I always enjoy reading Ace of Spades’ morning link roundups. There are usually around a dozen links with some catch line embedding a link to the story itself.
One day three stories sort of lined up together with a similar theme – leftists angry that the serfs do not blindly trust their views. The Jammie Wearing Fools found an interesting opinion on our Ebola problem:
Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said that the public wouldn’t be as alarmed about Ebola if more people were “thinking critically for themselves.”
Holt, a former physicist who is retiring at the end of this year, said that Americans should familiarize themselves more with science to trust medical professionals.
“We should have a citizenry that’s more comfortable with science and better able to understand and make decisions about it,” Holt said, according to the Times of Trenton. “If people were thinking critically for themselves, there wouldn’t be this level of panic.”
Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw wrote a good post under The NYT has had enough of you bumpkins deciding elections, but the post gets interesting when it turns to Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore:
And of course they are deeply stupid, because (just to cite the most obvious thing) working on a farm or riding Harleys or packing heat or baking biscuits has about as much relevance to the decisions being made (or evaded) in Washington as hog-calling has to high oratory. In Ernst’s case, the ads are doubly stupid because she’s not going to be casting votes based on her own homespun farm-bred judgment, but will instead do whatever Mitch McConnell and/or the right-wing activists of Iowa tell her to do.
Shaw goes on to point out problems with these elitist bubbles:
Leon Wolf, writing at Redstate, has a fairly effective takedown of these attacks, identifying the fact that what these elite culture warriors truly hate more than anything else is having to live on a patch of land which is attached to the flyover states where the annoying, unwashed masses reside. But more to the point, it should be noted that these campaign messages are effective for a reason, and it’s not a negative one. These “bumpkins” which Leibovitch so casually dismisses as being unworthy of participating in a modern democracy are, in fact, representative of a large swath of the nation. There are still people who actually live in farm country and maintain the values he so cheerily derides. There are people working in factories and mills – at least those few who can still find jobs – and get up every day worrying about problems which probably seem quaint, if not fictional, to those who spend their lives living in Manhattan, D.C. or Hollywood.
And for our third post, The Federalists’ Robert Tracinski about how the Dems are annoyed that public opinion has turned against their views with Skewedenfreude: Why Democrats Can’t Face the Midterm 2014 Polls
Timothy Egan tells us that “Oligarchs hiding behind front groups—Citizens for Fluffy Pillows—are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.” While Paul Krugman sums it up as “Plutocrats Against Democracy.”
Here’s where the skewedenfreude gets a little less amusing. It’s not just about denying the accuracy of the public opinion polls. It’s about denying the legitimacy of the vote itself.
It’s one thing to let wishful thinking carry you away and make you overoptimistic about your side’s political chances. It’s quite another to impugn the legitimacy of the whole electoral process because you don’t want to admit you’re losing a political argument.
Outside of those three posts, more was written on the subject. Also from The Federalist, David Harsanyi has his own take on the subject:
Left punditry, though, frames this kind of healthy American skepticism about state power as “cynicism.” And if people lose faith in the decency of hyperactive government, the nation is plunged into “malaise.”
Parties often fool themselves after setbacks. The GOP will, as well. No doubt, we’ll soon have a barrage of post-election autopsies that will get to the heart of the matter. You know the drill. Democrats don’t lose because of policy positions, they lose because of turnout, poorly run campaigns, or GOP voter interference. Democrats win elections on the strength of the electorate’s evolution on issues. Republican wins are always “structural.”
The meltdown by the leftists in the media is entertaining, and at times like this I wish we hadn’t gotten rid of cable – on nights where the Democrats are losing badly it’s fun to watch MSNBC. It seems that Jonah Goldberg has already been doing so so we wouldn’t have to. Hot Air’s Noah Rothman offers more on how cable news is having a hard time coming to grips with a potential GOP takeover.
And after the New York Times’ published a college student’s call for dictatorship, the Free Beacon felt they did not go far enough and offered a good parody of the original Times piece.
Image appears via The People’s Cube
But to wrap things up, I’ll leave you with a piece that put a smile on my face as I was enjoying my pancake breakfast while reading this past Sunday’s Washington Post. Steven Pearlstein was lamenting that the real problem is that Democrats are running away from their winning brand:
“I’m a Democrat. In economic terms, that means I believe we need an active, competent government to ensure that prosperity is broadly shared by protecting ordinary people from the occasional excesses of markets and the undue power of businesses. That’s why Democrats are for raising the minimum wage, closing down corporate tax scams, putting tighter regulation on Wall Street and providing adequate funding for a world-class public education system from pre-K through college. And it’s why we are proud to have passed legislation to ensure that all Americans finally have a basic health insurance plan regardless of income or health or which company they work for. With oil and gas prices falling, it means I’m even willing to raise energy taxes by a few pennies per gallon so we can reinvest in the infrastructure — highways, ports, airports, subway systems, the electric grid, the Internet — on which all of us and the economy depend. Republicans are uninterested in, or unwilling to do, any of these things or in making any of these investments. Are you with them, or are you with us Democrats?”
I was tempted to address that last statement point by point but Victor David Hansen gave a this great dissection of why the rosy promises of the left and the reality that results from their ideas are two different things.
OK, I do have to pull apart one line. Pearlstein opens with “I believe we need an active, competent government”. The party of big, active government has been in power for some time now, and has proven itself to be anything but competent. I’ve written before about the danger of the bubble mentality. Maybe if our press got out of their bubbles and saw the results of their policies maybe they’d understand why so many Americans have turned against those policies along with the president who pushed them on us.
Follow Brother Bob on Twitter and on Facebook.
Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
