Left Wing Feeding Frenzy

Oh, these are heady times for the political left in America. They have smelled blood in the water and the electronic seas are churning as members of the media, left wing pundits, commentators and unemployed liberal talk show hosts elbow their way in front of the nearest camera or microphone to explain to us how Bush has been neutralized, the Democrats are in the catbird seat and good times are back again. The feeding frenzy is so predictable that it’s almost laughable if it weren’t for the potentially disastrous consequences it could have for the country..

If you’ve watched television at all lately, the majority of the news media seem to think that the left is so firmly in power that only thing that remains for us all to do is decide whether we want Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton for our next president.

This should be interesting….

I suspect that the left, in it’s long and exhausting fight to win back power at any cost, to expand government and to increase taxes so they can spend like drunken sailors, has, in fact, drawn a big old pistol, loaded it up with high caliber ammunition and taken careful aim at its own foot.

If conservatives are smart, they’ll stay out of the way and let the Democrats, Greens, socialists and union bosses pull the trigger at their leisure. When taxes take a sharp turn upward and the economy takes a dive, when we crawl back from Iraq with our tails between our legs and the IED’s start going off in New Jersey, Hollywood, Florida and upstate New York, the Dems will take a swan dive into obscurity. The socialist thinkers will probably have to rename the party to get back in power again.

Till then, conservatives like me can only cringe at the onslaught of political correctness, left-wing propaganda and defeatist rhetoric aimed at us by a newly invigorated left. Hopefully, the American people are watching this and make wise decisions next election.

Hey, if the left can save the world, bring peace in our time and eliminate want, more power to them. I mean there are so many shining examples of leftist success in that regard. There are lots of examples of high tax, big socialist governments that have done so well in the past hundred years. You’ve got your National Socialists in Germany, the Communists in the Soviet Union, the Cuban workers paradise, Communist China and dozens of third world countries still locked in poverty to this day. Don’t we ever learn from history. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro, all of them believed that smart, compassionate people should hold great power and use it to make all workers equal, to eliminate private wealth and create a so-called “worker’s paradise”. Look at how that worked out.

How many millions died because total socialism turned out rather badly in practice and the egomaniacs in charge decided to cover it up by killing anyone smart enough to figure it out?

When you think you can tell millions how to live and when you believe that the perfect government you have created is going to change the world for the better, you set yourself up for failure. No one can manage the lives of that many people and create a perfect society simply by creating and enforcing laws. You can't just demand that everybody be the same, make the same amount of money, and be content with the same type of lifestyle as everyone else simply because you say they should. If you provide little or no real incentive for your citizens to put out extra effort at their jobs or to excel in their personal lives, you shouldn't be surprised if you've created an inherantly mediocre society as a consequence. You can’t make people be good simply by threatening them with punishment if they don’t believe the way you do and act the way you want and do what the government orders them to.

Incentives drive success. Capitalism offers all kinds of incentives for success. Socialism reduces those incentives. Want to guess what system generates most of the innovation that happens on this planet?

Another problem: If your socialist system doesn’t work very well, who do you suppose gets the blame? Of course, you’ve got absolute power, so you can just pretend that your system isn’t failing after all and you can blame the failure of everything you worked for on the people or some other country that’s not as enlightened as yours. The beauty is that you don’t have to accept any blame yourself. Since your system is perfect (because you said it would be in the manifesto) and since in that system, you are conveniently all powerful, nothing could be going wrong, ergo nothing is! Besides, if you were to admit that the system you are running isn’t perfect, you might get thrown out of your expensive dacha and have to give up the privileges you gave yourself as the smart guy in chief.

Then there are all those pesky naysayers who insist on blaming you anyway, forcing you to send them off to the gulags so they don’t tell everyone else the system isn’t working and discourage “the people” from being happy (as you knew they would be - remember it's in the manifesto).

Okay, all socialist countries don’t go completely off the rails into the swamps of totalitarianism – at least not right away. You’ve got some European countries that have embraced higher levels of socialism and seem to be doing okay (though some of them take advantage of American generosity and trade incentives balanced wildly in their favor in order to stay afloat). It helps that no one actually mentions this embarrassing fact when they’re telling us about how great their family leave policies are. They have practically perfect societies (just ask their governments or any American liberal you care to talk to). Of course some of their citizens disagree, but then they can always move to America and get good jobs, condos and drive an SUV and stop causing trouble if they don't like it.

For these and other reasons, conservatives like me tend to fear any group that wants to increase the size of our government. Sure the war is tough and isn’t going perfectly, though I do not believe it’s going as badly as the media portrays it. If you compare this war to practically every war we’ve ever fought, our casualties are fewer against a disproportionate number of enemy combatants who have been taken out of action. We’re actually doing pretty well. It’s messy, but war is like that.

I hope that war fatigue doesn’t wind up leading Americans to reject the conservative trend we've enjoyed and its attendant economic benefits in favor of a more socialist leadership in this country - backing away from the principles that made us strong in the first place.

Mainly, though, I just can’t stand to listen to liberal gloating.

Just one man’s opinion.