baldilocks

One of the interesting things about the presidential campaigns in 2008 is just how effectively Barack Obama and his team framed issues to serve their needs.  Throughout the election season-but especially during the primaries-Candidate Obama made a great deal of noise regarding just how badly the Bush Administration had abused civil liberties in order to fight the war on terror.  Then-Senator Obama contrasted the supposedly horrible Dubya record on constitutional rights with his own lofty promises.  By and large, Obama successfully painted himself as a true-blue friend of human rights during 2008. 

The problem with political campaigns is that they inexorably end.  Once they do, the harsh realities of governance can shatter the self-made myths about the people running the country.  The dissonance between a candidate's image and his actual governing style are often incredibly jarring.  How does the mythic St. Barry of the Sacred Civil Liberties square with one of President Obama's real-world positions?

Obama thinks that citizens should be DNA tested upon arrest.  Not conviction, not indictment...but right after the arrest.  Those DNA records would then become part of a national DNA registry that could be accessed by state and federal law enforcement agencies.  Pretty amazing considering the President's reputation as a civil liberties champion. 

Now, one can make a rational case for a national DNA registry.  Opponents of this program can come up with perfectly valid counter-arguments.  The issue I have is the shifting standards of progressive outrage.  What happened to the lefty thumbsuckers who constantly banged their spoons against their high-chairs wailing about President Bush's abuse of the US Constitution?  Where are Chris Matthews, Jack Cafferty, Michael Moore and every other prominent media liberal on the apostasy of Obama vis-a-vis civil liberties?  If the Patriot Act is a death blow to citizen's privacy rights, what does that make a national DNA registry?  If George Bush was a freedom-infringing fascist, how is Barack Obama any different? 

It seems pretty obvious that, like nearly every issue raised by Candidate Obama in 2008, defending civil liberties was just another campaign promise cynically used by the Democrats to get elected.  Once again, it should be clear that the Donkey Party is not serious about constitutional rights except as a means to rile up the marks within their own ranks.  Moreover, anybody who gets suckered in by Obambi's nonsense is a gullible fool.

PS:  Thanks to the Instapundit himself for finding the original link.  Gracias.

Mark Steyn, National Review's in-house demographic bore and all-around wet blanket, keeps it very real. 

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November. Okay, then what? You’ll roll it back — like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel ’n’ dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus: “Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”

As much as it might ruffle some feathers to admit it, Steyn is...as usual...spot on.

History tells us that the GOP is loathe to undo a Democratic domestic program with the exception of slavery.  Look back to the New Deal.  What put the presidential stamp of approval on Social Security was not the Truman Administration, but when Eisenhower elected not to even try to dismantle it.  The Great Society could've been demolished when Nixon took office.  Instead, Tricky Dick decided to build on it.  Not even Ronaldus Magnus Reagan found the political will to take a wrecking ball to any of the craptastic big government programs he came across.

Meanwhile, are the Democrats ever scared to stop or massively reconfigure any Republican policy they run into?  No  They gleefully roll back tax cuts, missile defense funding, military spending...whatever they want to do, they do it.  It's only the gutless GOP that holds to the notion that the Donkey Party's program is sanctified under some bizarre domestic program stare decisis.  It has to make you think just how committed the Republicans are to their alleged core small-government beliefs.

If you've ever played any video games, you've probably run across a point where a choice of actions directly correlates to an 'A or B'.  For example, if you shoot an opponent at one point in the game's progression, you create a chain of events that leads to your death in the game.  However, if you shoot that same opponent later in the match when you've completed other necessary tasks, you will continue to live in the game. 

As realistic and open-ended as computer games have become in the last few years, they're still a poor substitute for real life.  In reality, there are so many variables that go into everything that there are very few occasions where you draw a direct correlation.  I say this because in my last post here, I discuss why Mickey Kaus believes the Democrats will be hunky-dory if they just pass one their massive socialized medicine bills.  This is wishful thinking.  In life, you sometimes have several choices and every single one of them are terrible.  You don't get to dodge death and keep playing.  You're just toast.

The liberal media has in the last few weeks created a mini-narrative where...if the Democrats just pass health care deform...everything will be okay.  They cannot face the fact that the Donkey Party has painted itself into a deep dark corner and they have no way out.  If Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi ram-rod one of their bills onto Obama's desk, the voter rage could make the 1994 midterm elections look like a hiccup.  If Obama doesn't get a health care package, the Democrats still come off really bad.  To their lefty base they'll look weak and ineffective, which is the kiss of death in American politics. 

Here's the worst part for the Donks.  No matter what happens, the moderates and independents that were convinced in 2006 and 2008 that Democrats could be trusted with political power are starting to abandon President Obama.  This is in large part because of the way Obama, Reid and Pelosi have handled the health care reform process.

I think in this last year the Democrats have used up all their video game lives.  When they had President Bush to beat up on, they could just lay the blame for America's problems onto him and then skate away from most of the political flack.  When Obama was sworn in, the Democrats got to ride on St. Barry's dreamy honeymoon parade float from the American voters.  But now?  They have no good options left.  Barring some amazing and unforeseen turn-around, the Democrats have put their Congressional majorities and their Presidency into grave peril with no escape. 

To think people actually bought into the MSM meme that these guys were political super-geniuses.