Democrats in Congress recently went all-out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll — and stay — in college. Most of those who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California — still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall — is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars.
At around the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.
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Americans still seethe about the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the “fat-cat bankers,” in fact, were players in a far larger fraud made possible by liberal executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bill Clinton’s appointees and insider friends such as Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Robert Rubin made millions, while the agencies and banks they oversaw lost billions.
It was just disclosed that Rep. Barney Frank helped land a job at Fannie Mae for his then live-in boyfriend, Herb Moses — despite at the time sitting on a House oversight committee that monitored the federally regulated agency. Fannie Mae went belly up. Moses made a lot of money. And Frank kept assuring the public in hearings that the nearly insolvent agency was in no financial danger.
When news surfaced about Frank’s conflict of interest, he scoffed, “There is no rule against it at all,” and predicted the story would die. He was right: It did. But substitute scary names like Dick Cheney or Halliburton and it would not have.
Last week, President Obama quietly signed a renewal of the once-hated Patriot Act — rather nonchalantly from the United Kingdom via mechanical autopen. There was no media outrage, there were no hyperbolic campus protests, no juvenile outbursts from a Hollywood celebrity about shredding the Constitution. Most even forgot that senatorial candidate Barack Obama had once promised to help repeal the Patriot Act.
But then, such moral outrage belongs to the now fossilized age of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the exalted goal of stopping a conservative Texan justified any means of opposition necessary. We may continue almost all of his antiterrorism protocols, but they no longer earn elite outrage.
The same holds true of the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have somehow reverted to back-page news. MoveOn.org could not care less about the new involvement in Libya, and the media now could not care less about MoveOn.org — in the same manner that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore are now no more than extinct dinosaurs of a forgotten Jurassic age. After all, Iraq magically went from the “worst” mistake in U.S. foreign-policy history to one of the Obama administration’s “greatest achievements.”
Social Security and Medicare are nearing implosion. The aging baby boomers are about to retire en masse. They have no reputation for either stoic acceptance or self-sacrifice. The people are overtaxed, and the government is running a $1.6 trillion annual deficit. So either the retirement age must be upped, benefits cut, high payroll taxes further increased, or portions of the entitlements privatized to spur competition and efficiency.
And the progressive response to these proposed remedies? Instead of a detailed plan of salvation, we see ads portraying a Rep. Paul Ryan look-alike who is not just throwing an elderly woman out of her wheelchair, but sending her over a cliff as well.
There is a vast machinery of selective liberal outrage, fueled and lubricated by the media, universities, and celebrity entertainment. When the redistributive welfare state starts to run out of money, the gears and pulleys are flipped on and shrill charges of greed, cruelty, nativism, and racism spew out of the production line. The machine sputters and shuts down when an aggrieved liberal suddenly must either make cuts or adapt the very policies that he used to damn.
Understand the mechanics of selective outrage, and our upside-down politics becomes comprehensible: A state suing to enforce immigration law is tantamount to a racist intrusion on federal jurisdiction, but a state openly flouting federal statutes for the Dream Act is acting in enlightened, humanitarian fashion.
Greedy Wall Street insiders at the center of the 2008 meltdown could not possibly include progressive bureaucrats and their liberal enablers in Congress, who are interested in people first, profits last. Everything in 2006 that we were told was near fascistic about national security suddenly evolved into what is wonderful and necessary.
Heck, General “Betray-Us” is now Obama’s pick to run the CIA!
Dr. VDH - The Democrats have but one principle: stay in power; and they will do so by any means necessary, truth, facts and reality be dam*ed. BTW - I take umbrage at your calling these Leftists, "progressives." They are as progressive as they are liberal, with the only thing they are liberal about being other people's money, and the only thing they are progressive about being how they progressively take more and more of the people's money.
Silly conservatives... haven't we learned by now that the politicians in blue are expected to change (and hope). This is all apart of their glorius heritage as "progressives". If they don't crusade on behalf of everything outrageous they wouldn't be doing their job.
They would make great comic relief, but right now they are too busy making policies.
On a political show yesterday, I heard the expression "situational ethicist" referred to Democrats. I like that more than "selective moral outrage."
When the "situation" is that one of their own is in power, who needs ethics? They've got what they want. But when the opposition party rules, then they become the party of Cato the Censor.
What it really all boils down to is this. Look at the party in power as "substance" and what it does as the "accidents." When the party in power is theirs, the accidents belong to something they view as good, and therefore they hold no threat. When the party in power is the Republican, then its accidents are negative by default.
And for a philosophy that can't reveal itself in full to a mostly center-right country, fighting at "accident-level" is the best and only viable option.
"We conclude that these two entities contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary
cause. Importantly, GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value
throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses
that were central to the financial crisis."
-- Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Final Report
One must understand that the liberal position is always based on 99% emotion, 1% fact (and I'm probably being generous on the 1%) just like a two year old child, while conservative positions are based on 95% fact, 5% faith.
The sooner as we deal with this honestly the better off we will all be.
Yeah, the whole IMMEDIATE disappearance of the anti-war movement isn't suspicious at all. The Democrat party is truly the party of double standards and projectionism.
The Democrats will do the same with Medicare that they have done with Iraq, Afghanistan, and national security.
The Republicans will be relentlessly demonized over any changes they offer or put forward to save Medicare. Then when Obama wins in 2012 they will take these same changes, brand them as their own, and put them into effect. No one other than a few will notice or care who originally owned the solution.
I suppose we should be happy that even though our folks don't get the power or credit they deserve, at least our policies are implemented.
