Ann Coulter has a new book: Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, and is currently making the rounds of various talk shows. A quick trip through YouTube turns up a nice sample.

I don’t have a catchy word to describe my political point of view, and I’ve never felt I needed one, but I would probably consider myself more liberal than conservative as the terms are commonly employed. More than anything else, I abhor the reckless efforts by people such as Coulter to paint her political opponents with a broad brush. It may be fair to label certain political points of view as “liberal”, but it is not fair to accuse all “”liberals” of using victimhood as a tool. Is it fair to accuse some of playing politics with victimhood? Yes. Is it possible to find examples of that all across the political spectrum? Certainly.

Our current president is making great hay with the vicimhood of the working poor and the squeezed middle class. He got a lot of votes from people who believe that the economic system treats them unfairly. Are a large number of these people simply lazy? For sure. They would love nothing better than to have the government provide them with a level of comfort that they never have to earn. But - are there real victims of economics? Certainly. Are their issues and concerns real? Just as certainly.

Our previous president built an eight year mountain of debt and a relentless assault on liberty by declaring this country victims of a scraggly group of haters. Was he playing the victim card in order to win votes and pursue his agenda? He most certainly was.

So, it cuts both ways.

In listening to Coulter in her interviews, I’ve begun to notice that she’s not quite as erudite as she perhaps thinks she is. She believes that the word “prescient” has three syllables, not two. She believes that it’s important to separate the wheat from the “chafe”. She believes that doing nothing to rebuild the economy is quite correct because the market will sort things out and decide who are the winners and losers.

Where was this sort of commentary when it was the Bush administration providing the stimulus? What is Coulter’s response to the assertion from liberals as well as conservatives that the world banking system teeters on the brink of collapse? Is it Coulter’s view that this, too, should be shaken out by the market? Does she not recognize that the unfettered market is what caused the problem in the first place?

When will Coulter be writing her book: “Greed: How Corporate Pigs Have Nearly Destroyed The World“?

Maybe I should write that book. It seems somewhat unlikely that Coulter will.

So let’s see: during Bush’s eight years in office we started two wars, blew up the deficit and nearly ground capitalism to a halt. During much of that time he had a willing Congress at his disposal.

Blame the liberals?

My question is this: since Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are both single and seem not to be attracting much interest from the opposite sex, doesn’t it make perfect sense for them to get together? It doesn’t really matter if they aren’t sexually attracted to each other; they have so much else in common that it probably wouldn’t even be an issue. They’d be too busy bashing liberals to even have the time for sex anyway.

But give Coulter credit: she is a media firebrand. She dutifully writes outrageous books, goes on the liberal media, takes her bashing in good spirit and cashes her royalty checks. (No doubt she also receives hefty advances.) Coulter is an industry unto herself.

I do think it’s time to fire back, though. I do think it’s time we figured out who we can elevate as a liberal counterweight to Coulter’s right wing hate mongering.

The problem is, I’m not much of a fan of hate-mongering from either side of the spectrum. I think it’s a senseless waste of human brain power to engage in the sort of sweeping judgments that play well to certain crowds while stalling actual progress.

So if I was to attempt to become such a counterweight, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much bashing in my book, well at least not ideological bashing. But I would actually find it useful and entertaining to write a book bashing the bashers.

Now there’s an idea…

As frightening a prospect as it is to envision Rush Limbaugh naked, it is equally fascinating. The de facto leader of modern conservatism, Limbaugh has wasted no time taking on the new President. To Limbaugh, Obama is a recipient of some sort of affirmative action agenda, and is surely a socialist, albeit perhaps in the European model moreso than the Soviet model.

And now that the Democratic party has chosen to accept this challenge, and to elevate Limbaugh to the actual position of Republican Party leader, Limbaugh is slowly but surely unraveling.

Soon he will be completely naked.

First, he chastened the new *elected* Republican Party leader, Michael Steele, for daring to challenge Limbaugh’s supremacy; Steele, an African-American and the first ever to hold this position, quickly retreated in a fusillade of apologia. It was unseemly and embarrassing for all concerned.

Now comes the cover of Newsweek magazine with the word “ENOUGH” seemingly taped across Limbaugh’s mouth. The article is written by former Bush43 speech writer David Frum, who is in the process of being lambasted from one “conservtaive” talk show to another. He is receiving a ton of email inviting him to get out of the party.

So, just as capitalism is in the process of eating itself, so is the Republican party and what is left of the “conservative movement” championed by Goldwater and Reagan. A movement that began as moderation defined as extremism has evolved into extremism defined as moderation, and the public is buying this version about as much as they bought the original version: with a heaping dose of skepticism.

