“It’s always the hippies’ fault”: Why the left treats its idealists all wrong
While the right lionizes its idealists, the left blames and scoffs at its own. The difference is changing America

Last week the Internet was buzzing over the New York magazine cover story by Jonathan Chait in which he took the so-called Social Justice Warriors to task for their thuggish use of political correctness to make people feel uncomfortable on social media and shut down the important discussions that would surely happen there if only they would stop intimidating everyone with their tweets and comments.

It is worth noting that the notion the crazy lefties stand in the way of the Very Serious liberals who are trying to get things done is a trope of long standing. In fact, the governing principle of the New Democrats of yore was based on the belief among the smart folks in the political establishment that the hippies had ruined everything and it was time to take the party back.  And the Democratic establishment has been blaming them for their failures ever since.

Here’s a case in point as reported by BuzzFeed yesterday in a piece that ponders the question of why California has failed to further legalize pot. After all, it was the first state in the nation to pass medical marijuana and the state has shown no ill effects from the practice over the course of the nearly 20 years it’s been available. It points out the fact that California’s ballot initiatives have become something of a business and billionaire’s playground, costing vast sums to succeed, and unfortunately there don’t appear to be any California businesses or billionaires who see marijuana as their pet cause at the moment. (Bill Maher, pick up the white courtesy telephone please ….) In fact, the state’s experiment in direct democracy has become as undemocratic as it gets.

But the story BuzzFeed tells is about the infighting between a group of savvy, national pro-marijuana organizers and a band of illogical homegrown zealots who are standing in the way of real progress due to their lack of sophistication and strategic know-how that goes back 20 years. According to the article, in the early days back in the 1990s, a time when Democrats all over the country were running on the issue of pot being a “gateway drug” and supporting the arrest of anyone who knew the words to “Scarlet Begonias,” the foolish hippies blew it by passing the first medical marijuana bill in the country despite these huge odds. You see, they didn’t know how to write a proper marijuana bill so it had tons of problems and holes in it that made it difficult to defend in the ensuing years. One might expect that since it was the first initiative of its kind in the nation, but no, they should have known even if nobody else did.

What Steven F. Cohen & Other Liberals Get Wrong About Obama & Ukraine’s War

Liberals won’t acknowledge that they’ve “been had” by Barack Obama when they believed his liberal rhetoric; they won’t acknowledge it, even after Obama has proven by his actions that he is actually extremely conservative (a total agent of Wall Street; and, thus, inequality has been rising under his rule); Obama is conservative despite his liberal rhetoric, which is designed to deceive them; and he has — which is the worst thing of all — intentionally caused an extremely bloody ethnic cleansing in Ukraine, a war there against those of Ukraine’s citizens who think that Russia is a better country than the United States: an ethnic cleansing to cement-in, as permanent, a rabidly anti-Russian Government in Ukraine, by getting rid of the people there who had voted for the man Obama overthrew. This is, historically, the first time in history that any American President has sponsored an ethnic cleansing: it’s an attempt to exterminate a civilian population. That’s how bad Obama actually is.

Liberals won’t acknowledge either the violent coup in Ukraine, or the brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign to cement its result: an anti-Russian Government on Russia’s doorstep — a very real threat to Russia’s national security, and a very aggressive American policy against Russians.

The founder of Stratfor, the “private CIA” firm, says that the overthrow of Viktor Yanokovych in Ukraine in February 2014 was “the most blatant coup in history.” The President of the Czech Republic contrasts that coup versus Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic 1968 “Velvet Revolution,” and he says that “only poorly informed people” don’t know that the governmental overthrow in Ukraine in 2014 was a coup. America’s liberals, then, are indeed poorly informed, and they are so partly because they don’t want to know the truth about Obama; America’s conservatives, by contrast, simply hate Obama, merely because he’s a black Democratic politician (and any President who has been so good to Wall Street would be loved by them if he were a white Republican); they don’t mind (and they actually support) that Obama hates Russia and institutes an ethnic cleansing campaign in his aggressive war against Russia. Whereas conservatives don’t mind Obama’s ethnic-cleansing campaign to get rid of pro-Russians in Ukraine, liberals don’t want to know about it. The result is actually conservatives reigning in both Parties, not just in one: we now have one-party government, in all but name.

Typical on the liberal side is Professor Steven F. Cohen, a supposed Russia-expert, who sometimes writes articles for his wife’s liberal magazine (which she, Katrina vanden Heuvel, owns), The Nation, and plays dumb about Obama’s anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, and he even says, on Amy Goodman’s February 3rd “Democracy Now!”: “Many people have argued that the United States organized a coup in February to overthrow the president of Ukraine and bring to power of this new pro-American, pro-Western government. I do not know if that’s true.”