Liberal Theology

On the Democrat CNN/You Tube debate last July, Rob Porterfrom Irvine, CA asked a quintessential question: "Mrs. Clinton, how would you define the word 'liberal?' and would you use this word to describe yourself?"

After complaining that "it's been made to seem as though it ["liberal"]is a word that describes big government, " Mrs. Clinton dumped the term. "I prefer the word 'progressive,'" she insisted, "which has a real American meaning...I consider myself a modern progressive." She added, "I consider myself a proud modern American progressive..."

They [Democrats] are running from the word 'liberal' as fast as theycan, because it has been tainted," Berkely linguist and Democrat consultant George Lakoff ("rhymes with...") told Policico.com. "It's'bleeding-heart' liberal,' 'tax-and-spend liberal,' 'liberal elite,' 'liberalmedia' ... By not having reconstituted the word 'liberal' over many years, by not defending it, they ar forced to give it up."

My friends, there's a simple reason for this. The word 'liberal' has been tainted--by liberalism itself. The American public has seen liberalism at work over many decades--and the American public has come to despise it. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll indicated that only 28 percent of Americans call themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" (as opposed to 46 percent who call themselves "conservative" or very conservative").

Americans know--through their direct experience--that liberalism doesn't work. It fails, every time it's tried. Liberals don't help anybody. They don't solve anything. I was reminded of this when I read a recent column in The American Spectator by Jeffrey Lord, titled "A History of Liberal Disasters." He briefly discussed a few select examples, including forced school busing, welfare, withdrawal from Vietnam, "free love." I'd like to expand on his list.

All of the below are adhered to by virtually all liberals -- or progressives" -- though many won't admit it in public.

I've discussed these items separately in great detail on my radio program, so I just provide a shorthand list here. (An exhaustive accounting of liberal failures would fill thousands of volumes -- requiring vast new construction in the Library of Congress.) Still, it is revelatory to see these pulled together in one place. Show it to a liberal as a kindhearted Christmas gift to further his or her education.

*****In 1965 LBJ's "Great Society" programs, including the "War on Poverty," promised to eradicate poverty with federal dollars. To date, this has meant a $6.6 trillion transfer of wealth. The result: destruction of the black family, with illegitimacy rates a 75% (85 percent in some inner cities); an increase in the number of poor people (nearly 15 million on welfare and a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare); higher crime rates among the poor; families trapped in dependency.

*****There are scads of federal food programs, many of which duplicate state and local programs; Food Stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Women-Infant-Children [WIC] programs, Commodity Supplemental Food Program, School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, School Milk Program, Children and Adult Care Food Program, Summer Feeding Program, Needy Family Program, Nutrition Program for the Elderly, Emergency Food Assistance Program, and on and on. In 2006, taxpayers spent $52.9 billion on these programs. Since hunger in the U.S. is extremely rare, will such programs ever phase out? Nope. Libs now claim millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity." A lot of funding games are played with these huge federal programs; enormous political power accrues to liberal politicians who expand them, exploit them and use them as campaign fodders. the $33 billion Food Stamp program now advertises for "customers."

*****Social Security, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal -- the rusty vehicle generations of Democrat politicians have ridden toWashington - is nearing breakdown, with the impending retirement of 78 million baby boomers. Without reform, Social Security will be in the red by 2017, and the tax bite for boomers' children and grandchildren will be unendurable. Liberals will do nothing.

*****The libs' fond notion of "progressive" taxation was the basis of the 1969 Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT, designed to close "tax loopholes" for the super-rich. Under 200 taxpayers, in those days. Since Congress didn't index the AMT to inflation, this year (as Americans' incomes continued to rise), the "super-rich tax" is set to clip 23 million Americans -- 34 percent of taxpayers making between $50,000 and $100,000 -- costing them as much as $2,000 in extra taxes.

