The consistent aspect of American socialists I've noted is that they are sublimely ignorant of the realities of socialism. That might be because of the Paris Hilton syndrome--a life so removed from the ordinary that its possible to make a mildly amusing reality television series about encounters with the peasants. It might be because they profit or hope to profit from the political economy socialism represents, or they could simply be people who've never been anywhere or seen anything.

Having lived in a number of socialist countries, the prevailing mood appears to be despair, envy and desperation. The things you think would be solved with socialism--aren't. You can see a doctor, but you can't necessarily get treated, and even if you do get treated, there is no guarantee that the treatment will be effective. A market economy is about value--results. A political economy is about optics--political cover.

All the things socialist complain about in this country--rich people, homeless, etc... None of that changes with socialism, and sometimes it gets worse.

In this hell-hole we call the U.S.A., its notable that obesity is associated with poverty. Calories are no problem even for the very poor. Even the homeless get enough to eat.

No so much in France.

I bet they wish they had socialized medicine. Oh wait...

It's 1am in London and I can hear a police helicopter hovering around Tower Bridge to monitor any G20 malarkey. The protests so far are trivial, incentivised and amplified 100x by the media; a couple of broken windows in a bank and some City-workers mocking the protesters by waving banknotes from windows. If there were proportionate coverage, there'd be almost no aggro. There's symbiosis between the statists who want to use the Credit Crunch as a vehicle to get them to socialism and the pot-pourri of useful idiots who provide the media images. It's laughable close-up and sinister as part of the bigger project to subordinate liberty to corporatists.

The view from above:

“These groups actually believe that we should promote their stuff for free. Do they not understand that we need funds to sustain our viability?”

So whines John Amato of Crooks and Liars blog, who joined other left-wing bloggers to complain that they aren't getting their share of the ad frevenue wealth from the national Democratic party and the big liberal 527s.

Don't you just love it when liberals act like liberals? Everyone fighting for a bigger piece of the pie instead of building the pie higher.

The guys are building a permanent progressive majority the way the UAW is building the American automobile industry...

Keep Rahm Emanuel's words in mind as your government provides "solutions" to this year's Swine Flu crisis.

As a side note, I remember the 1976 swine flu scare, though I was living outside the country at the time. Below is President Gerald Ford setting the example by getting a swine flu innoculation:

Turns out in '76 only one person died from the Swine flu but 30 people died from the vaccinations. 40 million people were innoculated before the program was shut down within three months of its inception.

(While I point out the above, note I'm not against immunizations - I get a flu shot annually - I just have developed a sceptical disposition towards taking any government pronouncement at face value.)

I write not to praise Ted Kennedy, but to bury him.

A man died today, like men die everyday, but the reason Kennedy will be all over the cable news channels bumping Michael Jackson retrospectives from the schedule, is because of the mythology the American media and the Kennedy millions created for the family.

Michael Jackson's name can't be spoken without the tagline, "King of Pop" attached to it these days, but those of us with actual memories recall that he and his publicity people invented the phrase and promoted it to a then critical music media. Think of that when you hear Ted Kennedy referred to endlessly as "The Lion of the Senate".

The original lion of the Senate was William Borah (R-ID) who served between 1907 and 1940. One imagines that the mantle was appropriated by Kennedy, but I can't find any reference to how and when that actually happened.

Reputation is however a powerful tool, and Kennedy's role as heir of Democrat aspirations made him a co-sponsor magnet for important legislation. If a Republican wanted legislation to pass, getting Kennedy as a co-sponsor was a serious leg up. Regardless of what else can be said of the man, for good or ill, he was an extraordinarily effective legislator. I find some irony in that--while many Senators look at their office as simply a stepping stone to the Presidency (including Jack and Bobby), Kennedy didn't look beyond the mark. He thought the Senate a good a place as any to merit his best efforts.

The second generation of Kennedys have not forged the link to the dream that never dies. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg grossly mishandled her bid to be appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, and effectively destroyed her political prospects--the latest in a conga line of failure for the grandchildren of Joe Kennedy. Nevertheless, generations of Kennedys yet unborn will trade on the name recognition to gain elective office and establish modest political careers.

Ultimately, Edward Kennedy's death with hold the most meaning for those personally close to him. His reputation will fade away as those who can still extract benefits from it, experience diminishing returns from rising generations who have no emotional connection to the myth of Camelot.

