Caution: Liberals at Work!

Normally, I never get an opportunity to watch the Sunday morning talk shows because my wife and I are in church, but yesterday we were bringing our son home from the hospital in Bethesda and we flipped the TV on while we waited for the doctor to release him. The set happened to be tuned to WJLA Channel 7 so I left it there for This Week with George Stephanopoulos and came away with the following observations:

1) It's been done to death but there's no way that George Stephanopoulos is a journalist. Upon the death of David Brinkley, ABC News simply replaced one over-the-top liberal with another over-the-top liberal - for continuity, of course.

2) It's also been done to death but there's no way that four liberals and one conservative equal fair and balanced discussion. George Will was outnumbered by David Brooks of The New York Times, Arianna Huffington (yikes!), Robert Kuttner who's glorified Barack Obama in his latest book and the Boy Wonder himself, so the overwhelming message that ABC News wants the public to hear is liberalism, liberalism, liberalism. And they wonder why people watch Fox.

3) Mr. Brooks thought that selecting Tim Geithner for Treasury, Larry Summers for Director of the National Economic Council and HRC for SECSTATE are shrewd moves by Obama to satisfy the Republicans, but Mr. Kuttner lamented the dearth of "progressives" in Obama's Cabinet, "progressives" being the code word that liberals use to describe themselves since "liberal" provokes the same reaction as "pervert." This was the first of the intellectual potholes I noticed in the roundtable discussion, that liberals would think that Republicans would be pleased with a lamp-throwing harpy like Hillary and wouldn't notice socialists like Rahm Emanuel, Tom Daschle and Obama himself in the new administration.

4) Intellectual pothole #2 came when Arianna Huffington criticized the Big Three Detroit CEO's for flying into Washington, DC, on private jets when she defiantly justified her use of the same to Sean Hannity a couple of years ago, then followed it up with intellectual pothole #3 by insisting that the senior management of the major US automakers should be sacked, because in her opinion, the same people who created a mess cannot be trusted to clean it up. By this logic, of course, trusting the Federal government to clean up an economic mess that they created (Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, the Congressional Black Caucus and other liberal pinheads leaning on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Treasury to provide home mortgage loans to people who couldn't pay them back) is a mistake, but that's why America is such a special place: Even an idiot like Arianna Huffington can be on TV.

5) George Will tried valiantly to talk some sense into these people. For example, he correctly observed that the New Deal was a failure because, among other things, the worst loss of manufacturing capacity in US history occurred in 1937, four years after the sainted FDR introduced America to socialism. He only wanted his colleagues to acknowledge that the "new" New Deal that's got the Left all atwitter - the $700 billion boondoggle that Congress wants to blow in January, beyond the $700 billion boondoggle that Congress approved last month, beyond the $120 billion approved last Spring, and beyond the $1 trillion in new spending envisioned by Barack the First, Emperor of the Americas - would only be necessary if the original New Deal were a failure. This observation naturally incurred Arianna's and Mr. Kuttner's wrath since there is no higher god in the liberal pantheon than FDR and failure is never failure to a liberal...it is the nobility of a person's intentions that matter, not catastrophic results. Mr. Kuttner, in his excitement, then drove into intellectual pothole #4 by noting that employment in the United States fell to zero by 1942 under FDR's leadership, by which reasoning we should credit the 32d President with starting World War II.

6) Mr. Kuttner used the phrase "casino capitalism" to mock the Big Three Detroit automakers, the major Wall Street investment firms and by extension, the Bush administration, calling for more regulation of the market, which if anyone has been watching for the past few years, is a patently stupid thing to say. Did he not notice the Feds raiding and prosecuting white-collar crooks at Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Tyco and Adelphia? Did he not notice Congress approving stringent new regulations for the financial system? And like I mentioned earlier, did he not notice Congress (who can regulate or not regulate as they choose) using Fannie Mae like a piggy bank to reward their low-rent constituents, something even worse than putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop? Hence intellectual pothole #5: What Mr. Kuttner considers "casino capitalism" is a market already heavily regulated. It would seem , then, that the only thing that would satisfy a Leftist boob like him is a joint press conference with Danny Ortega, Hugo Chavez, El Comandante Castro and His Eminence Barack announcing a total transition to socialism and free cigars for everyone. Jeesh!

7) Given the choice between cutting taxes so people can spend their own money and raising taxes so the government can spend it for them, liberals prefer the latter. They instinctively distrust individual judgment, even though our history proves that free enterprise is the fastest, easiest and most productive way to prosperity. If His Serene Loftiness gets everything he wants, and there's no reason to think that he wouldn't, the Federal government will engage in $2.5 trillion of new spending between last Spring and the end of his first term, starving the market of a huge amount of capital at the very time it is needed most. In spite of repeated failures in this country and elsewhere, liberals positively adore socialism, that glittering jewel of equally-distributed mediocrity, and will tax whatever they need to tax, spend whatever they need to spend and break whatever they need to break to make that nightmare come true, which is the very definition of insanity: Following the same failed policy and expecting a different outcome. Voila! Intellectual pothole #6, and for God's sake, let's not hit any more.