 by Christopher Cook
According to one poll, 68% of Americans are on the wrong-track side of the right-track/wrong-track divide. According to Drudge, this is the lowest in 23 years. I am not going to spend time right now researching whether the 23 years figure is accurate. Suffice it to say that 68% is a bad number. Very bad.
But why, when things are actually going quite well, do so many people think things are so bad? By every measure except gas prices (and perhaps immigration, depending on where you stand), America is DEFINITELY on the right track.
• Unemployment is lower now than the average of the previous three decades.
• The stock market is about to reach its all-time high.
• Jobs are being created in abundance.
• We are winning---arguably brilliantly (in spite of the MSM's bias and routine fibrications™)---in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the GWOT generally. (For more on this, you MUST read Victor Davis Hanson's latest!)
• There has not been another major attack on U.S. soil since 9/11/01---something that would have come as a surprise to most Americans if you had told them on 9/12/01 that it would be so 4 years later.
• The U.S. economy is growing at a healthy clip, far outstripping the growth of other Western nations.
• Tax cuts have resulted in increased economic activity, increased personal wealth, and increased government revenue...
Things could always be better, but they are hardly at their worst state in 23 years. In many ways, this is a boom-time. So why do so many people think things are so bad?
Liberals.
People on the Left are miserable right now. They are out of power (after holding Congress in an almost unbroken stream from 1931 to 1994). They lost three congressional elections in a row, including the off-year election (a rare event for any party when the other party's president is in the White House). They loathe George Bush more than Ahab hated the White Whale. In fact, his entire cabinet fills them with contempt. (I have relatives who reflexively utter the word "a_ _hole" if they so much as see a quick flash of Donald Rumsfeld's face on the TV screen---he doesn't even need to say a word... and we all know about the racist bile the Left has been spewing at Condoleezza Rice.) In spite of the less-than-stellar start to Bush's second term, the Republicans and Bush have actually met with much success over the last five years (a fact which further erodes the Left's claim to be the only possible savior from the wascally Wepublicans). They have seen erosions in several key constituencies they absolutely NEED to survive electorally: blacks, Jews, and hispanics. In spite of their best efforts to steal elections (Florida 2000, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania 2004) and even their occasional successes (Washington 2004), and in spite of their best efforts to project their own electoral trickery onto the Republicans, they still remain out of power. And, while their control over the primary means of information dissemination (media, entertainment, academia) remains strong, it is no longer hegemonic; with the rise of talk radio, the blogosphere, and to a lesser degree FOX News, even this has begun to erode.
This equation is quite simple. People on the Left are unhappy. People on the Left control most of the primary means of information dissemination. Unhappy Left = Unhappy Information Stream. Unhappy Information Stream = Unhappy America. That's it.
They had near-complete control of Congress for 70 years.
They used to have a near-complete ability to inculcate their beliefs and ideas into people---directly into the youth through education and indirectly into us all through the media and through viral messaging in entertainment.
They are seeing a decline in support among hispanics and Jews. Moreover, after having kept blacks on literal plantations for years and electoral plantations ever since, the Democrats are even starting to see cracks in their support from American blacks. Without near-total support from these groups---without racial balkanization, fear, and animus---the Democrats know they have no chances as a national party.
It's all starting to fall apart for them, and they're freaking out. And they need you to be freaking out too.
Those of you who are parents know all too well what an incessantly crying baby can do to your day. You may have every other reason to be having a great day, but if your baby is unhappy about something, he's going to cry until you do something about it. In fact, his goal is essentially to ruin your day until you do something about it.
That's okay, of course. Babies are babies---they have no other way of letting us know their needs. But the Democrats' analogue of this infantile behavior is entirely unbecoming, and unbefitting people who claim to be adults.
Nevertheless----they control the information stream, and by golly, if they're having a bad day, well then the rest of us are going to have to have a bad day too.
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I began writing on this concept back in February. Many of you saw it then, but for those who didn't, perhaps it is worth reprising that article now. So, here it is...
A Giant Colicky Baby
Are the rantings of the left an electoral goldmine or a threat to the Republic?
Christopher Cook -- February 1, 2006
I am a new father, and as nearly every new parent soon discovers, the most difficult part of caring for a newborn is the sleep deprivation. (As I write this, I am coming off a night where I managed to cobble together a total of maybe 1 hour of sleep.) With a baby needing to be fed, burped, and changed every two hours, a new parent rapidly discovers that one of their strongest emotions during that period is desperation. Desperation to get some sleep. Desperation to find something---anything---to stop the baby from crying.
