The Other McCain

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The Progressive Hits Just Keep On Coming. The GOP Wasted Money?

Posted on | April 8, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Alan Colmes continues to be a more refined form of silliness than the SOL/PuffHo. The other day I was noting the sanctimonious concern for the poor. Now we observe him, get this, fretting that “GOP Shutdown Threats Already Costing Us Money“. This is hysterical, in both the ancient and modern senses of the word. Have a look, emphasis mine:

Steve Benen shares an email from a contact in the Obama administration about preparations for a government shutdown, indicating that is already costing us money. He notes the irony of those who want to cut the budget forcing a needless expense because of their threats and political posturing.

I think one of the better metaphors for the federal government is the alcoholic on a bender. After a sufficient period of being sloshed, the better part of a century in this case, drunkenness seems the norm. There may be some intellectual grasp that there will be a crushing hangover following the bender, but the wisdom to stop drinking is drowned by the foolish, nihilistic desire to keep the buzz alive, or die rather than face withdrawal and sobriety.
To paraphrase the Instapundit, I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about cutting the budget from the party that could not be bothered to offer so much as a draft in the last Congress, and whose Presidential offering received a “don’t take it too seriously” from none other than the Presidential lips.
The federal government in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, has lost all credibility. The drunk must sober up, and take the hangover. No further nihilistic behavior is acceptable. “. . .needless threats and political posturing” is called reality, ye besodden twerps.
And yet these drunks still want to play the Alinsky Rule Four, waving a wobbly finger at conservatives of faith for purportedly not living up to Judeo-Christian rules. The esteemed Roger Pilon at Cato, responds:

The budget battle is thus replete with moral implications far more basic than Sojourners and Catholics for Choice seem to imagine. They ask, implicitly, how “we” should spend “our” money, as though we were one big family quarreling over our collective assets. We’re not. We’re a constitutional republic, populated by discrete individuals, each with our own interests. Their question socializes us and our wherewithal. The Framers’ Constitution freed us to make our own individual choices.
The irony is that Jesus, properly understood, saw this clearly — both when he asked us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, and when he spoke of the Good Samaritan. The ads’ signers imagine that the Good Samaritan parable instructs us to attend to the afflicted through the coercive government programs of the modern welfare state. It does not. The Good Samaritan is virtuous not because he helps the fallen through the force of law but because he does so voluntarily, which he can do only if he has the right to freely choose the good, or not.

As I am fond of saying “The commandment is ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’, not ‘love thy neighbor by government proxy'”. Furthermore, the addition of government indirection achieves the opposite of the desired effect. Instead of the humbling realization when seeing the needy that “There but for the grace of God go I”, we have the heart-hardening effect of “The IRS has already beggared me, I have nothing to spare for this needy one.” Socialism, ironically, is the one achieving the anti-social results. This is because all law is an external forcing function, not an internal spiritual growth driver (Romans 7).
May the Almighty bless you, Mr. Colmes.

Category: Alan Colmes, Progressivism

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