[mod.politics] Trainable liberals

walton@csvax.caltech.edu@jaguar.UUCP (01/20/87)

In an otherwise intelligent and polemic-free posting in Poli-Sci V6
#107, Rick McGeer writes:

        Liberals take note: *this* is the effect of labour protection
   and civil rights legislation.  I wonder how our friends in the ADA,
   the ACLU and the AFL-CIO feel now?  Of course, if they regretted,
   this would imply that liberals can learn -- in which case, of
   course, they'd be conservatives.

The definition of "conservative" is someone who, generally
irrationally, prefers that things not change, with the implication
that they cannot learn from a changing world.  If you want a great
example of conservatives failing to learn from their mistakes, try
reading the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages.  They had the gall
last week to publish a little parable placing the Contra war on the
same plane as the American Revolution.  They also still believe that
the Federal budget can be balanced by non-defense spending cuts alone,
thus showing their inability to perform simple arithmetic.  Speaking
for myself, I think I've learned that the Great Society didn't work,
but the general lesson is that you can't solve a problem by throwing
money at it--a lesson which the current Administration seems to have
forgotten in the context of the DoD.

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