Most of us aren't perplexed when confronted with the linear relationship between competition and the cost of goods and services.  To the extent you increase the former you experience reductions in the latter.  De-regulate the airline industry, which we did many years ago, and we all enjoy the cheap fares, which means more vacations with family and lower costs for business travel.  In contrast, the auto industry, which breathes heavily under the stress of labor unions (which features an average of $750 in steel per car and $1700 in health care expenses), and you see pandemic failure.

In light of the numerous examples that are obvious to anyone with a room temperature IQ, why would we assume that eliminating competition from health care would benefit the consumer?  The problem, as I've argued in prior columns, is not the absence of competition, it's over-utilization due to the chasm between the consumer and the entity that pays for care.  For a dead-letter remedy, we turn to Katrina Vanden Heuvel, writing in The Nation, who argues for a new definition of bipartisanship, the kind that's been working so well in Iran.

When you peruse her piece you'll notice the implicit disdain for competition, not only in health care, but in the arena of ideas.  When the left descends onto the battlefield of ideas, which is rare these days, it does so with its faithful phalanx of mainstream media shills at its side.  However, there are occasions, such as the left's plan for the government to ingest the health care delivery system--that's 17 percent of our economy--that the citizens perk up and take notice.  Indeed, when people read that the government's plan for a single payor system (or, 'public option'--it's a difference without a distinction, since the two roads lead to the same fiscal mortuary), and that its authors plan to insure everyone without increasing taxes on average wage earners, it just sounds too good to be true.

If you have an interest in learning more about our health care system, its history, costs, complexities, and the inherent value of a reform model based on competition, I commend to you a highly readable book that you can get delivered to your door for under $10.  It's Healthy Competition:  What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free it, by Michael F. Cannon.

But back to this Machiavellian column.  The author notes that Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, said that bipartisanship is possible without Republican votes, quoting him as follows: 

"There will be ideas from both parties, and individuals from both parties, in the final product," he said. "Whether the Republicans decide to vote for things they promoted will be up to them."

If you detect a rhetorical slight of hand in that line, you're onto their game.  The plan will be to institute an ingeniously artful selection process, choosing those uniquely palatable ideas from choice Republicans in the Olympia Snow-Susan Collins vein, incorporate them into the left's oeuvre, run it up the flagpole and excoriate anyone who has the temerity to call it partisan.

It's painfully clear that the left isn't interested in the most efficient, least costly solution, they want it "controlled":

"I would prefer, as would my colleagues at The Nation, to see Congress respond to this country's healthcare crisis by scrapping a failed-for-profit system and replacing it with a comprehensive national health insurance program."

It would be a sign that our media had stirred from their self-imposed slumber if they'd ask these socialists to name one federal program that delivers superb services at a market-competitive cost---just one.  As we all know, it doesn't exist, and they know it as well.  But the thoughtful stewardship of your tax dollar--as well as those of your grand-children--is clearly not paramount in their thinking.  In a rare but illustrative glimpse into the left's soul, we have this closing gem from the author:

"...the cost debate is forcing to the fore much-needed consideration of changes to our dysfunctional and unjust tax structure that will enable us to pay for these healthcare reforms."  [Emphasis added.]  I've quoted the tax figures before, so I'll only note that the top 1 percent of income earners pays 40 percent of federal income taxes, and, middle and lower-income earners under former President Bush paid significantly less in federal taxes than they did under President Clinton.

The simplest solution to our health care conundrum is to provide portable/refundable tax credits, eliminate coverage for routine care (we don't have care insurance for oil changes and tune-ups), rescind the prohibition of cross-state purchasing of insurance, and eliminate employer sponsored coverage, which means each of us shops for that best fits our needs. 

Watch the utilization--and costs--plummet.

The expansion of government and its insidious intrusion into our lives takes many forms.  But the most incrementally seductive is the nanny state that seeks to mold behavior, from our so-called 'public health' initiatives to variable-type road signs.  The former cloak the left's political agenda in the garb of improved health, but since their policy nets are so wide and finely meshed they capture everything from smoking to 'affordable' housing.  And, those obnoxious highway signs warn us about the inclement weather that we're currently driving through, so we're left none the wiser.

But, beyond the fatuousness of their messages, covert and overt, such programs ensure that we're kept on a trajectory of incremental infantalization.  The corollary is the encroachment on our freedoms which happens so slowly we occasionally find ourselves unwittingly embracing the apparent good will implied in much of these initiatives. 

