"Conservative readers,...will appreciate Flynn’s accuracy, readability, and humor. Even longtime Left-watchers will discover new nuggets, such as Michael Moore’s old civics teacher remembering the future filmmaker: 'He’s always been ugly, fat, and obnoxious, a troubled child with no close friends to speak of.'It’s a testament to Flynn’s talent that reading "A Conservative History of the American Left" is as enervating as it is entertaining. In almost every chapter, the Nation issues another ridiculous prediction, another utopian starts another doomed commune, and another idealist promises the end of all war, famine, and bigotry — and attracts legions of foolish followers. Throughout, very few of Flynn’s 'characters' express regret for the lives they’ve ruined or outright ended.
'People die, but the Left will endure,' Flynn told me. 'The ideas of a brotherhood of man, heaven on earth, and human perfection are too beautiful to perish as ideas, even if they’re too utopian to succeed in reality. Leftists are idealists, and the havoc their ideas cause in the real world doesn’t seem to affect a rethinking of their ideas in their imaginations.'”
-- Kathy Shaidle, reviewing Daniel J. Flynn's "A Conservative History of the American Left" for the Pajamas Media.
Leftists are idealists, and the havoc their ideas cause in the real world doesn’t seem to affect a rethinking of their ideas in their imaginations.'”
ReplyDeleteThe Best example of that is Bush's idealist crusade to "liberate" the Middle East through a "democratic revolution" of "creative destruction."
High flown leftists ideals with no connection to reality? Check.
Speechifying leftist intellectuals thrust into positions of power so that they can test out how their pet theories apply to the real world for the very first times, consequences be damned? Check.
Soaring, soviet-style rhetoric about "oppressed" people and "counter-revolutionary" forces? Check.
The sooner we can McCain in there and get all of those ex-Marxist "Neoconservatives" leftists nutballs out of the State Dept and the Pentagon, far away from policy-making and back ion their ivory tower think tanks, the better off we'll be.
Too bad Bush didn't have the sense or experience to understand what he was dealing with when he let those people lead him down the garden path but I suspect that McCain, having be physically tortured by actual communist guerillas, will.
We can only hope...
The book actually sounds interesting, but the wholesale dismissal of those "leftist" ideals -- at least in the book's critique -- is going too far. Before we pooh-pooh such "utopian nonsense," we should remember, perhaps, that this country was founded on those very ideals: a brotherhood of man, freedom, equality, and there is even a mention of the right to pursue happiness (how utopian is that?). Clearly our Founding Fathers were idealist and set out to "cause havoc in the real world," to use Flynn's phrase, by starting this experiment in democracy called the USA (which, btw, allows us today to, among other things, express our ideas here freely without fear of punishment or retribution -- at least from the powers-that-be; don't know about fellow bloggers... ;).
ReplyDeleteFor the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.
ReplyDeleteSuddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.
The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.
Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.