PrintFebruary 9, 2009
Cooking American Frogs
“We Are All Socialists Now” is a Newsweek article co-authored by Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham. Evan Thomas is the grandson of six-time Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas .
Could it be that socialism is taking a premature victory lap?
One of Norman Thomas’s more memorable quotes is:
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under
the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist
program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without
knowing how it happened.
the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist
program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without
knowing how it happened.
This, in a nutshell has been the progressive left’s blueprint for the “socialization” of America.
Many have compared this strategy to: boiling frogs. The strategy is to start the cooking process by placing the frogs (us) in cold water and slowly turning up the heat up. The complacent frogs enjoy the warmer water at first. By the time the frogs realize what has happened, it is too late. They are cooked.
Elections have consequences. The 2006 election gave the Democrats control of Congress. Both bailouts have occurred with Democrats in control of the legislative branch. Under our Constitution, the congress, not the president, passes laws and writes budgets.
Predictably the Thomas/Meacham article states:
The architect of this new era of big government? History has a sense of humor, for the man who laid the foundations for the world Obama now rules is George W. Bush, who moved to bail out the financial sector last autumn with $700 billion.
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same.
Bush brought the Age of Reagan to a close; now Obama has gone further, reversing Bill Clinton's end of big government. The story, as always, is complicated. Polls show that Americans don't trust government and still don't want big government. They do, however, want what government delivers, like health care and national defense and, now, protections from banking and housing failure. During the roughly three decades since Reagan made big government the enemy and "liberal" an epithet, government did not shrink. It grew. But the economy grew just as fast, so government as a percentage of GDP remained about the same.
Try this for a thought experiment: Could it be that G.W. Bush allowed the Democrats to throw us frogs into the already boiling pot of water? Did Bush knowingly expose the socialist strategy to an overwhelming number of Americans who will realize, in the very near future, that we are the ones being cooked?
If so, this may be a far greater service to his country than having kept us safe from a terrorist attack for the last 7-½ years.
