I read something this morning that had me giggling for an entire day. You may be wondering what, during this scandal and disaster clad week could possibly help lighten the load of the gloom that has cast its pall over my perception of our national mood? Well, it was the logical gymnastics performed by a leading pundit of the political left, Kirsten Powers. She has written a defense of liberalism that is so convoluted, I feel fairly confident that her powers of critical thought could only have been developed at one of our institutions of expensive learning, (known as college.)
I literally do not know where to begin with Kirsten. So I guess I’ll start here. Saying that there’s a correlation between liberalism and these scandals is at best a straw man argument. Such foolishness allows Barack Obama, his Chicago cronies, and the culture of thuggish criminals which inhabit the Executive Branch to escape culpability. Were I a member of the Obama camp, attaching these scandals to something broader than my specific group would be something that I would actively be attempting to accomplish. Being one of a crowd in this instance is preferable to being placed atop the graft pyramid. Make no mistake about it, these latest bits that keep evolving every day have already placed the worst of Richard Nixon and his admittedly bad behavior in the category of piker.
Then she said this, and I could not thank her sufficiently, for making exactly the point that every conservative and otherwise advocate of smaller government has been making for decades.
Scandals happen under every president, regardless of the size of the government and regardless of the political ideology of the leader of that government.
Yes, scandals happen in every administration. That is because power has a corrupting influence all to itself. I made that point on Monday, with this post. The difference, and it is an individual character issue, is how those scandals are dealt with, from where did they originate, and how transparent the Administration is with those seeking truthful answers. These abuses of power were made by people who wished to hold that power, and wished to seek an expanse in government power, so that they could have more of that which their ambition drives them to seek. So yes, there is a connection between liberalism and scandal, but not in the way that she has implied with the argument she’s so helpfully put into my mouth.
Let me explain Dear Kirsten. This is not a chicken and egg scenario. We do not have to guess which came first, temptation or falling for that temptation. We just need to worry about solutions. The major difference between the left and right is in how we would go about solving these problems. Your side sees this graft and corruption and exclaim, this is bad, we need to change the people in charge, because obviously we haven’t found the right folks yet. We look at this problem and say, the right people do not, nor will ever exist. We need to find a way to constrain the reigns of power, so as to limit the ability of those who would seek to do wrong, to do just that. It isn’t just the individual people who can cause tyranny, but allowance of the apparatus at their control to give them greater opportunity that is at play here. I do not doubt your sincerity at being appalled by the abuse of power exhibited by George W. Bush. I also do not doubt your sincerity at the anger you have shown with our current President for the very same offenses. What perplexes me however is your theory that our problems could be solved if only we find someone new, and entrust them with greater amounts of authority.
To this point, Kirsten has only been wrong, here is where she crossed the border into bizarre.
It so happens that the claim that government is bigger under President Obama than any time in history — an oft-repeated trope — is actually not even true. Not counting the military, there were 3,054,000 federal employees in 1988, the last full year conservative standard bearer Ronald Reagan was in office. In 2011, there were 2,756,000 — a reduction of 10% from Reagan. Even characterizing the IRS scandal as a “big government” problem is silly: less than 200 employees in a single Cincinnati office had to process 60,000 non-profit applications. Government bloat this is not.
Using the number of government employees as a measure for the size and scope of government is just plain fallacy from start to finish. A better measure for the size of government would be the amount of money it confiscates from the tax payers who support it. Another measure would be the scope of regulations increased, decreased, and enforced. This particular method of measuring the size of government ignores an important trend, (an unfortunate byproduct of lacking any useful understanding of both economics and statistics.)
Two years ago, I watched several dozen people lose their cool in my local BMV. I spend my birthday there every four years getting my license renewed. During one episode of pissed off citizen versus snotty bureaucrat, the snotty bureaucrat informed the pissed off citizen that in fact, she was not a government employee. In the State of Ohio, that’s actually true. The State you see, under the leadership of Dick Celeste(D), contracted out the service and administration of the BMV to a company that has one customer, the Ohio BMV. The State of Ohio still runs the company, and the entire thing is nothing more than a ruse. So while the scope of government in Ohio has not been lessened one little bit, the State has fewer employees than before the move. More regulations can be added, and more expense layered in, and by using the number of government employees as the measure, the onerous growth of the BMV would be entirely missed. (Just ask any citizen of Ohio exactly how they feel about the BMV, and you’ll get an earful.)
Then she added this:
Then there is Benghazi. It is unclear how even the most willfully dishonest person could distort this travesty into an indictment of liberalism or blame it on big government. The fundamental scandal here is that the government scapegoated a private American citizen who made a YouTube video (constitutionally protected free speech) for their inability to protect American embassy workers in Benghazi. Then, to make matters worse, they offered dissembling and contradictory explanations for why they did this and have expressed offense at the mere suggestion they should be transparent about this process. Simple questions such as, “Did the President go to the Situation Room the night of the attack?” are met with blistering outrage.
Whatever happened that night and the weeks following, it’s clear that all of the decision-making was centralized among a small cohort of senior government officials. So, to cast this as flowing from an activist government run amok is just wishful thinking on the part of conservatives looking for an anti-liberal theme.
Liberalism is a noble tradition and worldview that is perennially in search of a leader — and these days even followers — worthy of its name. If in any of these situations even one person of influence had adhered to the basic tenets of liberalism — a respect for dissent, free speech, government transparency and liberty — all of these scandals could have been avoided.
The entire argument here is secondary to the fact that the entire event prior to that night was the direct result of a disastrously foolish and naive foreign policy that not only allowed for a cooperative nation to be over run by the same people who flew planes into several inhabited buildings September 11, 2001, but also saw us supporting that effort. They attacked us on September 11, 2012, mostly with weapons that our President thought would be a good idea to supply them with. The entire argument is secondary to the point that the cover up that followed, and the lies told to the American People were put forward for the purpose of hiding the colossal failure of what has to be the worst foreign policy since Jimmy Carter held the reigns of power. (At least Carter’s failure was localized to Iran, with Obama, not so much.) The question now, and the direction of the investigation currently is going to help determine if those people were purposefully sacrificed to help achieve that ruse.
But she is right, it’s not liberalism itself that did this, it’s Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and the rest of the children in charge. It’s just that if we follow the direction of the Political Left, we’ll be granting even more authority to all who would seek to be in charge in the future. The problem with trusting the right people with this power, even if they existed, is that at some time, they’ll be replaced by the wrong people again. Even if you loved George W. Bush or Barack Obama and hated the other, the next election cycle could see him replaced with either George W. Bush or Barack Obama once again. I’m not nearly as afraid of Barack Obama’s Presidency as I am of the guy who will be elected 20 years from now. I just wish Kirsten Powers had that same fear.
Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Kirsten Powers
