Oh-so-superior left-liberals make utter fools of themselves

Mock mockers after that.
— W.B. Yeats

A friend who watched the Chris Matthews program this morning told me that Matthews and his gaggle of left-liberals, including the supremely dislikable Cynthia Tucker and the (I presume) still pumped-up-with-male- hormones Andrew Sullivan, all ganged up on—and I can’t believe that they’re still trying to draw water from this empty well—Christine O’Donnell for having said that “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution. But of course separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, but comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson, in which he spoke of a “wall of separation between church and state,” and which liberal judges over the last hundred years have dishonestly attempted to inject into the Constitution.

The liberals on the Matthews program think that since non-establishment of religion is in the Constitution, therefore separation of church and state is in the Constitution. But of course non-establishment of religion and separation of church and state are not the same thing. Non-establishment of religion means that no religious denomination shall be favored in law over others; that no denomination shall receive public revenues; and that membership in any one denomination shall not be a requirement for voting or holding political office. (Indeed, since it was Congress, not the states, that was barred from establishing a religion, several states had religious establishments until well into the nineteenth century when they voluntarily ended them.) By contrast with non-establishment of religion, separation of church and state means that the state shall have absolutely nothing to do with religion.

The most evident proof that the two are not the same, and that they have never been understood by the U.S. Congress to be the same, is that the first Congress in 1789 passed the First Amendment which barred the Congress from establishing a religion, even as the same Congress did all kinds of things to advance religion, including hiring pastors for the Congress, holding daily prayers in the Congress, and distributing Bibles to the Northwest territories, and no one ever suggested that in doing these things the Congress was violating the First Amendment. In reality, the Congress, while it properly refrained as per the First Amendment from establishing any one denomination over others (which in the context of America meant establishing any one Christian denomination over other Christian denominations), it did not erect a wall of separation between religion and state but promoted religion (which in the context of America meant promoting Christianity).

Is there anything more contemptible than people who contemptuously mock a person as an ignoramus, when in reality the mockers are the ignorant ones?

And guess what? After the Matthews gang had had their way with the supposedly stupid Christine O’Donnell for a couple of minutes, they went back to an even older exhausted well and spent another couple of minutes mocking Dan Quayle for his entirely understandable misspelling of “potato” twenty years ago.

To what shall one compare these liberals, who deride others as ignoramuses and haters, but in reality are themselves ignoramuses and haters? They are like the devils in Paradise Lost, who in the final scene in hell are transformed into a huge mass of hissing snakes.

- end of initial entry -

October 25

Tim W. writes:

You noted how liberals are still ganging up on Christine O’Donnell to a ridiculous degree. It’s a form of bullying that the left specializes in. If a conservative gets caught in a gaffe (real or imagined) there’s a feeding frenzy in which the Democrats and the mainstream media both pile on until they destroy the victim. There’s no sense of proportion involved, let alone any reflection on the propriety of what they’re doing.

There really is no comparable behavior on the right. Here’s a good example. Alvin Greene won an upset victory to become the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. Greene is unemployed, illiterate, and has charges pending against him for showing pornography to college girls against their will. The conservative media (Rush, Hannity, etc.) mentioned Greene a couple of times and made a few jokes at his expense, and then dropped the matter. Greene’s going to lose, so why dwell on that race? You don’t turn on Hannity or Rush and hear them piling on Greene over and over, day after day, ad nauseum.

But the leftist media simply won’t let up on O’Donnell. Gee, isn’t she stupid? Gosh, isn’t she a loon? Darn, isn’t she a fool? Day in, day out. They’re on a feeding frenzy and won’t let up until she’s destroyed. The fact that she’ll likely lose her Senate race isn’t enough. She must be humiliated, humbled, dehumanized. This is what liberalism has come to.

LA writes:

Here is the passage from President Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists Association in 1802:

… I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Thus the stupid and unforgivable error, of equating non-establishment of religion with separation of church and state, began with Jefferson himself. Jefferson pushed this false view, because he himself, as an aggressive non-believer, wanted such a separation. But such a separation was not in the Constitution, as I have already explained. When Jefferson wrote the above passage he was engaged in an act of secularist propaganda.

LA writes:

Why do I say that Quayle’s mispelling of “potato” was entirely understandable? First, it was not his spelling. He had been given cards, and was asking pupils to spell the words on the cards. The card Quayle was given put an “e” at the end of “potato.” He was just responding to what had been given him. Second, since the plural of potato is “potatoes,” it would not be unreasonable to think for a moment that the singular also has an “e.” Third, English is an unusually hard language for spelling. The spelling of English words is highly un-phonetic and often arbitrary, and learning to spell correctly in English is a lifelong project, as every writer knows.

The liberal media’s orchestration of Quayle’s trivial error (which he was led into by the misspelled card he was given) into some towering proof that Quayle was stupid was one of the most vicious and childish things we have seen. Meanwhile, of course, the media systematically cover up much more significant errors and lapses of knowledge by Democrats. In my observation, literally every time a liberal Democrat quotes the Bible, or the American Founding documents, or some work of philosophy, he gets it deeply wrong, twisting the original words into a meaning conformable with modern, secular liberalism. But the media have never once exposed these repeated errors by liberal Democrats.

Clark Coleman writes:

Your recent entry about the left-liberals mocking the right but making utter fools of themselves reminded me of this piece from Gary Bauer’s daily e-mail last week:

Palin Exposes Liberal Ignorance (And Arrogance)

In Nevada Monday, Sarah Palin told Tea Party activists that they can’t “party like it’s 1773 yet.” She urged them to keep working hard until November 2nd. It didn’t take long before liberal bloggers and even respected journalists were Tweeting about Palin’s historical ignorance.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, wrote, “What happened in 1773?! She’s so smart.” PBS’s Gwen Ifill wrote, “Sarah Palin: party like it’s 1773! Ummm … ”

But while they were laughing at Palin yesterday, Palin is getting the last laugh today. Presumably, liberals were thinking about July 4th, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed. But unlike our liberal elites who don’t know America’s history, Sarah Palin knew exactly what she was talking about: the Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773.

LA replies:

Delicious.

And Bauer is right about people having the year 1776 so enblazoned in their heads that they don’t know anything else. It would be interesting to hold a poll of liberal media grandees and ask them when the American Revolution began. Nine out of ten would probably answer 1776, or July 4, 1776, the “official” date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Of course the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 24, 2010 05:16 PM | Send