In a column last week, E.J. Dionne, our favorite whiney, slobbering leftist nitwit columnist, complained that the Obama/Pelosi fake stimulus bill was “if anything, too small”. This is invariably the final rationalization of those on the left when their programs turn out to be unmitigated disasters for the nation – they would have been successful had they just been larger, and if anything, they were just too small.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal? If anything, just too small. Thus, over the decades, Democrat-dominated congresses enacted constant expansions of the benefits of Social Security without enacting corresponding expansions of worker contributions, leaving the system today basically bankrupt.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society? If anything, just too small. Trillions of wasted dollars later, the poverty rate today is higher than it was in 1965, the African American family has been decimated by the perverse incentives contained in Great Society programs, and liberals continue to contend it all would have worked if only we’d have spent more.
Johnson looked at John F. Kennedy’s minimal interventionist policy in Vietnam and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Out of that keen observation, the U.S. presence in that country soon grew from a few hundred advisors to more than half a million handcuffed-by-political-considerations troops, and the mother of all quagmires was born.
FDR, at Yalta, looked at Stalin’s plans for annexing much of Eastern Europe into his growing communist bloc and said it was “if anything, just too small.” Ok, he really didn’t do that, but he might as well have, as Stalin got everything he wanted out of that conference, ensuring communist domination of Eastern Europe for half a century.
Last year’s $100 billion 2-year increase in the budget of the soviet-style Department of Education? If anything, just too small. The result of this and the other enormous increases in the baseline budgets of a vast array of wasteful socialist federal programs is that the nation now faces a structural annual deficit in excess of $1 trillion as far as the eye can see.
A cap and trade bill that would waste $2 trillion taxpayer dollars over the next decade to marginally decrease man-made carbon dioxide emissions? If anything, just too small. With the failure of this human atrocity of an idea, the Obama Administration now pursues the wrecking of the U.S. economy by seeking soviet-style command-and-control regulation of “greenhouse gases” by the Environmental Protection Agency under the auspices of the Clean Air Act.
A bill to socialize the finest system of healthcare delivery in the world? If anything, just too small. Most of those on the political left will tell you that the bills currently before congress are too timid, and achieve their goal of a federal takeover of 1/6th of the economy over too long a period of time. They’d much prefer that their Democrat heroes in congress and the President commit outright political suicide by passing an outright, immediate single payer system into law and telling an adamantly opposed public to shut up and take it.
Harry Truman at least was correct when he looked at the bombs that were used in the fire-bombing of Dresden and said “if anything, they’re just too small.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed shortly thereafter, and a world war was ended. Then again, Truman may have been a Democrat, but he wasn’t a leftist.
We could go on and on here, but the point is obvious: liberals will never admit to the failure of their consistently failed policy ideas. In their minds, the only reason for the failure of their socialist experiments is that they just weren’t well-funded enough. In other words, if anything, they were just too small.
And so, we invariably end up with the same 6-step cycle of rationalization we have seen from President Obama and his lapdogs in the media like Mr. Dionne.
Step 1: Pass a hideously ill-considered, shamefully wasteful program into law. This step is known as Abject Stupidity. Step 2: Stand idly by as the program utterly and completely fails to produce the results you misled the public into believing it would produce. This step is known as Inevitability of Outcome. Step 3: Look on as the people slowly wake up to the reality of what is happening in Step 2, and public opinion turns radically against you. This step is known as Uh-Ohhhh. Step 4: Begin the process of pointing fingers of blame at anyone else who happens to be standing nearby in order to deflect attention away from yourself. This step is known as Desperate Responsibility Avoidance. Step 5: When Step 4 doesn’t work, team up with your fellow liberals to develop a common set of lies to try to convince the public that they simply misunderstood what the program was intended to do, and that it is really producing exactly the intended results. This step is known as Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything.
Step 6: Finally, when all else fails, and your party is now facing an enormous repudiation of everything it stands for at the polls next November, try to shift blame to the Republicans, painting them as obstructionists and blaming them for making your program, “if anything, just too small.” This step is known as The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit, and is ably personified by E.J. Dionne.
So, to summarize, here is the 6-Step Cycle of Leftist Rationalization:
Step 1: Abject Stupidity
Step 2: Inevitability of Outcome
Step 3: Uh-Ohhhhh
Step 4: Desperate Responsibility Avoidance
Step 5: Joe Biden Will Say Literally Anything
Step 6: The Last Refuge of a Leftist Nitwit
A sincere word of thanks to Mr. Dionne for playing the role of this week’s Poster Child for the slow-motion suicide of the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media.
