The Condescension Of Liberal Politics.



The Condescension Of Liberal Politics.  I have always been fascinated by the conflict between liberal and conservative politicians.  Being a moderate independent, I have seen what I view as the extreme wings of each party seize control of their party’s message.  The moderates of each side have been marginalized and have repeatedly ending up being pawns in the radical wing’s ongoing chess match.  There is clearly merit to both schools of political thought, liberal and conservative, and clearly pitfalls to each.  Policy itself is something that can be discussed, debated, and given a reasonable chance, compromised upon.  There is much truth in the old saying that a good man will compromise on practice, but never on principle.  It is the philosophy behind policy that I have always found mysterious and it is this philosophy that I believe has led us to this poisonous WDC environment where nothing can get done in government.   Although there are certainly peculiarities about the conservative philosophy that merit discussion, it is the motivation behind liberal policies that I have always struggled to define.  I think that perhaps I have discovered why at least a portion of that which has puzzled me for so many years.

Many hold the conventional wisdom that liberals are tolerant and conservatives are intolerant.  Now that is oversimplification, but oversimplification is what we do to make sense of this complex world in which we live and work.  In fact, liberal philosophy is tolerance to the extreme; pushing to accept extraordinary behavior simply for the case of acceptance.  By the same token, many conservatives have pushed their claims to individual rights to extreme by arguing for the acceptance of extraordinary behavior simply because of personal liberty.  Herein lays the difference.  Liberals will force the individual to behave in a certain way because they, the liberal, see it as the proper way to behave.  A conservative my engage in strange behavior, but it is their own personal brand of strange behavior and even though it might be outside the norm, they are self-engaged and not foisting it upon anyone else. It has struck me as strange that of all the extraordinary behaviors that liberals have championed, the one that that they find the most difficult to accept is conservative behavior.

The new aspect to liberal thought that I would like to highlight is the fact that while seeming to be extremely tolerant, they are in fact being very dictatorial.  If a liberal would prescribe their desired norms to themselves and the right to be themselves, that would make them not unlike many conservatives.  In fact, I dare say that many conservatives would be just fine with this standard and recognize left individual behavior as much a basic privilege as right individual behavior.  But when liberals endeavor to dictate certain norms through government action, they are not only tossing aside the principle of tolerance, they are engaging in a condescending mode of intolerance.  Obamacare is a good example of what I speak about.  Serious people from both the liberal and conservative sides can agree that there are too many people in this country without adequate health care.  They could probably even agree on a system to make adequate health care more easily available to most of those people.  But the conservatives promote a free market availability, decision-based approach driven by personal choice and accountability.  The liberals, through Obamacare, have foisted upon those Americans who pay taxes the burden of providing, to varying degrees, health care to those in need of it.  There is no choice here; if you pay taxes, you will finance Obamacare.  But it does not stop there.  The government, through the ACA, will prescribe exactly what constitutes adequate health care.  The old adage about “give a starving man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again” is very much in play here.  It is not that conservatives are not compassionate, they simply choose to dispense their compassion in their own fashion; a fashion that is prescribed as their right and privilege under the constitution of this nation.  When the liberals assume their superior airs of compassion through tolerance to the point where they mandate that same behavior upon others who think differently, they lose their mantle of tolerance and become small-minded, condescending intolerants.  Does our government have the authority to make us all good people in the image of liberal philosophy?  As long as we are law-abiding citizens, don’t we have the right to decide exactly how good we choose to be in this life?

Both liberals and conservatives have a right to be idiots and many on each side choose to exercise that right on a daily basis.  However, the conservatives have grasped a fundamental concept that has eluded the liberals; each side has the right to choose their idiocy, as long as they don’t inconvenience others with it. Conservatives are fine with this; they promote individual rights and less government intrusion into our private lives.  Occasionally, they take it to extremes that weaken the whole at the benefit of the individual and on those occasions, some compromise of individual liberty is required.  However, when liberals promote a certain type of personal benefit, right, or behavior based on their own deeply-held beliefs, they are obliged to convince others to accept those beliefs based on merit, as opposed to structuring our society to a point where it demands that type of behavior. 

So…at the end of the day, it would seem that the tolerant liberals are not so tolerant after all.  Some conservative kooks are just that, but their kook-dom is their own individual issue.  Liberal kook-um, on the other hand, is considered by those dispensing it to be of such unquestionable correctness that they feel all should accept and adopt it, regardless of their individual beliefs and philosophy.  That is simply not consistent with the principles upon which this country was founded.   

Nuclear Option Not Such A Big Bang.



