Wolfgang von Skeptik. . .

. . .has delivered a long essay on the murder of classical liberalism at the hands of the New Left, and I tend to agree. I believe that the government can, and should, help people where other institutions are unprepared to do so.

"The liberalism for which this essay has become a eulogy thus bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pathology today’s mass media labels 'liberalism': the feces-hurling, GOP-office-trashing, war-monument-vandalizing hatefulness of the self-proclaimed 'progressive' Left – a Left that in its pre-election frenzies reflected its cold indifference to America’s lower-income working families by proposing an expansion of health insurance that would have been available only if you as head-of-household were willing to submit self, mate and offspring to the ultimate humiliation of enslavement by the welfare bureaucracy. Not that I was especially surprised: the Left has dismissed the poor and near-poor as 'hopelessly reactionary' ever since welfare mothers rejected women’s-liberation organizing efforts in the early 1970s. The Left’s ideological hostility to the American underclass was in fact one of the earliest symptoms of the New Miserliness.

I believe in America as the land of the second chance, and that there is a role for the government in providing that second chance. That may be a bit self-serving, inasmuch as I've been on the needing end of that second chance, and have turned to the government for assistance. But, it's not a belief I arrived at "just in time" when I found myself in need.

Wolfgang's assertion concerning the hostility of the Left toward the underclass is a very good point -- one that ought to be examined by those who make up the modern Left and its ideological kin. There simply is no true compassion for the have-nots within modern liberalism. They are merely a means to an end, contemptuously viewed as wards of movement.

And woe be unto the working stiff who has the temerity to vote Republican. For, to the Left, you possess a particularly virulent form of ignorance that must be either stamped out, or purged.

OK. . .so, maybe I do have a few things to blog about.

UPDATE: Today is the 45th Anniversary of Wolfgang's enlistment in the US Army. Thanks for your contribution, Wolfie -- then and now!