In spite of having been surrounded by the left since infancy, I've never really considered that I understood the mindset. As a young man, I espouses some left-wing ideas and programs, but only out of ignorance. As I became wiser and better informed, I put away childish things.

In my middle-age, seeing peers still supporting left-wing ideology, I was puzzled, and remained puzzled. In spite of my obvious outspokenness, I genuinely wonder if people who disagree with me know something I don't. I must admit that the thought that they might be idiots had occurred to me, but lacking proof, either way, I left the matter unresolved.

No longer.

The embarrassment and consternation among even the left-wing, over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to a U.S. president who has been in office slightly less than ten months, is a clear sign that we have left the arena of reasonable doubt and entered the emperor-has-no-clothes zone.

Those who ascribe to left-wing views are morons, fools, parasites, or some combination of all three.

The entire country of Norway should be enjoined from further breeding. Oh wait! They are already reproducing below the replacement rate. Nevermind then.

Its been clear to me, after living in a variety of socialist countries, that immigration has always been a political tool to engineer a social order the left can control and leverage for permanent political advantage. In Canada they even have a word for it--"natural governing party", which is ironic, because there is nothing natural about it. In western country after western country, the left has "imported" voters to undermine the democratic rights of its citizens to control their own destiny. Clearly the socialists all get together at international conspiracy parties to discuss tactics, because its a clear pattern all over Europe, Canada, Australia and now the U.S.A., but it rare to have one of their number admit it outright.

Leaks which showed how Labour intentionally flooded Britain with immigrants in order to gain a permanent political majority and rub multiculturalism in the faces of poor whites has provoked a storm of outrage in the UK. It plays directly into the BNP narrative of invasion abetted by leftist treason. The Telegraph reported that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.” But it was manner in which the plan was sugar-coated which rankled the most. It was, if the leaks are to be believed, an ideological conspiracy sold as a plan to bolster the economy. It’s almost as if the Left set out to paint itself in the very same colors the BNP wanted it to done.

The BNP is essentially the British version of Le Front National in France (Jean-Marie Le Pen's party), which itself is a clone of any number of European fascist parties--all of which arose as backlash against socialist immigration policies.

It all sounds so familiar, doesn't it?

I was just fascinated by this paragraph by John Aravosis in the left-wing Americablog.

As Joe noted the other day, the pre-existing conditions promise, for "all Americans," was the top item on the Obama transition's health care reform page. So, in an effort to appease the masses, they're now considering gutting the one provision that everyone likes, the one provision that defines the legislation.

...in an effort to appease the masses...

An amazing juxtaposition of implied concern for Americans caught in between a rock and a hard place and a flip side disdain for those same Americans in the voting aggregate.

I think they call this a Freudian slip...

Joe Klein is pretty much useless as a journalist except for the occasional rant which generates a bunch of traffic because of links like this one.

Time Magazine is apparently following the GM business model--suicide spiral into irrelevancy and insolvency.

Nevertheless, Klein still has some utility, if for nothing else but to give us insight into the far-left radical mind.

A kooky nutroots freelance operation gone wrong.

How to take a great idea...

A proposed law would require new homes, larger developments and some redevelopments in Los Angeles to capture and reuse runoff generated in rainstorms.

...and turn it into a ruinous mess.

Under the ordinance, builders would be required to use rainwater storage tanks, permeable pavement, infiltration swales or curb bump-outs to manage the water where it falls. Builders unable to manage 100% of a project's runoff on site would be required to pay a penalty of $13 a gallon of runoff not handled there -- a requirement the Building Industry Assn. has been fighting.

In an arid climate like St Thomas, VI, homes are always built with cisterns that capture rain water for in-home use. Its a great idea that if water costs were properly apportioned, would probably be de riguer in large swaths of the country. Instead we get situations like this:

Behind all the bloated propaganda about California's five year drought lies a rather interesting truism. Water has never been naturally plentiful in California, but neither has milk. In fact, milk is much more difficult to "naturally" acquire than water (you don't have to squeeze an animal to get water), but California has never had to ration milk or send out "Milk Police." Why the difference? We all use more water than milk, but this is irrelevant to the issue. The answer is that one product, milk, is provided by a relatively free market, but, the other product, water, is "managed" by a deeply entrenched, monopolistic, government bureaucracy. California doesn't need government rationing, it needs to get rid of its Soviet-style water management system, and water would be as plentiful as milk.

