Winning with ‘No.’

From last week’s article on the growing awareness of Democratic corruption, by the always-interesting Jen Rubin:

…with the growth of government and the enormous amount of cash sloshing through Washington, the corruption problem is about to get worse. The stimulus money could, according to the FBI, be the breeding ground for its own crime wave. If the experts are right and 10% of the $787B stimulus plan will be lost to fraud and abuse, then $80B worth of graft and the congressmen, officials, lobbyists, and donors with their fingers in the pie will make fodder for plenty of headlines — just in time for the 2010 races.

No wonder the MSM is nervously sounding the alarm. There is the prospect that the age of “liberal dominance” could come screeching to a halt before it’s even gotten up to speed. Not only does it portend an electoral train wreck and loss of a governing liberal majority, but it sheds doubt on the notion that government was the knight in shining armor needed to ride to the rescue when the free market “failed.” If bigger and bigger government gets us more and more crooks and tens of billions in fraud, then maybe there is a better way to go than inflating the size and scope of the federal government.

One of the more common – and generally stupid, if amiable enough about it – memes out there is You can’t win elections without your own ideas. It’s a charming notion: almost as charming as the luminiferous aether, which is still a very romantic theory of physics.  Alas, one inconvenient experiment destroyed it… and the same thing happened to the above meme in 2006, when the Democrats retook Congress on the original idea of “the GOP is evil, and we’re not.”  Naturally, there are those out there who don’t want the GOP to do unto others as we were done unto, which is why we get a lot of people out there who want to give us ‘helpful’ advice (which is usually some variant of ‘adopt a liberal policy position that the populace at large isn’t buying’).  But, no: we’re not Them works perfectly well as an organizing/motivational principle, particularly when “Them” is the political party currently busily engaged in racking up the National Debt in order to buy toys for its cronies.

I will undoubtedly now get a lot of pounding on the table and shouting in response – and the cleverer ones will not pound the table; they’ll just try to turn this into a debate, which it actually isn’t.  And I’m under no particular obligation to pretend otherwise, so I shan’t.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.