Like now, for instance, we are not subjected to a barrage of negative news about our military, news which helped our enemies, every time some type of setback occurred; most are ignored. This probably means less casualties on our side since the enemy isn't motivated by our press to continue on with their barbaric headline grabbing murderous acts. Headlines and stories designed to weaken the war’s popularity at home. It is pretty much a bad news blackout that doesn’t give the enemy any gain from their actions. It also illustrates how the lives of our men and women in uniform met nothing when the wrong man (party) was at the helm.
Another commenter was correct, Democrat leadership will stoop to any level to regain or gain power. We should not be surprised that they cheat. We either have to cheat better or recognize them for what they are (read David Kahane) and deal with them in the manner they deserve.
Why is MikeB even still here? Has he not learned anything by being on a conservative website, or is he just here to make himself look like a fool?
A report that doesn't make mention of the government's role and continued role in the housing market is a report that is not worthy of mention. Then again, this position shouldn't be surprising when the man charged with leading the investigation, Phil Angelides, was in several positions that took advantage of subprime lending, especially as his time in real estate and as the director of CalPERS. On top of this, isn't there an implicit conflict of interest when someone who benefited from subprime lending is also chair of a board to investigate the cause of the financial meltdown which was linked to subprime lending?
Indeed, isn't something that the government regulates, finds out it can't regulate the industry it is charged with regulating, investigates said industry, concludes that the meltdown because it wasn't regulated enough, and asks for more power to regulate the industry to prevent the collapse from "ever happening again"? At what point will people realize the con game for what it is?
You've got it bass ackwards. Liberals believe their opponents are evil, and make every effort to demonize them, not conservatives. Conservatives not only believe, but have empirical proof that their opponents are merely stupid. Conservatives don't automatically assume evil intent, though we do fall prey to the idea that those who don't agree with us are simply as stupid as the day is long.
Which explains how you got that part wrong on your list. Not evil, just dumb.
1) If you have to pay for someone else's benefit, how can you call that liberty?
2) If conservatives assumed the intent of their opponents was bad, then we wouldn't have the mess we're in. The problem is that conservatives assume the intent of their opponents is good and their intended outcome is good. Read any mainstream conservative's column other than those who have caught on to the con and you'll see what I mean.
3) I'll be honest with you: I don't give to charity because I believe giving to charity is a waste. You will find that numerous conservatives disagree with me. However, I won't be like you and assume that others are lying about their donor intent. Indeed, all last week I had to hear Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt run a week long marathon for Feed The Children. Each one also run various charitable shows for many causes. So unless you have proof that people are lying about their donor intent, then I would refrain from calling them liars.
By the by, doesn't this make you a hypocrite? Did you not just assume a bad intent on part of your opponents?
3) You are absolutely correct that conservatives assume that liberals think utopia is around the corner. You do know that you are posting on a website whose founder is known for standing athwart history yelling, "Stop!", right?
MikeB - I think the report to which you make reference had an Appendix that totally disagrees with the report. I read part of that Appendix, and I think (as an economist) that it had a much better understanding of events than the report itself.
As for your list, I have the following comments:
"My liberty is being infringed!" is conservative-speak for "I don't want to pay for that!"
MikeB, That is indeed true when my money taken away from me and given to someone else. I consider that no different from legalized theft. Also, read the Constitution's general welfare clause on that. It precludes taking money from A to give to B (because it does not increase the general welfare). It gets worse, because my money is being taken from me, ostensibly to improve matters, when empirically doing that does just the opposite.
Here's another thing I learned: Conservative political philosophy is grounded in the imputation of bad motives to its opponents.
MikeB - You have that backwards. As for example, notice all the bad things Obama said about Bush and his policies, many of which Obama has since implemented. Also, note how Leftists jumped on conservatives after the Gifford shooting with no evidence at all about the shooter and his motives. Also, note some of the horrid things the Left has said about Ryan's Medicare plan.
Here's another thing I learned: People on this site lie to themselves about how much they give to charity.
MikeB - How much I want to give is my own business, and I do not recall seeing charitable giving an issue here. BTW, the Federal government does not do charity well, nor is it authorized to do charity.
Here's another thing I learned: Conservatives actually think liberals believe utopia is just a shot away.
MikeB - Can't disagree with you on that one. By "liberals" I presume you mean Leftists. Current 'liberals' are not truly liberal except with other people's money.
The Democrats are performing exactly as Martin Van Buren designed that party.
MVB intended for the Democratic Party to be concerned with the acquisition of power and the maintenence of it. It was founded on no other principle.
In contrast, the GOP was founded first as a haven for anti-slavery activists. In other words...it was founded on a principle higher than its own political power.
The Scottish Jurist and Historian Sir Alex Fraser Tyler published a collection of lectures in 1801. He advanced a theory of democracy based on historical observation:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship..."
When is NRO going to start saying the obvious: The Left views these things not as deeply-heald beliefs and issues. Instead they are tools to attack the Right.
If I don't want to pay for something, I won't couch it in "code". I'll just tell you it isn't my obligation to pay for it.
I don't ascribe bad motives or intentions to liberals automatically. It's just that I place more importance on end results rather than the intentions that got us there. For example, most everything the government of Detroit has done for the last 40 years was probably well-intentioned. Detroit as we see it today is the result. And those weren't Republicans in the mayor's office.
Charity? I cannot recall any posts where anybody here thumped their chests on this. As others have pointed out, this is a personal, individual matter.
"Immanentize the Eschaton" was neither coined nor ever parroted by a conservative. That's what I know about who does the utopia thing. One thing I have observed is that liberal patriotism is dependent on how hard the U.S. tries to achieve this, like when Michelle was proud of America for the first time in her life.
And I also know this. IF you respond to anybody who has easily parried your clumsy attack, it will not be substantive or supported by examples. Nor will it rise above the level of ad hominem fallacy and straw man.
