Liberals and “it’s not fair!”
Yesterday in the thead about the deficit there appeared this thought-provoking comment by Geoffrey Britain, in which he described the prevailing liberal/left mindset. Here’s an excerpt
We’re not really dealing with Machiavellian malevolence, we’re dealing with immature, arrested emotional development and with narcissism.
ALL points of view which spring from the left are, at base, centered in issues of ”˜fairness’.
Dig deeply enough and all leftist ”˜ism’s’ boil down to the child’s eternal cry of “it’s not fair!” and just as logic and reason are totally ineffective when dealing with a toddler’s temper tantrum, just so with trying to reason with liberals using facts and logic.
There’s some truth there. Yes, much liberalism is based on a sort of childish although natural human desire on the part of many poorer liberal Democrats to be given more stuff. But many liberals are the ones with more stuff. In fact, liberals (and Obama voters) tend to be the ones on the very bottom and the very top of the income ladder; it’s a somewhat U-shaped curve:
In 2008, the Democratic Party blossomed into a successful alliance of the upscale and the downscale—wealthy and needy marching hand in hand…The extent to which Democrats are relying on the far extremes of the income spectrum is striking. Democrats have generally performed well among low-income voters in the past, but now, the phenomenon has become more pronounced…Democratic gains among the rich have been even more dramatic and, given the party’s history, surprising…Obama…carried those making $200,000 or more by 6 points. True, these very affluent voters make up only 6 percent of the electorate, but Obama fared well in other upper-income categories too. Among non-Southern white voters–that is, voters living in states a Democrat must carry or have a shot at carrying to win an election–Obama claimed a majority of those making $80,000 or more…
Obama needed this strong showing at opposite ends of the income spectrum because he was far weaker in the middle.
So it’s not just narcissistic have-nots wanting their share of the pie, and willing to take it—if necessary by government force—from others who have more. It’s also many of the haves themselves shouting, “take mine, please; I’ve got too much!” This latter phenomenon may be a lot of things, but it’s not a “toddler’s temper tantrum.”
One of the things involved for many in this upper portion of the liberal socioeconomic curve is the opposite of wanting a bigger piece of the pie. It’s guilt—for having too much stuff when others lack it. But instead of doing the individual and voluntary thing—giving away their goods and becoming poor (that’s the path of the saint who takes a vow of poverty—or the follower of a leftist cult leader such as Jim Jones who required that members donate their personal property to the church), most well-off liberals who happen to feel the pangs of this sort of guilt take the less extreme route of supporting government taking a certain amount of their money (not enough to be too painful for them) and redistributing it to the poor.
This offers the multiple benefits of relieving them of their guilt and establishing them as good and generous people, all without having to take the initiative themselves as individuals, and without going so far as to make them markedly financially uncomfortable. And just to make sure there’s strength in numbers, the liberal/leftist wants to spread the responsibility around and take away the element of choice (and the individual soul-searching involved) by making such giving compulsory and universal above a certain income level.
In summary, liberalism and/or leftism promise to relieve the liberal have-nots of the twin burdens of envy and initiative, and the liberal haves of the twin burdens of guilt and choice. This latter phenomenon has long been one of the major attractions liberalism and leftism have had for the intelligentsia and/or the wealthy. Anguish over the unfairness of life can deeply affect those on both ends of the spectrum, and the simplistic solutions offered by leftism and/or socialism can appeal greatly to people who have not noticed or cared about the repeated failures of the leftist/socialist methods, their tendency to lower all boats and sink entire economies, and the heavy sacrifices of liberty that they inevitably require.
David Axelrod: again with the message
It’s not the message, stupid!
But the New York Times, a goodly portion of Obama’s remaining supporters, and the Obama administration itself seem to continue to think (or to pretend?) that it is.
This Times piece focuses on how David Axelrod has somehow failed to help the great communicator Obama get his message across. It also draws a portrait of the Obama aide as a beleaguered and long-suffering idealist who’s too soft for the rough and tumble world of Washington.
This is rather humorous, actually, to anyone who knows much about the tough-minded Chicago-based Mr. Axelrod. But it’s not the only unintentionally funny thing in the article. Here are a few choice items:
In a lengthy interview in his office on Wednesday, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.”…
“Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”
There’s another mildly comic but strange bit in the middle of the piece that includes what appears to be a gaffe by President Obama, unremarked upon by either Axelrod or the article’s author, Mark Leibovich. First, here’s Axelrod, making an intentional funny:
Sitting at his desk next door to the Oval Office last week, he was tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck. “I am the poster child for the president’s obesity program,” he said.
