In praise of loons

The Common Loon.  Those who have seen or heard the loon in person know how beautiful the bird is and how its haunting call "punctuates the fall of night."   To hear the sounds of the loon from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Click Here.

 

The Common Loon is the Canadian National Bird and its image is on their one dollar coins, called, "loonies."

Notable and Quotable:

Conservative 'Dingbats'

The liberal conceit that everyone on the right is crazy.

Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2014

Kyle Smith, writing in the New York Post, Aug. 10:

One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they're all pretty much the same — you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.

Can't spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, "conservative" and "crazy" are synonyms.

A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein's "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan." The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how "Super Size Me" was totally fair about McDonald's. . . .

What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here's a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled "wingnut" by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.

If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it's "crazy" not to panic about climate change.)

Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of [the] last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals. 

Note:  

The quote above is presented here, not to criticize any particular political viewpoint, but the practice of labeling and minimizing those who don't share one's same beliefs, ideas and world view.  While there are serious arguments to be made in defense of and in opposition to both right- and left-leaning political ideologies, personal attacks such as described above are a distraction, made by those who want to do damage rather than do the hard work of understanding and cooperative problem-solving.  So here's to the courageous loons who brave the cold waters of political debate to bring their voices to public realm of democratic process.