FROM LIMITED, INC.
Liberaliness
Does nobody remember the election of 2010? The GOP did not run
on cutting medicare - they ran on restoring the cuts Obama proposed. And
running to the left of Obama, they smashed the dems, who had their hands tied
behind them by the clueless prez.
With the new budger, O. has once again enacted the same
strategy. As a political strategy, his idea seems to be that trading the
votes of the Washington Post op ed crew (they will love the cuts to gross
entitlements) for the votes of the majority of Americans (who hate the cuts to
the entitlements they have earned over a generation of wage stagnation and
peculation by Wall Street) is an excellent idea. It isn't that the Dem voters
will vote for Republicans - they just wont vote. This is an easy dynamic to
see. As a farcical sideshow, this disaster will be accompanied, in the comments
sections of liberal blogs, with Dem operatives or Obama fans adopting strident
and bullying tones towards those who find the strategy politically pathetic and
economically noxious, to be followed by the same shills explaining the Dem
losses of 2014 on "holier than thou" leftists and liberals. Such are
the limits of politics in the era of the mock demoracy, as the plutocratic
parties battle for the margins.
One cannot, then, see this from the point of view of seerious
politics. There is no serious politics going on here - the viewpoint of the
majority is going to be ignored by whoever they elect. So one has to view it as
a form of entertainment, comedy on a low level. And of course the balony
factory, aka the establishment press, will provide the stage directions for
this farce in their own inimitable language, half high school cheerleader, half
dimwit. Thus, the NYT today, in Jackie Calmes thumbsucker, presented us with this
alice in wonderland analysis:
"The president’s views put him at the head of a small but
growing faction of liberals and moderate Democrats who began arguing several
years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit
programs — which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical
prices rise — the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to
help the poor, the working class and children.
“The math on entitlements is just not sustainable,” said Senator
Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to unequivocally endorse Mr.
Obama’s budget. “And if you’re not finding ways to reform, where do you
squeeze? Well, then you squeeze early-childhood programs, you squeeze Head
Start, you squeeze education and veterans.”
Ah, the small but growing portion of liberals who think that
unsustainable medical costs are best met by - throwinhg those costs back on the
individual! Its a whole new kind of liberalism, a sort of truthiness
liberalism, which simply uses a new language - for instance, it used to be that
the justification for entitlements is that certain costs can't be sustained by
the individual household, but now, through liberaliness, we simply and easily
reverse that notion and hope nobody notices that we are speaking nonsense. The
NYT, always looking for the cutting edge and always finding it a couple years
after it has become the boring norm, is charmed by the fact that it is small
but growing - which is usually what the doctor says before he recommends
surgery. Alas, the surgery that will be performed will separate the small but
growing plutocrat friendly party - defending entitlements by eviscerating them
- from the large but powerless body that cannot find any defenders among a
political class that has merged entirely with the gated community crowd. It is
the politics of the tumor by the tumor and for the tumor.
I can't wait for the Media to find the new Dem version of Paul
Ryan to represent this small but growing liberaliness faction: Obama's heir!
In one way, this doesn't come as a surprise: Obama did say, in
his first debate with Romney, that he and the governor agreed completely on
social security. But I was caught up in the small delusion that the election of
more liberal Dems to the senate would stifle Obama's liberaliness. It didn't.
Posted
by Roger Gathman at
8:14 AM ROGER HAS HIS OWN BLOG.
