You Might Be a Liberal

by C Edmund Wright

  When you get down to it, it seems to me that those pesky pump prices aren’t really haunting the Obamas all that much. The President and Michelle use more fuel on a single vacation than we will use in a lifetime, and they didn’t pay a cent for any of it.

  Of course I realize that the first point The Hill is trying to make is that Obama’s re-election prospects will be haunted by high gas prices, which inspires the second point that The Hill and the rest of the Jurassic media try to make on gas prices—that Obama has nothing to do with it. Somehow, in the liberal mind, we live in a world where a President and his party can stand in the way of all oil drilling in our country for four decades while simultaneously standing in the way of all nuclear power plant construction, and much coal and natural gas recovery, as well, all while not having a thing to do with energy prices.

  The reality that energy is fungible has never entered a liberal mind, apparently. That quality is, of course, tied to another concept foreign to the leftist—the notion of supply and demand. For our liberal friends who have no idea what this means, think about this: When you plug your Prius or your Volt into your house, you will be consuming energy. That is, unless your Volt catches fire and burns your house down. That energy magically coming from your plug-in unit might be generated by coal or nuclear or hydroelectric power. It doesn’t matter. The price of it is related to the total energy supply in the world, to some degree. Yes I know, it’s shocking to find out that a Pruis or a Volt does, in fact, burn coal, isn’t it?

  To be fair, Obama is merely the latest in a long line of anti-energy liberals. Yet he has done a pretty good job destroying domestic energy in just three dreadful years. His administration through the EPA has blocked oil in Alaska and put a halt to the Keystone Pipeline. They have issued an unnecessary moratorium in the Gulf that did far more damage to that economy than the BP oil spill ever threatened to do. They have issued devastating new regulations for coal, and meanwhile, they have their sites set on the Bakken Fields in the Dakotas next, with more regulations. It is notable to mention the one area of the country outside bureaucratic D.C. that is booming is the Dakotas.

  And yet to our best and brightest journalists, oil prices are merely third party headwinds that our unlucky young President is having to face. Now I remind you, these are the same cause and effect masterminds that find Sarah Palin and the Tea Party behind every shooting outside of Rahm Emmanuel’s gangland Chicago. So of course, no story on energy can be complete without mentioning the GOP attack machine in the lead, as The Hill did:

  “Gas prices have surged in recent weeks and analysts predict they’ll keep rising, creating fresh openings for GOP attacks against President Obama that had waned when prices dropped sharply.” (Emphasis mine)

  Yes, that really was the lead in this story.

  Because the main issue involving gas prices is what fresh openings they create for GOP attacks, you see. You and I and our economy are irrelevant. And did you happen to notice the subtlety in the wording that “prices have surged?” Yes, all by themselves, much the way SUV’s cause accidents or rob banks. When Democrats are in charge, energy prices are often reported as if they are some kind of mystical undefined force that is out to get the poor unlucky Democrats in charge. That is, unless they are the result of evil conservatives and Republicans directly. (More on that in a minute.) And as always, “analysts predict prices” just keep on rising by themselves, the rascals.

  Obviously, in the steel-trap mind of Mr. Geman, Obama’s energy policies are irrelevant. I guess the next mystery The Hill will tackle will be an expose on what is causing teen pregnancy.

  Mr. Geman goes on to report “The recent increase in prices has been rapid—AAA calls it the biggest July gain since they started tracking it in 2000, said Avery Ash, AAA’s manager of regulatory affairs. Ash and other experts say most of the recent run-up in gasoline prices stems from the rise in crude oil prices. “

  Really? Your in-depth report of why gas prices are rising uncovers the unbeknownst rubix cube relationship between pump and crude prices? Who needs “an expert” to uncover that mystery? Yet this is what passes for elite journalism and in-depth analysis, and folks in the media wonder why their empires are tanking. As a reminder, I think Newsweek was valued at the equivalent of one quart of retail gasoline.

  And Mr. Geman’s “nothing to see here” reporting about Obama’s liberal policies continues as he mentions that “tensions with Iran and sanctions and other factors have made oil more expensive in recent weeks. ‘We have seen some of that risk premium from these geopolitical tensions come back into the market,’ said Ash, who also noted the weakness of the dollar is another factor in the oil price rise.”

  There you go. It’s all Iran’s fault. Well, as we know everything is really George Bush’s fault generally, but in this particular case it’s also Iran’s fault. And oh, that little weak dollar thing? Trust me, that has nothing to do with Ben Bernanke and The Fed trying to bail out Obama’s socialism with his inflation policy. Well, at least he didn’t dare to actually try and blame it on Mitt Romney, who is not even in elected office.

