Monday, August 29, 2011

You really should be reading The Reality-Based Community

Kleiman alerts us to a Politico story:
The headline asks the question: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?” The story implies the answer: “As dumb as a box of rocks.” Or, as one Republican governor is quoted as saying, “Bush without the brains.”
And Keith Humphreys takes on liberals who are upset with the president (if you'll excuse the lengthy quotation):
Harold Pollack tells me that the Affordable Care Act is the best domestic AIDS health policy in the history of the United States. I know myself what Jeffrey Buck has just documented: It’s also the best domestic drug and alcohol health policy in the history of the United States. In these and countless other ways it will literally prove life-saving to hundreds of thousands of people who live in poverty and near-poverty.

Ted Kennedy couldn’t do it; it was the greatest regret of his political career. Jimmy Carter couldn’t do it. Bill Clinton came into office with both Houses of Congress in his party’s hands yet almost ruined his presidency trying to do it. President Barack Hussein Obama did it.

Yet a persistent minority of putative progressives speak of holding their nose and voting for Obama against Rick Perry, or call the President a failure, a traitor to liberalism, an icy technocrat, a heartless plutocrat, more conservative than Barry Goldwater, I could go on but I won’t.

[. . .] I have lost patience and very evidently my temper with those sanctimonious ingrates of the Left who denigrate as a turncoat the President who took an extraordinary political risk to deliver for progressives and for the most vulnerable citizens in this country.

It may sound like what I am saying is that the Affordable Care Act is such a historic triumph for American progressives that a liberal would have to be deluded to direct any of the aforementioned slanders at President Obama.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

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