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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

THE LIBERALS WE LOVE (UPDATE). It's hard to imagine the universe in which Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid live. It's like some bizarro-world they've made up for themselves, in which the sceptre of political office really can alter facts and even the laws of physics. Whatever they choose to affirm is automatically true, and whatever legislative response they fashion is bound to produce the result they desire. If only the annoying real world the rest of us live in didn't keep getting in the way.

Harry Reid declared the Iraq War lost when the surge was barely a few weeks old. To him, therefore, it is still lost, regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He is willing himself and, he thinks, the rest of us to dwell permanently in the year 2006. And Nancy Pelosi agrees with him.

Nancy Pelosi believes so devoutly in open borders and sanctuary cities that defy the authority of federal laws she has sworn an oath to uphold that she continues to defend a San Francisco policy even that city's mayor is backing away from -- a policy that has recently resulted in savage, random murders by an illegal alien gang member who should have been imprisoned and/or deported long ago.

They both subscribe to a rapidly unraveling theory of man-made climate change whose consequences would, at worst, occur only gradually over many many years, and in order to achieve an imperceptible diminishment of those consequences are prepared to put the national and global economies at serious risk in the here and now. These champions of the poor and dispossessed have already -- quite literally -- taken food out of the mouths of starving people around the world by legislating the redirection of American corn crops from cheap food to expensive alternative fuel.

For much the same reason, they are indifferent to the plight of American citizens who are struggling with the near doubling of gasoline prices within the past year. Their initial legislative impulse was to raise gas taxes because the consumer conservation they claim is integral to their own energy solution is marginally reducing gas tax revenues. And they insist that the immediate solution which is dead obvious to 70 percent of Americans -- drilling for more oil and gas in the United States -- is absolutely unacceptable because it won't produce results for ten years (they say) while the solution they offer instead -- windmills and solar panels -- won't be able to replace fossil fuels in thirty or even forty years. How is such bizarro logic justified? Nancy Pelosi says she's trying to "save the planet."

But it's worse than that, really. It's not just about misplaced priorities. It's also about a truly insane faith in government power. I think they believe, both of them, that government can mandate not only change but success. If the U.S. Congress decrees that Al Gore's idiotic carbon abolition schemes be met, they will be. If Congress commands automobiles that get 150 miles to the gallon or cars that run on discarded styrofoam peanuts, they will magically appear. If Congress decrees that an advanced industrialized nation can be run by windmills that consume all the arable lands of the plains states, that is exactly what will happen. And, I suppose, if Congress passes a law forbidding anyone to die of starvation in Haiti, Africa, or the world's other impoverished nations on account of dumbass alternative energy schemes in the U.S., they will obediently refrain from starving. Halleluiah.

One could call this kind of delusional mentality a great mystery. But it is (barely) explicable from the perspective of Capitol Hill. The most powerful members of Congress live lives almost completely devoid of consequences. Almost all the real world problems and nuisances that afflict ordinary citizens are mere expense account items to them. And unlike some of the lower ranking legislators they have to bully into compliance with their whims, they are essentially immune from being thrown out of office. Their pockets are too deep and their connections too vast for ordinary mortals to run successfully against them. And so, they can drink deeply of their power, become intoxicated by it, and begin to see even the worst human calamities caused by their delusions as unfortunate statistics in some subordinate's briefing paper, no more costly than the effort required to spin them away. They know their power, and it comes to replace every other consideration.


So maybe the Gothic congressional leadership of Pelosi and Reid isn't such a great mystery. Not nearly as great, anyway, as the mystery of why so many middle-class Americans continue to believe that the Democrat Party is the one that's on their side. At any given time, a majority of Americans are proud to claim an affiliation with the party that roots and actively works for the defeat of American troops in the field, that continuously sides with criminal illegal aliens against native-born citizens and legal immigrants who wait patiently in line for citizenship, that is perfectly willing to trade away all our hard-won present prosperity for phantom placebos in a distant, hypothetical future, and that bitterly despises almost all the basic human values and traditions of the very people who keep putting them in office.

Now that's a true Gothic tale. Who would ever believe it?

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