anyone to vote leftie.

"What is the last book Andrew Cuomo read about the Crusades?"

I spend a bit of time maybe once a month trying to explain to my fellow Americans that what they were taught about the Crusades is no more true than what they were taught about the European "invasion of the New World." About the former, they were taught that a bunch of diabolical whites carrying crosses headed off to the Middle East to slaughter as many brown people as possible. They raped, pillaged, and butchered, and committed the most horrendous atrocities, and the devastation was utterly unimaginable. If they had to number the dead, they would generally quote "ten million?" or thereabouts.

About the latter, just about the only thing they know are "germ warfare", "enslaving the Native Americans", and genocide. They know nothing of the missionaries' wish to convert the "heathen" and give them access to eternal Heaven, or if they do they know that a lot of evil monks brought their hateful narrow-mindedness to impose their religion on a bunch of innocent people who should have been left alone. If you mumble the phrase "Stone Age", they'll call you "racist".

One of the many problems plaguing the Left is a lack of ability to see past their own narrow horizons. This is what education is supposed to cure, and this is why we so badly need educational reform.

Toilet seats up or down?

This is a bit tangetial to Prager's argument, and yes, I'm aware of it.

Ten years ago I was astonished to learn that most men believe that women who complain about the toilet seat being up are doing so only because they're afraid they'll fall in.

There may be women who actually make this claim. They're not good thinkers; they just plain dislike seeing the thing yawning at them, and it bothers them, and they want to argue with the husband that he ought to do it her way, and she understands at least that she needs a real reason for her request. He's already belittled her to death about this issue, and she resorts to these mystery "feelings" in the hope that he stops arguing with her. In other words, she wants what she prefers, he has already belittled her preference, so she has to resort to lying to him about why she prefers it.

I know plenty of women who are not the slightest bit bothered by the sight of an open toilet. I'm not one of them.

When I walk into a bathroom, I don't want to see the humans' equivalent of a doggie doolie open and gaping at me. I imagine things falling into it--your toothbrush, my hairbrush, an electric appliance getting knocked off the counter, a cell phone flying pretty easily off the edge of the counter, or how about a whole tube of toothpaste going to the dogs? A jar has a lid to cover it with, and you put the lid on because that's where it belongs. When you're done using the toothpaste, you put it back on the tube. If your wife asks you to stop leaving the cap off the tube, you don't belittle her for preferring it that way.

The toilet lid belongs in its place as well--in the down position. There it can do its job of covering the inside of the toilet, which is a rather unesthetic place, even when it's sparkling clean. If you've had a recent male visitor who dribbled on the front edge of the bowl, the seat being down will hide the drops, and the lid being down will hide the seat. It's mostly a matter of aesthetics.

So there we have two solid reasons to put the lid down: practically, as a shield to cover the gaping maw and prevent things from falling in; and aesthetically as it conceals a place that is usually dirty and is always unsavory.

I'm going to add another practical reason: the fire departments across the country tell us this is a way to reduce drowning deaths for toddlers who wander in without an escort. Good enough for ya, hubbies?

But Prager's main point was one of kindness. It doesn't really hurt you to put the seat down, why not do it lovingly for your wife?

There he goes again, blaming college for all the emptyheadedness

I'm telling you, Prager, they launch this garbage in elementary school, pushing every liberal notion they themselves got in college and school before that. College just brings it to a head.

"When people hear a Biblical citation..."

And as you say, that's what people have been trained to think.

Book: "Can America Survive?" by Pastor John Hagee.

I have read some of what this man has written. He is a brilliant writer and a stimulating thinker. Without even looking at his book I'm pretty sure it's worth reading.

Do people want to be good?

People want to consider themselves good.

Most people aren't willing to take the trouble or make the effort to actually BE good.

Some people have as their motto, "I have to love myself before I can love anyone else."

Others say, "It's my job to take care of number one."

These two groups are overlapping sets.

