Pointless Rebuttals Section: Liberal Columns a Jersey Shore for Commonsense Americans

Reading an E.J. Dionne column is to me what Jersey Shore is to the lumpenproletariat: a sweeping but ultimately barren vista strewn with indiscernible trash, probably involving drugs, giving rise to an orgy of brazen idiocy whose incomprehensibility never fails to stroke one’s ego. In the nirvana of the Obama economy, one takes what little action one can get.

The recent offering by the infamously stupid Washington Post columnist asks the rhetorical rhetorical question, “Is it really time to cut spending?” I suppose I will be the Judas goat to carry Beelzebub into the desolate regions of Mr. Dionne’s thought and proffer a rebuttal.

As our esteemed unveiler of enlightened thought regales us:

“Take another five steps back and you realize how successful the tea party has been. No matter how much liberals may poke fun at them, tea party partisans can claim victory in fundamentally altering the country’s dialogue.”

If only dialogue were the ultimate determiner of our national fate! Surely there are more important things than “dialogue,” which I recount in the following order: ponies, chocolate ice cream, economic reality, lollipops, and puppy dog tails. Could we only get America to concentrate on all but economic reality, our problems would be solved!

Mr. Dionne continues, in professorial majesty:

“Consider all the things Washington and the media are mostly ignoring. You haven’t heard much lately on how Wall Street shenanigans tanked the economy in the first place — and in the process made a small number of people very rich. ”

Now how could evil Wall Street have devised a scam by which robber barons could invest their money in ballooning real estate assets guaranteed not to fail? Not sure how they could ever come up with such a scheme, but however they did it, we should have the government look into it immediately.

More airtight reasoning from our imagined interlocutor:

“Yet any discussion of the problems caused by concentrated wealth (a vital mainstream issue in the America of Andrew Jackson and both Roosevelts) is confined to the academic or left-wing sidelines.”

Perhaps the author would like to deviate from his echo chamber mannerisms and expand on this? What problem does it cause me if someone is rich if politicians are honest? Maybe America should strive to emulate a state with more equananimous living conditions – like North Korea? If we could only get a perfect Gini (pronounced “Genie”) coefficient, then our problems are over!

The author laments:

“You haven’t seen a lot of news stories describing the impact of long-term unemployment on people’s lives or the difficulty working-class kids are encountering if they want to go to college.”

Perhaps those narratives would contrast too much with life under a relatively free economy, making our current inhabitant of the Oval Office appear – less than competent?

“Thanks to the tea party, we are now told that all our problems will be solved by cutting government programs. Thus the House Republicans foresee nirvana if we simply reduce our spending on Head Start, Pell grants for college access, teen pregnancy prevention, clean water programs, K-12 education and a host of other areas.”

The tea party appreciates your commendation, though I am sure this was unintended verbal slippage on your part. But I would be remiss to point out that those goods and services you presume would cease to exist if it were not for the good graces of government are predicated on removing money from the private sector and redirecting it to the so-called “public sector” – at the escalating price of bureaucratic overhead and diminishing returns. This is not to mention that most self-respecting people have no problem working to fund their children’s education. Five percent unemployment when this country maintains a semblance of laissez-faire capitalism is not exactly Darfur.

But let us compare apples and kumquats. Government-funded workers now make twice what a similarly trained and educated counterpart does in the private sector when factoring in benefits. Are public employees twice as productive as private sector workers? Try half as productive and spoiled by perquisites the private sector workers only dream about. When overpaid government-funded workers spend their money in the economy, they consume, yes, consume resources they didn’t help produce, leading to a black hole in the economy. But let us not cast stones at your Keynesian gods, let’s wrap this exegesis up.

“Only a body dominated by millionaires could define ‘shared sacrifice’ as telling nurses’ aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don’t get why Democrats — ‘the party of the people,’ I’ve heard — would come near such an idea.

So many shibboleths, so little time. One gets the feeling Mr. Dionne truly believes that if a millionaire has a million bucks, that it’s a million bucks that could be someone else’s. But if our economy is predicated on production, on earning, then the question becomes – what is that million dollars doing? Is it being used to consume resources or to produce them?

And as for the Democrats being the “party of the people,” that is exactly what it is: a never-ending party for greedy fat cat bankers (if we can borrow the left’s language when appropriate), power-hungry politicians, and unwilling-to-work welfare recipients. The wreckage of the Democrats’ policies dot the landscape, kind of like that Jersey Shore to rehash an old reference. While Mr. Dionne attributes the cause of our national economic malaise to a failure of government action, he apparently is unable to trace the failures of government action and attribute them to our economic malaise. The author thus demonstrates the left’s logic is Gordian in nature: the solution to all of our problems begins and ends with government.