The Mother Jones Acid Trip

Whenever I want to understand the far left mindset, I head over to Mother Jones. It's always a strange trip. It's a world where facts are turned upside down, and blanket statements - easily refuted by opinion polls or balance sheets - are called facts. You learn, for example, that everyone in the world hates us (especially in Iraq and Afghanistan), the economy sucks, our rivers are trickles of toxic sludge, nothing is wrong with Social Security or Medicare, everybody wants political "change" except for the Bible thumpers and the corporate crooks, and people are only benefitted by more government spending, not lower taxes.

I was once a liberal. In some ways, I still am.

Part of the problem with contempary liberalism is its propensity for creating such a fantastic world of tragedy. Driven by these hallucinations, the far left spends its time proposing ways of dueling the fantasy demons only they - the lefty believers - can see.

It leads to extremely bad policy.

There is no better example of this than Campaign Finance Reform. It was taken on faith that the US spent too much on its elections. No one bothered with numbers. The US GDP was $11 trillion, and the elections of 2000 cost $300 million. That is, electing our leaders in 2000 cost about 5% of our national spending on dog food.

But for the left - which bizarrely sees mandatory government control of electioneering as its ultimate goal - this was TOO MUCH MONEY. So we got Campaign Finance Reform, which the idiot president signed. It has only made the "problem" worse.

How many other such "solutions" are out there in lefty land?

Just check out the pages of Mother Jones.

- posted by total @ 8/16/2004 05:59:00 AM .