*****Thanks to liberals' desire for "progressive taxation" (i.e. smacking the "the rich"), the government agency that does their bidding --the IRS-- has metastasized into a massively intrusive, controlling, freedom-killing, social engineering behemoth with its tentacles poking into every nook and cranny of American life. The current tax code runs 67,204 pages. {That�s a lot of crapola, using God's plan would take 1 page}

*****Liberalism's love of control and consequent attraction to a Soviet-style planned/command economy and revulsion toward capitalism leads it to demonize wealth and achievement. Hence, liberals' war on the most successful American companies: Wal-Mart, McDonald's and its hatred of lucrative industry: pharmaceuticals, Big Oil, business in general. The left's inability to respect, appreciate, encourage, or support the entrepreneurial creativity, innovation, and productive genius of the private sector is one of liberalism's biggest failures.{i.e.....Small business, and the mom and pop stores which is the backbone of our American economy.}

*****Government's multiple regulatory agencies (EBOC, FCC, FTC, FAA, FEC, FHA, TSA -- which issues instructions on how to pack you suitcase -- FERC, etc.) attract liberals, who live to direct the (in their view) lesser lives of their fellow citizens. Through liberals in general have little expertise in the industry they regulate, they floodthe marketplace with millions of rules, attempting to "improve society; level the playing field," and all manner of social engineering. They regulate virtually every aspect of the production and distribution of food and goods, buying, selling, lending, trading, earning, hiring, profit making, and movement of capital. Today's mind-boggling tangle of regulations -- nectar to liberals -- shackles the nation and fails American great spirit.

*****SCHIP (State Children�s Health Insurance Program), originally designed to provide poor children with health insurance, has swelled into a socialist monstrosity covering the non-poor and non-children. Liberal states have maneuvered the funds to cover both adults (700,000 last year alone) and illegal immigrants, a practice encouraged by Congressional Democrats. Bush�s move to expand the program without covering the middle class has been ridiculed as sadistically excluding poor sick kids. Dems want to cover those 400 percent above the poverty line; standard liberal failure to keep faith with taxpayers.

*****Democrats intend to finance their SCHIP expansion with a 156 percent increase in the federal cigarette tax � on the backs of the poor. Smokers, society�s pariahs, will be made to pay. More oppression of the oppressed by their liberal oppressors. To �fully fund� this program, Democrats must grow the pool of smokers by 22 million, but instead they�re shrinking the pool by taxing the hell out of it. A typical liberal error flowing from the libs� failure to understand basic economics.

*****The federal government � the taxpayer � currently spends about $560 billion on both Medicare (health insurance for seasoned citizens) and Medicaid (health care for the poor). In 1965, defenders promised that Medicaid would cost no more than $12 billion by 1990; they were off by $52 billion. In 1965, the cost of funding Medicare was $350 per taxpayer; today it�s $10,600. At this rate, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of both programs will eat up about 20 percent of our GDP by 2050. Medicaid alone covers about 53 million people, nearly 50 percent of them children. Wait a minute: if Medicaid already covers poor children�s health care�. What is SCHIP for?

*****Liberals habitually exploit the sick, the injured, and the young to further their political agenda on health care (using Michael J Fox, who suffers from Parkinson�s to advocate embryonic stem cell research, for instance, and exploiting 13 �year-old accident victim Graeme Frost during the SCHIP debate). Liberals believe this tactic insulates the liberal position from criticism. It doesn�t. Liberals routinely promise the most vulnerable unrealistic cures, like medicine men hawking elixirs in Wild West carny shows. On this, liberals fail the basic test of human decency.

*****Liberals want to replace the best medical system in the history of the world with a �free,� single payer, so-called universal system. This failed socialist model has resulted in inferior car, long wait time, shortages of medicine, doctors, and hospital beds, wherever it�s been tried.

*****The liberal approach to crime eschews punishment, preferring to believe the fantasy that bad behavior results from poverty or otherdeprivation arising from the �root cause� of American inequality, Liberals despise traditional American morality-based justice, with its confident judgments on right and wrong and its unapologetic drive to punish wrong. With liberal�s preference for �rehabilitation� and coddling of criminality gaining ground from 1960 to early 1990s America experienced a more than 500 percent increase in violent crime.