No point in feeling superior though--even a red state like Utah has a crazy water system that costs an order of magnitude more than it should and actually encourage prolifigate uses rather than conservation--this in the second driest state in the nation (after Arizona).

Of course, in Utah, inefficient system or not, the point is to get water to the consumer. In California, the point is to use environmentalist religious fervor to generate tax revenues to pay six figure salaries to unionized prison guards, who kick back political contributions to elected offiicials.

The reality of this nonsensical ordinance is that new construction will be throttled and more businesses will be looking outside of California for expansion opportunities. Meanwhile, the millions of gallons of polluted run-off will continue to find its way to the ocean.

A sigh for what might have been...

Christopher Hitchens:

Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

Get it? They are racist and nationalistic, therefore not socialist, which means of course that they are actually right-wing--you know, like the Tea Party people...

I frankly get a little surprised when apparently smart guys like Hitchens seem to get lost in clearly irrelevant and misleading terms like right-wing, left-wing. Let me provide some examples:

Democrats have engineered a permanent black underclass to create a self-perpetuating captive constituency. Martin Luther King, whose national holiday we just celebrated, wanted his children judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Democrats shook their heads and gave us affirmative action, thus enshrining the symbolism of racial equality while insuring a perpetuation of a stratified, racist society. Does this make Democrats right-wing? Well, yes, according to the strict definitions Brian Myers and eyelash-batting Christopher Hitchen are using.

Currently, the hottest politician in the nation is Sarah Palin, whose popularity stems from the identification ordinary Americans have for this anti-elitist mother of five, who attended an run-of-the-mill university rather than an ivy-league institution, and speaks a distinct provincial dialect. She is the ideal of a classless society, all men and women created equal. Taxonomically left-wing, as strange as that may seem.

The terms right and left wing actually come down to us from the French revolution, where supporters of the ancien regime were seated on the right while Republicans were seated on the left. Anyone familiar with the history of the French revolution will be aware of the increasing radicalization of the Republicans culminating in the the reign of terror by the left-wing Jacobins. I suppose some academic will have to set us straight on that--revising history so the Jacobins can be kissing cousins of 'extreme right-wing' Tea Party people.

No one should be too surprised. Red was always the color of the left, until U.S. networks decided to flip the political color scheme and make Republican states red states. In the early twentieth century, Democrats referred to themselves as Progressives until the term became so loaded with infamy that the simply traded it in for "liberal". Then they stunk up the liberal label so badly, they went back to 'progressive' figuring that not too many people are still around who remember Woodrow Wilson. I suspect they'll be needing a new label before long.

The language may be confusing--purposefully so, but no one is really confused. Democrats are elitist, anti-democratic, racists who use military aircraft to shuttle their grandchildren back and forth between San Francisco and Washington. Republicans drive trucks and wear barn coats, eat sloppy Joes and think NASCAR is cool, Jesus can save their souls and less government makes for a better country.

I know which side I think better reflects Liberte, Fraternite et Eqalite.

Simple answer: God is never wrong.

I've blogged on the uber-arrogance of liberals on more than one occasion, but then again, I'm not the Washington Post.

Its been interesting to read a number of stories and blog posts this week that imply a circling of the wagons by the left and the imposition of several forms of thought control to insure group cohesion.

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias, prophet of the church of self-deification and droits-du-Seigneur, responded to Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" is this fashion:

One thing that dimwitted and immoral people do when under pressure is decide that lashing out with a kind of dimwitted and immoral violence is going to help them. Consequently, they got the dimwitted and immoral idea that they ought to torture people with techniques they got out of techniques the US government has developed to train soldiers in torture-resistance.

'Stupid', 'torture', 'immoral' and 'violent' were repeated over and over through out a not overly-long blog post--like a chant, or 'thought-stopping' behavior. Thiessen and his book are so stupid, immoral and violent, that Yglesias didn't even need to read the book to write a review.

From "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" by Prof. Robert J. Lifton M.D.

Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group's ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also.

Hmmm. What we've been calling liberal condescension is actually a matter of self-preservation by a beleaguered and besieged cult of left-wing religion. If you leave the group, then you to will be stupid, immoral and violent--the 'worst person in the world'.

Well, no one want that.

Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga (Kos) recently commissioned a poll in support of his forthcoming book "American Taliban", which unsurprisingly, characterizes conservatives (more specifically--Republicans) as virtually indistinguishable from radical jihadists--you know--'violent'. The poll--also unsurprisingly, reveals that conservatives are well, 'stupid' and 'immoral'.

Name-calling and demonization has always been a feature of left-wing rhetoric, but this specific litany is a more recent phenomenon, and appears to be engineered.

If money is fuel for politics, anger must be its lubricant. The Democrat's current woes are due to having provoked American anger, and so naturally the response has to be stoking the boiler of left-wing anger to try and keep up.

Good luck with that.

Seen in Harlem-->

You've heard the kids say it. You undoubtedly said it yourself when you were a kid. Children operate by the philosophy that what's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs to. Most people grow out of this to become reasonable and generous adults, but those who don't seem to gravitate to the political extremes where promises of state (read adult...) intervention to redress the puerile view of injustice attracts them like flies to garbage.

Its why--without exception--that every devoted Marxist who comes to power makes the acquisition of a grand residence and a fleet of luxury sedans their first order of business.

I'm not telling you this so we can all feel smug in our moral superiority. Hypocrisy attends us all. However I think it is useful to understand that when it comes right down to it, politics comes down to a conflict between our collective natures and personal dysfunctions.

A case in point is this post from the Daily Kos.

But I have another bone to pick with these leaders that are unable to control their own citizens, provide security within their own countries, and demand US backing and support with both troops and huge amounts of money and materials. Our troops. Troops that die, daily. And, money. Money out of my pocket, and yours.

What fantasy allows anyone to posture that civilian deaths during a shooting war are "unjustifiable"? Civilians get caught in the cross fire. Civilians are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Civilians die. Yes, women and children, too. And pets, and farm animals, and rare and endangered species. Anything on a battle ground is in immediate danger of a bloody death.

Michelle Malkin is a Kos kid? Well, no--but its remarkable for one, that a diarist on the DK could write something completely indistinguishable from something Ann Coulter might have said a year or two ago. Perhaps even more remarkable that it would get pass through by the DK censors.

The difference of course is that the rhetorical gun is aimed at the head of the "Dear Leader" instead of evil George W. Bush. What was condemned, must now be defended.

Why was George Bush evil again? Oh yeah--he killed Iraqi civilians, tortured misunderstood terrorists and kept innocent Afghani farmers in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.

Honey, the children are quarreling again...

WELL, AT LEAST HE'S CONSISTENT: The 'other Mick' recalls this dynamic as it applied to Clinton's White House trysts and Jeffrey Toobin's book-length apologetic for risky sexual behavior by the famous and powerful. The married Toobin is being sued for child support by his his mistress

Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News tie all-time ratings low.

Surprisingly, there are still 4.5 million people who are watching her every evening on average. I caught a few minutes of Couric recently, and I was struck at how I couldn't really notice any difference between her delivery and that of any other cable news anchor babe, except of course that she is older and less attractive in comparison with her younger competitors.

Is it the credibility? Well, I'm not sure what credibility she every had for hard news. She had been occasionally confrontational on the Today show and I guess that gets confused with gravitas by network executives. There is no sense that she is operating from a larger insight the way Peter Jennings or Tim Russert did.

She appears to be a perfect liberal-left-wing icon; a loyal partisan whose lack of talent and style was supposed to have been hidden by manufactured praise (brilliant! sexy! smart!) that in the end, just can't hide the figure flaws of this naked Empress.

Sound familiar? I'd venture to say that the entire left-wing establishment is in the same boat these days. Minority leader John Boehner called for the resignations or firings of Obama's entire economic team, which of course won't happen, but highlighted a political reality.

Various senior Democrats insisted that Tim Geithner had to be confirmed in spite of his tax problems, because he was uniquely qualified to deal with the financial crisis, there being NO ONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY who could do the job....

Predictably, Geithner works alone these days for a simple reason--success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

Wheel barrels of praise, followed by epic failure, followed by embarrassment, followed by obscurity after they find some other poor sap to help them start the process all over again.

Are you listening General Petraeus?

There are few things in the world more cynical that selling a health system based on a political (or command) economy as 'universal'. While it is tempting to attribute the wrecked lives that socialized medicine will impose on us, on the profound economic ignorance that seems to characterize Progressives and many liberals, the issue of end-of-life counseling makes it clear that they know exactly what they are doing.

