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Today, I am going to deal only with The Nation, since the featured article in their January 12/19 issue by Michael H. Shuman entitled "Why do progressive foundations give too little to too many?" is so illustrative of just what is wrong with The Nation. The author describes himself as "director and fundraiser-in-chief" of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington based liberal "think tank" that produces written rationales for liberal policy.

The article itself is a thinly disguised plea to progressive foundations to donate more money to I.P.S.. At heart, it is a complaint that conservatives treat THEIR elites better than liberals treat THEIRS. It should have more appropriately been presented to those foundations in the form a of a memorandum, rather than tasking The Nation's remaining supply of dedicated true believers to yet another tortured whine about why liberals are declining in strength, influence and, most importantly, plausibility.

To achieve this end, Shuman argues that the massive amounts of money donated to conservative think tanks, like The Heritage Foundation, by right wing foundations is the reason why conservative thought is ascendant in this country. In other words, like the marketers for Coca Cola v.s. Pepsi, the conservatives are able to advance their "message" better purely and simply because they have a larger advertising budget (not because more people like Coke than Pepsi)! Someone once described a liberal as someone who has immense contempt for his fellow human beings disguised as compassion. Nothing demonstrates this better than Shuman's apparent disdain for the real reasons why his fellow citizens have grown tired with liberal "solutions" to our political problems. Ignoring the real and disastrous failures of so many liberal programs, he prattles on instead about the failure of progressive organizations to properly target their funding.

Furthermore, he fails completely to distinguish between conservative and libertarian thought, lumping them together indiscriminately. If he had, he might have noticed that it is not ALL "conservative" trends that are ascendant in the USA, but mainly those with a libertarian "get the government out of our lives" content. Conservatives have long since admitted that they are being split by libertarian trends, that they must "combat" libertarian thinking and that libertarians are NOT in synch with the conservative elite. When are liberals going to wise up as well?

For, there are liberal libertarians as well as conservative libertarians. While the latter emphasizes the freedom of the market, the former concentrates on individual freedom to speak and act. Both, however, come from the rather simple belief well supported by historical evidence, that the government...ANY government...seldom does anything very well. This is doubly true when the "anything" has to do with tinkering with one person's (or group's) freedom in order to advance another's. This is ESPECIALLY true when the tinkering is accomplished by making law. Conservatives at least understand that every law must be enforced (or it is meaningless). Liberals consistently fail to note this, urging the passage of endless rules and regulations, which, though well intentioned..usually aimed at righting some perceived wrong...almost always result in more beaurocracy, more waste, more chaos. Instead of seeing this obvious truism, liberals persist in fiddling with that which they can not control. Perhaps just ONE MORE law, ONE MORE regulation will make everything all right. Of course, conservatives are hardly exempt from this foolishness. The only difference is that conservatives are more likely to pass laws to regulate "morality," rigidly and narrowly described as what was true in the non-existent "good old days."

So, wise up, Nation. Unless you wish to find yourself cast into the dust bin of history, start paying attention to the wisdom of "the people" whom you claim to represent and stop pandering to the liberal elite. You made a good start by printing the commentary of Michael Moore, a great example of a liberal libertarian. Still, from the voluminous mail you received on the subject...most of it negative, if your sample of correspondence was representative...it appears that most of your remaining fans simply don't get it. Like your media reviewers who insist that the only valid point-of-view about popular culture is that it is inherently sordid (or else it wouldn't be so popular), you refuse to abandon the utopian and failed notions of modern liberalism and return to your roots and those of the American people. America IS a libertarian society. I, for one, want to keep it that way.

Talk to you later...

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