Moreover, trickle-down stupidity is emanating from Washington, as President Obama intends to eliminate risk from our lives.  The Consumer Protection Agency isn't nearly expensive or massive enough so he's going to mint another layer of bureaucracy to protect us from predatory credit card companies and mortgages, as if common sense can be codified like a virtue. 

The functionally obtuse, like evildoers, will always be with us, but in Obama's world, paying for mistakes is hostile to the common good.  His goal, which amounts to a civic exemption from personal responsibility, is a form of pre-emptive cultural penance, because when you eliminate the consequences for imprudent behavior you also remove the potential for lessons learned.

In the metastasizing area of 'public health,' the savage fitness programs hatched at the county level are a kind of nagging parent, telling us to exercise or stop smoking, lest the ill effects of a life of indolence or nicotine addiction puts us in an early grave.  With its myopic goal of decimating two thousand years of learning, the liberal polity also jettisoned the quaint lessons imparted by a life of duty, obligation, and, yes, discipline.  Now, many health insurance plans include a personal trainer to lose weight--they call it 'prevention'--and, despite the fact that one in six fails the program, it marches on moronic denial of reality.

Politics can't abide a vacuum, which is why liberalism is so successful.  Our apparent incapacity to face life's challenges alone left us at the mercy of the left's agenda of replacing personal responsibility with government programs.  And, as the sainted Ronald Reagan astutely observed, the only thing on earth that enjoys immortality, is a government program.

A good test of political traction is when the opposition tries to re-frame the issue.  With health care, President Obama and his liberal foot soldiers such as Mitchell Bard, writing in today's Huffington Post, play the obtuse card, which they do with more grace than intelligence.

Bard mixes churlish rhetoric with a premise that forms his counter-argument for Republicans (and, centrist Democrats, which he is forced to include in his diatribe) who are making credible arguments against the so-called 'public option.'  He makes the following assertion, which would be laughable were it not so thoroughly specious:

...when you argue for a public option, with people being given the chance to keep what they have (with private insurers) or opt for a new public option (especially for those who don't currently have any insurance) that would compete with the private companies, then the Republicans say that the private insurers would be driven out of business because they can't compete with the public plan.  But if the government-run plan would be so bad, why would the private insurers lose to it?

This argument posits an inverted learning curve which amounts to an insult to the common man.  Indeed, the problem of competing with the government's 'public option' has nothing to do with a de facto dual on the battle field of health care insurance, but rather the fact that when it's funded by effectively limitless deficit spending, the feds can set artificially low prices to strangle private carriers into submission.

You might recall that the anti-trust laws were written to mitigate the influence of inadvertent or overt market dominance by economic powerhouses that gobbled up small companies or merged with other giants, and which translates into hegemonic pricing.  Bard and his arch leftists shrug their shoulders and look surprised when this patently uncompetitive aspect of the public option is raised, but since there's no cogent rejoinder it, it perfectly illustrates their true motivations.

It's not about the most optimal way to provide health care services--because a truly competitive model is the most effective way--but rather, it underscores the left's concurrent disdain for capitalism and their infatuation with power.  Indeed, liberals have a deep distrust of markets because, they correctly assert, they are aren't perfect; but, rather than understanding that they do perfectly dovetail with human nature--read incentives and disincentives--and, as such they produce the best outcome for the most number of people, they prefer the universal mediocrity of government-run systems.

But, rather than supporting a plan that expands choice and reduces costs, the left is touting the new CBS/New York Times poll (which Bard quotes), which found that 72 percent of respondents supported a government-sponsored insurance plan.  But, as with most polls, they don't tell the entire story:  it's always a question of the cost and relative quality, and other polls show that when timely access to specialists and testing is compromised, and when life-style exclusions are imposed (no knee replacements for the overweight, which is the case in Great Britain), respondents' support drops significantly.

We all enjoy choosing a DSL carrier for our home computers, vetting car manufacturers to find just the right one for our budgets, and even reading cereal boxes to pick one that appeals to our individual tastes.  Why would we willingly allow the government to design, price, and implement a one-size-fits-all health insurance plan?

Slowly, almost tectonically, the intellectual ice age that froze the elitist left's thinking concerning the relative merits of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, is finally showing signs of a thaw.  One to today's archetypes of liberal thought, Thomas Friedman, made the following assertion in a recent New York Times op-ed concerning the astonishing events unfolding in Iran:

...for real politics to happen you need space...the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades.