*****Last month, researchers from the JEA Institute � a George Soros funded group of libs � announced that keeping people in jail comes at a great cost to society. JFA President James Austin asserts: �There is no evidence that keeping people in prison longer makes us any safer.� (Despite declining crime statistics.) JFA recommends shorter sentences, alternative punishments, more parole, relaxed drug laws, and more taxpayer resources for criminals released from the pokey. Fortunately, the sad results of this failed liberal prescription for crime remains vivid in living memory and it is unlikely American society sill choose to repeat the error in the foreseeable future.

*****The American public has lost patience with the failures of liberalism�s anti-death-penalty strain, its softness on crime, its obsession with gun control, its lack of judicial support for police. But liberalism, which cannot win at the ballot box, still injects its poison into the American judicial system through the courts � the machinations of activist liberal judges, the ACLU and the radical pro-criminal agenda of the defense bar. The result has been disastrous for the law�abiding in every segment of society.

*****Liberalism has failed to keep faith with the U. S. Constitution, preferring �emanations� and �penumbras� (that liberals pretend support abortion) to the clear words in the document � the right to bear arms, for instance � designed to preserve the liberty of the citizens and limit the power of the government.

*****Rachel Carson�s 1962 book, Silent Spring, claimed dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT, the tremendously effective pesticide, could kill off the world�s birds by thinning their eggs, thus upsetting our fragile ecosystem and poisoning the food chain. Policymakers swallowed her every claim, labeling DDT �the world�s deadliest poison� and a carcinogen. It was banned here and abroad. Result: malaria, which was nearly eradicated before Silent spring, spread like wildfire throughout the world�s poorest countries. Turns out Carson�s anti-DDT jeremiad was poppycock. As City Journal summarized, �test after test has shown that DDT isn�t dangerous to humans.� Malaria, a preventable disease, now kills about 2.5 million people a year, mostly children, 90 percent of them in Africa. That�s easily over 30 million deaths because 1962 liberals were panicked by rumors of thinning bird eggs.

*****Liberals are now similarly attempting to panic the population with the latest political jeremiad, Algore�s Inconvenient Truth � a junk-science propaganda vehicle for the global warming hoax, which has been adopted by the left with all the fervor and dogma of religious faith. Combining a paranoid fear of carbon, a hatred of progress (especially due to evil American prosperity) with a list for control of others� behavior that is so characteristic, liberals flush with virtue and self-righteous Puritanism are attempting to inflict guilt and asceticism society-wide � absurdly blaming the American lifestyle for planetary temperature. Environmentalists constantly harangue Americans about what they drive and purchase, how goods are packaged and disposed of, attempting to make life as inconvenient as possible. Americans stubbornly choose progress, development, and innovation, and refuse the left�s constant attempts to get them to live in huts as simple peasants.

*****Environmentalism, the new home of socialism, considers human beings the enemy of the earth, and the internal combustion engine the greatest threat to the planet. For years, the left has been targeting SUVs in a failed attempt to control American vehicle purchases and steer us toward glorified lawnmowers.

*****Thanks to the EPA and the Endangered species Act, normal development is constantly impeded. Wetlands, spotted owls, a clump of native grasses, or the existence of a handful of sand flies have permanently shut down building projects across the fruited plain, rendering land and investments worthless.

*****In what many be a first in the history of human civilization, our nation has been cowed by activist liberals from using our own natural resources. To thwart forward �looking � one could even call them �progressive� � Americans from drilling for oil or building new refineries in order to ease our dependence on foreign sources of energy, liberals sue, enact anti-development regulations, or produce shameful congressional testimony of a weeping teenager who�s been made to believe her culture is being destroyed. For decades, liberals have grossly filed the nation by checkmating us in every attempt to meet our own energy needs.

*****Public schools and universities � with curricula controlled by the social agenda of the teachers� union, the Democrats� most powerful activist bloc �are hotbeds of social engineering, anti-capitalist indoctrination, �diversity� training (where primacy is put on looking different but thinking alike), speech codes, and political correctness. Honest iniquity, debate, and dissent are rarely tolerated, a liberal failure of conscience that defrauds millions of young minds�while pocketing their parents� tuition dollars.

