Smart Liberals are worried

Smart liberals are worried about how the Health Care Reform bill got passed.

Leftists, on the other hand, aren't worried. Either they're not smart enough to see the implications, or they're arrogant enough to believe only they have what it takes to actually pull it off.

In a comment I sent to the North Central Prager Listeners' Group, I cited Bookworm Room (a blog recently cited by Rush Limbaugh, triggering a Rushalanche).

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In Robert Bolt's play, "A Man for All Seasons", Thomas More is adamant about granting the Devil the benefit of the protections under the law:

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

The Congress has been throwing open locked doors and paving roads for the sake of expediency. The problem is, roads and doorways will let people pass both ways.

Smart liberals are worried about what just took place

The Atlantic is no hotbed of conservatism, but at least one Atlantic writer is smart enough to understand what yesterday’s vote meant:

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator. But it’s also pretty worrying. Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don’t find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, Social Security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn’t–if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission–then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.

Oh, wait–suddenly it doesn’t seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it? Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free “Screw You” vote to balance out what the Democrats just did.

If the GOP takes the legislative innovations of the Democrats and decides to use them, please don’t complain that it’s not fair. Someone could get seriously hurt, laughing that hard.

But I hope they don’t. What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot boxand rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent–I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama’s opponent says. But because politicians shouldn’t feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.

Read the whole thing here.

Judging by the celebratory tone of facebook messages written by my liberal friends, most of them aren’t as smart as Megan McArdle — or, more likely, they don’t give a flying whatzit about constitutional liberties or the true meaning of representative democracy.