What Passes For “Mainstream” Liberal Thought These Days

The Smirking Chimp is an extremely popular liberal weblog. Just to give you an idea of how popular it is, it pulls roughly 4 times as much traffic as Right Wing News does. So, it’s very fair to call it a mainstream liberal weblog.

So, what sort of “mainstream” ideas does this “mainstream” liberal blog promote? Well, what you’re going to read below are some quotations from articles on the front page of the Smirking Chimp. Keep in mind that every single quote you’re about to read comes from the authors of the posts on the front page, not from the commenters. So, it’s fair to say that the sentiments you are about to read are representative of their opinion….and oh, what opinions they are!

As you read what the people over at the Smirking Chimp have to say, just remember that the people writing these remarks are not that dissimilar in mentality to the Democratic staffers up on Capitol Hill, the Democratic Party activists, and indeed, the very people who will take the reigns of power in the United States if the Democrats do well enough at the polls in November.

This is what most liberals in America believe today. Read it and weep.

“There have been too many instances in our nation’s history when fear has led to gross violations of civil liberties. If you still believe that dissent is the highest form of patriotism, there’s probably a spot in Bush’s gulags for you. And depending on where you live, most of your neighbors won’t even notice nor care if you disappear.” — Randolph T Holhut

“So we’re here. No more shilly-shallying about whether America is beginning to resemble a fascist society. We’re now plopped right down into it.

The slide into our particularly American brand of fascism is not total. There still are areas that, at least for a time, remain relatively free. And dissent is tolerated — up to a point. (That point, by the way, is when that dissent starts becoming effective; watch the number being done on MoveOn.org, for example.)

On the issues that really matter, America is fast moving itself into an authoritarian, militarist, imperial state, one that has more in common with Stalinist Soviet Union and Hitlerian Germany than with traditional American society.” — Bernard Weiner

“Paris: They don’t like the U.S. here. It’s not personal. Except for an occasional rude snot, the French are friendly to individual Americans. They’re not xenophobes. They just don’t like our government. Regard George Bush as an obnoxious paysan.

What’s new? A lot of Americans also believe that Bush is a blundering peasant.
Particularly those of us who don’t spend hours each day glued to Fox News. What’s changed is that France, Britain, and most of the other EU countries have moved on beyond dislike. Learned they can do without us. America’s become the obnoxious cousin with the drinking problem that everyone tolerates because they’re family. We continue to have our place at ceremonial occasions. Still show up in group photos. On the surface we appear to be part of the family. Only, we’re not. We’ve become etranger. The French have grown tired of trying to figure us out. Given up and gone their own way.” — Bob Burnett

“Who would have guessed that after 6 years of slaughtering and torturing people in their own countries, the American people could be so incensed about one rogue congressman bumping boys in his off-hours. It just shows what trivial people we’ve become.” — Mike Whitney

“And so all of this,” I said, “all of it, is spun and sanitized and sexed-up and spoon-fed in sensationalistic and sugarcoated sound bites to you and your fellow phony patriots, assuring you it’s all part of a grand scheme to keep you safe from some scary plan of world domination by ‘Islamofascists’ that exists only in your masters’ heads.

“You buy the lies and then, worse, spread them, repeating them until they’ve become gospel, thereby making possible both the transformation of a land that once held forth truly lofty ideals into a neo-feudalistic, murderous rogue nation, and the perpetuation of catastrophic atrocities like Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, and next, Iran, where your heroes fully intend, soon, to use nuclear weapons.” — Mark Drolette

“Bush is a lying, immoral coward who uses religion to spread hate and division. He is a vile, irredeemable fraud, and like most of those who crave dictatorial power, a mistake of history whose arrogance and megalomania are substitutes for leadership and decency.

America better wake up in a hurry or we are going to find ourselves sliding deeper into a fascist state and then wondering, “Gee, how did this happen?” And like many of the fascist experiments in the 20th century, the dictators get their dirty deeds done with the complicity of a cowardly legislature.” — Bill Gallagher

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