*****Portraying the country as a repository of injustice, American teachers pressure American students to despise America. The incomparable Founders (if they are mentioned at all) are reduced to and dismissed as racist, sexist �dead white guys� who inflicted pollution, consumerism, inequality, imperialism, and hegemony on the rest of the world. Since the 70s liberals have run the schools as anti-American propaganda factories, cheating generations of U. S. kids of their own profound, complex, and often heroic history � an unforgivable moral failure.

*****In 1965, longstanding immigration law was �reformed� by ditching country-of-origin / ethnic quotas, which were said to be racist and mean. At the time, Sen. Ted Kennedy averred: �No immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge.� And, �our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.� Oops. Our current �big wave� of immigration is three times larger than our earlier wave at the turn of the last century. New is the phenomenon of �chain migration,� mostly from Mexico, mostly illegal.

*****Also new are boneheaded liberal policy innovations: driver�s licenses for illegal aliens, free health care for illegals social services for illegals, and in-state tuition breaks for illegals. Liberals fail to keep faith with American citizens, including legal immigrants.

*****Thanks to liberalism�s �defining deviancy down,� in Sen. Pat Moynihan�s memorable phrase, and the injection of 1960s counterculture values into American society, there was a 400 plus percent increase in out-of-wedlock births from 1960 to the early 1990s � a liberal failure which still wounds. In 2005 out-of-wedlock births reached an all-time high at 37 percent of all births: there are 1.3 million abortions annually.

*****While tearing down the traditions and institutions that made America great, liberals have an unrelenting secularist, anti-religious (particularly anti-Christian) fervor. Liberals demand tolerance for all behavior and views except conservatism, targeting, for instance, the Boy Scouts (as is this Eagle Scout) in multi-prolonged attacks for refusing to hire gay scout leaders. The ACLU is tireless in its attempts to eliminate God from the public square, including erasing all mention of the Ten Commandments, Christmas, prayer, even student-mentioned God in graduation speeches. Liberals have so far failed in their mission to �redefine� marriage and the family for American society, but they don�t intend to stop the pressure.

*****The most damaging way liberalism fails the culture is in its worship of government nannyism, encouraging widespread victimology and dependence on government rather than the self-reliance and rugged individualism that built the nation. Instead of inspiring greatness and supporting the natural American optimism, liberals promote gloom and doom, working to ensure all are equally miserable.

*****The left has been wrong about just about everything internationally since the 1960s. Its trust in negotiation, diplomacy, and appeasement rather than American strength has led it to coddle our enemies (including communists during the Cold War), eschew national protection (anti-SDI), undermine the military, and invest in defeat in the War on Terror. Liberals� greatest failure is their betrayal of the Constitution�s prime directive for government: to provide for the common defense.

*****Liberalism�s hatred of �go-it-alone� �cowboy� �unilateralism� (the U. S. acting in its own national interest) means liberals feel nothing but scorn for the most valuable national character trait of American exceptionalism.

*****The global consequences of liberal anti-Americanism � the �blame-America-first� mentality � are lethal. Liberals literally give aid and comfort to our enemies. They are intent on bestowing American Constitutional rights on terrorists, and insist on responding to Islamofascism through the courts, with no power but subpoena power. As we say on 9/11, the �threat� of trial-by jury did not deter suicidal barbarians in the slightest. This is a liberal failure of epic proportions, and one which history will not forgive.

*****�In the summer of 1988,� noted Political.com, �when Democrat Michael Dukakis challenged Republican George H. W. Bush for the Presidency � Republicans successfully cast �liberal� in pejorative terms. Many Americans accepted the negative implication. Dukakis became a �Massachusetts liberal.� Democrats have been fleeing from the word ever since.�

Something else happened in that time frame. My radio program was first nationally syndicated in August 1988. And liberalism will never recover, thank the Lord.

This is what Ventures In Success is all about, being good stewards of God's resources through a foundation of good marketing plans and designs that honor God, as we move The Churchforward.

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Liberal Theology Threatens Our American Way of Life