Liberals Savaging Liberals

I’ve been reading an interesting series of posts at a blog belonging to a liberal named Lee Stranahan. He bills himself as a writer and a filmmaker, is regularly featured at Huffpo, and now has worked with Andrew Breitbart. I’d never heard of him until someone mentioned us in his comments and that got back to us, but what makes these posts so interesting is that Stranahan has recently discovered that liberals aren’t that tolerant of dissent. Surprise!

His first experience with liberal intolerance began when he suggested at the DailyKos that John Edwards may indeed have had an affairs as the National Enquirer was then saying. This resulted in him being banned by DailyKos, something which continues today, and he received a vicious verbal beating from his former brethren. Here's a sample:

“Mr. Stranahan, you seem to be clueless, dimwitted and, apparently, stupid. . . So, my dear idiot friend, Mr. Stranahan, please, I implore you, go and crawl back into whatever foul putrid pit of a hole that you and your Republican Minion Trolls were spawned from.”

Can you feel the love?

More recently, he’s been blasted for working with Andrew Breitbart on the Pigford fraud scandal -- a situation where a large group of blacks are pretending to be farmers so they can claim they were discriminated against and thereby share in a settlement with the Department of Agriculture. Breitbart’s interest is exposing the black racism and the fraud going on. Stranahan says his interest is keeping as much money as possible for the actual victims, rather than the fraudsters. That’s fair. Yet, he soon found himself attacked for working with Breitbart. Here’s a tweet: “Listen douche. I don’t care what you think about anything. You’re a whore and a traitor. Just piss off, weasel.”

All of this opened his eyes. And now he’s discovered that leftist bloggers willingly spread false stories to attack Republicans. Imagine that! This story involves attempts by Minnesota Republicans to prevent people from taking more than $20 in cash off welfare credit cards each month, i.e. to stop them from using these as cash cards. Simple enough. Yet, a leftist blogger turned this into the following:

“Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more than $20 in cash in their pockets any given month.”

That’s a total lie and is not even close to a reasonable interpretation of the law. But that didn’t stop other leftist bloggers from running with this: “GOP wants it to be illegal to carry cash if you’re poor” and “[GOP] make it a crime for poor to have more than $20.” Stranahan says he found hundreds of leftist blogs repeating this -- the only blog that accurately portrayed the law belonged to a conservative.

Having decided that lying was bad for their side, Stranahan notified one of the blogs belonging to a woman he’d known for years. He expected she would retract the story. She didn’t. Instead, she trashed Stranahan.

Now, he’s found leftists telling everyone to block him for asking whether the unemployed really should be getting 99 weeks of unemployment.

All of this has shocked Stranahan. He is shocked that people he assumed were his friends could turn on him so nastily and so quickly. He’s even more shocked that the reason they turned on him wasn’t that he no longer believes in liberalism, but that he had the nerve to express doubts on a couple minor points. But what’s shocked him the most is that leftists would continue to spread lies when they know them to be lies.

Of course, none of this surprises us. We’ve all experienced this ad nauseum by now. In my experience, and those of most conservatives with whom I’ve spoken, the vast majority of liberals love to describe themselves as loving, caring, open-minded people, but are anything but. They don’t allow even the slightest hints of dissent. They shout down their opponents rather than debate them. They use racist, sexist and homophobic attacks freely. They condone violence, threats and death threats, so long as they believe in the cause. They lie. They deny the truth. And when it becomes impossible to lie or deny, they shift blame. Indeed, they excel at seeing themselves as victims in every instance. They even blacklist conservatives in professional ranks. What’s more, the behavior of leftist in the past decade has reached such a psychopathic level of rage that I have to assume there is a great deal of insanity in their ranks.

This isn’t a group that is going to like anyone asking inconvenient questions. So it surprises me that Stranahan is shocked by the response he got.

Now, to be fair, there are conservatives like this. But here’s the difference. As a conservative, when I go to a liberal blog and start posting, I will be savagely attacked by almost everyone at that site. I will be called a monster, a criminal, a fascist, a racist and/or a hater. My motives will be impugned. And I will be told that my views don’t matter and that I shouldn’t be allowed to speak them.

By comparison, when I’ve seen liberals come to conservative blogs (excluding trolls of course), they are generally allowed to speak their minds and many of the regulars will try to engage them in discussions. Are there conservatives who will unfairly attack them? Sure, but we’re talking about a small percentage of conservatives, maybe 10%-15%. At liberal sites, it’s close to 80%-90% who will do the attacking. Thus, I see the current poisonous state of our national discourse as the fault of liberals, as it’s virtually impossible to engage them in conversation, whereas most conservatives are willing to debate.

Stranahan sounds like a “good” liberal, in the sense that he sounds thoughtful and has shown himself willing to question sacred cows. If more liberals were like that, then our politics wouldn’t be nearly as poisonous as it has become. Let’s hope that his asking these questions might convince other liberals that it’s time to stop hating those who disagree with them and to treat those who dissent with dignity and respect.

In the meantime, let me congratulate Stranahan for taking the red pill.