Although he injects the typical liberal stretch, arguing that "Mr. Obama's soft power has defused a lot of that [the Iranian anti-Americanism]", the clear implication is that our incipient success in Iraq provided a linear legitimacy for revolt in Iran.

Expert opinion concerning the potential for regime change in Iran varies widely, but the fact that it's even being discussed is obvious evidence of the success of the Bush Doctrine.  For those such as Friedman, and his less restrained cohorts on the left, who have been faithfully agnostic on the idea of Iraq being the beta site for a fledgling form of democracy in the Middle East, his statement borders on intellectual heresy.

The left's caustic dismissal of former President Bush's belief in the universality of democratic principles would be shocking were they not so utterly arrogant, xenophobic, and cynical.  That their motivations were purely political was transparently obvious, but it also made one wonder whether there was any war--or conflict, to use their sanitized term--they would support.  This, of course, in light of the paradoxical fact that it was Democrat presidents who either started or continued every major war in the 20th century.  That, in turn, raises the legitimate question of why they felt that toppling Saddam Hussein and permitting 25 million souls to have a taste of freedom was antithetical to American values.

Now that the oppressed Iranians are revolting against both Ahmadinejad as well as the real titans of totalitarianism in Iran, the mullahs, even inveterate liberals such as Friedman have slapped themselves on the forehead and connected the dots to Iraq.  But for Republicans, Iraq was always the conditional precursor for the potential liberation of Middle Eastern nations, although Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia were seen as the more likely candidates.  It was only the liberals, whose blinkered reading of history--in particular, American history--fails to yield a constructive lesson for dealing with the latest iteration of tyranny, be it Iran or North Korea.

Driving the point home, you may have made the useful comparison between President Obama's speech in Cairo and his remarks concerning the brutality evolving in Iran:  in Egypt he felt no compunction in inserting himself into the inner-workings of Israel--the only democratic nation in the Middle East--and effectively criticizing its leaders, but in his comments concerning Iran--a tyrannical state--he said we can't dictate how its leaders choose to govern, that it's up to the people.

Moreover, it's staggering to ponder his statement that we'll have to wait until the Iranian government completes its investigation into potential election irregularities; as Frank Gaffney recently observed on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, that's akin to Stalin looking into the problem of starvation in Ukraine.

Although it's unlikely that the mullahs will be overthrown, it's incontestable that the specter of freedom in Iraq that got its spark from American ideals--and might--is looming large in the collective psyche of the revolting Iranians.  Were Obama the post-political transnationalist he professes to be, he would take a hard line with the mullahs and support the suffering citizens of Iran.  But, it turns out he's as intellectually conventional--read politically predictable--as any DC liberal.

We probably shouldn't call it a sea change, but it did cause more than a ripple across the otherwise uniformly liberal surface of the LA Times when it issued a warning in today's editorial that spending under President Obama may be getting out of hand.  As you peruse it you'll see it's hardly a call for fiscal austerity and sacrifice, but anytime the likes of the Times calls Obama's version of "pay-go" "practically worthless," it should catch our eye.

Almost unique among all other professional callings, politics is one in which satisfying the pre-requisites should disqualify you from obtaining office.  Beyond having built up a lengthy political resume with the goal of progressively higher office--read more power--one of the more unflattering characteristics it requires is an out-sized ego.  'Political calculation,' which is, of course, something of a redundancy, encourages the most cynical and craven motivations, and the result is a Congress that moves in a kind of perverse unison, blindly voting for more and more spending.

Anyone who studies Congressional spending habits--an admittedly masochistic practice--knows that "pay-go" is nothing more than a political fig leaf for tax increases.  As the Times editorial notes "A true pay-go rule might help curb the worst instincts of lawmakers," but as it's typically enshrined, it merely provides an end-around for extracting higher taxes:  To wit, Obama's favored "pay-go" program exempts 40 percent of the budget that is discretionary spending, which is why when pay-go was law between 1991 and 2002, Congress still increased the budget deficit by $700 billion, since the law is written with exceptions such that Congress--and the president--can easily find ways to ignore it.

Critics have suggested everything from a line-item presidential veto to a Constitutional amendment that requires a balanced budget, but those are either unconstitutional or unworkable.  Moreover, they smack of the kind of rules we institute for adolescents to keep them from unwittingly harming themselves due to the pathological stupidity endemic to that age group.  We would like to think that some version of common sense would suddenly overtake Washington, but as history demonstrates, a lightning strike on a clear day is far more likely.

