Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Left, Left, Left, Right, Left

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/12/3/23217/6324

Booman touches on the single most important thing that currently holds "the Left" together: a reverence for data and truth.

For instance, I was not opposed to a limited Syrian intervention, because I based my position on the Libyan intervention.  Most on the Left compared it to Iraq.  But advocates on the Right tended not to tether their support for a Syrian intervention to anything of factual substance.  It was all about "credibility" and other forms of militarist dick measuring.  The debate on the Left was based more on what would work and what wouldn't.

Similarly, when Ezra Klein lambasted healthcare.gov, he did so because objectively the site didn't work.  Now it works well enough to get a huge thumbs up from the noted Marxists at Consumer Reports.  Klein remains concerned - as does everyone invested in the law working - that the so called 483 issues on the insurer's end are remedied.  Meanwhile, the GOP was ginning up outrage that the health care navigators were actually identity thieves out trying to scam you.

New Black Panthers.  Acorn.  Death panels.  WMD.  Benghazi.

Objective reality is not without its subjectivity (see the Syria debate).  But it is baffling to me that anyone with a functioning relationship with reality can support a political party that has lashed itself to the mast of the good ship Palinism, with Darrel Issa at the helm.

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