Open-Minded Liberals? Maybe Closed-Minded Liberals.

Friday, February 1, 2008
Open-Minded Liberals? Maybe Closed-Minded Liberals.
In his column "open-minded liberals?", Larry Elder uses "they say" strategy to mock liberals. First of all, Elder uses survey and tries to generalize the idea of people that liberals deserve to be made fun of. Elder uses a statistic which may mean "shoot-the-person-on-sight hatred.” And as an example, Elder gives a statistic, "twenty-eight percent gave Clinton a 0, with ten percent giving that score to Gore." This reveals that not many people love Clinton, despite of the fact that economy went well during his term in the office. Then, Elder uses another example of Bush and Cheney. He writes, "six out of ten Americans on the far left found that no evil, heinous person in the world could be worthy of more hatred than Bush and Cheney." Well, again, Elder mocks President Bush and V.P. Cheney and the decisions they made about wars by using generalized survey of people. Elder uses not only a survey but also his own experience at a barber shop. He says a guy at the barbershop thought 9/11 was Bush’ own work. The guy criticized and made fun of Bush because of what he thought. This information is strong enough to support the idea that people throw criticism and mock at the government. Then, Elder approaches to the ironic meaning of "open-minded liberals."Elder brings up hatred and disgust that Republicans and Democrats have at each other.Based on what politicians and survey a “they say” strategy says, Elder states, "Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people," at the bottom line. In these sentences, it is easy to find how Elder mocks liberals. He says Conservatives consider Liberals well-intentioned, which is a compliment for liberals. This shows Conservatives are nice enough to give respect and compliment to Liberals. However, Liberals, he says, consider Conservatives not only wrong, but really bad people. This seems make Liberals not very nice or generous because Liberals do not give a word of praise to Conservatives. And this is contradicted to the title, "Open-minded Liberals." If Liberals are open-minded, then they should be able to understand some concepts or thoughts of Conservative as much as Conservatives give respect to Liberals by not just blaming them. But Liberals do not do it. Liberals are closed-minded rather than open-minded because they blame Conservatives for everything. And that is the point that Larry Elder wants to mock at.