Since the election of 2000, Democrat politicians...wait, what's that you say? What does this have to do with crying babies? Just give me a minute, I'm going somewhere with this. I'll start again...
Since the election of 2000, Democrat politicians and pundits---together with those members of elite mainstream media with whom they share an agenda (i.e., most of them)---have essentially been on one long rant. It began when Vice President Gore and the son of Boss Daley attempted to wrest a victory in Florida away from Governor George W. Bush. After a series of legal maneuvers, 98% of which failed, Gore was forced to concede, and that's when the rancor really kicked into gear. It started with a political manifestation of the psychological concept of projection on so grand a scale that any political scientist or shrink could make a career studying it. Essentially, the big lie was repeated over and over until nearly all of the left's faithful (and an unfortunate number of independents) began to believe that "Bush stole Florida," when in fact it was the Gore team that did everything in its power to "steal" Florida for themselves. Bush won Florida, albeit by the smallest of margins, both in the official count, the recount, and in nearly all of the media-funded unofficial recounts performed thereafter. (It has occurred to many of us that Gore will likely be remembered very badly by history for the damage he did to this nation and its faith in elections.)
The belief---however erroneous---that the Presidency was stolen from them sent most everyone on the left in to a hate spiral from which they probably won't pull out even after Bush is long gone. So severe is this hatred that Charles Krauthammer (who is also a trained psychologist) was compelled to diagnose it and give it a name: BDS---Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Since this decent into the abyss of hatred began, there has been an unrelenting stream of political rancor the likes of which we haven't seen since Reconstruction. Simply put, today's Democratic Party---with the aid of their friends in the MSM and the left-wing groups who exercise increasing control over them---have crossed too many lines. In the last few years, their fury of being out of power has caused in them a willingness to do anything they have to do to regain that power. Their actions have violated precedents that had gone back for decades. Today, politics no longer stops at the water's edge, former presidents no longer keep their opinions respectfully out of day-to-day politics, and actions and statements that would have been previously unheard of during a time of war are now commonplace. Gone are the Daniel Patrick Moynihans, the Scoop Jacksons, and lonely indeed is Joseph Lieberman. They have become the party of "no," and of Bush-hatred, calumny, and nasty vitriol. Venom, violence, and conspiracy theories once reserved for the moonbat fringe have become mainstream. In an eerie continuation of their racist past, they behave horribly towards any black American who has the nerve to leave the "plantation," as is seen in the endless venom for Clarence Thomas, hideously racist cartoons of Condoleezza Rice, the references to Rice and Colin Powell as "house slaves," the tossing of Oreos at (and the rifling through the credit files of) Maryland Lt. Governor Michael Steele, and on and on. (Perhaps they fear the ultimate result when the truth becomes more generally known to blacks in America.)
Most disturbing of all is the apparent willingness of some of their leadership to undermine our efforts during time of war, cynically taking actions and making statements that even a political novice knows will diminish America's prestige, power, and security. Their incessant protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, many of them behave in ways that seem downright...dare we say it: U N P A T R I O T I C.
And then there's the mainstream media, which aids and abets, gives cover for, and actually participates in all of this.
Case-in-point is this NSA intercepts situation. It is reasonably clear that the President does have the authority to conduct such a program, and if you ask the questions correctly, Americans are quite sensible on this issue. But far too often, the MSM has it's agenda and it's sticking to it---damage George Bush, not matter what it takes. So, they use imbalanced reporting, glaring omissions, dishonest questions, misleading language (like the ubiquitous and misleading phrase "domestic spying"), so-called experts who are actually stealth Bush opponents, and push-polling in their naked obsession to harpoon the president.
Of course, the MSM couldn't get away with any of this if they didn't have allies in government willing to leak classified information to them. (Brought to them by some of the same crowd who like to leak information about CIA satellite programs and tip off our enemies about our military intentions.
And of course, there are the barking moonbats who dwell in the fever swamps of the left. The latest example was provided by the intrepid Andrew Marcus over at Andrew's Notepad. The video is of a rally held by the World Can't Wait people in Chicago. Go watch the video to learn more about the strange behaviors of these elusive creatures!
As Enrico Pollini said in the movie Rat Race, "I make a joke, to help you forget how screwed you are." Perhaps the joke would all be funnier, though, if the World Can't Wait were not a Communist front group.
And the more I think about it, the more I wonder if any of this is particularly funny at all. There's a meme on our side of the aisle that suggests that the more insane the Democrats become, the more they are led by the fever-swamp left, and the more the media abets and participates in the trend, the better it is for Republicans electorally...because it disgusts the average American. Each time I hear statements that are hate-filled, violent, completely false, borderline seditious, or next-of-kin to treason, I retreat into the comforting warmth of this meme. But is it true? I strongly suspect it is, but only to a very limited degree. What I fear is this---almost as many people are convinced or swayed by the calumny, vitriol, and dishonesty as are turned off by it.
