We live in interesting times. Back before special weekend
sessions, when presidents power-napped through Cabinet meetings
and Congress kept bankers’ hours, March Madness was confined to
college basketball. But now that we’re saddled with a
self-consciously progressive young chief executive and a Speaker
of the House who thinks of
herself as “capo di tutti capi,” bipartisanship is a shadow
of its former self, and one-sixth of the economy is now set for
an extreme makeover. As a result, tea parties have outgrown the
American Girl set, radio hosts warn about dangers to the
republic, and the global village seethes with indignation from
allies who have been told to acquaint themselves with the torn
upholstery on seats in the back of the bus. Democratic
operatives, many of them avowed secularists with an impoverished
understanding of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free
Exercise clauses, daily give the rest of us more than a few
reasons to pray harder.
Meanwhile, the friends and enemies of Obamacare talk past
each other. The current scene reminds me of a joke about a
grasshopper that springs into a bar. “What’ll you have?” asks the
bartender, who is quick on his feet. “We don’t get a lot of your
kind in here, but we actually have a drink named after you.” Then
the grasshopper says, “Really? You have a drink named
‘Bob’?”
A similar disconnect bedevils arguments with my friend
“Boris.” He knows the arcana of health care better than I do, so
his Facebook notes on that subject are tinged with polite
exasperation. I hold my own in our occasional arguments by
exploiting his weaknesses as a debater, the most glaring of which
is his fondness for hyperbole. On March 15, for example, Boris
informed all who would listen that “Every single poll that digs into what
people actually want confirms that people want all the things
that health care reform is going to begin to deliver to them. And
the Republicans know that.” Consequently, he added,
“Fear-mongering, demonization, and outright lies are the only
tools [Republicans] have in their arsenal to fight health care
reform; and they’re totally fine with using those
tools.”
The best response to that
might have been a shrug and the kind of “ho ho ho” that sounds
like it came from Inspector Clouseau. Instead, I bookmarked the
tirade. I did not expect Boris to explain why early versions of
the legislation over which he pants got nowhere until Democrats
resorted to bribery and parliamentary sleight-of-hand. I’m sure
he would say that the “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker
Kickback” were just the price of doing business with
obstructionists. But If anyone ever asks me what a defensive
crouch looks like, and whether it can be transposed from the
sparring floor of a dojo to the paragraphs in an
essay, I’ll know exactly what to show
them.
Note the line of attack Boris used. He’s certain that
anyone who has strong reservations about Obamacare is
“fear-mongering.”
Had Boris shouted that from a park bench in Chicago, I’d be
more inclined to overlook it, because there are certain precincts
in the Windy City where people still think of President Obama as
a favorite son rather than an eloquent-but-unhinged nephew. Yet
overlooking those insults might be uncharitable, because Boris is
flirting with something that sounds very much like libel.
May I extend the grasshopper gag for educational purposes?
Suppose a doctor, a politician, an economist, a writer, and an
archbishop walk into a bar. The doctor is cousin to President
Obama, and the politician is a ranking member of the budget
committee in the House of Representatives. None of these people
supports Obamacare, and none of them is hypothetical.
Can they all be fear-mongers? They’re not even all
Republicans. Dr.
Milton Wolf, Congressman Paul Ryan, Dr.
Thomas Sowell, Ms.
Megan McArdle, and Most Rev.
Charles J. Chaput, I’m looking at you (I have to do the
looking, because friend Boris is holding his hands over his
eyes).
Someone off his or her meds might be thinking that the
archbishop would “demonize” people with whom he disagrees, on the
theory that broad-brush rhetoric tempts men of the cloth. But
Chaput seems an amiable chap, and anyone who answers to a rabbi
famous for saying “Be not afraid” makes an exceedingly poor
excuse for a fear-monger. Worse for Boris, it’s not like everyone
else opposed to President Obama built a career on lying, either.
Democrats are not the only ones with access to
figures from the Congressional Budget Office. Representative
Ryan, for example, was widely praised for his impressive command
of subject matter at the president’s Potemkin “health care
summit.”
As for the idea that Republicans criticize initiatives from
the Democrats but do not propose serious alternatives of their
own, the fact that even a professional provocateur like Ann
Coulter has a health care reform plan ought
to give pause, if “Democratic
math” (that is, not counting when possible, and
double-counting when necessary) had not already.
All this is anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and yet the
people I’ve cited are routinely ignored by progressives because
listening to them would interfere with progressive ability to
make sweeping pronouncements. This weakness in logic does not
confine itself to Boris, or to arguments over healthcare reform.
Nearly every progressive outlet seems rife with attempts to pass
insults off as arguments.
Earlier this month, for example, the free weekly tabloid
serving my town published a cover story saying
“Wake County Goes to Hell.” Sure enough, the editor who smelled
sulphur found something diabolical about a “right-wing school
board” whose new majority threatened to “eliminate diversity as a
factor in student assignments” and “adopt a strictly neighborhood
(or ‘community’) schools approach.” Imagine the horror. Imagine
the non sequitur. Who knew that busing low-income students miles
from their homes was so wonderful? Would a real champion
of diversity have decided that hell is other people? And how is
this any different from screeching about Sarah Palin as a symbol
of everything wrong with the world?
Angst about alleged conservative heartlessness runs deep in
the progressive worldview, and of course the conservative
counterpart to that angst is worry over progressive
brainlessness. Monster legislation throws these opposing camps
into high relief. But this weekend’s trillion-dollar question was
and still is for Democrats: Do you see anything even a little
implausible about “saving” money by extending mandatory health
insurance and a retinue of new regulations to at least 32 million
more people?
