What is it with the liberals at the LA Times? They are on a mission to attack what many of us hold dear about America. All my favorite memories are doing things with my family and friends, as a kid and as an adult. Now I understand some people don’t have great families. And I understand some people don’t have enough good times with their families. And I understand some shun marriage and kids (Rush Limbaugh for one). But that is diversity or maybe imperfection. It is not a competition between only good family or community experiences and only bad ones.

We do not need to make a choice. That was the message of Ronald Reagan: no matter the challenges life is good, America is good, and things can be better. But the left is so pessimistic and dour and obsessed with failure they feel that the good times are illusions, or irrelevant. They actually denigrate those looking for the family moments, the times with friends at a church gathering, doing something good for someone else.

Read this latest liberal editorial from the LA Times and see the hate, dislike, whatever you want to call it.

ONCE UPON A TIME, Americans lived by a few simple maxims: God, country and family. Children respected their parents; students listened to their teachers; citizens followed the law. Then along came the 1960s, when liberal elites undermined traditional sources of authority. College kids smoked dope, feminists burned their bras and black militants burned down the cities. So now we have welfare, divorce, crime and a sick society that has lost its moral compass.

That’s the Republican Party line on the 1960s, when everything good turned sour.

Notice the subtle negative impressions with people comfortable, or even proud, of your religion, your country and your family? And one cannot help but notice the pathetic swipe at children who respect their parents. I grew up in the 60’s and it was not the parents who were the target of our youthful revolt (many parents were in agreement with us and partook in the revolt). It was the government we despised. But it was also mostly lies. It nearly all fantasy about nirvana on the cheap (no work, no effort, just party and be happy).

But this person seems to be talking about himself. He seems to be one of those who had parents who never agreed with his personal revolt. He places the Conservatives in the position of mature (partially stodgy) adult and the liberals in the role of young revolutionaries. Interesting positioning to say the least.

Well, maybe not everything. Amid the tumult and violence, a few Americans held fast to timeless American values. And that’s where our next prospective Supreme Court justice comes in.

Samuel A. Alito Jr., you see, has become the GOP’s anti-’60s cultural hero.

I have one thing to say to this person: dude, the 60’s are long over! Move on!

I mean seriously, Alito is not the anti-60’s ‘hero’ (he is not even a ‘hero’). He is an accomplished guy who married a nice woman and raised a nice family. Is that what liberals are fighting against now? Is that the war on America is for the left? Don’t be bland, don’t be dedicated, don’t work hard to rise to the pinnacle of your calling, don;t sacrifice for family? Have liberals now come to make their stand against God, country and family?

BTW, I equate ‘God’ with community because they can be one in the same. And for those of us who do not belong to a religion it is our equivalent. When I went to church I was told I was in God’s world and God was in everyone. So I took that to heart – my church is my life and the people I meet. Anyway, I simply mean to demonstrate how we can all find value and pleasure in the general concepts this person is apparently against being a core part of society.

Hamilton was “an unpretentious, down-to-earth community,” Alito recalled, where kids went to school in the morning and played baseball in the afternoon. But at Princeton, where Alito enrolled in 1968, he found something else. “I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly,” Alito said at the hearing. “I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.”

Alito’s story meshes perfectly with the larger Republican narrative about the 1960s: A lot of bad things happened, but a few good people resisted them. “Judge Alito is a paragon of the oldfashioned working-class ethic,” gushed the New York Times’ David Brooks. “In a culture that celebrates the rebel … he respects tradition, order and authority.”

What this person cannot grasp is it is not an either or choice. There are times and moments for being a rebel, breaking new ground, changing the paradigm. Otherwise things would be static and nothing would evolve. But there are also times and moments when you respect tradition and experience. Raising kids is one place. We as a culture learn to raise our families from our parents and our larger families. Over the centuries we know certain things work at certain times. And we definitely do no want to much ‘revolt’ in the norms when it comes to the sexual context of children. Today’s sexual predators on kids (and the criminal laxness regarding their vulture-like acts) are an example of the wrong kind of revolt against tradition.

But to this person it is either or – not both. He feels threatened because others do not see the need to act like a drooling teenager at 45+ years old. Well, if we can tolerate you acting like a juvenile, you should be able to tolerate us acting like adults. There is room in this country for both.

To Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, Alito symbolizes the “dutiful people” who adhered to tradition when the “beautiful people” attacked it. “While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein’s apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers,” Barone declared, “ordinary people … were going to work, raising their families and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.”

This guy is clearly saying in his world, only people who focus on themselves are wanted – those who focus on family and dedication are not wanted. To bolster his views he does what all liberals do – he focuses and emphasizes the problems, bad decisions, people who failed to make to propose ‘there is another way’.

There’s only one problem with this GOP version of postwar history: It isn’t true. The feel-good Republican vision of pre-’60s America is a myth. Urban kids were already using drugs in the 1950s, when J. Edgar Hoover called heroin a menace to American society. The FBI was busily harassing gays, who formed visible communities in many cities. And urban poverty was on the rise, even as most middle-class Americans looked the other away.

Most of all, a vicious racism infected enormous swaths of American society. And not just in the “Jim Crow” South, which is the story we know best, but in the urban North as well. In such cities as Chicago and Detroit, whites organized to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods. They rallied outside city housing agencies to bar black tenants; they picketed white homeowners who sold property to black buyers. Even more, as University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue has shown, whites often assaulted and vandalized blacks who did move into white areas. Were all whites racist? Of course not. But we can no longer pretend that they uniformly “respected authority” and “followed the law,” as Brooks and Barone maintain.

The problem with this thinking is no one on the conservative side has once said there were not challenges and problems in our history. And it was those normal, everyday people who got fed up and ended racism – not the rich and famous. What conservatives say is there is a lot to God, country and family and being dedicated to a cause or career. And if explore these things you find no need for drugs, violence and hate – let alone time for it.

And how does one equate fighting unjust laws like those supporting racism with fighting against the idea of God, country and family? Is it impossible for the liberal mind to discern when revolt is for a good cause and when it is for a bad cause?

One final comment on this pathetic liberal dribble

And that brings us back to Alito. Despite his paeans to the decency of his childhood neighbors, did he know that many hard-working white communities were working hard to keep blacks out? And when he indicted Princeton students for behaving irresponsibly, was he including their peaceful protests against the Vietnam War?

It is not whether he knew or did not know about racism, it is whether he participated or not. Obviously he did not. And when did he say protesting Vietnam was the bad behavior of the time? My guess is he is talking about the drug use. And having lost way too many friends to drugs I would agree that was one big mistake of the counter-culture. Drugs made people bold so they could stand up to their parents, but it also made them self indulgent, and they sapped their will to do more than make money and time to do more drugs.

And just like then, when people were denigrated because they were different, liberals now lash out and denigrate with a vengeance. Why? Because they are not tolerant of others. The ugly liberal has arisen.