I do not want to be good. I want to be narcissistic and I want to take care of myself first and foremost. But for me, that is not an option. When I was sixteen I took a course in Philosophy, a part of which focused on ethics. There I learned about altruism: "The good of the many outweighs the needs of the few." This also happens to be the Vulcan main principle. This simple statement struck me as eminently correct, and I adopted it as my slogan. Not, "What would Jesus do?" because I wasn't a Christian, but the notion that the right path to take was to consider myself not one whit more precious nor more important than anyone else. And if some action benefitted a dozen people and cost me everything, it was still the right thing to do.

Since I was a kid, though, the notion of right and wrong has been under constant attack. I suspect Prager doesn't know this, as he keeps referring to having your brain twisted in graduate school. He is naive. Every ninth-grade student has already been completely brainwashed that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and every human must make his moral code for himself. I'd like you to notice that I chose my moral code, but I did not fabricate it. It's one that has been around since the Greeks.

So, today, we have a whole crop of kids under 25 years of age who believe that whatever they do is right. They are mean, rude, nasty, insulting, even cruel and abusive, and have no clue that there is anything wrong with their behavior. They'll attack anyone and everyone who displays any sort of vulnerability, such as not playing a certain game as well as the bully does. And belittling someone for not being a top player is something they do every chance they get. They play their game in a constant swagger. Let some other player ask for information and that represents an opportunity to make mincemeat of him.

And very few people have the stomach to stand up to these vicious persons, and it's only rarely that the whole crowd will gang up on them and tell them to shut up and behave.

For the record, I want it to be known that my other favorite saying is, "Character is doing the right thing, even when it hurts you."

"If your wife says, 'I have a headache,' the answer is not , 'The aspirin is in the cupboard.'"

You are so brilliant. She wants the damn sympthy first, not instructions on how she ought to take care of her problem.

I have been telling this to young men for years. Most of the time our complaints are about something that's bothering us terribly, and we want to vent. We want to unload a clump of garbage to a listening ear (n.b.: the left side of his head as he reads his newspaper does NOT count as a listening ear!), then get a moment of sympathy, and follows a warm hug or even a cuddle.

What we don't want is a man telling us what we should do. Not even a loving, caring man can carry that off sympathetically, because to us it feels like, "Honey, you're so dumb, why didn't you think of my brilliant fix for your problem?" or even worse, the reminder that you SHOULD learn to be logical and reasonable in the way you organize your affairs.

Nope, we don't want to be fixed, we just want our mood fixed. So after she's dumped on you all the crap she's brought home from the office, what can you say if you can't fix her? First remember she's not broken, so she doesn't need a repair man. Or a repair daddy. She needs a loving co-equal to sympathize and stroke her feelings and tell her how much he cares.

Usually, sympathy can be easy to show. All you have to do is mirror what she says.

Try it like this:
She: "Damn that Margaret, she's so annoying, always talking, won't let me get my work done."
You: "You'd feel better if she'd let you get your work done."

NOT:
You: "She drives you nuts" because you've just drawn a conclusion and then you're only telling her how to feel.

I don't know a conservative leader who hasn't been portrayed as a bumbling idiot"

Does William F. Buckley count? I think he got away with not being considered a moron largely because of his Locust Valley Lockjaw, an accent close enough to that of the Kennedys to get him a lot of grace he wouldn't otherwise have received.

But I can't think of any others.

You and I and all the rest of the mainstream, reasonable, modest, unassuming, conservative world can't get away with it, no matter how very intelligent we are. It's no different from getting called racist. We're called racists by the likes of Janeane Garofolo, but worse, we're called racist by our own friends, who know us and who know how much we're not racist. To them it doesn't matter how good our intentions might be, all they know is that we disagree with them and that ultimately means we're stupid, racist, and all the rest of that stable of nasty labels.

The funny part--on another political board that I used to participate in, everyone acted as if they had never heard of Dennis Prager. Neither support nor opposition to Prager's radio show or his ideas had ever been expressed. Others were named. Rush Limbaugh, of course, and everyone who had ever listened to him were denounced as racist. Then I happened to mention Prager and immediately the lefties were all over the name as if I had spread honey on a slice of steak and left it on the picnic table. And all the lefties knew--Prager is a racist.