Nuclear Option Not Such A Big Bang.  Three observations about the recent triggering of the nuclear option by Senate Democrats:

1.    Sooner or later, one party or the other was going to eliminate the filibuster on administration nominees.  Elections are contests and the spoils of victory go to the winners.  Part of those spoils is the ability to select who you want to serve in your administration.  It is not surprising that a president chooses those of like mind to serve them.  This leads to the less surprising point that since Republicans don’t like Obama’s liberal philosophy and policies, then they will not like the liberal philosophies and policy opinions of those selected by Obama to serve in his administration.  I really do not have any issue with a simple majority in the Senate holding sway over these type of appointments.  We can only hope that our presidents have the good sense to nominate individuals, regardless of political concerns, who are competent to serve.  On the other hand, court appointments carry life tenures and impact our society far beyond the end of a presidential term.  In the famous (infamous?) words of then-Senator Hillary Clinton when referring to some of then-President George W. Bush’s nominees…”If they can’t get 60 votes, then maybe he should send us another nominee”.  If the case of judicial nominees, there should clearly be a 60 vote requirement and the implementation of the majority rule in this area is a terrible mistake.  Mistake though it is, its intention is crystal clear; which bring us to point number …

2.    President Obama has wasted more opportunity in 5 years than most Presidents even have over 2 full terms.  His raw political passage of Obamacare cost him full control of government after two years and its legacy has been open warfare between the two national parties.  Obama’s skill and lack of shame in the arena of political games has even allowed him to secure some victories (not accomplishments) since the Republicans gained control of the House.  However, now that the sheet is being pulled back on his signature accomplishment and people are seeing it for the farce it is, it is dawning on our president that he is indeed a very lame duck and he will likely lose any effective sway over the Democrats in the House and the Senate.  Bottom line: Anything he might accomplish over his last three years will likely be accomplished through executive actions and not the legislative process.  The only reasonable explanation for extending the nuclear option to judicial appointments is to permit Obama to pack the D. C. Circuit Court with liberal judges who will extend a kind reception to any of his administrative regulations that might come before them.  You have to know that they will be coming in large quantities.

3.    In the past, I have oftentimes been an advocate for a more aggressive legislative approach by the Republican Party.  I have gone so far as to say that they are in the habit of…”bringing a knife to a gun fight”.  The Democratic execution of this nuclear option will no doubt bring future retaliation from the Republicans.  In a legislative environment that was already paralyzed by partisanship, the injection of this issue was the last thing needed to improve the situation.  Now that the precedent has been established, it will be a great temptation for the Democrats in the Senate to extend the majority rule option to legislation.  They may be reluctant because its utility is limited by Republican control of the House.  However, they may be encouraged because some are convinced that Republicans will do it as soon as they regain control of the Senate.  One can only hope that both parties grasp the terrible damage such a move could inflict on our government and our country.  Let us hope that both parties can find leaders with the wisdom to step away from the cliff’s edge and understand that there must be limits to all political contests.

The Thinkers And The Doers.



The Thinkers and the Doers.  As the Obamacare debacle continues, it appears to me that a clear pattern is emerging from the Democratic side of this issue.   The academic and intellectual architects of the ACA, such as Z Emanuel, are unapologetically defending the wisdom of the program and apparently have no doubt that all we have seen so far constitutes nothing more than a bump in the road on the way to the nirvana of healthcare they have always envisioned.  In fact, if you listen closely to their interviews and articles, they seem to be practicing a bit of “I told you so” with their partners in crime; the ones who helped them birth this thing.  Those partners are the ones I will refer to as the “doers”; the aforementioned architects shall be labeled the “thinkers”.   The thinkers had been working on this project for decades but despite their best efforts (remember Hillarycare?), had been unable to pass it into law.  That task fell to the doers, of which Mr. Obama is the consummate professional.  It is amusing to see how Emanuel and his fellow wonks are entirely mystified as to why Obama and Reid and Pelosi chose to willfully deceive the nation about what the ACA is all about.  In their minds, it is so damn right that it couldn’t be wrong; no way, no how.  But the doers knew.  They knew that if the people could understand the philosophy behind Obamacare, really understood how it was nothing less than the establishment of a new entitlement that would ultimately serve to redistribute the earned wealth of this nation, then not only would they not support its passage into law, they might not even continue to support the Democrats who were proposing it.

In the minds of the thinkers, this is nothing less than “foundation of the nation” business; the type that literally transforms what this nation is and will be in the future.  To them, there is sufficient gravity to this move towards single payer that any means will justify the ends.  They are truly puzzled why anyone would oppose such policy in the first place and frankly feel quite put upon when asked to defend the reasoning behind Obamacare.  This is the type of attitude that in the past has kept them from obtaining the legislative victory necessary to move the ACA into the realm of law.  Enter the doers.  Once the Democrats were able to get a man who was a “thinker wannabe but a doer at heart” into the White House and simultaneously hold sway over both Houses of Congress, the potent brew had reached critical mass. 