I have had several friends---smart people who are "independent" voters---contact me recently making statements that indicate that the incessant drone is taking its toll.
One said of the NSA intercepts controversy that it was "clearly unconstitutional, and Bush lied about it." Now, whatever questions there are about the program, it is certainly not "clearly unconstitutional." Bush appears to have plenty more authority beyond just his mandate under Article 2 of the Constitution, but at very least, he has that. And the fact that my friend tacked on the "Bush lied" part is an indication that the intellectual virus of the fever swamp has jumped from moonbat to normal person.
Another dear friend, who once had pretty sensible ideas about the need for America to respond vigorously to Islamists and their totalitarian aims, has now gone wobbly on everything. Recently, this friend went so far as to claim that the war in Iraq is...yes, here it comes..."a war for oil," a calumny of the first order.
During the 2004 election year, I met a few people who knew exactly jack.squat about politics...except for everything they saw in Fahrenheit 9/11. And of course, each and every on of them cited what they "learned" in that movie as all they needed to know to make their decision that November.
Today, the economy really is in terrific shape. Unemployment is below 5% and we have an economic engine that is the envy of the world. Since September 11th, 2001, we have not had another major attack on our soil (and let's face it, we were all expecting one). We have liberated 60 million human beings from oppression, and democracy, with our help, is on the march in the Middle East and elsewhere. President Bush should be one of the most popular figures in American history. Instead, his approval numbers are rather low.
So yes, perhaps the unabated ranting of the left and the media manages to turn off some Americans. My fear, though, is that for every 20 Americans turned off, 19 are convinced. The result is that we have to pull out all the stops to win a 51-49 election, when by all rights we should be regularly winning 60-40.
Ok, so all this now brings me back to crying babies. It may amuse some of you to learn that when I started writing this article, my boy was two-weeks-old, but today, he's almost three-months! That's right---I was so sleep deprived that I forgot about the article for ten weeks. What prompted me to begin writing it---besides late-night delirium, of course---was our first visit to our baby's pediatrician, which had occurred the day before. In the course of the appointment, she introduced us to a word we'd both heard, but never *really* contemplated before: colic. She said that it can kick in sometime after the third week, and she defined it as "three or more hours of unexplained crying." Unexplained?! To that point, we had been struggling with the desperate need to attend to the nighttime crying we that we COULD explain---he's hungry, wet, lonely, gassy, etc. (He has since grown into a pretty easy-going baby, and we have developed and ingenious sleep-system, but that is another story.) That exhausting night, I was trying all sorts of techniques to quiet our beautiful child. Extra formula. The pacifier. The cute little nature-sound player that came with the bassinet. I even read to him from Congressman James Rogan's terrific book Rough Edges. Finally, he went to sleep, and so I put my head down to try and catch a few winks before the next feeding. As I was drifting, I remembered the pediatrician's description of colic. Then, I remembered what I had read in one of my "so you're going to be a daddy" books about babies who cried all the time. One anecdote in particular stuck out, about a baby whose parents called him "The Screamer," because he only slept four hours of each day and loudly squalled the other 20. Twenty hours of crying?! Now my mind was racing. What would I do to try to stop a baby from crying for 20 hours? The simple answer that occurred to me was... just about anything. I would vacuum the nursery if the sound would calm him. I would take him for a walk or a drive into the mountains at 3 AM. I would plunk him in front of the TV and play one of those Baby Einstein videos. Heck, I would probably plunk him in front of a movie about brain-eating zombies if it would put him to sleep. Basically, I realized that if I had a 20-hour-a-day screamer, I would take anyone's suggestion, no matter how cockamamie it sounded. I would have said anything, tried anything, BELIEVED anything....
...and that's when it occurred to me. The left, the Democrats, the media---they've essentially become a collective colicky baby, and Americans are becoming the desperate parents. The incessant rant is finally taking its toll. Bush's poll numbers are down. People believe that the economy is terrible, we're losing in Iraq, and Bush is spying on Aunt Mabel. The baby has screamed long enough and loud enough, and now it is getting whatever it wants.
Most have heard of the phenomenon called Stockholm Syndrome. It sounds counter-intuitive, but something in human nature causes hostages---after a certain amount of time in captivity---to begin to identify and sympathize with their captors. And it's starting to look like that's what we have now. This is Stockholm Syndrome, and we're all being held captive by a giant, colicky baby.
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