Pretending to be Centrist
Arnold Schwarzenegger's "new centrism" is, in fact, "old liberalism." I heard him talking about his new universal health care plan, and said that the new four percent tax he's proposing is not a tax even though it isn't, but that the cost of covering uninsured people, which actually is not a tax, is a "hidden tax."
He says he wants to "get things done" by working in the center but he's doing it by doing just what most liberals want to do. There's nothing centrist about it.
It's an old and boring trick, saying that you are a centrist, then picking a side and pretending that you're being sensible and moderate, when you're being no such thing.
It's like what the Democrats have done for the last few years on the whole, pretending to be centrist, in line with "the people," being the "reality-based community" and so on, when no such thing is remotely true.
One laughable (and sad) examples of this was last year in the Senate Intelligence Committee: there was no significant evidence that Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had played a key role in America's decision to go to war, despite having fed us incorrect information, and there was plenty of evidence that it had not. The Committee's professional staff, the CIA, everyone said, nope, it didn't have a key role. As one CIA officer said, "If you're trying to say that the INC is the one that pushed us to go to war because of the WMD reporting, that's wrong."
But Senator Jay Rockefeller came up with his own, unsupported, alternate conclusion: "False information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC)-affiliated sources was used to support key Intelligence Community assessments on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war."
With the help of Republican Senators Hagel and Snowe, Rockefeller's version won the day, prompting a nearly unprecedented reply from Pat Roberts, the Committee's chairman, who noted at the end of the official report: "These conclusions -- and the misconceptions they support -- are a myth." (See p. 130, although the whole section from pages 125 to 157 is enlighteneing.)
Again, I say: "reality-based, my ass."
He says he wants to "get things done" by working in the center but he's doing it by doing just what most liberals want to do. There's nothing centrist about it.
It's an old and boring trick, saying that you are a centrist, then picking a side and pretending that you're being sensible and moderate, when you're being no such thing.
It's like what the Democrats have done for the last few years on the whole, pretending to be centrist, in line with "the people," being the "reality-based community" and so on, when no such thing is remotely true.
One laughable (and sad) examples of this was last year in the Senate Intelligence Committee: there was no significant evidence that Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had played a key role in America's decision to go to war, despite having fed us incorrect information, and there was plenty of evidence that it had not. The Committee's professional staff, the CIA, everyone said, nope, it didn't have a key role. As one CIA officer said, "If you're trying to say that the INC is the one that pushed us to go to war because of the WMD reporting, that's wrong."
But Senator Jay Rockefeller came up with his own, unsupported, alternate conclusion: "False information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC)-affiliated sources was used to support key Intelligence Community assessments on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war."
With the help of Republican Senators Hagel and Snowe, Rockefeller's version won the day, prompting a nearly unprecedented reply from Pat Roberts, the Committee's chairman, who noted at the end of the official report: "These conclusions -- and the misconceptions they support -- are a myth." (See p. 130, although the whole section from pages 125 to 157 is enlighteneing.)
Again, I say: "reality-based, my ass."
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
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