Defining Liberal Values

[athelind]

Carla Binion: "The Enlightenment vs. Bush's America: Defining Liberal Values"

While the article itself is quite good, I found myself especially impressed by one of the comments below it:

Re: Carla Binion: 'The Enlightenment vs. Bush's America: Def (Score: 1)
by mdjelder on Tuesday, November 23 @ 14:10:45 EST

Conservatives have been allowed to frame the debate without opposition for too long. It's time to take back the mantel of truth by exposing the cheap-labor conservative agenda for what it is: exploitation of the common citizen.

Every American enjoys more lifestyle enhancements due to the work of liberals than they realize - National Parks, 40-hour work week, minimum wage, social security, and the list goes on and on. For all working Americans who vote Republican because you are convinced that doing so is in your best interests, consider this:

We gave you ethics and science and you called us heretics.
We gave you civil liberties but you refuse to include everyone.
We gave you a public education system but you won’t help us fund it and then complain that it doesn’t work.
We gave you protected wild lands which you insist on polluting and exploiting for profit.
We gave you freedom of religion but you won’t respect the beliefs of others.
We gave you libraries but you ignore them because they don’t turn a profit.
We gave you a social safety net, but you destroyed it and sent 2 million people into the streets to die of exposure because you said they were lazy.
We gave you child labor laws and you shipped your factories overseas.
We gave you living wages and entitlements but you crushed the unions that guarded them.
We gave our lives to stop a war and still you insist on slaughtering our young for corporate profits.
We work to provide women the same reproductive rights as men but you set fire to their medical clinics and threaten the doctors.
We try to tell you the truth but your corporate media and religious leaders call us names and vilify us.

We’ve done everything we could to save the world from becoming a toxic, barren wasteland of poverty, ignorance and intolerance; we’ve done nothing but work to give every human being the right to self-determination without government intervention;

and still you demonize us as godless liberals who have no values.

Has it ever occurred to you that your true enemies are those who pollute your air, mortgage your future, curtail your rights, tell you what to think, claim to speak for God, exploit you as a worker and send your children off to die for diminishing oil reserves;

and then place the blame on us for all that you’ve lost?

Every working American owes everything they have to the liberal agenda and everything they've lost to cheap-labor conservatives who've taken it away for their own selfish reasons.

It's time that each American understood that before they lose even more.

We need to make this the Democratic platform again. We need to shout it as loudly as the Cult of Fear and Loathing shouts their hatemongering and screams about "values", and we need to practice it, to stop letting the plutocracy whittle away at the freedom and prosperity of individual Americans.

How did the public come to believe that the "intellectual elites" were were working against them -- and the moneyed elites were on their side?