The American Spectator

A Further Perspective

For those of you who can idly pass these dog days of summer contentedly dozing on a beach, letting the soft hot breezes flip the pages of the book beside you while the weeks roll leisurely by, consider yourselves lucky. For the rest of us, especially those addicted to 24/7 TV news, the heat and humidity only exacerbate the rising of our political temperatures as we watch the attempted dismantling of our American way of life by the liberals in power. For us, this seems like an endless summer; while the hoped-for balm of November, though close calendar-wise, seems as far away right now as a 5% unemployment rate.

Complicating the misery of this long, hot summer is the looming liberal threat of what the outgoing lame-ducks might be quacking about; be it cap and trade, card check, or revisiting healthcare to finish us all off with the public option. One thing is for sure, whatever they're up to, it's bound to be no good for the country.

Why? Because it is the nature of progressives that they will go forward, even when the impact of their policies is unknown or worse, that the agenda they so recklessly pursue has proven time and again to be a miserable failure. And that is why, in the minds of liberals, there's nothing that doesn't need fixing. And this double negative is surely representative of the way they seek to govern.

Now, the original intent of our founding fathers was that Congress should meet from time to time to tend to the affairs of state that might arise on the way to America taking her place among the great nations. They would have recoiled violently at the notion that many in Congress would come to believe that their function is to sit continuously as a kind of gigantic machinery, constantly eroding the greatness as foreseen by the founders.

Still, even though their tactics are clear, their motives cause one to continually ask: why oh why do liberals persist in attempting to fix the things that are not only not broken, but on which the success of our national experiment hinges? What, you may ask, could be the problem with a country that has, within its short lifespan, been the liberator of and the economic, and moral beacon to, the rest of the world? It's because they do not, nor ever have, really loved our system of government or the things that have made us great. What they seek is the planned obsolescence of our constitutional republic; a task to be accomplished via the accumulation of more and more federal power. And so they fiddle while American exceptionalism burns. A few examples:

Healthcare. This country has led the world in research and in the development of life-saving drugs and procedures for years. And even after the price of medical care skyrocketed following the malpractice beachhead established by trial lawyers in the 1960s, our system was the envy of most of the rest of the planet. And, regardless of the fact that no patients may be turned away from receiving emergency treatment, and most can access some level of care through existing government programs, liberals have decided that cradle-to-grave healthcare must be a right for all, and most importantly, that it must be "fixed."

Global Warming. There's an old adage: everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. Well, progressives with god-like powers -- don't forget Barack Obama's election was to herald "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal" -- have a solution for you: cap and trade legislation. Yes, the death of capitalism will somehow turn the climate of every spot on the globe into that of Los Angeles, or more likely, San Francisco.

Public Sector Union Glut. It has become apparent, even in liberal enclaves like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, that municipal unions are eating away at the sustenance of cities and states in the same way that they crippled parts of the private sector like the auto industry. The liberal answer? Pass a $26 billion dollar bailout of government workers; just in time for the upcoming elections.

And on and on it goes. They are like modern-day Don Quixotes; tilting at the windmills of emergencies of their own making which make no beneficial difference in our nation, except to their core constituencies. If liberals truly wanted to make a difference -- as they claim ad nauseam in every election cycle -- they might start by fixing the things that really are broken in this country, like our woeful education system, Social Security, and the tax code.

In reality, what is broken and indeed has never worked, is the liberal/socialist way of governance. And the only "fix" for this is to assist Nancy Pelosi in her goal of draining out the congressional swamp; starting with her own party.