Delusional, Unhinged Liberals

My (news)paper, the Boston Globe, continues its hateful crusade against President Bush.

I'm not kidding, this is the asinine letter it published in yesterday's issue:

(Begin asinine letter)

RE "US seeks evidence for case against WikiLeaks founder” (Page A30, Dec. 16): I’m appalled but not surprised that the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is working assiduously to target Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. As the article states, “Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Assange with a crime.”

This, of course, is the same Justice Department that has successfully struggled to come up with a way to ignore the crimes committed by members of the Bush administration against our Constitution, our laws, and a non-aggressive sovereign nation. If ever there was a rogue government that violated our nation’s laws and core beliefs, it was this bush-league bunch of troublemakers, and if we won’t shine the cleansing light of truth on their dirty deeds, then thank heavens there’s a WikiLeaks to do it for us.

Ultimately, it will be deeds done in the dark that cripple our moral authority and make a mockery of our Constitution. Attorney General Holder will do us all a favor if he points his dogs in a different direction, pursuing those who, operating under a cloak of secrecy, used their positions of power to validate and legalize wide-ranging acts of criminal behavior.

Paul Steven Stone, Cambridge

(End asinine letter by Paul Steven Stone, Cambridge)

What Paul Steven Stone does not know, or choose to ignore if he's not really as ignorant as he projects, and what the asleep-at-the-fact-checker letters editor at the Boston Globe does not know, or chooses to ignore if she/he is not really as ignorant as she/he projects, is that on September 8, 2010, the Ninth Circuit, literally the most liberally-extreme Court in the land, sided with President Obama and Attorney General Holder when they reasserted Bush's state secret arguments before that Court (Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan).

Boston Globe Now Influenced by ZACKlyRight

At the right side of the screen, click on February 2009 or March 2009 and you will see bascially ever other post running under the theme of "Bush's Third Term" or "The Emperor is Wearing Bush's Clothes". Less frequently over the next 20 months I'd note the significant policy and personnel reassertions by President Obama of President George W. Bush.

Below are the columns by Ms. Joan Vennochi and Mr. Jeff Jacoby of my (news)paper, the Boston Globe, from Sunday, December 12 (my bold for emphasis):

In Obama, they see Bush
By Joan Vennochi
December 12, 2010

President Obama’s so-called compromise — tax cuts for the rich in exchange for unemployment benefits — does not make him look like Bill Clinton, the great triangulator. To hardcore liberals, he looks like George W. Bush, the not-so-great decider — minus Bush’s Texas swagger and misguided conviction. It’s not a pretty picture. And, for liberals, that picture has been developing since their supposed messiah took office.

Obama won election by running against the policies of a president who left Washington to the sound of people chanting 'na-na-hey-hey-good-bye.' Vanquished to Crawford with a 22 percent approval rating, the 43d president of the United States was reduced to cartoon-like status. He was supposed to stay on the ranch brooming brush and contemplating his legacy as the Worst President Ever.

Two years later, Bush is back in the saddle. His book tops the New York Times bestseller list and his job approval ratings are higher than Obama’s. On his book publicity tour, Bush is relaxed and funny.

From the Oval Office to the basketball court, Obama can’t catch a break. When Bill Clinton bit his lip, he felt our pain. Obama’s stitched lip makes us feel his. If Bush is all hat, no cattle, Obama is a man with neither hat, cattle, nor liberal friends, thanks to his embrace of the same Bush-era policies that he denounced.

The Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are now Obama’s. So are Bush’s wiretapping and detention policies. Obama took airport security beyond the Bush-imposed intrusions that require passengers to take off shoes and belts; in the Obama era, passengers submit to graphic body-imaging machines or full body pat-downs.

The health care reform legislation that conservatives demonize as socialism disappointed liberals because it is so far from it. There’s no public option or single-payer system. Indeed, its roots lie in the blueprint drawn up by a Republican governor of Massachusetts. ObamaCare is pretty close to RomneyCare, and a conceptual outgrowth of Bush’s Medicare reform.

Taxpayer-funded bailouts after Wall Street’s meltdown started under Bush and continued under Obama. Both administrations adhere to the theory that some businesses are 'too big to fail' and many little guys are too small to save.

In the run-up to midterm elections, Obama was still blaming Republicans, and Bush, by default, for the economic mess that refuses to tidy itself up. The prior administration drove the economy into a ditch, he repeatedly proclaimed, and the Bush tax cuts were part of the problem.

With each embrace of a Bush policy reviled by liberals, Obama lost a sliver of his base. But the core stuck with him. The far left agitated but John Kerry rescued him on Afghanistan. House Democrats didn’t like his health care plan, but they closed ranks for the sake of unity. Obama adds glue to the base, by holding out the promise of the Dream Act to the children of illegal immigrants — a policy Bush also supported. Reversing 'don’t ask, don’t tell' is designed to satisfy his gay constituency.