Part of the problem, it goes without saying, is us.  We've clearly raised stupidity to a kind of virtue in that as our average weight increased our knowledge of economics and history decreased.  The result is that as Obama lobbied earlier this year for so-called stimulus spending at levels that stagger the imagination, many, perhaps most Americans nodded their heads in bovine-like agreement.  Now, with health care 'reform' apparently just around the corner, they're once again heading for the fiscal precipice, lemming-like.

For those of us who find rewards in sacrifice, who see the civic symmetry of a restrained government, and who are convinced that risk was meant to be a part of life in America, it's thoroughly dispiriting to live through all of this.  That this appears to be the narrow edge of a wedge malignly designed to willfully weaken this great Republic, pains us is ways that no words can express.

All of us recall our early tenure in a new employment position, the struggles that ensued as we grappled with the myriad duties while delicately negotiating our way through political mine fields.  If the department we inherited was in disarray we found ourselves shaking our heads and casting a cold eye on our predecessor, while telling our supervisors about the mess he left.

But, if we're completely honest, we also recall that with the passage of time, we became progressively reticent to invoke the ghost of our predecessors because we intuitively--and correctly--sensed it would irritate our bosses.  They understandably have little sympathy for our plight because we were being paid to do a job, so all they wanted was results.

If you've been paying attention to the narrative of Bush blaming emanating from the White House since President Obama's inauguration, you probably sense that it's wearing thin among the electorate.  But when David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, protests that the newly minted administration isn't in fact, blaming Bush, that they're only cautioning the public that the profound nature of the problems will require time, that too has the ring of the querulous employee who still doesn't appreciate the nature of his charge.

But since results are the measure of success, we might ask why unemployment is inching far higher than Obama said it would if Congress approved his so-called stimulus package.  Politicians, for the untutored, have a remarkable knack for moving the goal posts down-field.  Their deft, if conveniently self-serving reply is that the recession is deeper than first believed.

We can segue to foreign policy and discuss the curiously anti-American apology tour Obama began during the campaign and mysteriously continued since his election.  Laced throughout his speeches and press conferences was a latently smug assertion that his administration would bring a deeply divergent approach to the problems we face, with renewed and more artful efforts in diplomacy, effectively supplanting eight years of impotence with unprecedented progress.

Therefore, we should look for Iran to acquiesce to Obama's insistence for a dialog without pre-conditions, and thence proceed to dismantle its nearly completed nuclear program.  Kim Jong Il, the recalcitrant tyrant of Pyongyang, will cave to U.S. led sanctions, and blithely cease its nuclear testing and allow U.N. inspectors to resume their verification program.  Afghanistan and Pakistan, the new theater of regional instability, will succumb to Obama's strategic genius, with the Taliban abandoning its designs for absolute dominance.

What's becoming apparent, even at this early stage in his presidency, is that Obama's Ivy League acumen is no match for the problems America faces.  Pure intelligence, as so many leaders in history have demonstrated, some unwittingly, is a poor proxy for success in civic matters or victory on the battlefield.

It's because Obama seems so utterly behind the comprehension curve, focused as he instinctively is on himself, that conservatives should regroup, co-opt Independents and like-minded conservative Democrats, and make this man a one-term president.

Our understanding of leadership inevitably takes us down the road which intersects with character, principles, and values.  Each American president had a public persona and agenda that reflected some mix of these vital elements, each of which differed in degrees that distinguished their presidencies, as well as highlighted their triumphs and failures.

During the campaign and since his election, we were told that one of the fundamental strengths of Barack Obama is his post-political, transpartisan approach to governing, which would translate into successes, domestically and in foreign affairs.  For two views of that we turn first to Eugene Robinson, writing in today's Washington Post.   

For Robinson, we can distill leadership down to certain key components, beginning with Obama's personal narrative and the way his unique ancestral influences have contributed to his universal appeal.  Coupled with another vital facet of the ideal leader--humility--which, in Robinson's view, was absent in the prior president and which led to America acting in ways "contrary to our ideals," and you have the complete 21st century leader.

What's intriguing about Robinson's analysis is the studied absence of the principles that won two world wars and the Cold War last century, that overcame the blight of slavery and led to a strong and unwavering insistence upon civil rights for all.  Rather, he focuses, rather narrowly, on Obama's adroit, new age view of the world, a place which obligates America to apologize for itself, to meekly assume her place among dozens of other nations, which also demands a revision of history as sweeping as Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust.

