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Despite their claim to the title of enlightenment and open-mindedness, liberals are always quick to tell other people they are unqualified to have conflicting opinions. A favorite tactic for liberals in an argument is to claim the person they are arguing against is not qualified to have an opinion on the subject due to the fact that they are not female, or Buddhist, or black, or poor, or Harvard-educated, or any number of other factors, and so the debate is over before it even begins. For all their talk about equality and wanting equal access to society for everyone, liberals are always quick to disqualify their opponents on the basis of race or gender if the disparity suits them.
The truth is that liberals always seek to disqualify conservatives who disagree with them, while simultaneously granting authority to novices who do agree with them. Liberal women often tell conservative men that men should have no say on the issue of abortion because abortion is about a woman’s body and reproductive rights, and men, being physically unable to get pregnant themselves, cannot possibly understand or sympathize with a woman in that position. As someone once pointed out, this same argument applied to slavery would have prevented Abraham Lincoln from opposing that practice, as Lincoln himself was never a slave owner and had never been in their position. Similarly, it has been pointed out that everyone to support slavery was themselves free, and that everyone who supports abortion has already been born.
Conversely, liberals are quick to elevate the unqualified based on nothing more than that they agree with them. Al Gore somehow became the world’s leading authority on Global Warming (later “Climate Change,” and whatever else they have to call it down the road) despite the fact that he has no scientific background whatsoever. If someone with Gore’s résumé but lacking his notoriety tried to get a job as a meteorologist, he wouldn’t get close to the position, but that hasn’t stopped Gore from somehow becoming recognized as an expert and amassing a fortune through his bogus “green” companies, Hollywood slideshows, and high-priced speeches for people who need help falling asleep. Similarly, Michelle Obama is reported on as the nation’s leading nutrition expert, based on nothing more than that she is married to the man who became president. Wielding this bizarrely-obtained authority, she has set about trying to dictate health standards for the entire country, again despite the fact that she has no real credentials to her name and doesn’t even appear especially fit herself.
If there is one profession where the people coming into the job seem woefully unqualified and untrained for the task at hand, it is the career politician. Many are elected to office after a successful career at one thing or another, and most of those acquire a small personal fortune somewhere along the way in that profession, but typically that career is all they know. But a miraculous thing happens to politicians as soon as they enter their first election: They become an expert on everything. We know this because they will lecture us endlessly on every topic someone puts in front of them, and if they are ever confronted by someone who is truly an expert but happens to disagree with them, the politician will tell that person he or she is wrong. Politicians elected to powerful offices have a say—and sometimes the final word—in matters of extreme importance which often involve things they have never dealt with before. Only a handful of representatives in Congress have any background whatsoever in medicine or health care services, but that didn’t stop all 535 members from becoming experts on the topic when they decided to revamp the entire health care institution. We can also safely assume they didn’t all educate themselves on the subject during that episode, since the vast majority demonstrated themselves to be horribly uninformed on the specifics of the very bill they wound up passing.
Barack Obama himself is perhaps the finest example of this, having risen from the position of a “community organizer” to President of the United States in an alarmingly short period of time. Obama never held an elected office where he wasn’t spending all his time campaigning for a position of higher authority, at least until he became president, and even then he has spent all his time giving speeches and golfing. Obama was heralded as “The One” who would solve all our problems, solely on the basis that he could give speeches that convinced people he knew what he was talking about. Obama had no economic experience and no record in the private sector, and yet it was determined he was the only one with the qualifications to pull the United States out of an economic crisis. Obama was even handed a Nobel Peace Prize upon entering the Oval Office on nothing more than the qualification that he wasn’t George W. Bush. Obama spent the past four years passing himself off as the authority on health care, energy production, foreign affairs, and every other subject under the sun, all the while claiming his educated opponents were either lying or didn’t know what they were talking about, and all the while failing miserably. Then, as a reputed professor of constitutional law, he attempted to publicly lecture the Supreme Court on the subject of judicial authority, and we learned he doesn’t even know very much about that.
