Thursday, November 28, 2013

JENNIFER RUBIN IS THE STUPIDEST PERSON ON THE INTERNET

How stupid is Jennifer Rubin? Stupid enough not only to have written this in September, but to be proud enough of it to quote it again triumphantly this week:
Obama is the only true man of the left to make it to the White House. Unlike his predecessors (both Democrat and Republican) he seeks to downsize America's footprint in the world, not expand it. He looks upon the United States as responsible for many of the world's ills, and therefore at its best when America is doing the least. He sees the economy as a fixed sum game in which, as he famously put it, you have to share the wealth. (Take from one group and give it to another.) We have never had a president as aggressively anti-business as this one.

That makes the stakes very high for the left-wing base of the Democratic Party. What if Obama can't succeed from either a policy or a political standpoint? In other words, what if the closest we've had to undistilled liberalism in the White House is a failure?
Not only does she write the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era out of history, she actually believes we liberals have done the same thing, and share her belief that Obama is the Leftiest President Evar, and thus the living embodiment of all of our commie hopes and dreams.

And not content with that, Rubin quotes another of her past idiocies:
A month later I wrote, "Given a choice between casting off their false idol and giving up the cult of liberalism, there is no competition. Liberals will have no compunction about dumping Obama."
All this is a lead-up to her contention that when people like Franklin Foer say that the problems with Obamacare threaten liberals' ability to persuade Americans that we have the right ideas, we're just throwing the president under the bus in an act of thoughtless desperation, not because some liberals always had reservations about the way Obamacare was structured and now believe that those fears are being realized. We don't actually have ideas! All we have is an ignorant knee-jerk belief in destroying capitalism that temporarily turned into a mindless personality cult!

Here's what we're too ignorant and blinkered to understand, according to Rubin:
Actually, the problem is the left's failure to grasp an essential truth: A vision that requires perfection in execution from a mammoth federal bureaucracy, like all utopian fantasies, demands ever-elevated levels of coercion to achieve its aims and is destined to fail. Human beings, those intractable and self-possessed rascals, stubbornly refuse to be pushed and prodded in ways contrary to their own self-interest, as they have the nerve to envision.
As we can tell from the utter failure of Medicare, or Social Security, or single-payer health care in every other First World country on the planet.

Rubin continues:
[Foer] makes a clever argument that the problem is too much moderation, a Clintonian preference for complication and insistence on invoking scraps of free-market economics. If only he hadn't been so darn moderate! The pose that it is the Obama execution, not the leftist undertaking that is responsible for the bellyflop.
Yes, it's a "pose." We're just buying time by pretending that the damn thing can be made to work; we secretly know that our destructively complex coercive torture machines can't accomplish their stated goals.

Here in the real world, we lefties always had varying opinions about whether this complicated plan could work well; most of us are still certain that it can work a hell of a lot better than it has so far.

And no, there's no one at the liberal Politburo carefully removing Barack Obama from the old pictures of the lefty Party Congresses. We just want the damn website to work.

*****

(OK, now I'm going to go celebrate Thanksgiving like a real American.)

7 comments:

aimai said...

I think its interesting that she had to put a definition of "share the wealth" in paranthesis. She didn't feel like she needed to remind her readers that this line comes from Obama's talk with Joe the Plumber--but she does seem worried that without that little aside her readers might not exactly grasp that "share the wealth" isn't out and out theft. This goes along with the trouble they are having making the argument that the middle class, those people who "worked hard and played by the rules" aren't also identical to the moochers and looters of the welfare class. Roy at alicublog has an example of this with the NRO writer explaining weakly that of course he supports those who 'work hard and play by the rules" but if they end up at the bottom of the heap financially can't we just kind of argue that they did something to bring it on themselves?

To me those two instances demonstrate that the theoretical audience for this kind of "rah rah" individualism and "rah rah" capitalism is getting smaller and smaller--and both Rubin and the NRO guy know it. Time was that these paid pundits believed that there was such a thing as alarger, right wing, republican, middle class. Now they are not so sure and they are doing what they can to shore up the propaganda, like someone building a breakwater to keep the beach sand in place as the tide pounds it.

At any rate: happy thanksgiving steveM and many, many thanks for all the posts you do every day, all year round.

Victor said...

Happy Thanksgiving.

My mom got out out of the hospital yesterday afternoon after being in it for 4 days because of a 'cardiac incident' she had on Monday morning, and went to my sister's house where most of the remaining relatives were gathered, prepared to either enjoy the holiday with her, or, if she had stayed in the hospital, to grab a nice quick meal, and go visit her.

No heart attack, but a lot of damage to her heart.
Not good.
No stents, to bypass possible - just medication.
So, I'll treasure her even more, while she's still with us.

Procopius said...

I find it hilarious that Rubin thinks Obama is a liberal. Id grant that he's *neoliberal*, but really, he's a moderate Republican. Since all of those who were identified as Republicans are now extinct, she had either forgotten what they were like or thinks we have. Heck, Richard Nixon was the last liberal President.

Philo Vaihinger said...

Maybe she was drunk when she wrote all that incredible garbage.

Victor said...

Philo,
That's Nooners act.

Rubin might be hooked on some pharmaceutical, instead.

Victor said...

Probably an anti-psychotic.

Though, it appears, not that she's off her dose, but that she maybe be buying or stealing the wrong ones.

mzrad said...

Haha: what a dingbat. She should check out how well the stock market is doing under this president (and every other Democratic administration in the 20th century) before talking about the anti-business nature of this president. What, do they count on the sheeple populace to swallow her garbage analysis? Dingbats all.