Then Obama enters and tries another witticism:
Mr. Obama surveyed the spread on Mr. Axelrod’s desk with a slight smirk.
“What is this, King Arthur’s court?” he asked, then pulled Mr. Axelrod aside to talk about a health care speech he was about to deliver.
King Arthur’s court? I believe Obama must have meant to refer to King Henry VIII, who was often pictured as a glutton holding a drumstick:
This is a small matter, but it’s another example of the peculiar lacunae in Obama’s experience. The reference—Henry VIII chomping on a drumstick—is a fairly common one, not an arcane association. King Arthur’s court (correct me if I’m wrong) doesn’t conjure up any epicurean associations of the culinary sort; it’s about idealism and chivalry and courtly love, as well as a bit of sexual fooling-around.
The fact that Obama got it wrong is more evidence of his disconnect. And speaking of disconnect, take the end of that same sentence—Obama and overeating gourmand (not that there’s anything wrong with that) Axelrod are about to consult on the president’s health care speech, in promotion of a policy that, among other things, is supposed to stress preventative medicine and good health habits.
The deficit: the Obama administration…
…has mortgaged our future, saying it’s okay because the good times will start rolling soon.
Or are they aiming for the collapse of the economy?
White House jello
What is White House jello? No, it doesn’t refer to Obama’s spine. It refers to this work of jello art, constructed by Liz Hickok, and sent to me by a thoughtful reader:
Has Obama done any irreversible damage so far?
I saw the above question in the comments section of a post at Althouse, and I believe the answer is “yes.”
But the reason I say this may surprise you. It’s not any one action or decision, or even several. It’s not even whether health care reform, if passed, can be reversed. It’s not the terrible precedent set by using reconciliation for a bill that is unpopular, not a budget or deficit measure, and has no bipartisan support. It’s not even Obama’s foreign policy, that insults our allies and emboldens dictators and fails to scare Iran in the least, although all of the above matter very much and they are all very bad.
I think the worst damage Obama has done is that, until now, America has always been a solid and somewhat predictable commodity, both domestically and internationally. There have been many fluctuations, of course. Presidents came and presidents went. Some were Republicans and some Democrats, some conservative and some liberal. But there remained a certain commonality and dependability that Americans and the rest of the world—our allies and our enemies—could depend on.
Allies would remain allies, and when the chips were down we would defend them. Enemies would remain enemies, even if we sometimes got closer to them and sometimes backed away from contact. We would get into debt, but not too much. Our economy was solid. And so on and so forth. But Obama has become a loose cannon, and American is suddenly not the rock it used to be. And I wonder if we ever again will be regarded in the same way.
Companion pieces about reconciliation for HCR
If you’re finding it difficult to understand exactly how reconciliation would work in terms of the current bills regarding health care reform, you’re not alone.
To clarify—or perhaps to add to your confusion—here are two somewhat opposing articles on the subject. The first is by Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, presenting the Democrats’ argument—reconciliation is just a little fix on some piddling budgetary matters. The second is by Daniel Foster and Stephen Spruiell for National Review, critiquing the Democrat argument and exposing its myths.
One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the entire edifice rests on the Democrat members of the House passing a bill they don’t like and trusting the Democrat members of the Senate to fix it ex-post-facto. This is by no means a sure thing. But you can bet that the pressure being brought to bear on Democrats in the House is extraordinary and viselike.
[ADDENDUM: Mark Steyn explains in his own inimitable way just why Democrats are determined to pass this even if they lose seats and control of Congress as a result. For them, it would still be a win in the long run.]
Thomas Sowell. Again.
An excellent interview with Thomas Sowell.
The point he makes reminds me of the following, one of my favorite quotes from the work of Czech novelist Milan Kundera:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat.
The Pentagon shooting: what’s the definition of “right-wing” these days?
Yesterday John Patick Bedell walked up to the Pentagon and shot two officers there before being killed himself. Bedell hated George Bush and was a 9/11-truther. And yet Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor calls him he was a right-wing fanatic. Bedell hated the government and the armed forces, as well. Typical right-wing sentiments, of course!
Grier doesn’t even try to explain how it is that these things made Bedell a man of the right rather than the left (or even, perhaps, just a confused and demented man). Perhaps Grier thinks it’s self-explanatory, obvious to any thinking person: Bedell had a gun; he shot two people. Man of the right.
