Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: Progressive

Democrat Pollster Doug Schoen on Life Lessons from Politics, Learning from Clinton and Nixon, Threats from China and Russia and Our Damaged Institutions


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My Guest

Doug Schoen has been one of the most influential Democratic campaign consultants for over thirty years. A founding partner and principal strategist for Penn, Schoen & Berland, he is widely recognized as one of the co-inventors of overnight polling. He has advised presidents, prime ministers and titans of private industry. He is the author of multiple books; his most recent include Putin’s Master PlanThe Nixon Effect (interview here), and Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (interview here). Schoen is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and various other newspaper and online publications as well as Fox News.

Even though Doug and I disagree on several political issues, I am proud to call him a mentor and friend. His insights on politics and policy are not at all clouded by ideology, something rare in the world of punditry and prognostication. And his experience, judgment and wisdom are unparalleled. Perhaps most importantly, Doug and I share a love of country and belief in the imperative to defend it.

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Talking Iran Deal, #Iransom and the War of Ideas with Buck Sexton

Check out my latest radio hit with friend and former colleague Buck Sexton on Iran, #Iransom, the War of Ideas and a whole lot more:

Image: Tehran 1993: An Iranian woman stands in front of a mural depicting Khomeini. (Armineh Johannes/Sygma/Corbis)

Talking Anti-Trump Protesters, Soros and the Illiberal Left on Dennis Michael Lynch’s DML Unfiltered

The Progressive Mantra: Never Let a Shooting Go to Waste

Progressive politicians politicize tragedies within 24 hours because the only principle they live by is that of winning and therefore power.

Here’s exhibit #3,689,474 from the particularly shameless Sen. Dick Durbin:

Of course Instapundit was ahead of the curve on this one:

https://twitter.com/instapundit/status/636725811517779968

Naturally, not mentioned by Durbin or the president is the fact that the perpetrator of this horrendous double homicide was a black man who wanted to start a race war.

The “national conversation” the Left is having is about guns, because narratives.

Of course one of the poisonous fruits of the Obama presidency is that we are subjected to national lectures on, and hyper-politicization regarding each individual tragedy that can be spun to push a policy objective of the progressive Democratic Party.

 

Featured Image Source: Clash Daily.

Does the Arc of History Bend Towards Tyranny? An Excerpt from Michael Walsh’s ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.’

Michael Walsh’s new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is pivotal in its explication of how poor and purely evil ideas have subverted America, and eaten away at the pillars of Western civilization.

While we often hear the refrain “ideas have consequences,” too frequently we attribute the decline of the American system to politics or particular political figures, while giving the power of ideas short thrift.

The Devil's Pleasure Palace

But as Walsh’s important work illustrates, ideas are everything, and if you lose the war of them you lose all of the other battles too.

One such idea that has trumped to date deals with “History” — which you would not dare be on the wrong side of — as if some metaphysical Berlin Wall.

Here is what Walsh has to say on the matter:

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

Isn’t it interesting that there can be some form of moral judgment in a morally relativistic, largely if not entirely amoral secular progressive system?

Walsh has some questions for the arc-ists too:

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20 Signs You Are Living in a Progressive Utopia

It can be said that progressivism at its core seeks to turn the world upside down.

It is an ideology and a tactic of modern-day Sophists who seek to replace facts with narrative, justice with injustice, morality with immorality and virtue with vice — but it does so with a smile on its face.

Consequently, in order to identify whether one is in fact living in a progressive Utopia, one merely needs to identify instances in one’s society, economy and political system, themselves a natural outgrowth of the culture (itself an outgrowth of the ideas that a people has imbibed), in which facts, logic and history have been shoved aside in favor of the whims of the wise collective.

Here are 20 signs that you might be living in such a blissful place:

1) When the executive branch has effectively become the legislative branch

President Obama has been pushing executive actions as a means of working around Congress in 2014. (Image Source: heartland.org)

President Obama has been pushing executive actions as a means of working around Congress in 2014. (Image Source: heartland.org)

2) When the notions of secure borders and national sovereignty are considered thinly-veiled euphemisms for racial hatred

3) When justice means determining a person is guilty before seeing any evidence, then rioting, looting and destroying property when said person does not even make it to trial

4) When those who riot, loot and destroy property are considered freedom-fighters, and those who peacefully assemble are considered radical extremists

In this June 19, 2013, photo, Tea Party activists attend a rally on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 19, 2013. (Photo: AP)

In this June 19, 2013, photo, Tea Party activists attend a rally on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 19, 2013. (Image Source: AP)

5) When criminals advise law enforcement on how to do its job

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

An interview with Paul Kengor, Reagan biographer and author of 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative

In connection with the release of his new book, “11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative,” reviewed here, we interviewed Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, Reagan biographer, and author of numerous books including the 2012 title ”The Communist” (published under our Mercury Ink imprint) and “God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life.”

