Bound

I noticed this story today about an unfortunate young man who mistook a comically bad idea for inspiration. It's worth the read, but if you don'’t have time the basic gist of the thing is that he wanted to paint a representation of what legs would look like bound with a chain and locked securely. Not my cup of tea, but you know, these artist types think differently than you and me.

The real problem for our young Christo with the bondage complex was two fold. First, he wanted to paint this scene 12 miles out in the desert and secondly, once there, he lost the key.
Nice image that; stuck out in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a contraption of your own making, and nobody around to even laugh at your misfortune, much less help you out of it.

Naturally, my thoughts turned to the Liberal Left.

Things haven'’t gone very well for our friends on the left in recent years and there is really no sign that the situation will get much better in the near term either. In one of history'’s great political miscalculations the left has taken what at one time looked like a potentially strong hand that combined a generational shift with socially liberal policies, and completely threw the opportunity out the window when it lost it'’s intellectual underpinnings. What once was a cause for individual rights”, became an entrenched political power structure that used it'’s moral base as an excuse for identity based politics strictly enforced through the award of tax dollars and set-asides for favored groups.

I always believed that our lefty pals had much in common with the Soviets which is exactly why I became a conservative during the late seventies. Well that and the odious Jimmy Carter'’s tragic reign, but I digress. So perhaps the greatest irony of this whole sad story is that the western left chose to follow this dubious path at exactly the moment of communism'’s fall in Eastern Europe. How they couldn'’t see the makings for their own ultimate decline will forever remain a mystery to me.

As a result, we now have our tragi-comic artist pal as the latest living, breathing metaphor for the left. They'’ve got themselves so bound up in their own failed ideology, that every election is an exercise in conniptions. This, just to make it in from the desert to the ballot box. The coming mid-terms appear to be no different.

In just the last week we'’ve had the spectacle of the left'’s hysterics over NSA monitoring. The ongoing although nearly sputtered-out bloviating about “torture”, and of course old white flag'’s non-sense about how he wouldn'’t join the military these days (but he supports the troops!). Perhaps most amusing was the previously interesting now generally pathetic Andrew Sullivan'’s acknowledgement that unbound presidential power has “neutered” Al Queda; of course, as always with Andrew, the but quickly followed.

The question, as it is always for these guys, is what in the world do they stand for. We live in a time when the people'’s trust in government is extremely low. Basically, voters would love for the government to provide welfare, social security, health care and any number of other goodies, but they know this simply isn'’t possible, nor even desirable in any practical sense. When it comes to the economy, the country has learned that less is more. Minimal Fed intervention, and limited taxation in general have allowed our private institutions to provide for a historically smooth economy. The message from the electorate is give us a stable currency and get out of our way. Praise Double R and pass the 401k'’s.

When it comes to health care the liberals promote the idea that we all have a basic right to healthcare, and this message polls well until we get to the poll that really counts: the ballot box. Americans instinctively know that government provided healthcare is a mirage that just won'’t work. For those that didn't see this fact quite so clearly, we have dear Hillary to thank. Yup, Hil did us a tremendous public service when she was daring enough to attempt her re-engineering of the nation's healthcare system. The beauty part of it was that Hil was smart enough to design a plan that was really the only way such a scheme would ever work. Care rationing, extreme restrictions on individal rights and a central buearacracy to try to contain costs and keep us under the central command's control were the basic tenants of Hilcare. Thanks to the plan's audacious sponsors we all got a chance to see how damned un-American it would be and as a result killed the beast before it was born, never to see it rise again.

So basically we'’ve reached this unspoken consensus that for now anyway, we want a few simple services from government, a stable currency, and a secure defense. For the most part this is the conservative agenda. It'’s true that the Bush administration has moved away from this base with their unbound spending, but who expects them to pay the price politically when the alternative is led by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean?

The liberals, instead of figuring out how to alter their message to meet the demand in the political marketplace, have chosen to demonize their opponents and move further away from the mainstream in the process. They continue to create polls that are rigged to gain a favorable response in the electorate so salvation always seems to be just around the corner. That is, until the next election cycle rolls around. When that happens they suddenly wake up, find they're out in the middle of the desert, chained by their self marginalizing beliefs with not a key nor a clue to be found.