Posted on 02/20/2010 1:46:49 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
btt
The reason for that is that those same media figures, whether openly liberal or nominally conservative, have formed a privileged class and are defending what they perceive to be class interests. Among those is nothing less than to select the next President of the United States, and to determine by public praise or censure what policies he or she is to advance. Of course such creatures find the Tea Parties threatening. They are.
It remains a matter of some amusement to what degree this privileged class is going to recognize rebellion against itself, and at what point somebody within its close-knit ranks realizes that the next election is going to be as much a referendum on the media as it is on their cherished 0bama. Some may already, although apparently David Brooks is not among them. Those who do will find the news unwelcome, and the statement thereof risky to the careers which confer membership in that privileged class.
These are not, of course, real "egalitarians" except in the most ironical sense. Nor is the voting public proletarian in any sense whatever. That's a cute mental model if one happens to be a 19-year-old journalism undergraduate, but internalizing it into adulthood carries the hazard of looking like a tomfool when it's disproven. Watch it happen.
That has not changed under Obama and the Democrats. The corruption is worse, and we are angrier.
I call it Electoral Churn. The voters didn’t sweep out the pubs because they loved the rats, it was because you can’t realistically attack incumbents in the primaries - the deck is too stacked. So you have to let the other guy score in order to get the ball back.
Moreover, we may be heading back toward 1990s gridlock. The best government is the one that is tied up in knots.
At any rate, the rats shouldn’t feel bad, it’s just their turn in the barrel.
Sounds good to me, but I am sick of paying them.
Although Joe Klein's opinion is probably the biggest joke I've read today I'd like to take a step beyond that and ask any progressives that might lurk a simple question...even if one agrees with Klein do the people have a right to being wrong and should their representatives follow their desires, or should the politicians just ignore what the "idiot electorate" thinks and do what is best for them? And if so...what is that style of government actually called given that it's not democracy?
Wow, I liked what you wrote. In many ways you described me back in my 20’s (a long time ago) secure in a good civil service job but resenting the private sector folks who took risks and succeeded. Fortunately I saw the error of my ways.
One of the best books ever written. I think Dr. Sowell is the greatest mind alive today in the fields of economics as well as politics. He should be required reading in every college campus in the country.
“It is said that the people are revolting.” “You said it! They stink on ice!”
Time to get out the tumbrels...
The rep.is not sent to necessarily follow voters desires. We hire him to use his best judgment on matters of public policy.
Of course his desire to stay there helps to ensure that he does follow most voter desires. Or at least gets them a bridge to build or a hospital wing.
What frustrates me is these people are given responsibilities way above their ability. And they start to believe they are qualified. Most couldn't run a lemonade stand.
That was a good read. I thought this was an interesting insight:
“”””Yet as J.R. Lucas wrote more than three decades ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize “an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made.” Members of Tea Party Nation may simply prefer to tolerate monetary inequalities rather than to hand more power over their lives to progressives who, while purporting to care about the great unwashed, sometimes treat them with casual contempt.””””
While I agree that a politician shouldn't be swayed by the winds of every daily poll they are in position to do what is best for the people...and when the vast majority of the people are vociferously telling their official that they're wrong they need to step back and take that into consideration. That step back is not happening...the statist politicians are callously trampling on the sincere wishes and freedoms of the people they are supposedly sworn to protect...and they are doing so not out of some intellectual conclusion that they know what is best but an arrogant and dictatorial pronouncement that they are correct and anyone who would question them be damned. That is not the role of our elected representatives, that is not in the best interests of the electorate and that sort of arrogance rises to the level of fascism.
Bump.
Dr. Sowell’s book is quite the eye-opener, isn’t it?
The reader-contributed quote of American socialist Robert Owen is particularly deadly.
The real problem is that our representatives are constantly being bought out from under us, suborned by a host of interests both political and venal.
The worst are the people who are using their great wealth to foment Communism, like George Soros, in much the same manner that self-seeking multimillionaires like the Marquis de Sade fomented Jacobinism in their day. In the case of de Sade, he wanted revolutionaries to dissolve morality itself, to remove the social stigma of the atrocities he loved and lived for.
it is no little irony that progressives were very loud in denouncing president Bush as a Nazi and yet they were themselves funded by an actual Nazi collaborator in Soros.
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