Our correspondence with Professor Kengor comes in light of a renewed focus on Russia given the goings-on in the Ukraine, years of economic stagnation and hostile in-fighting between conservatives and Establishment Republicans, among other similarities with the era in which Reagan rose to the White House.

Below we cover these timely issues and more. The interview, conducted via email, has been slightly edited for formatting. And again, be sure to check out our review and cheat sheet if you missed them too.

Give us your elevator pitch for why TheBlaze audience should read another book on Reagan. 

Kengor: Because this is a book on Reagan that’s crucial and timely and well worth their time—and it’s short. They will sincerely find great benefit in this one. I mean that.

We constantly hear Republicans of all stripes make the claim “I’m a Reagan conservative,” or, when asked which Republican they most identify with, they point to Reagan. But in fact, many to most are not Reagan conservatives at all. Many of them are liberal/progressive Republicans. So, what is a “Reagan conservative?”

I’m someone who has studied Reagan enough (some say more than anyone) that I felt I could and should and must take up the task of answering that question, especially during this battle within the GOP between genuine conservatives like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Tom Coburn and what Reagan would have called the “Rockefeller Republican” types. There are far more Reagan conservatives coming out of the Tea Party than from the so-called Establishment.

Thus, with the 2014 mid-terms coming up, and the crucial 2016 presidential nomination coming as well, this project to define what a Reagan conservative is struck me as imperative. I should add, too, that Reagan was such a model conservative, really the prototype, that this book defines not just Reagan conservatism but conservatism generally.

When I spoke on this book at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara last week, the executive director of the group, Andrew Coffin, said that this book is a kind of manifesto on conservatism.

So, I ask readers of The Blaze: What could be more needed right now as we engage in this battle for 2016? I think a short book carefully explaining Reagan conservatism and conservatism generally is one they should read.

Besides, because it’s a short book, it’s also very inexpensive—only something like $13 on Amazon. You can’t beat that. It’s cheap and quick but an enlightening read. You’ll benefit from this and will want to buy it for your friends, including your liberal friends.

Read more at TheBlaze…

 

The Lebowski Economy: Creating an Infant Culture Where Government Decides and Self Sufficiency Subsides

“I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” – Walter Sobchak in “The Big Lebowski

When news broke that the Congressional Budget Office Report indicated that the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs would be lost by 2024 under Obamacare, to a chorus of laughable cheerleading that the “job-locked” would be “liberated” and America could now restore its national “work-life balance,” one man came to mind: Jeffrey Lebowski, properly known as the Dude, or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

For I would submit that the explicit purpose of the progressive agenda is to create a nation of Lebowskis (Dudes) and Julias (Dudettes), or at least a two-class system in which big business and big labor are protected by government in the way that the Mafia protects your friendly local butcher, while Lebowskis and Julias are showered with benefits in exchange for votes.

If I sound cynical it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of “House of Cards” lately (culture matters).

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

Free Speech in Name Only

The cruel irony of what happened to Maria Conchita Alonso this past week lies in the following: Here was a woman descended from Communist Cuba, who emigrated to the United States from Communist Venezuela, only to find herself a victim of the more insidious totalitarianism of a monolithic Leftist artistic establishment.

For those unfamiliar, Maria Conchita Alonso is a Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress who had the temerity to endorse a conservative gubernatorial candidate in California. Even worse, in an interview she said she supported candidate Tim Donnelley’s views on immigration, using the term “illegal” to describe immigrants who were here…well…illegally.

Maria Conchita Alonso with candidate Tim Donnelly. (Image source: YouTube raw video)

The penalty for her thought crime? Alonso was compelled to “resign” from her role in a Spanish-Language version of the “Vagina Monologues” set to run in San Francisco’s Mission District in mid-February.

Eliana Lopez, the producer of the show, and herself a fellow Venezuelan actress, said “We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately…Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe.”

Stated differently, here was a Hispanic woman telling another Hispanic woman that her views on Hispanic immigration were too odious to be given sanction by a role in a performance. Apparently not all wise Latina women are born equal.

Maria Conchita Alonso is just the latest in a series of victims of the Left’s fatwa against anyone who does not hew to the party line in recent years.

Continue reading at TheBlaze…

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