Idiocracy
By L. Russell Allen - Nov 18th, 2008 at 5:19 pmAfter deep introspection and soul searching, some of the torch bearers of the right have finally realized how Barack Obama won the presidency.
“Lots and lots of stupid people.”
Well, that and the “mainstream media.”
That line is taken directly from right-wing crazy Michelle Malkin, who is promoting a new site that uses information from disgraced pollster John Zogby to prove how stupid Obama supporters are.
The failure of conservative ideology on issues like banking, the environment, war and peace, health care… that’s all small potatoes to the dolts who voted for Obama because they didn’t know any better.
If that’s the best conservatives can come up with to explain their failures, I am really going to enjoy the next eight years.
How can you claim that the practice on banking, the environment, foreign policy, or healthcare has been pro-limited government (which I assume you mean by conservative).
Banking has been marked by ridiculous amounts of government regulation and intervention. Mark-to-market, the CRA, Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Reserve. Government was ridiculously intertwined with that industry and that’s how we got the results we did. On the other hand, places like Panama, with no central bank and relatively lax regulation, have been weathering the international credit crisis just fine.
The Bush administration and Congress have pumped more regulations than any other in history. A good number of them have been environmental in nature. Energy subsidies, market distorting limits like CAFE standards, and others have all been “pro-environment” regulations. Meanwhile the push to force other nations to give up DDT has had a grievous toll in human lives.
Foreign policy has been anything but limited under Bush. The closest he ever came to a limited government philosophy on that was in 2000 when he spoke of a “humble” foreign policy. In practice though he’s been another Woodrow Wilson, aggressively using the power of the state to force change.
And as far as healthcare, the Prescription Drug Benefit, one of the single largest expansions of the welfare state since LBJ.
That’s not even touching education (NCLB), expansion of the federal government (Homeland Security among other things), and government spending in general.
So how exactly has there been a failure of limited government ideology?
November 18th, 2008 at 11:02 pmWaterman, I’m afraid “conservative” no longer means “limited government”; and this is less the mainstream media’s fault than it is the fault of limited-government conservatives for maintaining their devil’s-bargain with the “family values conservatives” for so long. “Conservative” is now at least as ambiguous a word as “liberal” hereabouts. As L. Russel uses it here, it’s just a synonym for “Dubya-style”. Sad, I know…
November 19th, 2008 at 9:06 amzomg, they found that a bunch of Obama supporters couldn’t pass a snap quiz on politics, and they drew a conclusion from that *without giving the same quiz to McCain supporters*? Even if Zogby conducted the poll with perfect procedural neutrality, just the question that they asked completely invalidates the result. American votes in general are awful at this kind of quiz. (Hm, maybe they polled McCain voters as well, found that they did even worse, and just didn’t bother to publish that bit…)
November 19th, 2008 at 9:09 am