It can very rightly be argued that the nation was due for a conservative movement 30 years ago, as a brake against the excesses of the post-war liberal society which had grown in the U.S. to dangerous proportions, affecting quality of life across the board. Too much of the peoples’ money went to things that had little or nothing to do with preserving prosperity.

As we gaze back on the wreckage of Bush43’s eight years in office, we see what happened to that movement. It replaced one form of big government with another, only more insidious. In place of a big government which considered war to be a last resort, we got big government that ran toward every frontier with guns ready to fire, and we stretched our forces too thin, disrupted the peaceful lives of millions of men and women, many of who had already served their time and were brought back because they were still considered part of the “ready reserve”. We destroyed our international prestige among friends and foes alike.  We replaced permissive government with ruthlessly doctrinaire government, telling people how to live and how not to live in ways that once would have been considered distinctly ‘un-American.’ We slashed taxes but kept such pressure on wages, through policies which made it much easier to import cheap labor and export actual work, that incomes remained flat through the entire period, even as costs went up.

In other words, it turns out that it wasn’t “liberalism” that was the problem, it was being in charge for too long that was the problem. We need turnover in order to take a fresh look at things and see how well ideas have been working. Instead, Limbaugh would have us believe that the ideas are fine, it is we who are wrong. LImbaugh insists that we want cradle-to-grave security and comfort, and we want all of it provided for us, and we will destroy the country unless we change our ways.

And you know what? Once, there was a grain of truth to that point. Once, this truly was a “welfare society”, with the expectation that government spending and services would continue to expand because we were aflluent enough to afford it. As economic growth slowed, we could afford less, and we had to make choices.  Republicans and especially Conservatives seized on this circumstance to push a “smaller government” agenda, much of which was achieved from 1980 forward.

The problem now is that “small government” turned into “lax regulation” and the pendulum swung way, way too far. The extremist conservative view, that the best government is the least government, has been shown to be a dangerous lie, in a way that “liberalism” never was. All of the things that conservatism was deigned to cure, even things that never happened, are now happening under “conservatism.”

Limbaugh is trying to make the case that conservatism did not go far enough, or was interfered with or poorly executed. He has no proof of this, no previous model to compare to. It’s all theory, and it’s all designed to accomplish one thing: keep his name front and center.

Which is why it will be impossible to miss his public unraveling. He will turn it into the most dramatic death scene ever, worthy of comparison to the most moving of operas.

And the lesson will be, as it always is: Evolve Or Die.

Mr. Will,

As an avowed social liberal, I consider you to be an important voice, not because we see things the same way but because we don’t. I am a keen admirer of your intellect, as I possess a sharp intellect as well. I am nowhere near as educated nor as well read as you, and I am constantly being educated and enlightened by following your train of thought.

Having said that, I have become disturbed with your recent inability to complete a thought. Your columns will start off on a sharp tack, then veer this way and that, then sort of slow to a stop. No coherent development, no walloping final point.

I’ve noticed a tendency amongst social conservatives such as yourself to assume the burden of defending capitalism. Although I understand that social conservatives fancy themselves fiscal conservatives, what I see is an unbridled defense of free enterprise. In other words, Convervative seems to equate to Capitalist. Thus, you collectively have demonstrated that you feel a duty to represent free enterprise in its best possible light in this, perhaps the worst of times.

What I see is that you have undertaken an impossible task, and will likely be undone by it.

Your Sunday column in the Washington Post today clearly calls for government to get out of the way and allow business and industry to cast aside workers, and to greatly reduce the income for those they keep, in order to regain efficiency.

If you are as analytical and skeptical as I believe you are, then you will at some point question whether or not free enterprise capitalism is the best we as humans can do. You will ask if the pain and misery which batters untold millions during economic slowdowns is an acceptable price for economic renewal.

You will ask yourself if our labor and material resources are really being used as wisely as possible. And while you are wondering that, you will ask yourself why this economic system has no use for 9 percent of its potential labor force which is ready and willing to show up for work, if asked. You will, if honest, acknowledge that you consider it acceptable to allow this number to grow.

You will ask yourself why the essential elements of human life: food, fuel, shelter, health care, medicine, are also the most expensive, and thus out of reach to some extent for more than a quarter of the population of this country.

You will ask yourself why more than two thirds of all workers are one or two paychecks away from poverty.

I will ask you this: Would you consider it elitist to defend policies which inflict pain that you will never have to endure? Would that not be a perfect definition of the term?

Imagine this: ABC fires you. WashPost/Newsweek fires you. Your syndicate drops you. Nobody will pay you a penny to publish a word you say.

Your savings lose all of their value. Your home plummets in price and you can’t profit from selling it, but you can’t afford to keep it.

You have to walk away.

Far-fetched, of course. There is a certain momentum to your life that only a sex scandal could derail. But what I want you to do is imagine it. The question is: what would you do next?

