For those of you who aren't Christian, I would like for you to indulge me for a moment as I tell one of my favorite Bible stories as a metaphor to explain why I not only abandoned my leftist beliefs, but did so with a pretty strong contempt for all things left. It's a gross paraphrase (The "Gideon Standard Version"), so I don't need correction for my slight inaccuracies.

In the bible, there is the story of the Jewish patriarch Jacob. Jacob went looking for someone to marry, and found the love of his life in a young woman named Rachel, the second daughter of a man named Laban. Jacob approaches Laban about marrying Rachel, and Laban agrees, provided Jacob give him seven years as an indentured servant beforehand (pretty damn good idea...I'm considering it for my girls...but I digress). Jacob works the seven years, gets married, and after the ceremony, lifts the veil to find he has been tricked. Laban substituted Rachel's sister Leah, who, the Bible says in so many words, is pretty much fugly (but not too fugly, I might add, for Jacob to produce 11 kids with...but again, I digress). Jacob has to work another seven years to earn the right to marry Rachel.

The trickery of Laban in offering up Leah as a bride can be analogized to the trickery of the leftist programs. But, like Jacob, I was surprised when I lifted the veil and found out the bride underneath was NOT the beautiful bride I had expected, but rather, the skanky hobag who slept with the football team. Their policy on environmentalism seemed attractive until you stopped to consider all the privately held land they seized to protect a subspecies of a subspecies with a slight variant coloring from one nearby that was readily abundant. Their social programs to help families seemed attractive until you stopped to consider that they basically trapped those families in the cycle of dependence, rather than offering them a way out. Their labor policies seemed good until you had to reengineer a machine to make its usage more difficult because of OSHA concerns that a laborer would be stupid enough to insert their hand into a pinchpoint, and, furthermore, deserved government protection from their own stupidity; and until you considered the impact on job creation that would be brought about with every minimum wage increase.

But for all the criticisms I have to offer of the left, I have one EXTREME positive to offer: regardless of what critics may think in each person I have ever known who has espoused leftist politics, I have found a deep and abiding love for those who are downtrodden. I just wish I could reach them with the message that the best way to help, sometimes, is to help the downtrodden help themselves.