From Lileks:

I thought about a friend who’s pro-small business, pro-military, pro-religious freedom – of course! This is America! – and she will vote for Obama. She believes that the state should take more property from people who die with X amount of money in the bank and give it to other people, and while she’s not exactly sure about what X should be, this is necessary because of Fairness.

That does seem to be the dominant idea in the land these days, no? The State shall have the power to do X if the objective is Fairness. The details – and the actual result – are less important. If you believe the State should do these things, why, it stands to reason that it can, and and hence any limitation of the powers of the State is a mulish obstruction of a better world.

Good people do not vote against such things.

She also believes, I think, in the following propositions:

The severing of the concept of marriage from the traditional understanding of male-female-children is inconsequential, and that the definition, thus expanded, will hereafter suffer no additional challenges;

Access to abortion is a prime metric for determining the worthiness of a society, but the details – quantity, sex-selection criteria, late-term instances – are relevant only inasmuch as they are cudgels used by those who would ban the procedure entirely, and hence they are a diversion.;

The deficit can be solved by taxing other people;

The financial industry was unregulated prior to 2009;

Inflation is just a thing that happens, like weather;

The State never forces you to do anything. It merely “asks.” The true coercive power in society today resides with corporations.

Read all.

More thoughts on the disgusting nature of the leftist media:

This is truly awful. Between Chuck Woods and Cindy Sheehan, the MSM chose to elevate the latter, a paranoiac who has, on more than a few occasions, abruptly exploded into a fit of anti-semetic apoplexy in situations where the subject of Jews or Israel wasn’t even being discussed. A woman who has used her son’s tragic death to promote causes that had nothing even tangentially to do with the war in Iraq. A woman who’s undeserved fame and and lack of self-awareness have led her into embarrassing public displays that no normal person could witness without cringing.

Chuck Woods simply wants to know why back-up wasn’t provided for his son on the night of his death. It’s a perfectly relevant question, seeing that Tyrone Woods actually requested help. And Woods pere gotten virtually no help from those whose job it is to challenge power and authority. So far, Jake Tapper is the only MSM journalist willing to ask questions on Chuck Woods’s behalf. But these same people, pathetically, did just about everything in their power to promote a woman whose real objective– as distinct from her stated objective of getting justice for her slain son– was to promote a Chomskyite political programme.

Of course, after Sheehan was no longer useful– after the Democrats had won control of congress, and after it seemed assured that they would win back the presidency– the MSM abandoned her. They abetted her in all of her clownish public behavior and in all of her nauseating pronouncements, they let her act the fool as long as she was useful for good copy and for advancing their political biases– and then, when her usefulness was at an end, they heartlessly abandoned her.

I say “heartless” here because that’s what the MSM’s behavior, at bottom, was. They took advantage of a deeply wounded and vulnerable person. Because in spite of all her political tendentiousness, Sheehan was at heart a grieving mother whose grief had unhinged her. Yes, she was no doubt a radical buffoon before her son’s death, but her obnoxious political activism was just her way of coping. Her behavior was unseemly to most people, but not to herself for the very simple reason that she was without self-awareness. Her grief had killed it. And the MSM took advantage of this lack.

“Heartless” may be an apt description of the MSM’s behavior vis a vis Cindy Sheehan, but on second thought it seems highly insufficient. Words like “monstrous,” “cruel” and “sinister” seem much more appropriate.

Yup.

No, they’re not just discouraged Republicans.