There's also an ignorant irony in Robinson's implied argument that Obama set a new tone in his Cairo speech by stating that America is not at war with Islam.  There are too many instances to quote, but this was a theme former President Bush maintained throughout his tenure, and it's the height of hypocrisy that liberals such as Robinson are so ideologically incandescent concerning the Obama-phenomenon that he doesn't have the--yes, humility--to admit the truth.

Another paradoxical truth is how the left lionizes emotion over substance.  Robinson becomes teary-eyed when recounting the audience member in Cairo who shouted "We love you!" at Obama, comparing it with obvious disdain with the shoe-throwing spectacle during President Bush's news conference in Iraq.  So, we have Obama who, as a senator, authored legislation that mandated the removal of all American combat forces by March of 2008, just when the surge was having a positive impact, who, to this day, minimizes the fact that a butcher is no longer installed as chief tyrant of 25 million people, who erroneously called Afghanistan a war of necessity, and who stunned our moral sensibilities by comparing the slaughter of 6 million Jews to the injustices the Palestinians have suffered for the past 60 years.  And, this is the man Robinson touts as a Messiah?

For a bracing antidote, let's have a look at this piece by Patrick Buchanan.  Although there are many issues where he and I would diverge, sometimes dramatically, in general Buchanan's reading of history, which he deftly applies to current challenges, is at once credible and thoughtful.

I'll let his piece speak for itself, but, since we're on the subject of truths, it's irrefutably true that no American president has ever prevailed in a regional or global conflict with a foreign policy that effectively denigrates his own nation.  There's a time and place for apologies and national self-criticism, but they shouldn't be woven into a national narrative thematically expressed in speeches on foreign soil.  

Especially in a time when America's civic resolve is frayed its national security is challenged.

It's a peculiarity of contemporary culture that government spending has achieved a kind of civic cache.  It's probably due to a combination of factors, beginning with a nascent ignorance of how and why this Republic was founded, and including the tacit denial that discipline is a prerequisite for a life of virtue.

Writing in today's Denver Post, David Harsanyi extols that and other endangered virtues by touting the low-tax and fiscal restraint that has made Colorado the envy of a spendthrift nation.  Culture is the mechanism that provides plausibility to public policy, and when a large fiscal footprint for government is viewed as prudent--which is surely the case today--we can be assured capitalism and free enterprise will suffer.  Witness the debacle evolving in California, the only place in America that can make inebriated mariners look positively frugal.

But, it's not limited to the poor souls on the west coast.  Nationwide, the license to expand government seems limitless, and, as the Congressional Budget Office noted this week, the 2009 deficit will likely crest $1.8 trillion--a fourfold increase.  The debate between fiscal stimulus and monetary policy to redress our ailing economy would be a healthy one, but our elected officials have conveniently ducked the question. 

Since inaction is a kind of kryptonite for politicians, they've all excelled at hogging the stage to outspend their colleagues.  Underlying the premise of their fiscal effervescence is an implied understanding that the electorate is incapable of the sacrifice and work necessary to weather an economic downturn.  Those who made imprudent decisions with respect to volatile mortgages, along with businesses from AIG to General Motors, are being 'rescued' from their stupidity, which will only ensure it will resurface again, none the wiser from the experience.

Here in Colorado, one of the last vestiges of civic restraint and discipline, our legislators are showing signs of succumbing to the national addiction to spending.  As reported in yesterday's Colorado Springs Gazette, Democrat Governor Bill Ritter just signed a bill that eliminated a 1991 law that imposed a "6 percent annual growth limit on appropriations to the state's general fund and mandated that money in excess of the 6 percent be automatically diverted to two separate pots of money, the transportation and capital construction funds."

State Sen. John Morse, a Colorado Springs Democrat, touted the legislation, asserting it "simply provides greater flexibility so the state can make wiser investments with existing resources."  [emphasis added].  Well, in case you haven't noticed, the Democrats have redacted the word "tax" from our national lexicon and replaced it with "investment."  Mr. Morse, being an astute student (read politician), is merely parroting President Obama, who is so obviously enamored of government spending.  And, of course "flexibility" is just code for a license to exploit, which is yet another transparently obtuse attempt to frustrate the will of voters.

