PUBLIC ENEMY #1

A friend asked me today why everybody’s so pissed at Rush Limbaugh.     His greater question was “why are the Democrats and the press attacking him?   What did he do?”

Well, it’s important to first recognize that the Democrats and the press are the same thing – or as is classically referred to as a ‘distinction without a difference’.   To the point though, it is a very good question with a number of possible answers.

The first thing you have to do is recognize that this is politics, at least for the politicians.   There’s only one reason a politician would give anybody or anything any attention at all…for political gain.   So given that fact the real question is “what is the political gain the President is seeking by attacking a private citizen?”

He obviously thinks Mr. Limbaugh is a threat to him or his plans.    Limbaugh’s on to him, or on to something.   The criticism of Rush has largely been ad hominum based on comments taken out of context.   No surprise there.   That’s really all you need to know to be sufficiently suspicious that President Obama isn’t the ‘new’ agent of “change” in the attitude and character of government.

If you are brave enough to listen to the Limbaugh radio program, you’ll hear him assert that the bail-out is a purposeful tanking of our economy.   It makes perfect sense if you believe that Obama and his ilk are willing to let or make things get so bad they can ride in on their big government white horse and save the day.   Everything about the stimulus plan defies every predictable precept of economics.   Everything about it makes no sense. For someone as smart as the president to suggest that bottom up stimulus actually grows an economy staggers the mind.    It makes so little sense that I can’t help but agree with Rush’s assessment.

Think about it, if you wanted to “change the face of America” how would you do it?       

CHANGE

i have two friends.  Actually, i have more than two but the two to which i’m referring are uniquely juxtaposed.  

On many levels they’re very much alike, but like most people who share similarities they’re also quite different.   Where these two intersect is a very strange place because of the vastly differing motives for a shared support of welfare.   Public assistance is a policy which dates back to the 1930’s in its crudest form as the New Deal.   It was updated and expanded in the sixties as the Great Society and today is thriving in many forms and programs.

Modern welfare was established with the Great Society as – among other things – a means to combat poverty and the lingering effect of institutional racism.   What started out as assistance has in large part become subsistence with generations of families dependent on the State for housing, food, health care and living expenses.   One of the greatest failures of this effort to elevate the poor is displayed in the reality that it has relegated more people to poverty than it has relieved.  

Sure, there are many who have escaped the clutches of spiraling dependency, yet the number of people who still reside in the entitlement world is startling and growing.

My two friends are both pleased with the current state of affairs in the Great Society.   The first friend is a misguided altruist.   She’s a communist actually.   She not only believes that it’s the fundamental goal of government to provide and ensure opportunities, but that it’s the government’s responsibility to take from the gifted and fortunate and simply give their stuff away to those who have not.   In her world the government is the humanist agent and the divine wrapped up in one.   All things moral and equitable are to be arbitrated by the educated and enlightened at the expense of the “rich” for the benefit of the “poor”.

My other friend supports public assistance in the form of housing and basic needs (health care, education, food, affirmative action etc.) not because she’s altruistic, but because she believes that by giving freebies to the uninspired they won’t notice that they’ve been coraled together to merely exist far from the places hard working people choose to live.   She’s perfectly content to part with whatever is necessary from her paycheck to keep the unwashed at bey.   She believes that people are poor (at least in the U.S.) because they have ultimately chosen to be.

i wonder whose position is more broadly represented in our culture? 

i seriously wonder how many of the do-gooders who support expanded socialism are really in the deep recesses of their minds glad that the real opportunities are being preserved for them and for their children.   The ‘Matrix’ that is the social safety net has plugged tubes and wires into the poor to feed them a steady diet of life-support while robbing them of any kind of real life while keeping them ignorant and oppressed in perpetuity.  

Which “hero” is really doing any good at all; the blind one or the bigot?

The tragic injustice of this whole sordid affair is that my two friends never really have to leave their cocoons either.   Their hands never get dirty.   They don’t even have to consider whether or not their advocacy is doing any good as long as they vote for ideologues who make sure the necessary funding for entitlements remains burdensome in a ‘progessive’ way.

And look at the poor themselves; when they do finally get inspired to get up and take a first step toward freedom, they cast ballots for leaders who are dedicated to disabusing them of an honest future.  

You want change?   Start being honest with yourself for a change.