{"id":18479,"date":"2013-09-17T12:10:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-17T17:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=18479"},"modified":"2013-09-17T12:10:44","modified_gmt":"2013-09-17T17:10:44","slug":"todays-most-infuriating-quote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=18479","title":{"rendered":"Today’s Most infuriating Quote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Dwight<\/a> comes a link to this Jonathan Chait piece<\/a> in New York<\/i> magazine. Which contained this gem of prevarication: <\/p>\n

Bloomberg\u2019s health crusade is so unusual because it embraces a political mode usually associated with the right. Conservatives favor regulation of vice and personal behavior, especially related to sex, because they believe that the state has a legitimate role in shaping the culture. Traditional social values, they believe, undergird stable families and a well-functioning community. Liberals traditionally want to remove the government from regulating personal behavior and to deploy it only in the economic realm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That quote might have had some nodding relationship to reality in, oh, 1980 or so. But it’s certainly not conservatives who have been pushing to:<\/p>\n

  • Ban civilian firearms ownership\n
  • Increase tobacco taxes\n
  • Ban incandescent light bulbs\n
  • Force Catholics to pay for abortions\n
  • Ban “high flow” toilets\n
  • Ban “hate speech”\n
  • Ban plastic bags\n
  • Ban transfats\n
  • Ban crosses and managers on public land\n
  • Ban liquor stores in black neighborhoods\n
  • Ban talk radio\n
  • Ban government use of the word “Christmas”\n
  • Ban SUVs, or any other vehicle that get insufficiently “virtuous” gas mileage\n
  • Ban genetically modified foods\n
  • Ban foie gras\n
  • And don’t forget that the “War on Drugs” was an extremely bipartisan affair, with Hubert Humphrey, Joe Biden and Tip O’Neil all among its enthusiastic backers.\n
  • Etc.\n<\/li>\n

    This poster<\/a> makes many of the same points:<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    The idea that modern (as opposed to classical) liberals “want to remove the government from regulating personal behavior” is a naked, vainglorious, self-flattering lie on Chait’s part, and only someone living in the coastal Liberal Reality Bubble could possibly type it with a straight face. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Via Dwight comes a link to this Jonathan Chait piece in New York magazine. Which contained this gem of prevarication: Bloomberg\u2019s health crusade is so unusual because it embraces a political mode usually associated with the right. Conservatives favor regulation of vice and personal behavior, especially related to sex, because they believe that the state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":15,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,11,255],"tags":[2864,459,2860,372,2876],"class_list":["post-18479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-media-watch","category-regulation","tag-democrats","tag-jonathan-chait","tag-media-watch","tag-nanny-state","tag-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18479"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18487,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18479\/revisions\/18487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}