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A Swing and a Miss

In today’s Ol’ Dirty, Matt Petryni has done the world a favor by distilling the last eight years of the progressive movement’s bitterness, victim posturing, and recent Obamic messianism into what is surely going to top peoples’ lists for “Cutest Little Article of the Year“, starting thusly:

Since the 1980s, political liberals have largely been thought of as the minority. Their views were quickly discredited, their programs systematically dismantled, their diverse ranks were painted as latte-sipping demons who sought to micromanage the lives of “real Americans.” Any attempt to deny this is to deny reality… 

The liberal voice was, for the most part, silenced.

Thankfully, the revolutionary vanguard was struggling to ensure that folks like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Jon Stewart, every pot-smoking, bedreadlocked college kid, and millions of anti-whatever protesters were spared a midnight visit from the Gestapo during these last 28 years of jackbooted oppression!

After this pouting, he intones a litany of boilerplate college progressive criticisms of the Bush Administration and Republicans in general, with a dash of hyperbole thrown in for good measure (“Our economic crisis, now front and center, will likely rival even the Great Depression in its severity.” The horror!)

But all that’s just a warm-up for the real meat of the article: Liberals only want to help, so vote for change! After informing his readership that there is no “good” way to resolve our country’s problems, he assures us that “[t]he only true way to effectively resolve the crisis we face is the liberal way”:

Liberals seek not to overburden the taxpayer with regulations, with social and diplomatic causes. They seek only to prevent the taxpayer from being burdened with the consequences of not pursuing those causes and regulations. Without levees, cities flood. Without allies, wars fail. Without regulations, greed prevails, and dangerous risks are assumed. And without environmental protections, natural resources are degraded. Without planning and prevention, consequences and costs result.

All of these terrible things are, of course, assumed to be the natural by-products of “conservative” boogeymen and their disastrous policies, which he goes on to limply admit that are arguably not to blame at all.

Instead of attempting to actually refute that criticism, however, Petryni simply suggests that we, as a society, “change” and start living up to our responsibilities as members of the “American community”, by which he presumably means “vote for Barack Obama”. After all, once Obama is President, things’ll be so great that taxes won’t even really be like taxes anymore — they’ll really be more like “investments”! Whether or not American “investors” will be “investing” their money in stuff like billions of dollars of bailouts for the financial industry and Detroit is left unsaid.

“What a monumental fuck-up,” indeed.

  1. Vincent says:

    Tyler:

    Would it have been helpful to you if I had put “The liberal voice was, for the most part, silenced” in boldface?

  2. Chris says:

    He’s providing an alternative (paragraph form) definition of “Hyperbole”….I think.

    That is, the arguments in the article are laced with it.

    Again, I think.

  3. T says:

    “Thankfully, the revolutionary vanguard was struggling to ensure that folks like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Jon Stewart, every pot-smoking, bedreadlocked college kid, and millions of anti-whatever protesters were spared a midnight visit from the Gestapo during these last 28 years of jackbooted oppression!”

    First: I think “dreadlocked” suffices. Second: I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Explain please.

    If it’s simply “Matt Petryni is a stupid librul” then I saved you the trouble.

  4. I sort of have a man-crush on Todd Palin says:

    Just throwing it out there. Anyone else?

  5. Pat says:

    Im certainly not a liberal…but Chomsky is about as far away from the group you put him with as you are.

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