About AJ DiCintio
A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on
the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up.
Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and
polished by experience, to social/political affairs.
To hear liberal mouthpieces in and out of the administration tell it, a
sweet rationality guides the minds of those who agree with Barack
Obama’s economic policies, not an emotion so debilitating it prevents
even the acknowledgment of their consequences.
Fortunately, a great many Americans recognize such drivel for what it
is: propaganda spewed by wolfish shills whose job is to quash the notion
that much public opinion is being driven by an understandable, transient
fear that the president and his liberal allies in Congress are happily
(actually, ecstatically) taking advantage of.
Those wolves, by the way, come dressed in all manner of sheep’s
clothing, a fact exemplified by White House Budget
Director Peter Orszag, who, sporting a suit, tie, and two glittering
diplomas, answered a reporter’s question about how the administration
can speak of "fiscal rsponsibility” when it is creating a "spiraling
debt” with this low-down, pusillanimous lie: "I don’t know what
spiraling debt you’re referring to.”
But to return to the point at hand, those of us who are actually trying
to be reasonable about the president’s proposals are accumulating plenty
of evidence to support the notion that fear has frozen millions of
minds.
How?
Simple. We listen carefully, finding that almost invariably, expressions
of concern about the consequences of the president’s policies elicit
responses that are nothing short of astonishing in their intellectual
deficiencies.
Common among those responses is "He [Obama] has got to try something,”
an embarrassingly vacuous utterance that allows us to immediately draw
two conclusions:
1) It can’t claim even a distant relationship with any rational idea.
2) It does, however, shout its sister and brotherhood to the kind of
childish irrationality that responds to a "why” with an implacably
resolute, perfectly smug "because.”
Just as simply, we state facts and ask questions as follows:
(Fact) At a minimum, an astounding ten trillion dollars needs to be
borrowed, printed, and taxed to finance the mad spending (much of it
permanent) and suffocating bureaucratic expansion (all of it permanent)
required to fulfill Obama’s dream of transforming America from a land
where liberty, individualism, and free markets reign supreme to a place
thoroughly worthy of the term "nanny state.”
(Question) How many of those who currently support the president’s
agenda would put an immediate end to their stunningly incurious
acquiescence to such a transformation if every penny of the ten trillion
were borrowed, taxed, spent, and stuffed with power at the state and
local levels?
(Fact) The federal government, the level of government most remote from
the people, is incorrigibly corrupt, having wreaked thousands of
depredations upon the people’s rights and wealth — including the
particularly vile act of siphoning every last dollar of the more than 2
trillion dollars the people have deposited into the "Social Security
Trust [sic] Fund.”
(Question) Isn’t it, therefore, an incontrovertible truth that only a
paralyzing fear could drive the mass of citizens to exponentially
increase the power and the money they entrust to federal politicians and
bureaucrats, whose most recent example of "service” to their country
consists of having been fully complicit in the destruction of its
financial system?
With that last question, this piece could end; for every reasonable
American will agree that the behavior of otherwise sensible folks who
risk breaking a leg or worse as they rush to bestow huge "performance
based bonuses” upon the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank,
Harry Reid, and Alan Greenspan seals the deal for the "fear argument.”
However, it cannot end without mentioning the motivation of liberals,
who with every bit of their being support Obama’s plan to enormously
increase the size and strength of the monstrosity whose obscene
tentacles already probe the nation’s every nook in a ceaseless search
for more power and wealth to stuff into its insatiable maw.
That motivation, of course, is the love of power.
It explains why liberals, who make a religion of politics and gods of
politicians, do not react to Obama’s grandiose plans (domestic and
global) by quoting the world’s great creative spirits, including Dante,
Swift, and Twain — all of whom honored politicians either by damning
them to hell or mocking them with a hellish fury.
It explains why, in the midst of a mindless, selfish, "eat, drink, and
be merry” orgy of borrowing that has the Chinese concerned about holding
American debt, liberals have not a word to say about history, for
example, about what happened — economically, socially, and politically —
to Germany in the twenties when the Reichsbank set its printing presses
to max speed and ordered operators to print marks 24/7.
And it explains why the nation’s self-proclaimed intellectual giants
inundate us daily with this kind of sycophantic gushing:
Michael Moore: "He [Obama] has the massive will of the American people
behind him -- and he has been granted permission by us to do what he
sees fit.”
Maureen Dowd: "President Obama [like a good Nanny-in-Chief?] must nurse
us through our [addiction to materialism]...”
Now, that
kind of "thinking” — not something relatively simple such as
rehabilitating and then properly regulating the nation’s banks — is
worthy of filling all Americans who consider themselves heirs of
Jefferson’s legacy with a profound fear.