No Friends of Reality

Progressives like to think of themselves as belonging to a "reality-based community"... and I concur. Anything "-based" is inherently less than or not the object they aspire to mimic. That precisely describes the problem with Senate Democrats today, as they try to ram through a doomed vote on the Obama tax increases:

Seeking to paint Republicans as guardians of the rich, Senate Democrats are forcing a vote Saturday on extending the Bush tax cuts to only the middle class – a defeat that is inevitable as negotiations between the White House and Republicans for a compromise continues.

But Democrats, already eyeing the 2012 elections, want to use this showdown to weaken a resurgent GOP.

"All those people out there in the Tea Party that are angry about the economics of Washington, they really need to look at this," Sen. Claire McCaskill., D-Mo., said Friday as Democrats took turns pummeling Republicans.

"They need to pull back the curtain and realize that you've got a Republican Party that's not worried about the people in the Tea Party," said McCaskill, who will be on the ballot next year. "They're worried about people that can't decide which home to go to over the Christmas holidays."

It is the height of hilarity that McCaskill and her fellow Democratic senators think that this vote actually helps their image with the Tea Party-affiliated voters that drove so many of their allies out of office just over a month ago. It is cognitive dissonance on a massive scale.

These Democratic Senators—and progressives in general—are under the illusion that by pushing for only the middle class to avoid the Obama tax increases, that they will find sympathy from the American people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

If the Tea Party has done one thing extremely well, it is to espouse the values of fiscal conservatism, and highlighting the importance of the health of the small business sector. While corporations employ millions of Americans and have the lobbying dollars politicians crave, it is small businessmen that employ the majority of Americans. The Tea Party and other fiscal conservatives have done an excellent job of explaining to the American people that when small businessmen aren't hiring, it severely affects the economy and jobless rates.

As a result, the American people are not long susceptible to the worn liberal lie that the Obama tax increases are a sop to "the rich." Americans know that the people that will be hurt the most are the small businessmen who can hire them and drag this economy out of a recession, if politicians will just get out of the way.

Claire McCaskill and liberals like her simply lack the cognitive processing ability to think that way. They are fundamentally unable to understand the simple truth that an ever-expanding government is an impediment to growth and prosperity, or that lower taxes means that employers are able to hire more workers.

On one level I feel sorry for the birth defect of liberalism that prevents them from understanding such simple economic realities. On the other, however, I can feel not pity for a group of would-be elites that has watched big government socialism collapsing economies worldwide, and somehow is delusional enough to think that the solution is more of it.

And so the Democrats persist in a bit of Saturday theater that will make the the public revile them all the more, unable to understand the people that the simply no longer represent in any meaningful way.

They'll have their vote. They'll be defeated. And they'll be utterly unable to understand the contempt with which they will be held for the useless spectacle they've engineered.