  Uh, oh. I didn’t read far enough. The Iran problem is a Mitt problem apparently. In what has become typical double speak and analysis, the reporter puts words into the mouth of an expert to make his anti-Romney point.

  “Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research Inc., said the sanctions efforts and Mitt Romney’s aggressive talk on Iran’s nuclear program during his recent visit to Israel are influencing energy prices. “

  And what did Lynch say to include Mitt in this issue? “I think the Iranian situation has become tenser and that is making people more concerned.” Wait a minute. I didn’t see anything about Mitt in that statement. The expert didn’t say anything about Romney’s aggressive talk. And yet from that, Mr. Geman wants us to think that Lynch is merely among many experts blaming Romney for high gas prices. Well, Romney is a rich Republican, so high gas prices must he his fault at some level.

  There is one other liberal meme on gas prices besides the three mentioned above. That is the notion that when a Democrat is in the White House, normally bad things like high gas prices are really not such bad things, after all. In March of 2012, CNN Money had a story on high gas prices with the following lead:

  “Gas prices are once again dominating the national debate. But despite rhetoric, high gas prices aren’t hurting as much as they used to.”

  In other words, it was all just in our heads. Silly us.

  And the empire Ted Turner founded continued this line of reasoning by adding “for the average American household, which has an income of over $62,000 a year, the increase in gas prices represents a relatively small portion of total spending. For example, in 2008 gas prices were all over the news when they hit their all time high. But in 2010… people barely mentioned them.”

  And by people barely mentioning them in 2010, what CNN meant was that, with Democrats in control of all three branches of government, the media was barely mentioning the fact that gas has been roughly double what it was when Obama took office for much of his term. Out in the 57 states, many people were mentioning high gas prices in 2010, along with Obama Care and debt and deficits and, by the way, their determination to remove as many Democrats as possible from office. Which they did.

  But on the bright side, CNN barely mentioned that election either.

  Obama, as we know, has given “motorists” advice on how to handle the “pain at the pump” on numerous occasions, including his famous “get a tune up” and his reminder to “check the air pressure” in your tires. Can’t you just hear that 1960’s ad jingle now, picturing Obama in a neatly pressed uniform of the Texaco full service attendant?

  “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star… the big bright TEXACO STARRRRRRR!!!”

  Which reminds me, this idea that “motorists” are just some subspecies of American who is likely to feel “pain at the pump” is such a sophomoric notion of the damage of h
igh gas prices. And yet, the way energy stories are reported and the way liberal politicians talk about them, that’s how they are couched.

  This is what happens when you have an Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, who is not a motorist. He rides a bike to work. All fine and good, but it’s damned hard to stock a Wal-Mart or even a Starbucks by delivering the goods on a bicycle. In fact, at Wal-Mart—not to mention REI—many of the goods are bicycles! And yet, our elitist, jumbo jet flying, vacationing President thought it wise to appoint a man to that post who does not even own a car.

  Think about that for a moment. How sick do you have to be to even consider that? The next thing you know he’ll appoint a Treasury Secretary who can’t figure out Turbo Tax.

  This points out another trait of liberals, which is on both sides of the causal dynamic, and that is that many live cloistered in big cities, living the Seinfeld, walk-everywhere lifestyle. Again, that’s fine for those who can make that work, but Texas, for example, is a darned big state to walk around. Yet, these libs become President and Energy Secretary and Treasury Secretary and Fed Chairman and in charge of Ways and Means and on and on and on—and we have a country of space and freedom being governed by big city folks who ride bikes or limousines and look at energy as something a few bumpkins in fly over country have to pay more for.

  No, it does not dawn on them that nothing happens without energy, and that no successful society ever got that way without inexpensive energy. Apparently. These limousine liberals all “have people” who pump gas for them and shop for them at the grocery store. They don’t get it.

  Thus, to them this is all a game. It’s a game between the evil Republicans and the wonderful liberal Democrats. The country is not relevant. And this is how liberals stay so disconnected from reality, allowing them to say, as Mr. Geman did in his article “that still leaves weeks for Republicans to try and lay rising pump prices at the feet of Obama and Democrats, even though experts say that federal policymakers have little effect either way on prices that are tethered to global oil markets.”

  You see, oil prices are tethered to global oil markets and the puny little United States and their policy makers can do nothing about it. This is the liberal mindset. They want to sound intellectual by stating the obvious—prices are tethered to the oil market—all the while not understanding that the oil market is tethered to our lack of domestic production!

  Liberalism. The total lack of any ability to process even the most fundamental cause and effect.