But herein lays the problem.  The thinkers have the luxury of debating issues based on theory; on the lightness of academia and the condescension of intellect.  They can pretend to be ordained with the power to know better what is good for you than you know yourself and get by with it.  Their conversations and rhetoric are discussed by people who have jobs that do not depend on performance, but are largely ignored by the overwhelming majority of the public who actually work for a living.  In other words, the thinkers are largely ignored…and it disturbs the hell out of them.  The doers on the other hand are the ones who are in charge of getting things done (normally at this point, I would say “in charge of paying the bills”; but the Dems gave up on that principle when Mr. Clinton left the White House).  They can practice deceit and dance around the truth, but eventually consequences (both intended and unintended) will raise their collective heads and they will have to be dealt with.  They live and work in the real world.  For a few critical months, the thinkers in the Democratic Party won a victory beyond their wildest dreams and that led to an unthinkable accomplishment.  Not only did the moon and stars align properly to constitute Democratic control of the Legislative and Executive branches of government, but more importantly they were able to get the doers to act like thinkers.  The Democrats in the Senate and the House got so embroiled in the quest for all-out political victory that they forgot they were doers.  They forgot that reality would one day come calling and the wages of political over-indulgence would have to be paid.  For a brief moment in time, they made the mistake of assuming liberties that are reserved only for the thinkers among us; liberties like “We must pass it to find out what is in it”.  Several of them, especially the ones scheduled for races that might be termed competitive, are thinking very hard about that right about now.

My God...We Have Learned Nothing.



My God…We Have Learned Nothing.  I cannot believe what I have been reading in the last couple of weeks.  Many journalists (and I use the term loosely!) have been glancing at Elizabeth Warren as a…wait for it…a presidential candidate.  The logic is that she will be able to run to the left of Hillary Clinton and make a serious run for the Democratic nomination.  Now couple this with the conjecture that Rand Paul could be a serious candidate for the Republican nomination because he appeals to the right wing of the party.  Really? 

Whatever you may think of Obama, his performance and his policies, it is indisputable that he carried one of the lightest resumes in history when he moved into the White House.  And now, serious people are talking about doubling down on that move (how’s that Obama vote working out for ya…change you can believe in?) by giving us a choice between a wannabe Indian chief and a curly headed idealist.  

At the local (county) level of politics in this country, it is common to hear our friends and neighbors moan and groan about the quality of our political candidates.  The logic goes something like…nobody worth having the job will run for the job.  It is true that running for political office has become very expensive and lays one open to unwarranted intrusion and persecution regarding their private lives.  However, a larger explanation for this logic is that we are always looking for the perfect candidate; the one who looks the part and who thinks just like we do.  Good luck with that search!

Instead of Democrats seeing who can out-socialize the others and Republicans seeing who can out-Tea Party the others, it is time to look for people who are serious about wanting to WORK to improve our government, who are reasonable enough to grasp the reality of what is possible and what is impossible, and most importantly, who can demonstrate a record of experience and accomplishment that gives us some tangible hope that they might be somewhat successful at governing.  He was not my favorite cup of tea, but history will show that Mitt Romney was perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate for his time in our history.  We need to vote for our public officials the same way we hire our employees; choose the best qualified from the pool that is available.  The American voting public was blinded by the light, voted for flash instead of substance, and look where that has gotten us.  Unfortunately, we will always have to live with the question…”How would things be different right now with Romney and Ryan in the White House?”

Repeal And Replace.



Repeal And Replace.  The window of opportunity has been pried open by reality, but many hands are trying to pull it back down.  How long it remains open is very real question.  There exists an opportunity NOW to repeal and replace what is quite possibly the worst piece of legislation ever approved by our government.  It should be done.

In the past, I have been an advocate of trying to fix Obamacare, as opposed to trying to repeal Obamacare.   I attribute that opinion to an objective and pragmatic view that told me repeal was not politically possible and that a fix was essential.  Like almost everyone else, I did not anticipate the degree to which this legislation would fail.  That colossal failure has created the possibility  of starting over (in a legislative sense) by simultaneously repealing the ACA and passing a new piece of health care legislation that reflects the 80 percent of the ACA that can garner bi-partisan support.

You might ask…Why not just fix Obamacare?  The answer is simple.  Even though there is a great deal in the ACA that reflects bi-partisan solutions to real problems in our health care system, the fact is that the ACA is intrinsically tied to the mandates, both individual and employee.   The mandate is woven throughout the fabric of the ACA and it would be impossible to remove it without destroying the program.  I am not a lawyer and do not have a professional understanding of the law, but it continues to confound me that the Supreme Court could rule that it is legal to require us to buy health insurance and then have the government prescribe exactly what that health insurance should be.  This is simply wrong and contrary to so much that our country stands for.