This sort of “reasoning” also was present in most coverage of the case of Joseph Stack, who killed himself and one other person when he flew his plane into an Austin IRS building and was widely described as a right-wing teabagger. Stack left a manifesto in which he “railed against the U.S. tax system, capitalist greed, his accountant, former President George W. Bush and others.” Most news outlets left out the fact that it also contained praise for communism and condemnation of the greed of capitalism. Typical right-wing stuff.
Obama and Holder reversal: will it be a military trial for KSM after all?
It appears that a military trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is looking mighty good to the Obama administration right about now.
The strange thing is that those legal geniuses, Obama and Holder, didn’t see that to begin with. I’m not just being facetious; I do find it odd that their ideology blinded them to the astounding unpopularity which would inevitably greet their original decision. And now this subsequent flip-flop is likely to enrage the left, just as the original one outraged the right and middle. When Obama ends up being reasonable, it seems it’s only after he has offended and dismayed the largest number of people possible. That seems to be the extent of his bipartisanship.
But if he has to flip flop, it’s certainly a good thing that he ends up on the right (that is, the correct) side of the issue. And although it is true that Obama clung to this idea of a civilian KSM trial in NY for way too long, even he can apparently let go of something if the clamor is loud enough. It is ironic that Obama, a vocal critic of virtually everything George Bush did in his treatment of terrorists, has adopted so many of Bush’s policies, but only after trying the opposite and finding it inadvisable or even impossible. Perhaps if a fool persists in his folly he becomes wise. But in the meantime, damage is done, time is wasted, and the American people have lost faith in our president’s judgment.
But are things quite what they appear? Andy McCarthy, the original WTC trial prosecutor, is highly skeptical about this decision of Obama’s. It’s not that he thinks the story isn’t true. It’s just that McCarthy focuses on the fact that, according to the original WaPo article, it appears to be part of a quid pro quo in which Obama is seeking a compromise from Congressional Republicans that will help him close Gitmo. He’s giving up something small to get something bigger. In McCarthy’s opinion:
…[T]he public strongly opposes a civilian trial for the 9/11 plotters. There is only so much an administration can do against the will of the American people…But…Senator Graham and whoever else are treating the president like he has cards to play. Rather than just be quietly embarrassed over their loopy position that Gitmo causes terrorism, these senators are using that fiction as a reason for trading away Gitmo (i.e., a facility we need) in order to achieve military commission trials for enemy combatants (i.e., something we’d get anyway without the trade)…[This] would significantly increase the threat to U.S. military bases and geometrically increase the likelihood that federal judges will order that trained terrorists be released in the United States. There is no excuse for taking on these risks given that Gitmo is a top-flight, completely secure facility. It makes no sense to horse-trade when Obama was being pushed toward military commissions by reality.
Sounds convincing to me. Obama’s caving is unlikely to be part of any real change of mind or policy. It appears prmarily strategic, and moderate Republicans may be playing right into his hands.
I guess the surge worked
Our MSM has been relatively quiet about it, but Iraq is having another election, and democracy seems to be taking hold there. Oh, how awful those evil neocons were to have ruined a perfectly good country!
Let’s hear it for parsnips
Parsnips have gotten a bad rap. Although I’m not sure why they are so often either detested or ignored, I’ve got some ideas.
For starters, they look like wan and bleached-out versions of their cousin the carrot. But I think the real reason is their unfortunate name, which makes them sound like the dread turnip (which is actually fairly good too, if cooked correctly). But parsnips are sweeter and tastier than either, although you rarely see them on a restaurant menu and only tend to find them on the home dinner table at holiday time, if then.
If you hate parsnips, you are hardly alone, although I think you are wrong, wrong, wrong. I used to think I hated them, too, until I discovered I’d not ever tasted one. I also don’t like them mashed, the easiest and most common way to make them, as well as the most insipid.
Parsnips just plain sound nasty. But I had some the other day and they were marvelous, with a deep rich flavor that reminded me how very much I like them, even though I tend to forget they exist. They were in a pot roast with carrots, onions, and potatoes. They’re good roasted alone as well, or sauteed in oil or butter, and they can be the secret ingredient to give a special mysterious mild sweetness to a soup stock.
The parsnip used to be more ubiquitous before the potato came to Europe from the Western Hemisphere and supplanted it. Parsnips were relied on because they can be grown in cold climates—in fact, parsnips need some frost to flourish—and they have more nutrients than carrots. A parsnip can be eaten raw, although no one ever does. I’ve never even tried, but my guess is that it would be a tough and fibrous undertaking.
But did you know the Romans considered parsnips an aphrodisiac? Maybe if we spread the word around they’d suddenly become a lot more popular.