02.05.09
These people live in some alternative universe
My recent post “Sam has no idea how to diagnose us” dealt with Sam Tanenhaus’s New Republic piece on his delusion that conservatism was dead. (More accurately, it was a heads-up to read Roger Kimball’s reaction to it at Pajamas Media.)
Along comes further evidence that these effete East Coast smarty-pants sycophants to the Freedom Haters truly have no idea how things operate beyond the Boston-NYC-Washington corridor. Michael Hirsch at Newsweek now offers his prescription for how TCM can reagain control of the “stimulus” debate. He says that said debate has become, as he views it, mired in a “decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending.” As if these were incidental matters, barely consequential, tiny roadblocks on the way to the realization of The Anointed One’s grand vision for rescuing America from this recession.
My God, what kind of wild drug is Hirsch ingesting these days? Has he not seen the lists, available everywhere, of all the unaffordable, unadvisable and just plain silly measures in the bill? How about six billion for university buidlings? Or $380 million for the Women, Children and Infants program? $4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”? $145 billion for “Making Work Pay” tax credits? $83 billion for the Earned Income Tax Credit? $600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids? $850 million to Amtrak? $2 billion for renewable energy research? And that’s only eight examples from the list of fifty posted on NRO’s home page today.
Hirsch perhaps hasn’t seen the Congressional Budget Office’s report that this monstrosity would be harmful to the US economy in the long term. Or the latest poll numbers showing that public support for it has sunk to 37 percent.
If conservatives will just muster all the clarity of vision and ferocity of resolve they can, it will be easy to give this whole FHer house of cards – the majority in government, the lapdog MSM, the arts-and-entertainment world, the education fiefdom – a gentle poke and see it collapse. These people are like the Wicked Witch of the West, who, because she was made of nothing but brown sugar, melted at the slightest moistening. To use a more historical example, the whole FHer infrastucture is more like the Ceaucescu regime in Romania, or the Mussolini regime in Italy. Or, to use a domestic analogy, it is like a violently addictive family member whose bluff can be called. In each case – most definitely including the TCM / Pelosi / Hirsch / Tanenhaus stronghold, a little standing up to them by normal people armed with a grip on reality could be their instant undoing. We’ve seen eveidence that this is possible over the last week. This is no time to let up.
