Conservative Cash Crop
2nd July 2011
Reading the New York Times is much like reading Pravda back when the old Soviet Union was in power — you know more or less what the Party line is this week (and ‘this week’ is the important part, because it can change, often dramatically and without warning), so the only unknown quantity is how tortured a sophistry is going to be served up in pursuit thereof.
Timothy Egan is billed by the Times as writing ‘on American politics and life, as seen from the West’, the ‘West’ in question apparently stopping at the Hudson River. His trope this week is the common one of ‘well, these right-wing nuts bitch and moan about government spending but they’re getting X amount from a government program’, as if that were some sort of ‘Aha! Caught you in the depths of hypocrisy, we have!’
Uh, no.
First of all, so long as the Crust tout public schools (and lock poor minority kids into those failing schools by killing school voucher programs) while sending their offspring to Sidwell Friends, it continues one of those speck-in-the-other-guy’s-eye-beam-in-your-own moments. I’ll listen to you bitch about my dirty hands once you’re done with your shower, thanks.
Secondly, an obsession with hypocrisy as the most heinous of sins is a distinctively adolescent trait, one that nominal adults ought to have gotten over lang syne. Guys, grow up; there are people out there who are trying to kill us and destroy our civilization, and I suggest that’s a bit more important than domestic witch-hunts.
And thirdly, so long as those opposing government spending continue to do so no matter where their own money comes from, there’s no hypocrisy involved … unless the opposition were merely pro forma and not intended to be effective, which none of these puling whiners can demonstrate.
The law is the law, and it does not say — nor can it say — that only those who support a program are allowed to take advantage of it. For people who work against a program, and who would kill it if they could (which the Crust is very careful not to allow), to leave the advantages of that program while it exists to the jackals of the Crust is a classic case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder. The fundamental argument against any entitlement program is that it is, in the long term, unsustainable; for right-thinking people to shun the program merely delays its inevitable collapse and encourages proponents to say ‘See? It’s not a bad as you said it would be!’