The Consistency of the Left

A number of things I've seen lately have made me reflect on the kind of consistency commonly seen in the Left, both within the U.S. and worldwide. And when I say the Left, I include much of today's Democratic Party. A few of their characteristic elements of consistency are described below.

The Left is always pushing a gun control agenda. In that, they're consistent. You'll hear them pushing for gun control after any high profile shooting incident.

Well, not every shooting incident.
Notice how quiet the Left has been about the shooting of a television news reporter and her cameraman by a man who could find organizational racism and personal racist insults in everything that anyone said.

To the Left, some things are good or bad according to who is responsible for them. Walls and fences, for example. Walls to keep people imprisoned seem to be OK, or at least the Left didn't spend time objecting to, for example, the wall East Germany built in Berlin. (To its credit, yesterday's Democratic Party did object — loud & long.) Walls and fences built for protection seem to be bad, especially those built for protection against illegal immigration (think Europe, the U.S., and Israel) and most especially those where terrorists could use the immigrants to cover their infiltration. These barriers are racist, they claim. Yet even in those cases, it makes a big difference who built the barrier and where it is.
I guess they only demand open borders in the U.S. and our close allies.

The Left believes in enforcing the law and in following the law. Sometimes. Maybe. It really seems to depend on which law you're talking about.They don't want to enforce — or even acknowledge — immigration law. They don't want to enforce the marijuana laws, and they don't seem real sure about the other drug laws. Except, of course, the laws on prescription drugs, which they want to tighten up. They don't (and didn't) believe in the Defense Of Marriage Act.

They also don't believe in following judicial orders enforcing any of the laws they don't like. To them, any order they don't like can be ignored until it's changed, but any order they do like is permanent and final. So, for example, they support a Kentucky judge jailing Kim Davis for violating his order; they don't care that his order violated her rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment to the Constitution.
The Left is also rather selective about when to apply this approach. While Kim Davis was jailed for not issuing same-sex marriage licenses, the mayor of Washington DC is still free after ignoring multiple orders to issue legally required gun carry permits. There is another solution in both cases. Kim Davis offered an accommodation that would have let her deputies issue the marriage certificates without her signature. The judge refused. For the gun permits, the easiest accommodation for many applicants is this:
For those who reside in states and cities that continue to flout the Constitution, the law, and court orders, perhaps there can be new laws allowing them to obtain gun permits in nearby, more law-friendly, locations.

Why does the Left have such a thing for gun control laws? Easy. It's an Article of Faith for the Left that more guns means more murders, that the only way to reduce the murder rate is to get rid of the guns. Unfortunately for the Left, that Article of Faith is completely false. Yes, the U.S. ranks high in gun ownership per capita, but it ranks low in murders per capita — except in heavily gun-controlled cities like Detroit & etc. See Bill Whittle's Firewall for details, the episode titled "Number One With A Bullet" for details.

One of the Left's principles is that the indigenous people in any area should control that area, independent of any events that may have occurred in more recent historical times. That doesn't apply to full political control of regions under their overall control, of course, but does include limited sovereignty (under them, naturally) like that they're pushing for the native Hawaiians and the right to have their names used for geographic features. Thus, President Obama has unilaterally (without Congressional sanction) changed the name of Alaska's Mount McKinley to Denali. He has also applied the same principle to other renaming actions.
But even a core Left principle like this has its limits. For example, in the Middle East, it only goes back to the early part of the 20th century, based on conquests in the 7th and 12th centuries, but ignores the indigenous peoples living in the region from the first through the third millenia B.C.
It also ignores the (no longer existing) peoples who inhabited the region before that.

Sometimes the character of the Left's consistency is even more obvious (except to the Leftists, of course)
That's usually pretty entertaining. And sometimes it appears as examples of what I would characterize as Deliberate Stupidity.

But sometimes it portends — if actually put into practice — substandial damage to large numbers of people, to the nation, and to the nation's economy.

Most would see things like this as extreme hypocrisy. But not the Left. To them, it's all consistent, in one of two ways. To some in the Left, it's part of their ideology-driven viewpoint (see Cloward-Piven and "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" as two examples). To the others, it's part of the series of lies needed to maintain their positions of power "for the good of the country", as in this case.

For myself, I think most Leftists are simply misguided. I tend to believe in the dictum that "Given a choice between incompetence and malice, always choose incompetence — you will almost always be right." Thus, I believe liberals are misguided, even though they believe I am evil. Put more simply, I would say

And that is the real consistency of the Left.