But now, he wants Democrats to accept the Bush tax cuts as part of a grand economic compromise? For the left, that’s ideological heresy and more.

It rejuvenates what supporters and detractors define as Bush’s crowning domestic achievement.

As a candidate, Obama denounced Bush’s tax cuts as 'that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.' He ran an ad saying John McCain’s support of the Bush tax cuts offended 'his conscience.'

Obama’s conscience is apparently no longer offended by the Bush tax cuts and that offends liberals. It’s their tipping point.

It makes them question their core beliefs and wonder about his. Did they fall in love with the idea of electing the first black president on the assumption that he is as liberal as they are?

Or, maybe they were simply blinded by hatred of Bush. (End of Vennochi column that reads an awful lot like posts previously published at ZACKlyRight.)

In tax deal, they reveal their envy
By Jeff Jacoby
December 12, 2010

Liberals and Democrats have been melting down, blowing up, and freaking out over President Obama’s agreement with Republican leaders to extend Bush-era tax rates for another two years. 'An absolute disaster,' fumes Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in an interview on MSNBC. 'Anger of House Dems boils over,' Politico reports. 'An Odious Tax Deal,' editorializes The New York Times. 'Moral corruptness,' seethes Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

'No amount of lipstick,' roars a headline at Democratic Underground, 'can make this pig of a deal acceptable.'

Why is the left so furious?

I realize, of course, that liberals were against the Bush tax cuts from the start. I know that Obama vowed time and again to let those tax cuts expire for households earning more than $250,000 a year. He made that pledge as a candidate for president, and he was still making it on the campaign trail this fall. 'We are ready . . . to give tax cuts to every American making $250,000 or less,' the president said in Cleveland on Sept. 8. 'For any income over this amount, the tax rates would just go back to what they were under President Clinton.'

But Obama swore to end plenty of other Bush policies that nevertheless remain intact. Why aren’t Democrats in a blind rage over the tens of thousands of US troops still deployed in Iraq? Or his extension of the Patriot Act? Or the ongoing rendition of terror suspects to third countries for interrogation?

Roll Call reported last week that liberal activists angry about Obama’s compromise on tax cuts 'crashed two phone lines at the White House' and are planning to do the same to the Senate. Why have they never overloaded the White House switchboard with calls protesting the continued use of the presidential signing statements for which Bush was so sharply criticized? Or warrantless wiretapping? Or over the fact that Guantanamo still hasn’t been shut down?

Of all the ways in which 'George W. Obama' (as a Village Voice headline dubbed him in January) has disappointed his ideological supporters, why is it the prospect of not raising taxes on the wealthy that drives them into such a frenzy?

After all, it isn’t as though Obama’s deal with the GOP singles out the rich for a windfall. It is simply an agreement not to single them out for a loss. And it isn’t as though the affluent don’t already shoulder an income-tax burden disproportionately higher than their share of the national income. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax filers accounted for 20 percent of all income earned that year, yet they paid 38 percent of all federal individual income taxes. Federal income tax rates are progressive to a fault. So why are 'progressives' spitting nails at the thought of leaving those rates where they are?

In an interview on Tuesday, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell demanded to know how Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, could 'justify going along with a larger tax cut, for those who really don’t need it.' Gregg replied: 'Well, my view is: It’s their money.'

That would be my view, too — and the view of most Americans, who are not conditioned to equate wealth with dispossession, and have not been raised to resent the rich. The premise of Mitchell’s question — that government has the strongest claim on money the affluent 'really don’t need' — strikes most non-liberals as not just wrong, but pernicious.

To the left, the opposite is true. 'We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one,' Ronald Reagan, a recovered liberal, once said, 'without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.' As long as there are have-nots, therefore — and there will always be have-nots — it is pernicious for government not to confiscate more wealth from the haves.

This envy and resentment, which liberals think of as sensitivity and compassion, are at the very core of the liberal conception of good government. That is why 'tax cuts for the rich' gets them so emotional and angry — and it only deepens their outrage that most Americans don’t think the way they do. Hence the Democrats’ apoplexy. And hence their unbridled fury at Obama for agreeing to a compromise that a majority of voters seem to like. (End of Jacoby column.)

Oh, The Irony!

For the last year or so, I'm now generally reading my (news)paper, the Boston Globe, 14 hours after it lands in my driveway and I'm reading the Wall Street Journal a full 28 hours or so after it hits my driveway. The time lag has taken a obvious toll on my ability to type original material for this blog. For those still periodically checking-in, please bear with me as I hope my days start to look a little different.

This week, two topics seemed to blanket my stale newspapers: New START and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT).

Does anyone else but me see the irony in President Obama trotting out former Secretary of State Colin Powell to lobby an international weapons treaty but not have Powell, the father of DADT, lobby the repeal of DADT?