Two fine pieces from National Review
March 17, 2014
William Voegeli, "Bait-and-Switch Liberalism".
The keys to bait-and-switch liberalism are: a) serial responsibility, so that the people who do the baiting are not the ones who do the switching; and b) plausible deniability, so that those still on the scene who did the baiting can claim, if anyone asks, that they never anticipated or intended the subsequent switching. Either the welfare state will need to be scaled back, or taxes will need to be raised on Americans making less — much less — than $250,000, but those unpleasant necessities will be confronted on some future president’s watch.
Charles C. W. Cooke, "Harry Reid’s Two Minutes Hate".
One wonders, too, why Reid and his friends remain so quiet about campaign financing that doesn’t originate in Wichita, Kansas. The brothers’ “reach,” Alternet’s Adele M. Stan screamed in 2011, “is probably greater than you thought possible,” extending “into virtually every aspect of political, economic and physical life on the planet.” And yet, omnipresent as they are, the duo has not yet managed to corrupt Open Secrets, the non-partisan contribution tracker that rather inconveniently revealed last month that the Koch Brothers barely scrape into the list of the top sixty all-time political donors and, too, that of the 58 organizations that are ahead of them, 48 were described as being politically between “solidly Democrat” and “sitting on the fence”; that six of the top ten were unions; and that Democrats benefited disproportionately from all but two of the most prolific 20 contributors.