Weekly Standard: The Angry White Liberal

[Splashdown]

Great read. I highly recommend.

The more Obama talked about health care reform, the further his numbers dropped. The country seemed caught in a time-warp. We'd been catapulted back to 2005, when another president attempted a major overhaul of the American welfare state. Then, too, the president deferred to Congress to come up with a plan. Then, too, as the president crisscrossed the nation, warning of the dangers of out-of-control entitlement spending, the public increasingly tuned him out. The innate conservatism of the American people--an instinctual resistance to sudden changes in existing social arrangements--came to the fore.

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The Angry White Liberal reaction? Outrage and calumny. Protest, which a few years ago was the highest form of patriotism, is now considered artificial, dishonest, misinformed, cynical, and mean-spirited. "An ugly campaign is underway," Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote in USA Today on August 10, "not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. . . . Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American."

Meanwhile, Harry Reid referred to the town hall protestors as "evil-mongers." Senate finance committee chairman Max Baucus preferred "agitators." Congressman Eric Massa, Democrat of New York, accused Iowa Republican senator Charles Grassley of "treason" for criticizing the health care plan.

The King of the Angry White Liberals, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, wrote on August 14 that Grassley is "flat-out despicable." Resistance to the Democrats' plans, Krugman continued, amounts to an "outpouring of hate," the result of "the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia." (For the record, more Americans disapprove than approve of Obamacare.)

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