{"id":9223,"date":"2012-11-11T15:34:41","date_gmt":"2012-11-11T15:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/11\/11\/robert-reich-on-the-new-american-civil-war\/"},"modified":"2012-11-11T15:34:41","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T15:34:41","slug":"robert-reich-on-the-new-american-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/11\/11\/robert-reich-on-the-new-american-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Reich on the New American Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Robert Reich <a href=\"http:\/\/robertreich.org\/post\/35070262414\" target=\"_self\">bemoans<\/a> the New American Civil War as he calls it:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won\u2019t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn\u2019t share with my granddaughter. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">What\u2019s going on? Yes, we\u2019re divided over issues like the size of government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But these aren\u2019t exactly new debates. [. . .] And we\u2019ve had bigger disagreements in the past \u2013 over the Vietnam War, civil rights, communist witch hunts \u2013 that didn\u2019t rip us apart like this.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Part of the reason that there is a &#39;civil war&#39; is because of people like Reich and their inability to fairly present the issues that divide us.&#0160; <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">He mentions the abortion issue.&#0160; It is<em> not<\/em> about whether women should have control over their bodies.&#0160; Of course they should. It is about whether the fetus growing inside a woman is a part of her body in a sense of &#39;part&#39; that would permit her to dispose of it the way she would dispose of unwanted fat through liposuction.&#0160; Reich is not unintelligent: he is capable of understanding the issue.&#0160; But he&#0160; is intellectually dishonest:&#0160; he does not present the issue objectively and fairly.&#0160; He&#0160;distorts it &#0160;like the typical leftist ideologue he is.&#0160;&#0160;(See <a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2012\/11\/what-does-abortion-have-to-do-with-religion.html\" target=\"_self\">here<\/a> for my refutation of the &#39;woman&#39;s body&#39; argument.) <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">He does the very same thing with his talk of &quot;communist witch hunts.&quot;&#0160; That phrase implies that there was no communist infiltration of the U. S. government.&#0160; But that was precisely the question. The phrase he employs is a question-begging epithet.&#0160; Why?&#0160; Well, there are no witches.&#0160; So if you call something a witch hunt then you are implying that it is a hunt for something that doesn&#39;t exist.&#0160; There is also the implication that the people conducting this search have some ulterior motive such as the desire to&#0160;suppress all dissent.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The same goes for the phrase &#39;Red Scare&#39; beloved of the Left.&#0160;&#0160;The phrase&#0160;implies that there was no threat to our gvernment posed by communists. But again that was the very question, a question that is begged by the use of the phrase &#39;Red Scare.&#39; &#0160; As a matter of fact, it was not a mere scare, but a real threat.&#0160;So &#0160;&#39;Red Threat&#39; is the proper phrase.&#0160; After all, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/opinion\/commentary\/la-oe-radosh17-2008sep17,0,864776.story\" target=\"_self\">we now know <\/a>that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies and that <a href=\"http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/ronradosh\/2009\/06\/09\/935\/\" target=\"_self\">Alger Hiss was a communist.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">My point is that Reich is not intellectually honest.&#0160; He understands the issues but he refuses to present them objectively and fairly.&#0160; He is nothing but a leftist ideologue.&#0160; And notice the tone of his piece.&#0160; It begins with a gratuitous smear against Sarah Palin.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">The piece ends with Reich&#39;s playing of the race card.&#0160; So typical.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">So while bemoaning the &#39;new American civil war,&#39; he fuels it by his own contemptible behavior.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Reich bemoans the New American Civil War as he calls it: I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won\u2019t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn\u2019t share with my granddaughter. What\u2019s going on? &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/11\/11\/robert-reich-on-the-new-american-civil-war\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Robert Reich on the New American Civil War&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[163,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}