Oops

Karl Rove set up this graph so we'd see just how well Obama's promises about the economy are going. Looks like an oopsie to me. Hope and change - it's what's for dinner.

When arguing with leftists (a fruitless enterprise; I hope you don't engage in it much) it's kind of stunning how often they fall into the false dichotomy of calling various despotic societies "right-wing" and only allowing that the despotic "left-wing" societies were only so because people didn't implement them right. I'd like to clear the idiot cobwebs away with some sanity from Mark Levin's amazing tome, Liberty and Tyranny. This is not a polemicist book; this is not a "fun" book - it is very serious, and this guy is genuinely brilliant. So here's some genius from The Great One:

The Conservative must accept that the Statist does not share his passion for liberty and all the good that flows from it. The Statist does not acknowledge the tremendous benefits to society from the individual pursuits of tens of millions of others. The Statist rejects the Founders' idea of the dignity of the individual, who can flourish through ordered liberty, for one rooted in unpredictability, irrationality and, ultimately, tyranny...

For the Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way. The individual must be dehumanized and his nature delegitimized. Through persuasion, deception and coercion, the individual must be subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state - not family, community, and faith, all of which have the potential of threatening the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state.

The Statist's Utopia can take many forms, and has throughout human history, including monarchism, feudalism, militarism, fascism, communism, national socialism, and economic socialism. They are all of the same species - tyranny. The primary principle around which the Statist organizes can be summed up in a single word - equality.

Equality, as understood by the Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.

The Statist, however, misuses equality to pursue uniform economic and social outcomes. He must continuously enhance his power at the expense of self-government and violate the individual's property rights at the expense of individual liberty, for he believes that through persuasion, deception, and coercion he can tame man's natural state and man's perfection can, therefore, be achieved in Utopia. The Statist must claim the power to make that which is unequal equal and that which is imperfect perfect. This is the hope the Statist offers, if only the individual surrenders himself to the all-powerful state. Only then can the impossible be made possible.