  YMBAL’S #14

  If you wear your AIDS ribbon to a protest against using animals in lab research for new medicines…

  If you think voters in South Florida who cannot figure out how to use a simple ballot should choose the President of the United States…

  If you are more concerned with the rights of convicted felons than you are the rights of business owners…

  If you support a woman’s right to choose, unless of course she chooses to have the baby or to home school her kids…

  If you are more concerned with Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton than you are with Saddam Husseins’ ties with terrorists or Vladimir Putin’s ties to Syria…

  If your idea of control is to control everyone else while having no self control of your own…

  If you have argued the point that “in Europe, the government pays for health care and vacations” with a straight face and thought you had a point…

  If you are obsessed with what the French think of the United States…

  If you believe that nativity scenes should be banned from public places but that anyone who objects to pornography should just change the channel…

  If you refuse to admit that you are a liberal but claim to be a progressive…

  If you call anyone who calls you a liberal guilty of McCarthyism…

  If you like to give to charities, with other people’s money…

  If your mother wore boots and your father wore flowers as young adults…

  If you routinely excuse our Vice President with the phrase “that’s just Joe being Joe” …

  If you think the Second Amendment means the right to keep and bear a white flag…

  If you think Occupy Wall Street is a citizens’ movement and the Tea Party is a mob…

  If you went to prep school, college, grad school for a masters, then a doctorate, and you now teach in a university, and you think you understand the real world…

  If you think “evangelical” is a dirty word…

  If you think alcoholics are disabled and deserve social security, or at least a senate seat from Massachusetts…

  If you think rats are “people too”…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen.”

  —Walter Cronkite

  “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

  —Dr. Thomas Sowell

  15: THE WORLD’S MOST EXPENSIVE FISHING LICENSE

  If you’ve ever done something stupid because ‘the rules are the rules’…

  “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing. “ – Dr. Thomas Sowell

  One real problem with liberalism is that it can start to creep into our everyday lives and we may not even realize it. Like the proverbial frog in the tepid water that reaches a boil very slowly, we may not know to jump out in time, and we’re doomed before we realize it. This is creeping liberalism, and it manifests itself by making normal routine compliance with government seem like the common sense, path of least resistance thing to do. And I suppose it is, at times, easier to do what the ridiculous government bureaucrat asks you to do than to stand your ground. And they know this, by the way.

  Documenting this kind of liberalism sneaking into the otherwise conservative mind is not the kind of thing that lends itself to a lot of humor. Liberals in all of their glory can be funny, as well as dangerous. Normal people who allow too much liberal-think to infect their decisions in the course of their day to day life represent a much more subtle danger to their own way of life. I find it chilling.

  This becomes very problematic when we start to be too compliant, and start to cede our freedoms simply not to cause a fuss. In the mildest cases, normally independent and conservative individuals toss little tidbits of freedom away in the name of normal politeness. In Christian circles, this is the result, at times, of a misplaced understanding of turning the other cheek.

  Another factor could be that conservatives are, by nature, law and order types, and desire an orderly society. There is a fuzzy line between being a “law and order” believer and taking “the rules are the rules” thing too far. We need rules, and we need law and order, to have any real freedoms. In a lawless society, there is no freedom except for the freedom of outlaws. I get that. The key is not to let the rules become more important than the underlying activity.

  In more advanced stages, people you would think of as independent and freedom loving and conservative start to become the agents of the creeping bureaucratic liberalism themselves. An example of this follows in a bit. When we, as a nation, have too many people in both categories combined, we are done. These are dynamics that play out day after day in our routine lives. This is more than just an election year phenomenon.

  I suppose the most obvious example of this is how we are treated by TSA employees in airports since 9-11. This whole charade has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with control and compliance. If air safety were really the issue, our airports would do what the safest airports in the world do. They profile! Box cutters and four ounce bottles of shampoo don’t kill people. Islamic terrorists kill people. And if terrorists can’t smugg
le box cutters or nail clippers or Swiss Army knife key chains onto planes, they’ll find a shoe bomb or something else.

  And yet, the “rules are the rules,” so airport security stands look like the bargain bin at a CVS with all kinds of “outlawed” contraband like shaving cream, hand lotion, and tiny little shampoos stacked on them.

  The same people who think the way the TSA thinks are the same people who write headlines like “SUV Robs Bank.” And yet, the TSA issue—as bad as it seems—is at least somewhat kept in check by the fact that almost everybody is aware of how ridiculous it is. Sure, there are too many citizens who put up with the shenanigans like sheep, and too many folks in positions of power or elective office that help propagate this freedom- and dignity-robbing fraud. But it’s no secret., and YouTube heroes keep us posted on the worst of TSA behaviors. Sometimes the smaller hidden issues of mundane existence are where the real danger is.