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)

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.”

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.