*Please... Cut the Crap

Once More, With "Chained CPI" Madness, Some Liberals Caught in "Sky is Falling" Mode

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I said it before, and I guess I have to say it again; folks on both extreme ends of the political spectrum seem to have an amazing inability to think about more than one thing at a time, and they seem incapable of considering two related concepts at the same time.  We should expect this lack of critical thinking from the far right, but a similar level of cognitive dissonance has  increasingly become a feature of liberal politics, and it’s coming from people who should know better.

As I noted about a year and a half ago, the debt ceiling situation brought out the loon factor on the far left more than anything in years. We were given the choice between a few cuts in Social Security and default, and a significant and loud contingent of lefties actually chose default, despite the fact that allowing default would actually do more damage to Social Security than the cuts the GOP had proposed.

The same thing has happened again, when discussing the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. Some lefties have gone absolutely insane over the inclusion of a “chained CPI” codicil in President Obama’s latest proposal to solve the “fiscal cliff.” I see so many arguments on the left, in which reasonable liberals shrug over it, and others scream about gloom and doom and insinuate that such a proposal would be nearly impossible to kill.  So many libs have excoriated Obama over this proposal, it started making me laugh a few days ago. Some have even suggested that Reagan was to the left of Obama on Social Security, which is historically ignorant.  I also found myself amused by the lefties suggesting that Obama holds all of the cards in this negotiation, and he shouldn’t give the GOP anything, and just let the country go off the “cliff.”

It's Not Just About the Guns. This Could Be Time for Progressives to Shine...

Two things:

It’s simply not enough to be mad about what happened at Sandy Hook. 

Sandy Hook isn’t just about guns. 

No one with a pulse could possibly have heard, seen or read about the tragic elementary school shooting last Friday without experiencing a sick feeling in their stomach. I wept, and I rarely do that. I imagined my son when he was that age enduring such terror, and it made me physically ill. As I watched everything unfold, I first heard that one child was killed and I was mortified. Then, I heard that the previous report was erroneous, and I felt a bit of elation, that the children had escaped harm, somehow. Then, the hammer hit. The number of dead kept growing, and so did my anger and my sickness at this, and what it meant.

I took to the Internet to express my sorrow and anger. Almost immediately, I was bombarded with the usual silly arguments, like the classic “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” and the variation on that, “We have to stop the people; guns are just the tools. Going after the tools won’t stop this.”  It’s the best they can do, because even the staunchest gunloon knows deep down there is no excuse for anything like this. So why aren’t we winning this issue? We should have had full-on common sense gun control by now.