Mona Charen Quotes
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Liberals cling to the idea that critics of welfare are motivated by greed or callous disregard for the less fortunate. In fact, during the twenty-five years that followed Lyndon Johnson's declaration of war on poverty, U.S. tax payers spent $3 trillion providing every conceivable support for the poor, the elderly, and the infirm. Private foundations spent scores of billions more, and private and religious charities even more. Nevertheless, as Ronald Raegan later quipped, 'in the war on poverty, poverty won.'
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Because adoption meets the needs of children so successfully, and because there have long been waiting lists of couples hoping to adopt babies and children, it would seem that the solution for abused or neglected kids was obvious. But not to the do-gooders. To remove a child from an abusive parent, sever the parent's parental rights, and permit the child to be adopted by a couple who would give the child a loving home began to seem too 'judgmental.'
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If the party of gloom is ever to regain its footing, it will have to start by understanding that those who defeated them are not a bunch of ignorant yahoos looking forward to Armageddon.
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Feminists are forever discovering subtle new forms of sexism and then beating men around the head and shoulders with it. It is left to the rest of us to suffer the inevitable backlash this provokes among men. Besides, the feminists have the Federal Government behind them.
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The proposed liberal solution was always negotiation. Just as they believed in nuclear arms negotiations for their own sake, they believe in a "peace process" without regard to what its consequences might be....It was impossible for any peace plan to fail in their eyes, since lack of progress was nearly always interpreted as evidence that new talks were now "urgent".
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One might have thought that the Cold War's conclusion would have convinced the Left that appeasement of dictators is not profitable.
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The entitlement mentality so carefully cultivated by liberal academics, politicians, clergymen, and journalists continues to corrode the self-sufficiency that once defined the American character.
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Though the two issues may seem utterly unrelated, they do have this in common - both health care and higher education are realms of American life in which government has undermined the operation of market forces and caused artificially high prices. These are two arenas in which the Democrats now propose to do exactly the wrong thing. Their reform reinforces old errors and will infinitely compound the problem of rising prices.
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The facts of life are conservative.
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Truth telling is the first building block of character -- a quality that seems to be getting rarer and rarer in all-forgiving America.
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Liberal dominance of important areas of America's social and political life has undermined many of the virtues that have sustained this country.
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Liberalism in various guises - feminism, the sexual revolution, gay activism - has been at war with marriage and family for several decades now. And when do-gooders look around at the wreckage of human lives caused by disintegrating families, they call for government to act as father, mother, brother, and sister.
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Just as the baby boom generation seemed to believe it was the first to discover sex, many of its members also seemed to think they were the first to discover the horrors of war.
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It's a peculiar thing about liberals. When it comes to middle-class people who are fully capable of caring for themselves, liberals seek to undermine their independence in every way possible. With seductive 'entitlements' like guaranteed retirement, health care, nutrition, education, and jobs, liberals attempt to lure the middle class into dependence on the state. But when it comes to those who are truly incompetent, those whose mental afflictions render them unable to manage their lives at all, liberals are suddenly transformed into absolutists for personal autonomy.
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If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
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Homelessness came into being because liberal policy makers embraced a series of foolish ideas.
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The recommendation by the Arkansas Supreme Court Disciplinary Committee that President Clinton be disbarred is like a tender green shoot of integrity rising from the stinking junkyard of American public life. At last, some official body has come to a decision about Clinton's conduct that is untainted by politics, cowardice or cynicism.
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If the Democrats have their way, African Americans will continue to feel oppressed, despised and handicapped into the indefinite future. All progress will be downplayed and every setback amplified. In this way, Democrats can continue to rely on lopsided black support at the polls.
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As the data from the past decade clarify, there is no evidence that poverty causes crime but a great deal of evidence that crime causes poverty. By aligning themselves against the police, against commonsense tactics like stop and frisk, against metal detectors in public housing, against swift and certain punishment, and for a broad array of legal protections for accused criminals, liberals helped to aggrieve the lives of the poor and society as a whole.
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It continues to defy explanation why liberals who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe.
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There was a time when 'fear of God' meant piety, or at least conscience. Today, it more accurately describes the worldview of secular liberals who get itchy and twitchy at any reminder of our religious roots as a nation.
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Abused And neglected children have paid the price for liberalism's tendency to sentimentalize the poor.
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Time and time again throughout the latter part of the Cold War, liberals chose a morally perverse pose. They would seek to find any suspect motive or impure act on the part of the United States rather than confront the staggering scale of destruction and misery being wrought by our adversaries.
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The notion that the UN is some sort of dispassionate body that, “does right” and just pursues everybody’s best interests is a fantasy. Each individual nation will be pursuing their best interests. That’s the normal behavior of nation-states. It shouldn’t surprise us, but neither should we go to them for permission to do what’s in our national interests.
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Every liberal initiative, from welfare to antismoking measures, is justified by reference to 'the children.' Yet the clear result of liberal policies is to harm children even more than adults.
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Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years.
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The Senate wants you to know how terribly, sincerely sorry they are even though not a single member of today's Senate was even in office the last time America saw a lynching. Some were not even born. But that's the way we prefer our apologies in American politics. We don't apologize for our own sins.
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Liberals and international diplomats (a distinction without a difference) have notorious difficulty understanding how to deal with totalitarian regimes.
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[T]he sprawl of government into every conceivable realm of life has caused the withering of traditional institutions. Fathers become unnecessary if the government provides Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Church charities lose their mission when the government provides food, shelter and income to the poor. And the non-poor no longer feel pressed to provide aid to those in need, be they aged parents or their unfortunate neighbors-"compassion" having become the province of the state.
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Popular culture, in all its crudeness, is the output of liberals. It is liberalism that for decades has rejected any protest as 'censorship' or 'McCarthyism.'
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