Just having a bit of fun...

...fisking lefty absurdities. Feel free to ignore this...

Nothing like a Republican yarn:

As David M. Ricci shows in Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't: Rhetoric, Faith, and Vision on the American Right recently released by Paradigm, the Republicans have a knack for storytelling that seems to elude Democrats. Here, Ricci, a professor of political science and American studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains that the cause may lie in the different political philosophies of the left and the right. [I've been blogging since November-2001, and waiting that long for a liberal to say what his political philosophy actually is. Will this be my lucky day?]

Democrats lost heavily in the midterm elections partly because they told no shared story. [So that means they had a story in 2006 and 2008? Ha.] Before the debacle, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times complained: "The thing that baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can't come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics." [Cuz Alynsky-ism consists of living a lie, and not revealing your Marxist politics.] On Election Day, Roger Cohen was similarly annoyed: "Like many at midterm," he wrote, "I'm struggling with my disappointment... Back and forth go the voices... There's no narrative to the presidency." [There is a narrative, but alas for Dems it's pro-American. It goes: President of USA loves our country and is humbly proud to be a servant of the greatest nation on Earth.]

The missing story was crucial because narratives help citizens to decide what is or isn't important while Digital Age sources flood everyone with information and images. [When Dems are losing then you discover the people are bewildered.] Consequently, if one party campaigns with a narrative and the other does not, it is as if the two are running a horse race in which one side has no nag. [You Dems gotta great story: America weak, government strong. Say it proudly, baby.]

Right-wing talk about poverty, taxes, race, ecology, feminism, families, crime, education, multiculturalism – you name it – leads to a storytelling gap between Republicans and Democrats. Right-wing grievances, which Republicans assert repeatedly, add up to a grand narrative about, say, Judeo-Christian ethics, capitalist efficiency and governmental tyranny. [So Dems, put forthr your counter-narrative. You're anti-Christian, anti-Capitalist, pro big gov. Sounds snappy to me!]

Meanwhile, Democrats may tell small stories that illuminate various policy issues. But left-wing people do not all tell the same tales, and the ones they do tell neither reinforce one another nor project a shared vision of where America is and what they propose to do about it. [The secret to being liars is to coordinate your story ahead of time]

The result, according to psychologist Drew Westen in "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation " (2007), is that "every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts." [Just say you're doing it for the children.]

Democrats aren't necessarily incompetent because they fail to compose a signature narrative. Rather, liberalism is intrinsically opposed to storytelling, and there's the rub. [Because liberalism has become nihilism, and you have nothing to say.]

Since the Enlightenment, liberals have -- in the largest sense -- evoked science, theory, and facts to release citizens from many traditional restraints, whereas conservatives have -- generally speaking -- promoted traditional truths they regard as fostering decency and stability in American life. [Then why do you get upset when Republicans point out that you want to "release citizens from many traditional restraints?" Is there something wrong with being hippies?]

In this division of labor, science seeks not stories but data and experiments, [If you really seek "data and experiments," why do you get upset when we point out that your economic experiments have uniformly failed?] whereas traditions are affirmed in familiar tales such as those retold by conservative think-tanker William Bennett in "The book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories" (1993). [So get busy and write The Book of Immoral Stories.]

These points are not merely academic. America's leading liberal today is Barack Obama, a president described by historian James Kloppenberg in "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition " (2010) as inherently "pragmatic" and therefore, in Ricci's terms, so flexible that his national health law meanders over 2,300 pages and cannot be summed up intelligibly in Democratic stump speeches. [That's stupid. Obama had nothing to do with writing the law. It was written by lobbyists for Nancy Pelosi.]

This while conservatives over the years, such as Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Sarah Palin, collaborate on a rousing narrative that exalts American life via stirring tales such as "Creationism" and "The Free Market," neither of which can be verified decisively. [The Free Market can't be verified? Who knew? Maybe it's really weather balloons.]

An electoral payoff can emerge when storytelling mobilizes civic enthusiasm. [You do mobilize civic enthusiasm.. In Paris.] But some political stories have led people astray ever since Alcibiades in 415 B. C. persuaded the Athenian Assembly to launch a disastrous military expedition against Syracuse. [That's totally irrelevant. But I guess it gives you some fake academic-superiority glitz.] Similarly, Republicans would like everyone to forget, about how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and their accomplices -- in pursuit of a "War on Terror" -- inspired America to invade Iraq to destroy WMDs that weren't there and bring democracy to Arabs who didn't want it. [On the contrary, we are PROUD of it. We overthrew a cruel fascist tyrant and brought freedom and democracy to his oppressed subjects. But... but...wait a minute. Isn't that a traditional liberal story?]

The country is still paying dearly for that story. [NO. we won a splendid victory over the terrorist slime-animals and the even-slimier liberal Democrats who are allied with them.]