QotD, It Makes Your Head Hurt If You Think About It Too Much edition.

Matt Welch (via Hot Air Headlines) sounds like he’s about one more shot of cognitive dissonance away from a three-day bender*:

Well into the third year of the weakest economic recovery since at least the mid-19th century, less than two months before the U.S. government was scheduled to plunge off a “fiscal cliff,” an American public deeply and rightly dissatisfied with the economic and political status quo voted to lock it into place.

Then again, 2012 was… bizarre. I was going to make a convoluted joke about Obama and his indifference towards the down-ticket races, but it was taking more than sixty seconds to write, which means that it wouldn’t have been funny, anyway.  Suffice it to say: the Democrats are going to end up bitterly resenting Obama’s callous decision to not take House Democrats along for his seven point ride.  If they had taken back the House – but then, perhaps Barack Obama actually did learn a lesson from 2008: to wit, never let the Democrats control two branches of government at the same time…

Moe Lane

*Not really, but that joke I let stick around.

Reason discusses Reality Non-Unicorn.

Mind you, Matt Welch reveals himself to be a rampaging optimist in his last sentence:

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed. Back when he was still considered a plausible stand-in for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (enough to win 2.7 percent of the presidential vote in 2000, much of it from progressives disgruntled at New Democrat policies), Ralph Nader insisted on a daily basis that his agenda was essentially “majoritarian.”

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place.

Bolding mine, and no: that’s not going to happen. A scapegoat will be found. Remember: we are talking about a group that is currently claiming with a straight face that having a 59/41 split in the Senate, a 255/178 split in the House, and the Presidency is not sufficiently overwhelming to let them accomplish their goals.  Losing the House will not act as a laudable shock to their system; losing the House and the Senate will not do it, either.  Losing both Houses of Congress in 2010 and the Presidency in 2012 won’t do it.  God could descend from Heaven in all His glory (with Thorstein Veblen and William Jennings Bryan in attendance) and carrying a signed note from Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling progressives that they are being muddle-headed – and it won’t dissuade them from their belief structure.

Fortunately, it’s not them that we have to convince.  Just the centrist voters who are swiftly coming to understand that what they signed up for is not what they’re getting…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Frank Rich and the crypto-Stalinists!

I wouldn’t have bothered even bringing up Frank Rich’s decision to urinate all over the memory of 20 million murder victims for the sake of calling Republicans ‘Stalinists,’ except that Pejman posted something on it and I’ve seen some people trying to pretend that articles like that one… just don’t happen.

Well, they do.

Moe Lane

PS: We will now pause while people search frantically for counter-examples, thus allowing them to continue to feel at least personally validated in their attitudes.

Crossposted to RedState.

Quote of the Day, Matt Welch edition.

I’m really looking forward to the day when tech CEOs feel comfortable in saying “Damn RIGHT, I helped kill newspapers! I’m running a business here!” – Matt Welch.

He goes on to suggest a certain amount of shock therapy, which just happens to resemble high school bullying. Speaking as somebody who suffered from it once*, it does have a certain motivational power to it. It does also breed a certain desire for blood-soaked revenge, so caution seems… best.

Via R.S. McCain, who has an Unfortunate Picture.

Moe Lane

*Once. It turns out that diving off of a bleacher your freshman year to tackle somebody does wonders for ensuring a reasonably tranquil high school existence. My only regret is – well, my only two regrets are the lack of a video camera and that I was unable to convincingly froth at the mouth.

Well, I wasn’t looking for popularity. I was looking to do my time and be left the Hell alone.

Prison metaphor deliberate.

Crossposted to RedState.

Line of the day, Reason Hit & Run edition.

‘…the soft sophistry of low absolutism.’ – Matt Welch, in the process of eviscerating Ezra Klein for, among other things, holding up as a model the state-run newspaper industry of a minor European country with no meaningful defense budget and a GDP comparable to that of North Carolina’s. (Via Jim Treacher‘s Twitter.)

I’d comment further, except that I’m doing a quick check for the thens, so forths, after alls, insofars, and especially of courses that apparently cause Matt to get that funky Hulk-pupil effect going.  I haven’t decided yet whether to banish them from my language, or save them up for the next Reason shindig…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.