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Why would such an innocuous provision, so easily dropped when it became a political liability, be reinjected into the remaking of the medical system by surreptitious Presidential fiat?

Every socialized medical system in the world was enacted and is maintained by a fraud. To this day, most Canadians will tell you that their medical system is 'morally' superior because 'everyone is covered'. The reality is of course, much different. Various schemes have been applied to ration scarce medical resources including making you wait long enough so you'll die in line.

One of the cruelest aspects of government-run health care systems in other countries is the degree to which these systems engage in non-price rationing of health care services. The hospital does not give out tickets or numbers; it just places the people it is reluctant to serve on a waiting list. Take the health care systems of Britain and New Zealand, for example. In both countries hospital services are completely paid for by government. Yet both countries also have long waiting lists for hospital surgery. In Britain, with a population of about 55 million, the number of people waiting for surgery is almost 800,000. In New Zealand, with a population of three million, the waiting list is currently about 50,000. In both countries the adverse effect on patients is about the same. Elderly patients in need of a hip replacement may wait in pain and discomfort for years. Patients waiting for heart surgery are often risking their lives. Canada is a country that has had a national health care program for only a few decades. But because the demand for health care has proved insatiable, and because the Canadian government has resolutely refused to increase spending beyond a level of about 8.5 percent of the GNP, the waiting lines for surgery have been growing. In the province of Newfoundland the wait for a hip replacement is about six to ten months, the wait f o r cataract surgery is about two months, for pap smears up to five months, for "urgent" pap smears two months, and for CAT scans two months. All over Canada heart patients wait for coronary bypass surgery, and the Canadian press is frequently reporting episodes of heart patients dying while on the waiting list.

The pervasiveness of this practice among so many socialized medical systems makes it clear that this is policy and not merely an unintended consequence, just as short-changing the elderly on medical care is also a policy.

Medicare statistics are revealing in this instance. 28% of expenditures went to just 6% of Medicare recipients who all died in the same year. It's just commonsense that people need more medical care in their last years than during their prime.

Of course, how are you going to tell an estimated 35 million voters that the government has decided that they lived long enough and should just go into the woods and die gracefully?

Not surprisingly, you blame it on Bush.

Democrats lie, and primarily they lie to each other. Kirsten Powers, a 'Democrat party strategist' (flunky) who is supposed to defend the party's positions, insisted, because this is what she was told, that the Obama administration was simply maintaining the end-of-life counseling provision first enacted by the Bush administration.

SCHLAPP: And government itself, let me tell you, the language here right, the language is different. They made the language worse, instead of doing this once every five years, now the Obama administration is allowing this to happen every year and actually reimbursing doctors to do it every year. So, that’s quite a slight of hand. And doesn’t government — aren’t they a little conflicted here? They have to find this huge health care savings for seniors at the same time they’ve become the counselors to seniors in their end of care decisions?

POWERS: Where was your outrage in 2008 when the Bush administration said that Medicare would reimburse end of life counseling?

SCHLAPP: It was a veto that was overridden by the Democrats. So, I give President Bush credit for vetoing that bill.

POWERS: No, it was a 2008 law. I mean, I don’t know what are talking about.

SCHLAPP: Yes, that became law over the president’s veto.

POWERS: No, that’s not true.

To Democrats, 'not true' apparently means 'contradicts the narrative'. Powers later had to acknowledge (by tweet) that she was in fact mistaken, even as other flunkies spokespersons, continued to maintain the fiction.

The upshot is that end-of-life counseling is more like Sarah Palin's 'death panels' that the Democrats would ever like to admit. For Obamacare to work politically, a lot of people are going to have to die.

The narcissism of the left is obvious to anyone but themselves, but you wonder sometimes if other lefties look over at their fellow-travelers and say to themselves, "Man, that guy is really out there..."

ThinkProgress is a left-wing blog of moderate traffic, with an Alexa rank of 9067 (For comparison, Hotair.com has an Alexa rank of 4614...lower is better.), yet feels itself and its contributors to be the center of the political universe, with influence so pervasive that their 'enemies' would go to any lengths to stop them.

