The American Spectator

Why are Democrats on a suicide mission and what is it they are trying to accomplish? Poll after poll tells us that the public finds little to like in the broad goals of the Obama-ites, and even less to like in the doings of Congress. Yet, undeterred, they proceed to do things one would think no politician in his right mind would consider.

Only 30 percent of voters approve of the mess that has become health care reform, yet endangered members of the House and Senate are dragged kicking and screaming into the “yea” column, aware that their longevity in Washington may be terminated the next time (which is not soon enough) they face the voters. And the latter don’t like the process any more than they do the substance.  A  Zogby poll taken soon before the Senate vote on Harry Reid’s monstrosity was revealing: 84 percent of respondents said they believe that bills are thousands of pages long so that earmarks and other special deals can be hidden in them and that they are rushed into passage so that citizens can’t figure out what they mean in time. If the Democrats don’t believe the pollsters, they need only look for verification to the newly elected Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey.

Politics, in the final analysis, is the art of taking things away from people who don’t support you and giving them to people who do. In the left-wing, ideologically driven mentality of the American 21st-century liberal, this maxim is reduced to thinking at the outset of the great blocs of the population — those groups always looked to by the left, including minorities, the downtrodden and impoverished, and the grievance-driven discontented — who, the lefties believe, will remain their constituency for decade after decade and keep them in power. Those who must pay for it all are the ones who don’t support them and never will — future generations, taxpayers in other states, or that part of the electorate who won’t vote for them anyway.

Obamacare is really not about health care, but about ideology. Old civil libertarian Nat Hentoff recently remarked that “the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don’t think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in him in the religious sense…”

Hentoff should know. To the good liberal, left-wing ideology is a religion; he is absolutely convinced that he is right, that his beliefs are sound, and that the only way the world can be saved is by imposing his ideology on the rest of us. There is no evidence, no argument, no logic that can deter his conviction, and he is willing to go to the mat, if necessary, to see that his ideology is adopted. Big government is center stage — center pulpit, if you will — in the mind of the good liberal and is the cure for all ills. As Henry Hazlitt wrote in his little book Economics in One Lesson more than 60 years ago, “There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world than the faith in government spending.”

To be sure, not all the Democrats are liberal ideologues. But those accomplices who succumb to Rahm Emanuel’s rubber hose and shock treatments, and who believe that one can somehow sweet-talk
his way past the voters in November, are as guilty as the true believers and deserve whatever the voters hand them.

What an opportunity we have. Where the Democratic Congress earns an approval rating of some 20 percent, where Mr. Obama’s ratings have dropped more, in the first year, than any president’s in recent history, where broad voter sentiments have turned strongly away from the ideology of the left, but where the Congress and the administration continue on their mission to make that ideology the law, it is incumbent on us to see that 2010 goes down in the record books as the year that turns the liberal suicide mission into reality. Or to put it another way, let’s make the Gingrich revolution of 1994 look like a close call.