This board has been active for ten years. We know each other. We know one another's attitudes. The only racist in the place is a fellow who believes that individual Muslims cannot be trusted to be non-violent, which isn't the same as saying they are all violent. But the lefties are positive that anyone who disagrees with them is not only a closet racist but that we can't discern who among the commentators we listen to aren't racist. We evidently can't tell a racist when we're listening to one. This is the worst of it, in my opinion.

"Jews do a disservice when they lump American evangelical Christians in with Medieval Christians."

We spent a great deal of time in elementary and high school listening to, repeating, reinforcing, repeating, spreading, repeating, absorbing, and helping to establish as rock-solid truth the axiom that one of the most important principles of learning and knowledge was to understand other cultures outside of our own. Along with it came the judgement that it was wrong to judge other cultures as better or worse than ours. By the Seventies we also had established in the public discourse the "truth" that there was no such thing as "American culture" and consequently that there was no such thing as struggling to maintain or keep American culture.

Years later, with this inviolable truth firmly ground into our minds--so much so that this principle underlay just about everything we thought--I realized that these people who had been so thoroughly trained in "understanding and tolerating other cultures" were incapable of understanding or tolerating anything that smacked of Western culture, Western history, Western values, or Western attitudes. If it was from our ancestors, it was bad. There was never, not once, any attempt to understand the thoughts or feelings of the Renaissance, or the colonial period, or the middle ages. Not if we're talking about Europe, that is.

Let some native from the most barbaric tribe in the deepest backwoods torture babies for fun as part of his adulthood ritual and that's fine. But let a Christian from the seventeenth century find that truth is important enough to have a fight over, and your twentieth-century student turns into a raving lunatic for whom "tolerance" is so important he could kill.

Never let it be said that we tried to "understand" our own society or where we came from.

"Truth comes before my own interest."

This is what I like so much about you, Dennis. Your principles are more important to you than doing yourself some favor. You'd give back the five dollars to the poor dumb little cashier who overpaid you your change at the cash register. Sadly, I know too many people who would rationalize that and tell themselves she only had herself to blame for not having learnt any math. In fact, I was married to one of them once.

"I'm tired of the assertion that someone who believes marriage should remain male-female is a hater and a bigot."

So are we all.

I remind you that the name-calling is an attempt to shut the other person up. It paints him as evil so that (first) no one will listen to his position and (second) no one who is forced to hear the position will credit anything he says.

So we have:
Poisoning the well
Demonizing
Discrediting
Attempt to silence the opposition
Ridiculing and or belittling
Nihilification
Cockblocking
Stonewalling

and, most significant of all

Playing a trump card over anything the opposition can say.

Prager keeps claiming that playing the race card is an attempt to avoid an argument. I believe that's only a small part of it. Those who fling the epithet "racist" at their debating opposition are trying to shut them up, shut them out of the debate, and play an Automatic-Win card, better known as a trump card.

"Perfect pitch--You can't acquire it, I don't belive"

Sure you can. If you had ever read my letters, I sent you instructions on EXACTLY HOW YOU CAN GET PERFECT PITCH, as taught to our entire class by a piano and theory professor at Cal State U at Northridge.

Well, that's your loss. And I feel sorry for you.

"If you want us to leave Afghanistan, and you know the nature of the Taliban..."

I'm sorry but most of those in America who oppose our involvement in conflicts like this one don't give the slightest bit of a crap about what the Taliban does to Afghanis.

Dictators and genocide and oppression are all just fine with our left wing, as long as the oppressor-murderers are sympathetic in some way with leftist ideals. Let me re-word that: if they're non white, non Christian, non American or at least non-Occidental, anti-conservative, anti-freedom, pro slavery, pro oppression, pro tyranny, or pro genocide, our leftwing love them, because these items are the essence of left-wingedness.

I believe average Americans who usually don't read up on these things are finally getting a clue about these issues, thanks to Van Jones, Jeremiah Wright, Anita Dunn, William Ayers, and hundreds of others who are running the administration, and thanks to the journalistic fraud our younger reporters are resorting to, especially concerning the constant drumbeat of hate and bias in covering such issues as the TEA partiers and the way the left has smeared them in an obvious attempt to discredit them.

