It may no longer instruct (p. 68), but the liberal mind
continues to amaze. Just in one sitting I come across two splendid
examples, both intended to defend our president against his alleged
enemies, none of them foreign, all of them domestic. In the first,
the columnist Ms. Maureen Dowd heaps scorn on Justice Antonin
Scalia yet has the cheek to call him “venomous.” Justice
Anthony Kennedy, as the “swing vote” on Obamacare, gets off easier.
Suddenly Dowd turns silly, asking “Could the dream of expanded
health care die at the hands of a Kennedy?” Teddy must be sitting
up in his grave.
In the second example, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth
Kolbert, in the weekly’s lead editorial, goes after Republicans who
say Mr. Obama’s energy policy is the product of radical ideology
and responsible for our nation’s rising gasoline prices. That’s all
“hokum,” she notes, as if “the President could, if he wanted to,
reduce the price of oil.” But she doesn’t stop there, expressing
joy instead that he doesn’t want to. “When it comes to gas prices,
it’s been clear for, well, let’s just say forever that the cost of
gasoline in America is actually too low. Cheap gas generates sprawl
and traffic. It discourages the use of mass transit…” Before you
know it, it causes global warming. So what’s one American’s radical
ideology is another’s “rational policy option,” as she terms
it.
At least with Ms. Kolbert, we know where she stands. She simply
wants to overturn the American way of life.
Conversely, her party rebels at any challenge to its way of
doing business. For his troubles, a Jimmy Stewart-like Paul Ryan is
described by our president as a purveyor of Social Darwinism, a
Trojan horse, a wild-eyed radical. (Do these people ever stop
projecting?) Last year, Ms. Dowd said Ryan was “trying to push the
cost of Medicare and Medicaid onto the old, the sick, and the
disabled,” thus inspiring the recent liberal ad depicting a man who
could be mistaken for Ryan pushing an helpless old woman in a
wheelchair off a cliff. Through all this, none of the Ryan
vilifiers ever engage his arguments. It’s enough to read any of
Ryan’s plain-spoken observations—here’s a pearl from this month’s
symposium (p. 14), “Government has never come up with a magic
formula for lowering costs and improving quality”—to know
immediately that the likes of Ms. Dowd have no answer, and so they
carry on as if such arguments did not exist.
But they do exist, and that’s why we’re here today. For all
their fulminating against “the rich,” Obamaworlders insist money is
no obstacle. Easy for them to say, when it’s always somebody else’s
money they have in their sights. But money is an obstacle when
government is bankrupt and all signs point to even more alarming
indebtedness in the coming years and decades. In one vision,
government coddles us all, from cradle to grave, and in return, we
show our gratitude by re-electing those who take such good care of
us and even let us ride on mass transit. The other vision says,
“Enough already; this is not how our country was built and not how
any self-respecting human should be forced to live.” If we are to
continue as free citizens, we face facts now and formulate policies
consistent with the meaning of freedom. It’s a very American thing
to do (p. 56), and as readers of our special symposium will learn,
at the heart of the alternative policies to the Entitlement State
laid out here is a lovely notion called Choice. Back when they were
liberals, Liberals used to treasure it too.