Now, imagine a 50-something factory worker, making perhaps $50,000 a year, with perhaps 25 years toward a nice pension. Then his company goes broke and he is out of a job. The pension fund is also broke and therefore worthless. He can’t find anything like the work he used to do. He finds himself in late working life, with no education which has any value in the job market, and no chance whatsoever to make even half of what he once earned.

My question for you is: What did he do wrong?

In today’s column, “Socialism? It’s Already Here” George Will writes

Sugar import quotas cost the American people approximately $2 billion a year, but that sum is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, hidden increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do notice and are grateful to the government that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few.

You should read the entire column, and when you do you will understand that Will is not advocating socialism, and the sort of practices which he refers to as socialism are usually ill conceived and poorly executed. True socialism would involve a true realignment of the ownership of the means of production.

Which brings me to this quote:

Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government.

We’ll assume that Will meant “rightly” as a pun, not as a definition of correctness. What I want to address are two points Will makes above: 1) redistribution of wealth, based on need, slows wealth creation; 2) the wealth belongs to those who created it.

It’s hard not to consider these positions to be intellectually dishonest, or else they don’t make sense alone or together. Will asserts flatly that optimum wealth creation can only occur when markets are completely free. This is every bit as utopian as the most pie in the sky collectivist dream. Will ignores the social decay which sets in when capital only flows where it “grows best”, meaning quickest, meaning it flows toward the best “opportunities.”

In this consumer-crazy system in which we live today and which is in the process of melting down, “opportunities” are represented by potential profits, which is determined by the popularity of something versus its cost. So, the free flow of capital would lead it to prefer catchy gadgets which can be made cheaply.

We convince ourselves that these gadgets in some way improve our lot in life, and never ask some basic questions, such as: what were the labor conditions under which this product was made? And, could the productive capacity and raw materials which went into making this gadget have served a better purpose?

These are important questions when we are concerned with the health of a civilization, yet they are questions that capitalism never asks. Only government has, and only occasionally, managed to ask questions of capitalism that it would never ask of itself. Will would have us believe that the market settles all things for the best. He cannot possibly, actually believe that.

Second, he states that the wealth belongs to those who created it. He will never be more right, and in this case I do mean “correct.” Wealth belongs to those who create it: the workers. Those who manage the broader aspects of the business are also workers and deserve fair wages, but no human’s work is worth 100,000 times more than the work of another human. And if it were somehow so, it would reveal deeply disturbing truths about the relative capabilities of humans as a species.

Or, to put it another way: if the current system is the best we can do, we aren’t very bright.
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George Will is a political opinion columnist for the Washington Post and a commentator on ABC’s Sunday talk show, This Week With George Stephanopoulos. His political stance is that of a social and fiscal conservative, and he is not above criticizing the Republican Party when the mood strikes. His tone is intellectual, and he expects his audience to keep up.

He is the man who famously asked presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in 1988, “What is your position on the policies of the G-7 and of the Louvre Accord?” Will was referring to the Group Of 7 Industrialized Nations, and a recent agreement they had struck to stabilize currency markets. What Will was really doing was to play “Gotcha!” with Jackson, to demonstrate that perhaps the most visible black presidential candidate in the nation’s history was not exactly up to the task, not as “qualified” as Jackson impassionedly assured voters he was.

In today’s column Will writes this:

Still, the Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain’s often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds. Conservatives can take some solace from the fact that four years after Goldwater won just 38.5 percent of the popular vote, a Republican president was elected.

The conservative ascendancy that was achieved in 1980 reflected a broad consensus favoring government more robust abroad and less ambitious at home — roughly the reverse of Tuesday’s consensus. But conservatives should note what their current condition demonstrates: Opinion is shiftable sand. It can be shifted, as Goldwater understood, by ideas, and by the other party overreaching, which the heavily Democratic Congress elected in 1964 promptly did.

Will is fully aware that the unified Democratic government has stated its clear intentions to seek compromise, and not “over-reach.” He has also been known in the past to say that Americans “prefer divided government.” He seems to be staking an early claim that conservatism is in nothing more than a short time-out, and will no doubt rebound within 4 years. I expect that he will soon write a column reminding us of the 1994 bloodbath in president Clinton’s first mid-term election.

As the Obama presidency unfolds. we will keep an eye on the opinions of this influential conservative bellwether. Without question, the talk-radio wing of the conservative movement will spend the next four years in some state of hysteria; Will represents the calmer, more thoughtful tone of a man who has seen the comings and goings in national politics from the inside, for decades. It will be opinions such as his which will carry the most weight with the “other side.”

At this moment in time, I don’t see two sides. I see the “transformational presidency” already planning to avoid making Will’s hypothesis come true, by playing as nice with the conservative wing as possible.

A profoundly troubling sign, to say the least.