By extension, Obama has a habit of appointing cabinet members and czars who are often the least-qualified to preside over the tasks they are charged with. Timothy Geithner was famously appointed Secretary of the Treasury in the midst of his own tax-evasion scandal. Energy Secretary Steven Chu doesn’t even own a car and never pays for gas, so the high price American citizens pay at the gas pump is a burden he is totally removed from. Chu grades his own job performance with an “A,” which is to be expected, since both he and Obama are on record for stating their desire to see the price of gasoline rise to the level suffered in Europe.
Among this elected class and their unaccountable appointees is a category of people who are basically just theoreticians; again, Obama himself is a fine example. These are people who are highly educated and have spent many years in the classrooms of universities, first as students and later as instructors. In fact, they spent so much time hidden behind the thick walls of their refuge that they have had practically no personal involvement with what most of us would define as “the real world.” They have not held positions in the private sector, have not produced tangible goods, have never balanced books, never worried about meeting payroll, and they have certainly never created any jobs. What they have done is gathered together in hazy faculty lounges and theorized. This is not unlike a gang of alcoholics gathering in a bar and drunkenly determining how they could solve all the world’s problems if only they were the ones in charge, and it would be of the same comical inconsequence except that where alcoholics eventually sober up and lose their ridiculous notions, the educated theoreticians dive headlong into the outside world and start telling everyone else the way everything should be run.
In a classic line from The Simpsons TV show, Homer once pointed out that, “In theory, communism works,” using the sarcastic implication to dismiss something else which did not hold up in the real world. The problem with liberals is they only know the theory and are at a loss for understanding why it fails when it meets with reality. Every one of them seems to assume the right people simply haven’t been in charge and government hasn’t thrown enough money into the system, and so eventually it becomes their turn and they see themselves as the ones who will magically, finally get things right. This explains both the socialist philosophies of the left and the policy of the current administration to spend their way out of debt.
Imagine for a moment if some of these liberals were ever asked to reveal the source of their educations on the various subjects on which they claim to be experts. Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama were asked to reveal where they learned what they know about domestic oil production and nutrition, respectively, and if Al Gore were made to name the source of his environmental wisdom. Answered truthful, their responses would be, “It’s something George Soros taught me,” “I read it off the back of a box of Special K,” and, “I’ve just been misquoting Smoky the Bear for decades.”
Meanwhile, liberals routinely attempt to discredit conservatives who have shown aptitude within the field of discussion. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were criticized as being the wrong people to fix high gas prices precisely because they had experience in the oil industry. Conservatives with stable family lives are ridiculed as too old-fashioned to relate to today’s broken homes, and those who have found wealth are labeled as “out of touch” with Americans suffering through hard economic times. Notice that this does not run both ways; Mitt Romney is facing a battle against the perception that his economic success places him out of touch with most Americans, while the Obamas are also wealthy and living like royalty at the taxpayers’ expense, but never criticized for their own finances or their apparently stable family. Similarly, previous wealthy Democratic presidential candidates like John Kerry and John Edwards were never criticized as being out of touch, and that was even with Edwards running on the concept of “Two Americas” while he was enjoying $400 haircuts, and Kerry having done nothing more to earn his fortune than uttering the words, “I do.”
Even on matters of genetics, conservatives can never qualify their positions in the eyes of the left. In the eyes of liberals, women are inherently oppressed victims in need of liberal policies, and any who buck the system in favor of their own path are portrayed as mentally unstable reprobates who must be destroyed like a disease before they can spread the notion to others. Similarly, if a minority holds conservative positions, they are labeled as “race traitors” and “Uncle Toms” for their independent efforts. A minority liberal who is uneducated and dependent on government assistance is portrayed as more aware of “the plight of his people” than a worldly representative of the race who has achieved success by his own merit.
Liberals are incapable of competing in the arena of ideas, so they do the only thing they can and try to eliminate the competition before the battle even begins. Allowing any liberal to censor any conservative through this tactic is a mistake. With our own thoughts and research born of both independent study and the examples of those who came before us, any of us can be qualified to bring insight to any issue. The qualifying question we should instead ask of any liberal is: Why do we allow you people to dictate anything to us when you yourselves are always so blatantly wrong?
Travis Sedars
Mason City, Iowa
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