 Democrats could not stomach stand-alone repeal of Obamacare; they have too much skin invested.  They are, however, beginning to realize that the program is fundamentally flawed and will never function as it is designed.  They are looking for a way out of this thing.  The Republican ploy of delaying the mandate is not the solution; that just postpones the inevitable.  In the long run, it will lock in the damage for many, many more citizens.  The rumored Administration ploy of supplying a new subsidy to those who lost existing policies is nonsensical…on so many levels.  It would simply exacerbate the existing problems and do absolutely nothing to address the fundamental fissures in the program.

There was a bi-partisan plan or two in the Senate prior to passage of Obamacare.  There has been a multitude of Obamacare fixes passed in the House.  Clearly, there is common ground between the two parties on health care legislation and that ground has been somewhat prepared.  Without obtrusively inserting government into our lives and personal choices on health care, I believe we can all accept that some of our tax money could be spent on insuring that all Americans have a minimal amount of health care maintenance.  If each party can get around their “win at all costs and crush the opponent” strategies that they are currently employing, they could promulgate some repeal and replace legislation that reflects good compromise and both can declare victory.  Is that really too much to ask from a democratic government?

Well....Here We Are.



Well…Here We Are.  The Obamacare rollout has premiered to, how can I say this, less than rave reviews?  What are we now left with?

·        There is, for the present, a new God-given right to all Americans: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….and free health insurance if you can’t afford it…and only as prescribed by Uncle Sam.

·        We have a president who is not only a shallow, unprincipled, narcissistic, sophomoric, spiteful incompetent; he is also a liar who will say or do anything, to anybody, at any place, at any time, in order to win a political game.

·        The Republicans are slowly coming to the realization that rather than pursue the “David vs. Goliath” goal of defunding Obamacare, they are much better advised to get out the way and let it deconstruct itself.

·        The mainstream media (I hate that phrase but how else do I refer to them…flock of fools, sniveling groupies, blind following the blind, fools to the fool), based on their coverage recently, remain solidly in the tank for Obama and will rationalize to the max to try and save his hide.

·        The Citizenry of America can be hoodwinked on many issues which do not directly impact their daily lives; they are quite content to be sublime in the abstract.  But doctor bills, hospital bills, prescription bills, and insurance premiums hit home real quickly and this bitter pill is not going down real well.

·        Although one event cannot adequately define an issue, on rare occasions one event will really bring an issue into focus.  The rollout of Obamacare was a chance for its supporters to prove to the public that…yes, the government can competently administer health care for this nation; that government knows better than you what is best for you.  Epic fail.  Anyone who had any illusions about the government’s administrative competence should now realize that if they can’t even get the website right with over 3 years to prepare, how in the hell will they manage a program that reflects one-sixth of this nation’s economy?

·        And then there is this little nugget.  In an arena that has seen command performances from players both Democrat and Republican, this outfit has set new standards for cronyism.  It is nothing short of hilarious that the company that was originally contracted (no-bid, BTW) to construct the ACA website has now received a new ADDITIONAL contract to repair it.  You can’t make this stuff up!

·        Thoughtful Democrats are beginning to have serious doubts about the wisdom of Chicago-style politics.    After ramming Obamacare through the legislative process using every abnormal play in the book (and some new ones heretofore not thought of) on a straight party-line vote (NOT ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN VOTE!), they now roam around whining that the other party will not sit down with them to “fix” Obamacare.   How many ways can you say…”that train has left the station”?

·        Many people, from both political spectrum sides and the middle, are beginning to reflect on the wisdom of Democratic/Progressive/Socialist policies.  They were fooled twice by Obama.  They briefly put the Democrats in full control of government; just long enough to pass Obamacare.  They must now be wondering….”if they can do this to our health care system, what can they do to the rest of our country?”.  The 2014 mid-term elections will be interesting indeed.

·        As much as we all despise excessive Capitol Hill hearings and investigations that seem to go on forever and feature bloviating, self-aggrandizing buffoons from both parties parading themselves before any camera that might be operating, no Administration in my memory of over 60 years needs a thorough cleansing more than this one.  After 5 years of being left to its own devices and having the run of the kingdom, this arrogant king and his minions have created a cesspool that is dire need of draining.  I fear the only way to do this is to shame the media into legitimate investigations.  And the only way I see that happening is if the Republicans gain control of the Senate, hold the House, and begin their infuriating rounds of hearings.  Only if the public is force-fed a taste of this administration’s mode of operation will it raise a clamor sufficient to shame the media into doing its duty.