[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]I have several candidates for the dopiest comment of the day — thank heaven Mr. Olbermann still has a gag in his mouth.
You doubtless have read or heard in the last six days that when the Republicans elected 60 new members to the House of Representatives last week, it was historic, the largest one-party landslide in Congress since 1938. Ever since the polls closed, Democrats have been stepping on each other’s toes to be the first to stand before a camera and bellow, elegantly:
“Don’t mean a darned thing.”
Two years ago, when many fewer Democrats were elected, along with a black President, the election meant, all hail to Allah, our messiah had landed on earth.
Hollering that the final tally is meaningless, hardline left-winger Bob Herbert of The New York Times offers the first Quote of the Day:
“It was hardly a mandate for the GOP’s way of doing things. The public does not want the next two years to be a bitter period of endless Congressional investigations of the Obama administration; more tax cuts and other giveaways to the very wealthy; and attacks on programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance that offer at least a measure of economic security for ordinary people.”
Thank you, Bobby Baby. Why bother to stage elections unless all voters pledge to only mark their ballots for Democrats?
Then there is the aptly named Chuckie Blow of the aforementioned Times:
“Instead of moving toward the middle, we are drifting toward the extremes.
“We need only flip on cab;e ‘news’ in the evenings to see how this plays out.
“So now the political pendulum has swung back hard to the right, mostly because of a disproportionately large number of older, wealthier, conservative voters, a quirk of midterms in general but particularly strong this cycle.”
Finally, there is another Times’ essayist, Gail Collins:
“We’re left with a passel of normal conservatives of both sexes along with a cadre of male and female wackos, some of whom we have yet to really meet.
“Michele Bachmann wants to be in the House leadership. She’d be the only Republican woman at the top of the heap, but I think even-keeled Americans of both parties and genders can have sympathy of John Boehner’s desperate signals that he’d rather not.
“Many women are horrified by people like Bachmann because they fear that when the rest of he country watches her bizarre performances, they see not just an addled person from Minnesota but a woman in politics. We have to get past that.”
Instead of embittered lefties who deny the culpability of President Obama’s horrifying agenda, starting with ObamaCare, let us return to a normal person, columnist George Will, who quotes an academic of all people to give us the best condensed definition of liberalism I have ever seen.
George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux agreed that interest-group liberalism has indeed been leavened by idea-driven liberalism. Which is the problem.
“These ideas,” Boudreaux says, “are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments.” Liberalism's ideas are “about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people.”
