Once again, Mark Steyn brings up a depressingly great point.
It’s not just long-ago sins like imperialism and colonialism and Eurocentric white male patriarchy and other fancies barely within living memory. Our very lifestyle demands penitence: Americans have easily accessible oil reserves, but it would be wrong to touch them, so poor old BP have to do the “environmentally responsible” thing and be out in the middle of the Gulf a mile underwater. If you’re rich enough to be that stupid, what won’t you subsidize? The top al-Qaeda recruiter in Britain, Abu Qatada, had 150,000 pounds in his bank account courtesy of the taxpayer before the comically misnamed Department for Work and Pensions decided to cut back his benefits.
The green jobs, the gay parades, the jihadist welfare queens, the Greek public sector unions, all have to be paid for by a shrinking base of contributing workers whose children and grandchildren will lead poorer and meaner lives because of the fecklessness of government. The social compact of the postwar era cannot hold. Across the developed world, a beleaguered middle class is beginning to understand that it’s no longer that rich. At some point, it will look at the sheer waste of government spending, the other shoe will drop, and it will decide that it no longer wishes to be that stupid.
The Republicans had a majority in the House of Representatives for, what, 12 years? During that time, the GOP did very little to break the Left’s choke-hold on the levers of power. Oh sure, the GOP would win a presidency and yeah, they’d gain control of the Senate for a time or two. But the basically permanent federal bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly liberal, hardly changed.
The left-wing hacks that infest almost every layer of the federal government are very protective of their fiefdoms from outside-aka conservative-influences. Here’s a question: Does anybody think the mega-bureaucracy that is Obama-Care will be any sort of compatible with small government reforms?
Look at something as seemingly benign as PBS. From Sesame Street to Nova, it’s a bastion of left-wing politics. It indoctrinates kids and adults in liberal propaganda with your tax dollars, then guilt-trips you into donating $100 for a $5 tote bag. In the history of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, have they ever been in any danger of being weaned off the public trough? Have they ever been in any danger of just having their budgets cut?
Elements of the government have long been in bed with barely-legal groups like La Raza and ACORN. Socialism, race-hustling and criminal conduct…all of these things are aided and abetted by taxpayer dollars.
Don’t get me wrong. Elections still matter. 2010 is most assuredly going to be a big battle in the fight against the statist project. But on a deeper level, the government life support system for the Left must have it’s plug pulled. If we are to make any progress against the Progressives, we must stop giving the liberals a blank check from the government to meddle in American public life.
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