How stupid is Jennifer Rubin? Stupid enough not only to have written this in September, but to be proud enough of it to quote it again triumphantly this week:
Obama is the only true man of the left to make it to the White House. Unlike his predecessors (both Democrat and Republican) he seeks to downsize America's footprint in the world, not expand it. He looks upon the United States as responsible for many of the world's ills, and therefore at its best when America is doing the least. He sees the economy as a fixed sum game in which, as he famously put it, you have to share the wealth. (Take from one group and give it to another.) We have never had a president as aggressively anti-business as this one.Not only does she write the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era out of history, she actually believes we liberals have done the same thing, and share her belief that Obama is the Leftiest President Evar, and thus the living embodiment of all of our commie hopes and dreams.
That makes the stakes very high for the left-wing base of the Democratic Party. What if Obama can't succeed from either a policy or a political standpoint? In other words, what if the closest we've had to undistilled liberalism in the White House is a failure?
And not content with that, Rubin quotes another of her past idiocies:
A month later I wrote, "Given a choice between casting off their false idol and giving up the cult of liberalism, there is no competition. Liberals will have no compunction about dumping Obama."All this is a lead-up to her contention that when people like Franklin Foer say that the problems with Obamacare threaten liberals' ability to persuade Americans that we have the right ideas, we're just throwing the president under the bus in an act of thoughtless desperation, not because some liberals always had reservations about the way Obamacare was structured and now believe that those fears are being realized. We don't actually have ideas! All we have is an ignorant knee-jerk belief in destroying capitalism that temporarily turned into a mindless personality cult!
Here's what we're too ignorant and blinkered to understand, according to Rubin:
Actually, the problem is the left's failure to grasp an essential truth: A vision that requires perfection in execution from a mammoth federal bureaucracy, like all utopian fantasies, demands ever-elevated levels of coercion to achieve its aims and is destined to fail. Human beings, those intractable and self-possessed rascals, stubbornly refuse to be pushed and prodded in ways contrary to their own self-interest, as they have the nerve to envision.As we can tell from the utter failure of Medicare, or Social Security, or single-payer health care in every other First World country on the planet.
Rubin continues:
[Foer] makes a clever argument that the problem is too much moderation, a Clintonian preference for complication and insistence on invoking scraps of free-market economics. If only he hadn't been so darn moderate! The pose that it is the Obama execution, not the leftist undertaking that is responsible for the bellyflop.Yes, it's a "pose." We're just buying time by pretending that the damn thing can be made to work; we secretly know that our destructively complex coercive torture machines can't accomplish their stated goals.
Here in the real world, we lefties always had varying opinions about whether this complicated plan could work well; most of us are still certain that it can work a hell of a lot better than it has so far.
And no, there's no one at the liberal Politburo carefully removing Barack Obama from the old pictures of the lefty Party Congresses. We just want the damn website to work.
*****
(OK, now I'm going to go celebrate Thanksgiving like a real American.)
