Behind Enemy Lines

Well, not really. Actually, I was just listening in on them a couple nights ago. If you were wondering why no posts for the last few days, it's because I've been on the road and otherwise occupied. When I'm away from home I'll sometimes dare to switch the channel to MSNBC and witness firsthand what the other side is up to. I can't do this at home very often as the Mrs. will start sputtering and fuming and using language she really ought not to. (You think I'M conservative!) Anyway, safely distant, I tuned in to Chris Matthews' Hardball one night to watch a segment.

His guests were a couple of labor union apologists and, along with Matthews himself, the three of them were cheerleading for Big Labor and predicting that it will play a much larger role in the election this fall than everyone thinks. (Yawn.) What caught my attention, however, was the way they talked about your average working class voters.

During the course of the interview, they all expressed their frustration with the fact that those same voters could not be counted on to understand and vote their own material interests. Those interests, it was obvious to them, were better represented, protected, and advanced by liberalism, Labor, and the Democrat Party. So why did such a large portion, a majority at times, persist in casting their votes otherwise? Careful not to focus too much on the voters themselves, they instead took aim at conservative and Republican elites who, they insisted, lured them away with appeals to some form of bigotry, whether religious, racial, or national, convincing them by that appeal to pull the lever for the GOP.

How perfectly this all captured the reason why so many Americans are turning against liberalism and the Democrats! And how illustrative it was as to why so very few watch this out-of-touch cable news network!

First, as I said, while they were careful not to attack the working class directly, they may as well have. Are working class citizens really so unsophisticated as to not know their own interests? Are they so stupid that they simply have to be lead, if not by cynical conservatives, then by condescending liberals? Might they just want to be in charge of their own lives?

Second, has it never occurred to them that perhaps these same voters do indeed know their own material interests and have concluded that the Republican Party and conservatism better serve them than do the Democrat Party and liberalism championing, as it does, the ever-expanding Nanny State with its unavoidable confiscatory tax schemes?

Finally, has the thought never once crossed their minds that people might actually be more than simplistic getting and spending economic machines? That just maybe they care about other things as well, care even more about them in fact, things like the right to life of the unborn, like the defense of their country, its territory and principles, like the preservation of the founding constitutional order both for themselves and their posterity, like liberty itself.

Nope, probably never crossed their minds.

Where's the remote? "Honey!!!"