It's been a terrible week for the American liberal. First, Martha Coakley blew a thirty-point lead in the polls to lose Ted Kennedy's Senate seat - or as the victor Scott Brown properly called it, the People's seat - to a Republican unknown, giving the GOP the one vote they needed to filibuster President Obama's health care hijacking bill. Next, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that restrictions on corporate political advertising are a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech and thus unconstitutional, reversing 35 years of liberal-driven legislation designed to throttle non-union participation in the political process. Last, Air America, the libs' supposed answer to Rush Limbaugh, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and will air its final broadcast tomorrow the 25th. What's a liberal to do?
Well, for one thing, Priest-King wasn't willing to surrender the political momentum quite yet and spent Thursday lashing out at the banking industry (kneeing the markets in the groin yet again) and repeated himself at a town hall meeting in Ohio on Friday. In his deluded, socialist true-believer mind, the defeats in Massachusetts and the Supreme Court weren't rebukes of his policies but the result of a dark conspiracy between evil Wall Street bankers, die-hard conservatives and "special interests," by which he means special interests who support his opponents, not him. He cannot accept that ordinary people simply disagree with him, that they object to his radical agenda and the candidates he's endorsed, whether in Massachusetts or New Jersey or Virginia. As I have remarked repeatedly in this space, Priest-King sees himself as an epic figure standing above history, law and politics, whose vision is glorious and whose will should be obeyed as holy writ, thus his frustration when that self-image is rejected. His victory in 2008 closed the debate as far as he is concerned so he sees further discussion as not only unnecessary but rebellious. Watching him on television on Thursday, one could see the indignation seething out of him as he lambasted the financial industry, as if the TEA parties, the town hall meetings and the recent conservative electoral victories were insubordination rather than legitimate political expression. Capitalism is evil and must be destroyed, thinks Priest-King, public opinion and Scott Brown be damned.
But the voice of the people must prevail. As the people chose Barack Obama in 2008, they have chosen Scott Brown, Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell now. Instead of corrupt incumbents engineering their re-elections by strangling political speech they can't control, the people can freely support issues through their businesses just as trade unions have been doing for decades. And instead of listening to the hysterical rantings of Leftist hacks on the radio, the people tuned into Rush Limbaugh and left Air America to its fate, a bankrupt failure in the market and as an idea. Vox populi.