But let me address my main point--that the left will argue that stopping the Taliban is not in Americans' interests, and we have no business stepping in. At this very moment the caller is fulfilling my prophecy. When Bush was in office and fighting a war in Iraq, they argued that Iran and Afghanistan were far more important and dangerous to America than Iraq had ever been. Now that it's Obama's issue, they've begun arguing that we need to get out of other involvements as well.

No one wants us to get into a war. Our Left claims the high ground because they want us out of all involvements. That's their first-stage thinking. For them there is nothing "down the road", they are little children who can't see that if the Taliban takes over this country it could be very bad for us. The same kind of people foresaw no slaughter of South Vietnamese sympathizers, never saw Pol Pot coming, and in fact deny Papa Joe's genocide in the Ukraine or Chairman Mao's slaughter of roughly sixty million Chinese. First-stage thinking, imbued with a hefty dose of childlike narcissism that keeps them from looking beyond their horizons.

The evolutionists have no explanation for music

I can come up with a dozen different stories about how music arose and evolved, and how it answers a spiritual need.

But I can't come up with any explanation for how music filled an evolutionary niche and helped the human species survive. But there are many other things for which there is no evolutionary explanation. How, for example, did the smile evolve before the muscles that could make us smile? And without the smile, why would the muscles develop there? This is an unanswered question for me, and as such doesn't prove something about the supposed evolution of the smile.

Eight persons killed because of their race, and no one calls it a hate crime.

Yeah, well, that's our Irrelevant Stream Media. You know, the one that is unbiased and only tells the truth, in contrast to that bad old FOX news which is incapable of telling the truth, but can only lie.

I have a suggestion for a new name for them instead of the Main Stream Media, often abbreviated as MSM. They are so far out of the main stream they would be more appropriately called The Old Stream Media, or OSM.

"Don't laugh at me, I didn't laugh at you."

For the last fifty years, the left has used laughter as a form of argument. When they don't agree with you, they laugh. Saves them from ever coming up with an answer.

The liberal guests I see on the conservative commentary shows (as the liberal guest debater to the conservative guest) are prime examples. Bob Beckel, Sean Hannity, and the snake-faced man, all steal time from their conservative opponents by snorting, grinning, shaking their heads, and outright laughing at the opposition, to continually remind the audience that "That conservative talking is a moron whose positions are so ridiculous he is only worth laughing at. Don't listen to him."

Just one more of the leftist "shut up" cards.

"I killed the five racists that was there that was bothering me."

For at least twenty years (by coincidence, that is a whole generation) I have been listening to very goofy accusations that because some white said this or that thing, we could take that as proof of his racism, and that racism is everywhere, and that every white person in the country--with, of course, the obvious exception of liberal whites who accuse everyone else of racism--is racist, whether they think they are or not.

A few such stories:

From a caller to a talk show on a local radio station: I was shopping in the local mall and had bought several books as well as other things that made my shoulder bag rather heavy, so I was switching it from side to side pretty often. At one point, two other women were walking toward me, though of course I didn't even notice them at the time, as they were part of the crowd there at the mall, and I had my own matters to think about . I switched the bag to my other shoulder for the umpteenth time that morning. And as these women got within speaking distance, one of them stopped, looked me straight in the face and said, "That's right, honey, you switch that bag so these two pickpocketing Negroes can't steal anything out of it."

Switching a bag is proof you're racist.

From my cub scout pack: When a new den formed, one of the new six-year-old boys and his best friend were African-American. The temporary leader was a woman who had a problem with both faces and names. With all five of the little kids in their beautiful new uniforms, she was having more trouble than usual. She got the two black kids mixed up. She also got the three other kids, one tall and blond, one medium and blond, and one Middle Eastern and olive-skinned, mixed up. But the fact that she got the two black kids mixed up was evidence enough to report the pack to the district for their "racism". Never mind that we were an integrated pack and none of the other parents had ever had a problem with one another. She went to a leadership meeting and when a stack of papers was passed round, the parent sitting next to her forgot to pass the stack on. She reported that man for his "racism" too.

I have a couple other stories. I'll post them later.

Dennis, you are called racist all the time. Never mind that you say it just about every day: "The fact that your skin is a certain color means NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to me. It's what's inside you that matters." You'd think eventually they could figure out that you mean it.

