What Intellectual Bankruptcy Reads Like...

What is the point of bothering to ride into battle if all your enemy are busily falling on their swords? - Craig Brown

An amazing argument from Slate's William Saletan:

The Democrats are toast! That's the Republican prediction if Congress passes President Obama's health care legislation in the face of hostile polls. Sunday on Face the Nation, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., warned that by "thumbing your nose at the American people," Democrats would trigger "a political wipeout" in November. Two veteran Democratic pollsters, Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, agree. "The issue, in voters' minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people," they wrote in Friday's Washington Post. "Democrats are pursuing policies that are out of step with the way ordinary Americans think and feel about politics and government. Barring some change of approach, they will be punished severely at the polls."

The purpose of these warnings is to kill the bill. Republicans, having lost the last election, are conjuring the prospect of the next one. Democratic politicos such as Caddell and Schoen, likewise thinking ahead to November, are trying to minimize their party's risk. Their advice is bad, but their pretense of speaking for "the will of the people" is worse. Democracy isn't about doing what might sell in the next election. It's about doing what you promised in the last one. If you're in Congress, and if you think this bill is good for the country, vote for it. Even if it costs you your job.

Think about this statement, if for only a moment: "Democracy isn't about doing what might sell in the next election. It's about doing what you promised in the last one." This is some sort of political burlesque, is it not? Is one really supposed to sit through an argument such as this without laughing? In all seriousness, is it?

That, my friends, is what intellectual bankruptcy reads like. Unable, or unwilling, to process the fact that the citizenry does not want this legislation (as opposed to health care reform in general), the Democratic/liberal/progressive commentariat does what it always does...

It urges the governing to ignore the wishes of the governed.

You know, it would be different if the legislation in hand actually advanced Democratic/liberal/progressive notions of what they've always said health care reform should be. But it doesn't. What Caddell and Schoen forgot to mention with regards to Barbara Tuchman's thesis in The March of Folly was this: The march in question is always predicated upon intellectual bankruptcy.

Comments

[richard mcenroe]

If you ain't SEIU, or a pharma company, or an insurer, or a stock jobber, or any other big donor, YOU AIN'T PEOPLE. What part of that is hard to understand, Dennis?

[aelfheld]

But the legislation does advance Democratic/liberal/progressive notions of what 'health care reform' should be - it gives the government control over every aspect of every person's life and permanently tilts the political culture to the Left.

That's why the arguments over public option and abortion and kickbacks and buy-offs are something of a sideshow - the goal is a permanently entrenched nanny-state totalitarianism.

[Dennis the Peasant]

When you're done, check your spelling.

[just passin by]

LOL, Dennis...you've got Mark all twisted up over His Messiah's destruction of the Democrats AND the economy at the same time.

Too bad it's not just the Dems that the Obamessiah is nuking.

Toxic megacolon...aint that what the lying sack of sh*t Murtha died of?

[Dennis the Peasant]

Sounds like he's one of those "a clean colon is the key to health" guys. Figures.

Besides, I have gastritis, which the last time I checked, wasn't colonic in nature.

[William]

Hope you're feeling better, Dennis

Maybe anon meant "Dam, ewer write" and that you have this.

[aelfheld]

I always figured the 'clean colon' crowd objected to having to wash their hair so often.