The author of the last message should be tied up and
put on a cargo plane to Kiev, where he can see anarcho-communism
first hand. After he has most of his belongings stolen
five feet outside of the airport, he will have the opportunity
to go down to the police station where they will steal
the rest.
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Perhaps I should have sympathy for all of those devoid
of hope and possibility, apart from the fact that they
live in the most prosperous and powerful nation in the
world. These are lean times, and it's becoming difficult
to justify going to work while all of Europe is trying
to figure out if they can put everyone on unemployment
and go on eating smelly cheese in the south of France
forever.
The climate of the world is hot and crazy, and only
a handful scientists will attribute all of
it to global warming. The polar ice caps are still there,
they say, but the brains of many have melted, and the
end of the hot weather is still not in sight. Before
we are overwhelmed by the humidity, or the air conditioning
goes, we must try to answer the difficult questions:
If the Democrats always want to see the bright side,
why are they looking for it so far up in their own intestinal
tract, and, if Democrats are generally pacifists, how
did they get so good at shooting their own foot?
Some have suggested "bad intelligence," a
recurrent hobgoblin in national politics these days.
There is much to this, and we shall assess its multivariate
forms now. The Republicans often "catch hell,"
as it were, for the disgusting excesses of our nation’s
corporate kings, financial cowboys, energy executives
and other assorted yahoos. The ’80s were deemed
the decade of greed, but as conservative critic Rich
Lowry highlighted, the ’80s were small fish compared
with the redlining ’90s, a decade that saw executive
pay go up by six times, twice that of the ’80s.
Earning inequality increased, according to Robert Reich,
and by the time the whole storm blew over, the 400 richest
people were giving themselves raises 15 times larger
than the lowest 90 percent of the population. Of course,
we don't get to give ourselves raises like chief executive
officers or Congress, but it does make one wonder how
much you would if you could.
The point is that all of these shenanigans happened
on a Democratic
administration's watch, indicating that either somebody
was Sleeping
Something Off when the slick fat-cats all huddled around
the boardroom table
handing out raises, or maybe the Democrats get something
out of this too.
Or, at least maybe they did.
Bad intelligence struck again, and when the Democrats
were congratulating
themselves on the McCain-Feingold bill, Something Big
and Nasty, and wearing
a Dunhill suit, walked up behind them and hit them over
the head with an
alligator briefcase filled with stock notes. Perhaps
they had done more
schmoozing than homework, because when they came to,
the Center for
Responsive Politics had published its study of the last
election cycle,
which stated that, according to Byron York, "People
who gave less than $200
to politicians or parties gave 64 percent of their money
to Republicans.
Just 35 percent went to Democrats. On the other hand,
the Center found that
people who gave $1 million or more gave 92 percent to
Democrats — and a
whopping 8 percent to Republicans."
The Democrats were doing the equivalent of reading
to school children while
a Democratic Congress effectively hijacked a plane and
flew it into their
campaign finance strategy. To be serious, and it is
important to be serious
when one party in a two-party system insists on trying
to self-destruct, addressing
these causes is worth a extensive revisiting of the
Democratic platform,
liberal intellectual integrity, and the closed culture
of self-approbation
that goes on in politically homogenous circles.
Much for the same reason that a bunch of Quran-crazed
suicide attackers were able to put together a pretty
extensive plan without anyone in the Western intelligence
agencies getting wind of it, the liberals of this country
are getting further and further out of touch with many
of the principles that guide the formation and implementation
of hard policy.
Just as not too many highly educated Ivy League grads
want to join the CIA to grow a beard and hang out in
mud hovels in Yemen waiting for a tidbit of information
in backwoods Arabic, not many American liberals want
to study macroeconomics and pore over the dry writings
of Henry Kissinger or Foreign Affairs. They don't want
to, not because it isn't necessary, but because it isn't
fun.
Street battles, creative papier-mache sculpting, and
student hug-ins beat Macroeconomics 301 any day. But
in the end, this sort of desultory intellectualism leaves
pockets of homogenous debate in places like Cambridge
and Berkeley, which daily atrophies the bloodline of
that weakening species, Homo Liberalus, and ultimately
hurts the base of the party that used to stand for something
worth standing for: "Full speed ahead, and damn
the profits! Let's give those cold-hearted bastards
what for!"
So I invite you to pick up a macroeconomics textbook
or a copy of The Economist, and the next time some conservative
says something you take issue with, you'll have a better
idea of the holes in his armor.
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