There is something really wrong with our leftists. I know what it is, and it isn't stupidity, though they ACT and THINK like imbeciles, because so much of their presuppositions keep them from thinking.

"If you went to graduate school..."

I don't know why you keep saying this. The indoctrination is in full force in undergraduate school.

While I'm on the subject, it is NOT less oppressive or more open-minded in the sciences. Liberalism being the religious faith that it is--and everyone knows it's the true faith, the righteous faith, the path to righteousness, with no reward after death but only here in this world--our lefties tend to feel entitled to spread the faith whenever they can, and surprisingly, no one has told them that it's inappropriate to do it from the professor's bully pulpit.

I have heard anti-Republican sneer after joke after bash after label from the front of a classroom (even down to junior high school, yea verily unto elementary school, and yes, even in undergraduate college), while I never once heard a Republican professor take pot shots at Clinton. I expect Obama gets the same respect from conservative college professors, and most likely from school teachers as well.

"The victory belongs to colleges"

Dennis, I know you have been to high schools and you have talked to high school students quite a bit, though most likely you have never spent hours at a time among the bull sessions they can have when they think no adult (or none that matters, at any rate) is listening. I think that is the reason you don't seem to know much about how much indoctrination goes on at that level, on the taxpayer's dime.

I'll let a teacher speak for herself. In the course of her rather brief discourse, she spoke for all teachers by using the plural "we" most of the time. She told a conservative:

"You have converted me. I was very liberal until a year or two ago. And I taught all my liberal principles to the kids in my classes. I didn't think of it as indoctrination, it was simply the truth, the right way to look at things. I had no idea there was another point of view. In fact, we all believed, and reassured each other whenever we'd meet in the teachers' lounge or in faculty meetings, that any other point of view was evil and contrary to progress. And we certainly didn't want those poor children growing up with an evil point of view."

She was there to rescue kids from conservatism, from the old American values. And it was her job to do it.

"Cog no sent ee"

You really ought to know about the "gn" combination. This is not a Latin word, it's an Italian word.

Caw nyuh shen tee

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cognoscenti

"Diversity trumps all, as if the issue were diversity and not sensitivity"

Of course the liberals who are all excited to have a diversity mosque near Ground Zero think they're being sensitive. But their idea of sensitivity is to be sensitive to Muslims (no matter how crazed and radical the imam who is demanding the right to build his mosque there). And the bias toward Muslims springs from Americans' passion for diversity (interpreted as "compassion"). Taking Americans' hurt feelings about friends or relatives or countrymen dying by the thousands into account is anti-diversity, racist, bigoted, unenlightened, and therefore deserves to be looked down upon with severity and contempt, even disgust.

So, you see, in the liberal eye, there can be no compassion for the majority view, if the majority is composed of WASPs

"If you're conservative you can't say people have a right to do what they want with their own money and then attack them for spending their money"

This is true, and beside the fact that some people dislike it and can't articulate what they dislike about it, so they focus on the obvious and miss the point--

We're not saying they can't spend that money however they want.

We're amused and or disgusted by the hypocrisy of attacking, and taxing, and tarring, and pre-tarring, and demonizing everyone else (all those everyone elses being anonymous rich folk who are presumably Republicans who don't ever give any of their money to charity or to needy people, since everyone knows Republicans are the party of the filthy rich hateful racists), when the Clintons turn out to be worse than the worst of the accused rich people.

So yes, you're right, you can't attack them for it, but you laugh at their inconsistency and their public face of hypocrisy and their tendency to insist that other people are demons while they themselves are saints.

"Imagine that, an American telling a guy who was born in Juarez, 'Chutzpah'."

This isn't so special. You probably ran into multilingual situations, because you ran into multilingual people, all over Europe.

Unlike what we do in America, the Europeans start their school children out on a second foreign language fairly early in their school careers. Then they often add a third and even a fourth later on, though they really shouldn't put it off but set aside a portion of each child's school day for immersion (and for teaching other subjects at the same time) in those languages from the first day they're in school. Immersion is painless (except to the whiny females who gave us "gentle"--and pointless--language acquisition delay in the form of the worthless but extremely expensive bilingual education plan in California.