{"id":3851,"date":"2010-04-19T17:43:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T22:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/?p=3851"},"modified":"2010-04-19T17:43:59","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T22:43:59","slug":"is-everything-left-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/?p=3851","title":{"rendered":"Is everything left-right?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"clear: both\">This Hullabaloo <a href=\"http:\/\/digbysblog.blogspot.com\/2010\/04\/defending-ourselves-against-little.html\">post<\/a> got me thinking. Digby discusses a blog post by a fellow named Dennis Praeger whining about the fact that the left has imposed anti-smoking ordinances on the good Americans on the right.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both\">There is a tendency, more pronounced (I think) on the right than the left, but general enough, to place issues on a left right continuum when doing so makes absolutely no sense. Why, in this country, the question of religious faith, against all the evidence, has become a left-right issue. Against all the evidence, conservatives are religious and left wingers atheistic or godless, while the truth is far more murky. I mean <a href=\"http:\/\/www.infouprise.com\/TheKarlRoveReligionMystery.html\">Karl Rove doesn&#8217;t even believe in god<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both\">The smoking issue seems even more ludicrous. I am a very political person, but I wasn&#8217;t that political when early on, before I received my first communion, I developed an abiding loathing for tobacco. In my case, it was exposure to concentrated second hand smoke in the car, for at the time my mother smoked like a chimney. I don&#8217;t recall politics having anything to do with it. I suspect that if one were to poll on the issue one would find antipathy to tobacco spread rather evenly across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n<p style=\"clear: both\">What&#8217;s amazing, as Digby&#8217;s post illustrates, is how easily we allow ourselves to fall into this left-right trap in situations where it really makes no sense. Let me hasten to add that I can conjure up both a left and right wing case for both sides of the tobacco issue, so it won&#8217;t work to say that restrictions on smoking offend right wing libertarian principles. <\/p>\n<p><br class=\"final-break\" style=\"clear: both\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This Hullabaloo post got me thinking. Digby discusses a blog post by a fellow named Dennis Praeger whining about the fact that the left has imposed anti-smoking ordinances on the good Americans on the right. There is a tendency, more pronounced (I think) on the right than the left, but general enough, to place issues [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3852,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3851\/revisions\/3852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}