Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin
was a liberal Democrat. But his big sales pitch
was what he called The Golden Fleece Award. Each
time, he would give an award to government agencies
or grant recipients who had fleeced the public out
of a lot of money.
At first The Golden Fleece Award was
really good. But it took a lot of work to find out
the details of something stupid in one of the Federal
agencies every week. So soon Proxmire's staff found
a way to get out of all that work. They found a
cheap shot that required no effort.
Instead of digging for a real scandal,
they looked at the list of National Science Foundation
grants that came out each week. They just found
a title that sounded absurd. They gave the Golden
Fleece to one of those grantees.
Soon they just picked any title that
was hard to understand and called that research
project a waste of money.
This was easy, and this was evil.
To a true yahoo, a real ignoramus, ALL scientific
research sounds useless. Someone getting a million
dollars to study ocean floor life seems, if you
just say it that way, to be a true waste of money.
But some of that research is now promising an advance
in cancer research.
The result was that Proxmire attacked
some of the most productive scientific research
that has ever been done. All real scientists despised
him, and for excellent reason.
What if Proxmire had been a conservative
Republican instead of a liberal Democrat? Liberals
would have exposed this gambit instantly. They wold
have ridiculed the "hayseed" who attacked great
research because the yahoo voters who elected him
couldn't understand the titles.
I explained this to a yuppie liberal
the other day, and he simply could not take it in.
To somebody in the media or a fashionable yuppie
liberal or a respectable conservative, a liberal
simply cannot be an ignorant yahoo. A liberal Democrat
like Proxmire can "make mistakes" or be "too idealistic,"
but he cannot just be an ignorant, blind rube the
way a right-winger can.
So my liberal buddy honestly could
not take this in, really! That is what I call hypnotic
leftism.
Once during the Cold War, I crossed
the Hungarian border on a bus that had some hippies
on it. The Hungarian border, like all the borders
of the Democratic Peace-Loving People's Republics,
had guards standing at the border with automatic
weapons to kill anybody who tried to escape from
their Workers' Paradise.
On the Hungarian People's Republic
side of the border there was a broad dirt ditch
cut out. It had signs with the skull and crossbones
that are the universal sign for land mines on it.
I knew that the hippies were always
saying that the West was at least as bad as the
Communists. To them, the Communists were the good
guys. I could not imagine how someone could go over
a murderous border like that, a prison wall around
a country, and imagine the Reds were the good guys.
So I watched the hippies to see how they would react
to the ditch and guns and land mines and the skull
and cross bones.
Their reaction as we got to the Hungarian
border was amazing. They simply looked straight
ahead. THEY DIDN"T SEE THE MINE WARNINGS OR GUARDS
OR THE MURDEROUS DITCH THEY WERE CROSSING OVER!
It was as if they went into a trance and came to
after we crossed the border.
Hypnotic leftism really is a form
of hypnosis. To a hypnotic leftist, a rightist like
Hitler or Franco is a dictator. Leftists may make
"idealistic errors," but no leftist is ever called
a yahoo or a tyrant or an ignoramus.
We must start calling them that and
backing it up.
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