Michael Savage asserts that liberalism is a form of insanity, and I agree with him. Considering the reaction of liberals to the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, it is obvious that liberals are out of touch with reality and prefer to live in a fantasy world of their own making. They devoutly wish that conservatives were violent and murderous and that the Tea Party was run by a group of Nazis. But alas, conservatives and Tea Partiers are just ordinary patriotic citizens who believe in a constitutional republic and that, in a free society, the ballot box is the way to change things.
But what is insanity? My college dictionary defines insane as “mentally deranged, crazy; utterly senseless.” Insanity is defined as “extravagant folly,” with synonyms such as: “dementia, lunacy, mania, frenzy, madness,” and many more. Which means that there are insane people both inside and outside insane asylums. But I would define insanity as lacking logic, rationality, and common sense, the inability to put two and two together. From that point of view, liberalism is indeed a form of insanity.
Let’s look at the liberal policies of our government that, from any viewpoint, can be considered insane. For example, the liberal Congress and our ultra-liberal President enacted a highly complex, 2000-page national healthcare bill, which few legislators actually read. Indeed, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi who said that the bill had to be passed so that we could see what was in it. That’s crazy. How many citizens have access to this 2000-page monster? Is it being freely distributed to each household like the income tax forms? Obviously, 99 percent of Americans will never know what‘s in that law. Ms. Pelosi also characterized the Tea Party movement as Astroturf. Another sign of an unbalanced mind.
Then our government promoted a policy of forcing banks to provide mortgages to poor people who would be unable to make their monthly payments. The liberals’ rationale? Poor people should be able to own homes. Sounds nice, but it’s insane. And the nation is suffering its consequences.
Another act of insanity was committed when the liberal lame-duck Congress voted to scrap the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and permit homosexuals to serve openly in the military. Why would anyone want to join the military and advertise something as private as one’s sexual preference? Why? To openly solicit sexual propositions? Is that now legal? And will openly gay enlistees be required to take tests, just like other enlistees, to see if they are HIV positive or have a sexually-transmitted disease? And will gay enlistees complain that these tests are discriminatory? When you pass insane laws you get more problems than you can logically deal with.
Our new airport security policies are also a form of blatant insanity. The new policy assumes that an 80-year-old Jewish male, a 60-year-old Catholic nun, a 45-year-old businessman on his way to a conference, a 20-year-old college student on spring break, and a 10-year-old Little Leaguer are all potentially suicidal and are boarding their planes in order to blow them up in service to Islamic Jihad. That’s totally insane.
We know who the potential terrorists are: young male Muslims with one-way tickets and no luggage. So why must every air traveler in America be subjected to a search for a bomb in his or her underwear? And why do we now need thousands of airport security employees to spot the few actual suicidal terrorists who want to blow up planes?
Any junior psychologist or intelligent layman should be able to pick out a suicidal terrorist from among a group of passengers boarding a plane. I think I could do it. The average air traveler does not spend big money to commit suicide on a plane. Yet the government actually believes that anyone who buys an airline ticket and shows up at an airport is a potential suicidal maniac serving Allah.
Another foolish idea was the creation of the Federal Reserve System by a group of secretive New York bankers on the premise that it would prevent bank failures, depressions, recessions, and inflation. Yet, under the Fed we had the longest and deepest depression in American history. We’ve had inflation to the point where a hotdog that cost five cents in 1938 now costs $2.50 in lots of sports venues. We’ve also had many more bank failures than before the Fed was created. Yet the liberals claim that the idea of doing away with the Fed is unthinkable, as if there were no banks or currency before the Fed was invented.
Another massive form of insanity is our public education system that is dumbing down the nation and costing billions of dollars. Everyone in Congress ought to be required to read Charlotte Iserbyt’s well-documented indictment of the U.S. Department of Education, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, as well as John Taylor Gatto’s masterpiece of historical research, The Underground History of American Education. If this nation does not bring sanity back to the education of its youth, it faces a gloomy future.
Indeed, public education has become a criminal enterprise. First the schools actually create dyslexia and thereby deform the brains of our children by using the sight method to teach reading. Brain scientists have shown through brain scans what a child’s brain looks like when he or she is dyslexic. Our schools no longer teach cursive writing, which actually helps a child learn to read. They let our kids hold pens with as many fingers as they want so that their handwriting resembles chicken scratches. As for spelling, kids are encouraged to spell any way they want. It’s called “creative spelling.”
Our educators have also become drug pushers by forcing millions of children to take such mood-altering drugs as Ritalin and Adderall to relieve the symptoms of ADD or ADHD, both created by the frustration of reading failure. Some kids have dropped dead or committed suicide because of the long-term effects of these drugs.
Then our schools destroy the religious beliefs of the children by evicting God from the school house. As a result the kids become humanists, atheists or nihilists. The educators then contribute to the delinquency of minors by teaching pornographic sex ed which encourages sexual experimentation, promiscuity, and risky alternate lifestyles. They also contribute to teenage suicide by teaching death ed — a depressing, scary subject. And yet, we keep financing this insane horror show as if there were no better way to educate our children. In fact, homeschoolers have found a better way: education at home by parents at no cost to the taxpayer.
Then we have an insane government energy policy which bans drilling for oil in Alaska even though gas prices continue to rise and our dependence on foreign oil increases. We pour money into windmills and solar panels which cannot be used to drive cars. And we pour billions into making ethanol so that ranchers have to pay higher prices for corn, thus increasing the cost of food in the supermarket. None of this makes sense.
We also have hundreds of laws and regulations restricting property owners on how they can use their own property. We have an insane system of taxation that requires every individual to either be an accountant or hire a professional accountant to figure out the rules of the system. Attempts to simplify the system have been met by political inertia.
The American people are now so totally mesmerized by their government’s insane liberalism that they consider the abnormal to be normal and the normal to be abnormal. They can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, or the beautiful and the ugly. Religious belief is considered hokey, and cynical nihilism is the mindset of the intellectual elite.
Yes, we do have some islands of sanity in America: the homeschool movement, a few good conservative colleges and think tanks, some patriotic commentators on television, a handful of rational news publications (The New American surely among them), and a small group of sane economists like Thomas Sowell who are willing to provide us with cogent analysis of our present situation. And not much else. It takes a lot of courage and moral honesty to remain sane in America. A sort of bleak way to start 2011. Can the Tea Party movement begin to set things right? We hope so.
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of nine books on education including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, The Whole Language/OBE Fraud, and The Victims of Dick & Jane and Other Essays. Of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, former U.S. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho said: “Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s columns have appeared in such diverse publications as Reason, The New American,The Chalcedon Report, Insight, Education Digest, Vital Speeches, WorldNetDaily, and others.