Of course, it would be more challenging for Democrats locally and nationally to achieve their statist aims if voters didn't telegraph conflicting messages by electing them.  The next two elections are litmus tests that will either impede or abet the Democrats' (and their invertebrate cousins across the aisle) propensity to expand the role of government in our lives.

Let's not stand idly by as they decimate what's left of this great Republic.

It's a curiosity of liberals that in the arena of morality, truth and absolutes are in the eye of the beholder, but in politics they alone have a direct conduit to the truth.  For an example almost guaranteed to cause heartburn, let's have a look at Arrianna Huffington's piece on Dick Cheney, which again demonstrates that the former vice president's truth tour is hitting a nerve with the hard left.

With respect to connections between Iraq/Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda/9/11, we turn to the most credible source available, Stephen F. Hayes' The Connection:  How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.  His work is well researched and provides incontestable evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, which really should surprise no one.  In order to make their arguments nominally plausible, critics are obliged to trot out the argument that Hussein was a secularist and had no interest in al Qaeda's goal of hegemonic Sharia law.

For those willing to look, history provides numerous examples of paradoxical alliances based on the momentary alignment of strategic interests of two otherwise adversarial forces.  The practice of medism in ancient Greece involved wayward Greeks siding with the Persian Empire and it played an adverse role in key battles such as Marathon.  In modern times, we're reminded of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which may seem shocking at first glance.  However, when you realize it was Hitler's attempt to avoid a two-front war--which is what led to Germany's defeat in WWI--it made perfect strategic sense.

Huffington concludes her misinformed paean to political cynicism with a reference to glass houses, noting "that people with a paper trail that proves they ignored the looming threat of al-Qaeda, sanctioned torture, and used lies and manipulated intelligence to get us into a war, shouldn't be so fast to throw stones either."

Well, of course, no one sanctioned torture, and, as I've argued here, there's no evidence that anyone lied to get us into Iraq, but with respect to ignoring "the looming threat of al-Qaeda," she must be referring to former President Clinton's studied avoidance of the threat that developed under his very eyes, abetted, of course, by his insistence on maintaining the bifurcation of intelligence between the FBI and CIA.

Talk about 'glass houses.'

As adults, we all know the power of infatuation.  We can recall swooning over someone of the opposite sex in high school or college, and how overpowering the emotions can be.  But when it comes do doing our jobs we have an intuitive understanding that infatuation has no legitimate role, that, in fact, it can cause serious problems.

Unless, of course, you're a member of the mainstream media charged with covering President Obama.  As Robert J. Samuelson reports in today's Washington Post, media coverage of Obama has ranged from merely fawning to blind infatuation, with a summary indifference to any pretense of maintaining journalistic standards.  Of course, Samuelson's observations and the data he provides in support of them merely confirm what most Americans are already convinced is the case:  Not only are reporters in Obama's thrall, their visceral attraction has compromised their integrity (or, more candidly, further compromised their integrity).

Samuelson also explores the linear relationship between uncritical coverage and approval ratings, which effectively means the media is complicit in distorting Obama's relatively high job approval ratings.  This kind of shameful self-promotion and indifference to professional honesty would be headline news were it not for the fact that these mainstream media mavens also have absolutely no humility, or insight.

Imagine for a moment that a Republican president moved to aggressively decimate federal spending, proposed eliminating entire departments, including the Internal Revenue Service, slashing the federal budget by twenty-five percent.  Every newspaper and news program nationwide would report that doomsday was around the corner and bleeding-hearts in news rooms nationwide would sound like town criers in Pompeii. 

Yet here's Obama, launching the highest level of federal spending in American history, creating deficits for decades to come, and now, proposing to put us on a track to nationalize health care, and all you hear from the media is the sounds of silence.  Pick up any newspaper or watch any evening news show and it's as though the content was faithfully copied off the White House web site or lifted from the Democratic National Committee's talking points.

Reinforcing the perception we all have of them is the fact that they're oblivious to the problem.  Indeed, the studied indifference they bring to their work would earn anyone in a normal job a one-way ticket out the door.  For a more lively take on how the press treats the Obama monarchy, have a look at James Lewis' column in the American Thinker, who notes that "Stalin himself couldn't have wished for a more slobbering press corps."

Of course, we can thank God for the Internet, but the consensual infatuation of the press corps is truly a national embarrassment, and, it does a great disservice to the voters who the media also scorns by its willful refusal to do its job.