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Wednesday, June 27. 2007

The Best of Intentions

Stuck in Reagan with the Memphis blues again, with a delayed flight to Boston. We have written about the notion of "good intentions" by people with power on this blog, but I cannot find the piece. Found this quoted at Driscoll:

Fortunately, the Daily Gut has a running tally, "For those of you keeping score at home, here's a partial list (in no particular order) of leaders who have meant or mean well":

Hitler
Stalin
Lenin
Mao
Big Kim and Li'l Kim
Castro
The Khmer Rouge
Ceausescu
The Taliban
Saddam
Ayatollah Khomeini
Ahmedinejad

I'll take an incompetent leader over one who means well any day!

The thing about Mehlman's column is it lays out the central tenet of lefty thought: All that matters is that you mean well.

In the 1940s and '50s many lefties (including some if not all of the Hollywood Ten) were apologists for Stalin? Who cares - they were "idealists" who meant well.

Decades of welfare programs actually hurt the already poor and and caused more to join them? Doesn't matter - we meant well.

Read the whole piece. As CS Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive."

Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Politics at 16:49 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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"Sun boldly, that grace may abound.". Martin Luther
But first read Dieteivh Bonhoeffer [his daddy a shrink] on the Cost of Discipleship. It's about sacrifice and obedience to the will of God, not intentions.
#1 retriever on 2007-06-27 17:34 (Reply)
Sorry about Blackberry typos...
Should have typed:
Sin boldly
Dietrich
#2 retriever on 2007-06-27 18:11 (Reply)
While reading the post I mentally jumped to the same essay by Lewis.
#3 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2007-06-27 22:21 (Reply)
Bad men all.
#4 Elliot Ness on 2007-06-27 22:52 (Reply)
Good intentions give me the creeps. Bad intentions are easy to deal with.
#5 BD on 2007-06-28 08:26 (Reply)
Too bad they only want competent well meaning leaders! That counts out Che Guevera, Hugo Chavez, and such... although Carlos Menem could fit in either depending upon your view of him. And the Duvalier family (Papa and Baby), the Assad family (Hafez and the kid), Ferdinand Marcos was no great shakes either, and Slobodan Milosevic... All, really, doing it for the best of all reasons!

For the People!

For the Nation!

For their Swiss Bank Accounts!

The Pathet Lao were not great shakes either, come to think of it.... Jean Kambanda of Rwanda is no great shakes, either, getting rid of the country's problems through genocide. Also Mehmed Talat Pasha in the Ottoman Empire to become Turkey, just a tad of ethnic cleansing there, only 1.5 million dead. So easy! It's for the good of the Nation!

And I haven't even gotten past the 20th century yet... put the competent and incompetent do-gooders together and you wind up with one of the most horrific death tolls in history... not from *wars*, although that didn't help, but from good, old fashioned, killing for the 'greater good'.
#6 ajacksonian (Link) on 2007-06-28 08:44 (Reply)

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