Mindboggling.  As I discussed yesterday, many on the left are in an uproar about Mr. Obama’s idea for a spending freeze because it flies in the face of Keynesian articles of faith prescribing government spending to prop up aggregate demand as a policy response to economic recession.  They’re, in other words, captive to the broken window fallacy and believe, urgently, that the U.S. economy remains moribund because government hasn’t spend lavishly enough on economic stimulus.

Enter Nancy Pelosi, who’s critical of the freeze not on the economic merits, but because it exempts defense spending.  In other words, if there’s to be a freeze, she wants to freeze more, not less.

Two possibilities present themselves.  Either:

(1) Madame Speaker is ignorant of economics and has been going along with the administration’s policies for the last year out of political tribalism and because they tickled her ideological erogenous zones.  Freezing non-defense discretionary spending without also taking a whack at those warmongering bubbas at the Pentagon was, for her, simply a bridge too far, notwithstanding the views of her base; or,

(2) Madame Speaker has completely misunderstood her base’s complaints about the freeze idea as being unrequited peacenikkery rather than unrequited Keynesianism, and accordingly, as she attempts to pander, is tripping over her own shoelaces.

What is this woman thinking?  Is she thinking?  Help me out, here.

(Hat tip: Hot Air)

I’ve been remiss in updating the blog since just before Thanksgiving, except for a short “quote of the day” post back towards the end of December.  Rather than ease my way back into the swing of things, though, I thought I’d take a stab at discussing the implications of the special election in Massachusetts three days ago, to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late Ted Kennedy, and won decisively by Scott Brown.

Others have tried their hand at analyzing, with varying degrees of objectivity and persuasiveness, why this occurred.  As a Bay State expat I suspect there are a number of factors: Martha Coakley had some difficult-to-shed baggage (the Amirault case, the Geoghan case, the Winfield case) from her career as a prosecutor; Coakley ran a weak, gaffe-prone campaign that veered from entitled indolence in the early days to frenzied negativity once Brown surged; Brown was an affable candidate who excelled at retail politics, and managed to tap into across-the-political-spectrum anxieties about what’s going on in Washington, particularly with the healthcare bill; Kennedy fatigue; increasing disgust with the corruption in the state-level Democratic Party; and so forth.  Naturally national Republicans are claiming this is a wholesale repudiation of the Obama agenda, while national Democrats are spinning it as the result of a poor candidate and an electorate focused exclusively on local issues.  Given that Brown ran explicitly as the “41st vote” that would enable a GOP filibuster against ObamaCare, I suspect reality, while undoubtedly short of Republicans’ “wholesale repudiation” scenario, is somewhat closer to that spin than the Democrats’.

What I think is telling, though, is the sackcloth-and-ashes angst from Democrats about the loss of the seat, and with it their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.  One friend of mine characterized it as the triumph of witless populism, and the death of nuance.  Andrew Sullivan and his readers have gone off the deep end, as ably chronicled by Megan McArdle.  And we’re being told by the Very Smart People that this could mean the death of health care reform or even the entirity of President Obama’s domestic agenda.

Some perspective, here, is worthwhile.  Notwithstanding Mr. Brown’s victory, Democrats haven’t enjoyed Congressional majorities this large since the 1920s.  The hated George W. Bush, who managed to push several signature initiatives through Congress, never, at any point during his presidency, had a 59-seat majority in the Senate (Jon Stewart, while mocking Democrats for their incompetence, made a similar point the other night).

So here’s a thought: to the extent that the loss of a filibuster-proof majority operates as a repudiation of the Democrats’ governing agenda and renders them politically powerless, it’s evidence not of the death of thoughtful politics or that the United States is ungovernable, but rather that the Democrats’ governing agenda is so unpopular that only a supermajority could pass it.  Moreover, rather than moderate that agenda in the face of public opposition, they have instead doubled down, deluding themselves on the basis of cherrypicking polls and their own three-generations-long dream of socializing healthcare that the proles would eventually come around.  The result has been predictable: they’ve alienated independents and thus energized an opposition party that, a mere year ago, looked like a regional rump.

It’s unclear to me that Democrats possess the humility and capacity for self-reflection necessary for them to pull back from the precipice.  In light of their having spent the last year pursuing a maximalist liberal agenda, it’s going to cost them a great deal of embarassment and political capital to tack back to the center (and to implicitly concede that George W. Bush wasn’t, and the Tea Partiers aren’t, the radical far-right extremists of MSNBC spin).  The alternative, though — to continue pursuing maximalist liberalism after this — is likely to prove even more costly.

