Going mad

On my way to work one day this week, I caught a caller on a regular afternoon radio talk show. He was English, in the U.S. on vacation as he said is his habit, and, after taking in a week’s worth of the political scene, asked a very basic question.

“What’s wrong with this country? Have you all gone mad?”

The caller’s opinion, contrary to what the media and the Left (sorry, redundant) has been telling us for quite some time, is that America has a helluva lot more going for it than against it. And has for a long, long time. No matter the extent that someone wants to run down this country, from within or from the outside, the fact is that many, many more people would live here in a heartbeat than anywhere else.

And that was the essence of the caller’s point.

“This man,” the caller said in reference to Barack Obama, “wants to give you something that does not work. It is socialism. It is attractive in theory; I understand that. But it has never worked. Look at Europe. It has taken some of us 30 years to understand that it does not work, and it will take us longer to fix the damage that has been done.”

Therein lays the madness.

We have the models to see. Many of them. There’s the Russian version of socialism, the Eastern Europe version. There’s the Western Europe version. Right off our southeastern shore is the Cuban version; farther to the south, the Venezuelan version. To our north, there is the Canadian version.

IT DOES NOT WORK. IT HAS NEVER WORKED. IT WILL NEVER WORK.

But here we are, a few days away from possibly following Obama off the very same cliff. Why? Because it’s packaged nice and neat and marketed in such a slick manner? That’s been done, too. Promises on top of promises have been made all around the world by Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists. They all claimed to represent the poor.

They all promised change. And they all delivered change.

Anyone need a refresher course on how that change worked out in any of those countries?

Communism, as everyone knows, crumbled in Russia and Eastern Europe two decades ago. There, as in Cuba and Venezuela, living conditions were and are deplorable.

In Western Europe, Italians early this year swept the Communists completely out of their Senate and Chamber of Deputies for the first time since World War II, and drove the socialists to the brink of no power. France and Germany have conservative governments after years of liberal rule. England, polls there show, is about to boot its liberal Labor Party out of office after a decade of rule.

And conservatives in Canada have made huge gains the last three years after a long stretch of virtually unchecked liberalism.

Seems few in those countries are big fans of high unemployment, spiraling inflation, crumbling infrastructures and ever-rising taxes. (Not to mention flailing government health care programs, open-border immigration stances and the slew of burdensome policies in the name of Global Warming, other issues we can't seem to see and learn from either, but those are topics for another time.)

Yet here we are.

It’s hardly surprising we can’t learn from the lessons taught elsewhere in the world. We can’t even learn from our own.

Our 10 most impoverished cities (I provided the list in another blog) have remained so under decades of Democrat policy-makers. What makes those people continue to empower liberals?

For those who experienced the late 1970s as adults, what exactly was the attraction to double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation and 21-percent interest rates?

For those who didn’t experience that time as adults and might need a history lesson, our president then was Jimmy Carter. It also was the last time Democrats had a 60-seat supermajority in the Senate.

To say we’re headed in that same direction would, in large part, be misleading, because our present-day Democrat party has moved even further to the left than Carter and his bunch ever dreamed of being.

We have, for a century, had a Communist Party in this country. People who preached Marxism. People who hated America and everything it stood for. People who not only promoted class envy, but class warfare.

They never seriously threatened to gain power. Until now.

They are who run today's Democrat Party. To call Obama a socialist is not hate-speech. It’s not fear-mongering or anything else. It’s fact. The man quotes Karl Marx, for God’s sake. In his own words, he “sought out the most radical elements and Marxist professors” early in his adult life. He has surrounded himself with the same type people ever since, from William Ayers to Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan.

His policies are socialist. “Growing the economy from the bottom up,” as he promises to do, is socialist. A massive federal government that takes everything so that it can provide everything (or claim to) … it couldn’t be any more socialist if Vladimir Lenin himself were on stage regurgitating the same speeches.

(And don't even go there on Obama's tax cut promises, which have as much a chance of happening as folks on the Equator have of seeing snow on Christmas Day.)

Democrats have harped this entire decade about how bad the economy is, even when by every comparative measure, it was as good or better than anything we’d seen in our lifetimes.

Yes, it’s gotten worse these last months, the result of a housing and credit crash that's coated with liberal fingerprints from as far back as the Carter years. I’ve covered that topic in previous blogs, as well, and will skip the details this time around.

Point is, you think the economy is bad now? We’re standing at the precipice of something much, much worse.

Why? Because we refuse to learn the painful lessons of others, as well as our own.

Have we gone mad? Oh yes. Very much so indeed.

(Imported from Oct. 31, 2008)