The Phony Center exposed (again)

Rick U. writes:

I was reading through Michelle Malkin’s articles on the Democrats’ plans and guess what, Evan Bayh—the self proclaimed moderate, the uber bi-partisan Senator—supports reconciliation. Good riddance. The Republicans should not talk about anything else in the upcoming summit until the shenanigans of reconciliation are dead.

LA replies:

This stunning information is conclusive evidence for what I’ve been saying all along, Bayh is a huge phony. And the people who since his retirement announcement have been promoting him as some kind of saint of centrism and cooperation against a “broken,” “overly partisan” political system, as someone who was too high-minded and moderate to endure the radicalism of his fellow Democrats, are as phony as he.

An example is Charles Hurt’s column in the February 17 New York Post, which begins like this:

Having lived in the belly of the beast for much of his life, Evan Bayh has emerged—soul apparently intact—to testify about it.

What he witnessed convinced him that giving it all up and walking away was better than staying part of the criminal charade that is Congress today.

Belly of the Beast? That was an expression popularized through the title of the murderer John Henry Abbot’s memoir of life in prison. And Hurt equates being a governor for eight years and a senator for 12 with being in the Belly of the Beast, from which the noble Bayh has just escaped, his precious, delicate soul intact.

The reality is that if the Democrats had managed to pass the health care bill into law, even by reconciliation, Bayh would have been happy, would not have been complaining about a “broken political system,” and would not have left the Senate.

So here is what I think Bayh’s unhappiness with “partisanship” is really about. He wants to pass left-wing measures, such as the health care bill, such as the stimulus, but without unpleasant debate and controversy. In other words, what he wants is a European style political system where left-liberals are in control and there is no nasty “partisanship” because opposition to left-liberalism has been abolished—politics itself has been abolished.

If you look at the writings of any of these self-proclaimed centrists who are forever decrying the excessive “partisanship” in our political system, you’ll find the thing I’ve just described: a liberal who wants to eliminate conservative opposition to liberalism and thus eliminate politics.

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LA writes:

As far as I know, the description of people as “phonies” entered our language with Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, who died the other week.

Rick U. writes:

You nailed it here! The left only cries about partisanship when they aren’t getting their way. Shamefully, the Republicans now do it too, and in doing so, they surrender the language to the Democrats. As an aside, I think the term “bi-partisanship” entered the modern lexicon during President Reagan’s administration when he would go straight to the people with a Presidential address to get his proposals passed. This is also the time when the “opposition response” (called the Democratic response back then) became a fixture of politics. Both are examples of Democrats whining when they don’t get their way.

I think it was Ayn Rand who lamented compromise, with the example that a bucket of water with a little poison in it, poisons the entire bucket. Something like that, but you get the idea. The Republicans today are in the sorry state they find themselves, precisely because they have compromised their principles with liberals to the extent that it is often hard to tell the difference between the two.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 20, 2010 04:55 PM | Send