“The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that ‘reform’ has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state.”

On the heels of her risible claim that the House healthcare reform bill is a Christmas gift for the country, Madame Speaker says that her legislation is “very fair” insofar as it contemplates criminal penalties for people who refuse to comply with its individual mandate:

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Socialism always comes with handcuffs.  Always.

UPDATE: Ace has a fantastic post on this same subject, that it’s probably unfair to quote so extensively:

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn’t, after all) to enforce its notions of the “economic good.”

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I’m paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of “slippery slopes” or in terms of “what comes next?”

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you’re proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here — Pelosi, Reid, Obama — are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state’s balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term “economics” is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state’s master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they’ve realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we’re paranoid. We’re lunatics. We’re “extreme.”

Read the whole thing.

My visceral reaction to this loathsome woman’s untrammelled hubris was pure rage — nearly enough to make me put my fist through a convenient wall.  Upon reflection I realized that, like Hillary Clinton’s execrable ad during the primaries last year, it’s a wonderful illustration of the leftist habit of mind: forcibly confiscate money out of the pockets of the unwilling, buy them something they don’t really want, and then give yourself a repetitive motion injury patting yourself on the pack for your good intentions and magnaminity despite the certainty that the program will turn out to be (yet another) horrendous boondoggle.

My wife (peace be upon her) added this: “You can’t return it and you have to wear it — like the bunny pajamas in A Christmas Story.”

You don’t say.

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) wants to name the healthcare bill after his deceased friend Ted Kennedy.

Warning to Democrats: Like many people, I’m very deliberately holding my tongue about Kennedy out of decorum, a sense of respect for the Kennedy family in what is undoubtedly a difficult time.  If, however, you insist on politicizing the man’s death, the gloves come off.

Instead of blustering about the need to police the fine print of consumer credit agreements, how about policing the fine print of federal legislation — say, by requiring congresscritters to actually read and understand the full text of bills before voting on them?

Within the pantheon of loathsome politicians, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) manages to stand out as a particularly repulsive specimen.  Waxman and his fans fancy the congressman a latter-day Eliot Ness, relentless in exposing government corruption.  In reality, he’s just a partisan thug of the “no enemies to the left” flavor — the House’s version of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), albeit with less charm. 

(Though, to be perfectly fair, one suspects that while Schumer may mug for the cameras, he privately doesn’t actually believe that his party has cornered the market on virtuousness and American values.  Waxman, on the other hand…) 

Today Waxman, as one of the principal architects of the carbon cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House on Friday, has his panties in a wad about Republican opponents of the bill:

They [Republicans] want to play politics and see if they can keep any achievements from being accomplished that may be beneficial to the Democrats. They’re rooting against the country and I think in this case, even rooting against the world because the world needs to get its act together to stop global warming.

That first sentence is a pretty classic case of projection, inasmuch as it was the Democratic Party’s modus operandi from 1994 through 2008.  Not that Republicans did themselves any favors, but the degree of bad faith obstructionism exhibited by Waxman and his fellow-travellers has been appalling.  These people — and I use the term loosely — actually denied the existence of the entitlement crisis (i.e., the explosion of entitlement spending that’s necessarily going to result as the Baby Boomers retire) for pure partisan advantage, back during the Social Security reform debate of 2005.

As for the second sentence: no, Henry.  I’m not rooting against the country and the world.  I’m just rooting against you and your party, and the economic insanity that you’re thrall to.  I want you to fail, because the policies you’re putting in place are going to result in incalculable damage to people’s freedoms and lives.

Watching a vicious partisan opportunist like Nancy Pelosi get caught out brazenly lying about her knowledge of and assent to the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration, after the last six years of the political left’s sanctimonious moral posturing with respect to “torture,” is deeply, deeply satisfying.

Whatever the merits of waterboarding, it takes a special kind of hack to spend the better part of a decade publicly complaining about the immorality of a given policy despite having been briefed on the particulars at the outset, and despite having failed to object at that time.  This loathsome woman tacitly approved of what the administration was doing until she discovered that political hay could be made of it, whereupon she reflexively played to her base.  May the same wolves she didn’t hesitate throwing George W. Bush to, now turn their jaws on her.