Case in point.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

Alinsky's rules demand a target for that stew pot of left-wing rage, lest they arm themselves and shoot Congresspersons in the head...oh wait, that happened didn't it. In any case, the targets identified in the wake of the head-crushing Democrats received this past November, are the Koch brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Koch brothers are supposedly the brains and money behind the Tea Party, all of us being merely the dupes of these billionaire industrialist because, because, well because the New Yorker magazine said so. Actually the real reason is that the left can't get their heads around a grassroots movement that isn't, well them. It just doesn't fit the template of the oppressed and downtrodden masses shaking a fist at the man.

Oh wait. Yeah, the left now is the 'man'. Oppressing the good citizens of the U.S. with artificially created energy shortages, living high on the hog at tax payer expense, and putting generations yet unborn into debt to the tune of $50K for every man, woman, child, foetus and glimmer.

Reminds me of the ending of the movie "Falling Down", where the down-on-his-luck, middle class, middle-aged defense industry engineer asks, at the end of an armed rampage, "I'm the bad guy?"

But I digress.

The sin of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was to have the temerity to actually raise money to defeat its political enemies. Only Democrats are allowed to do that.

On reflection, if by chance the Chamber was involved, the strategy was brilliant. Excerpted from the alleged 'internal email' was this:

Create a false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information, and monitor to see if US Chamber Watch acquires it. Afterwards, provide explicit evidence proving that such transactions never occurred....

In other words, start a rumor, see if ThinkProgress bites and make them look ridiculous.

It worked perfectly.

Who-whom, Lenin's essence of politics, is starkly evident in the recent skirmishes of the war against public employee union parasitism. The shenanigans in Wisconsin are clarifying: Democrats aren't democrats; they're who-whomocrats. To fix a problem, you first have to state it clearly. Robert Tracinski does that:

The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left. It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians. But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable. Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

The Huffington Post reports:

Both national and Wisconsin-based Republican operatives tell the Huffington Post the party is being dramatically outworked and out-organized by Democrats in the recall campaigns being launched against state Senators.

The operatives, who raised their concerns out of hope it would jar the GOP into assertiveness, argue complacency has taken over after Governor Scott Walker successfully shepherded his anti-collective bargaining bill into law. While the Wisconsin Democratic Party, with major assists from progressive groups and unions, has harnessed resentment towards the governor into a full-throttled effort to recall eight GOP Senators, neither the enthusiasm nor organizational acumen exists on the Republican side of the aisle.

“It's clear that Democrats and liberal organizations are engaging in an attempt to make recall more than a mere hypothetical possibility for some Wisconsin Republicans,” said Liz Mair, Vice President of Hynes Communications and former RNC Online Communications Director, who has worked closely with officials on the ground in Wisconsin. “Even though Governor Walker acted to end the impasse, Republicans and conservatives should not be acting like this is done and dusted.”

The likely hood of this effort succeeding is not negligible, but nearly so. WIsconsin's rules for recall require signatures from 25% of the voters in the past election, and that those signatures be filed by May 2nd. The signatures must be validated and the petition deemed sufficient and insufficient. The the office-holder can challenge, so the thing just drags on and on, one way or another. If the petition succeeds, an election is called, which Democrats would have to actually win.

There is no political upside for Democrats in Wisconsin. Even in the extraordinary event that they would actually win a recall election, Republicans would still have a comfortable majority and no incentive to reverse themselves. The process is in fact just getting started, since many of the most egregious union rip-offs of the Wisconsin taxpayer are enscounced in concessions won through collective bargaining. Correctional officers, can in fact, call in sick for one shift, get paid for that shift, and then report for the shift immediately afterwards and collect overtime, getting paid 2-1/2 times their normal rate. They call it sick-leave stacking.

The real reason for the effort though has little to do with Wisconsin and everything to do with Michigan, Ohio and other states actively working on shaking off the parasites infecting state and local governments. They are demonstrating the price they intend to extract for defying their prerogatives.

Republican strategy in Wisconsin appears to be just right--let the unions cry-it-out, but keep an eye on the situation. If by some miracle, they do manage a successful petition--congratulate them on availing themselves of the proper constitutional means of protest, then spend big money insuring that the Republican candidate wins with a significantly larger margin than they did in 2008 (Those elected in 2011 are ineligible for recall).

The bottom line is, if the petition fails, the Republicans win. If the petition succeeds and the incumbent wins, the Republicans win. If the petition succeeds and the incumbent loses, it's at best, an anomaly.