Sunday, August 07, 2005
Dumbing down opposition
There was, by the way, no suggestion that parents who ply their children with junk food -- or simply refuse to deny them what they want -- might be responsible.
Not surprisingly, Mark Steyn jumped ugly on the DNC in this morning's column:
Wow. I noticed my gal had put on a few pounds but I had no idea it was Bush's fault. That sonofabitch chicken hawk. Just for the record, "his cuts to education funding" are cuts only in the sense that Hackett's performance in the Ohio election was a tremendous victory: that's to say, Bush's "cuts to education funding" are in fact an increase of roughly 50 percent in federal education funding.
Some of us wish he had cut education funding. By any rational measure, a good third of public school expenditures are completely wasted. But instead it's skyrocketed. And the idea that Bush is heartlessly pursuing an elite leisure activity denied to millions of American schoolchildren takes a bit of swallowing given that his preferred fitness activity is running. "Running" requires two things: you and ground. Short of buying every schoolkid some John Kerry thousand-dollar electric-yellow buttock-hugging lycra singlet, it's hard to see what there is about "running" that requires increasing federal funding....
The DNC's Bush-is-the-reason-your-kid-is-fat press release is a convenient precis of the party's problem: While he runs rings around them, the Dems lounge about getting flabbier by the week and telling themselves it's all his fault they can barely move except to complain about Bush's Supreme Court nominee's kid being overly cute.
It is astonishing the degree to which the Democrats define themselves in opposition to the Bush administration. Since I subscribe to the New York Review of Books, or perhaps because I gave some money to Howard Dean a couple of years ago, I just get deluged in mail from Democrats looking for more. I can't remember the last time that any of it described in the affirmative what the Democrats would do were they in power, other than that it would not be what the Bush administration has done. The last letter I got from Nancy Pelosi droned on for at least four pages complaining about Bush, without a single solitary sentence describing what the Democrats would do differently.
Of course, even the Democratic elites -- who have made one political error after another -- would not keep raising money this way if it didn't work: the deep pockets (or even the many shallow pockets) in the Democratic Party obviously prefer that the leadership define themselves in opposition to Bush, rather than in some affirmative sense. Is this because they suspect that their own ideas are just not popular enough to win on their own?
5 Comments:
By 
Enlighten-NewJersey, at
Sun Aug 07, 12:51:00 PM:
The whole premise that government is responsible for children being over weight is ridiculous, but worse yet is the implication federal funding for education has been cut during Bush’s time in office.
The federal Department of Education's budget has increased under President Bush by 82.5 percent, growing from $34.9 billion in FY2001 to $63.7 billion in FY2005. The average state receives a level of grant funding that is 51 percent higher than when President Bush took office; no state received an increase less than 35 percent.
By Cardinalpark, at
Sun Aug 07, 05:21:00 PM:
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Aug 07, 05:49:00 PM:
Sigh. I know. Pretty unbelievable if you think about it.
A good friend of mine was raising money for Dean in the fall of 2003. He asked for the contribution, and I stepped up out of loyalty, rather than political conviction. I figured that Dean was pretty beatable, so I wasn't really against helping him get the Democratic nomination.
By Cardinalpark, at
Sun Aug 07, 07:04:00 PM:
I got it. You gave to Dean because he was a bigger loser than Kerry.
Plausible.
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Aug 07, 08:27:00 PM:
Just as, after the fact, it is surprising that there were no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, it is also surprising that I once thought that Dean was a bigger loser than Kerry. Considering, for a moment, what a huge loser Kerry was.
