THE BENGHAZI LIAR – a.k.a. Hillary Clinton, the self-proclaimed glass ceiling cracker who rode her husband’s coattails to the Senate and beyond, and presumably the next American president.
Yes, there were a number of officials who lied about the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, including President Obama, Susan Rice, and Victoria Nuland. But it was Hillary who went before Congress to testify about her lies and practically pounded on the table as she demanded to know “what difference, at this point, does it make.” Her performance at that hearing makes her THE Benghazi Liar.
One of Clinton’s heroes is Saul Alinsky, the community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals. Some believe that liberals today display great skill in applying Alinsky’s Rules, including the use of deception, to force their agenda on the American public. But Clinton and liberals’ approach to lying seems based more on the 1967 movie, A Guide For The Married Man, starring Walter Matthau.
In the movie, which is a bedroom farce comedy, Matthau’s neighbor gives lessons in a series of vignettes on how to cheat on your wife without getting caught. The best vignette is the one where the adulterer is taught to deny, deny, deny, even if his wife has literally just caught him in bed with another woman. Sounds like the liberal approach.
THE DETERMINED STATIST – a.k.a. The Incidental Economist, a liberal healthcare policy blog whose Editors in Chief are Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt. Although health-care is a local activity, Carroll and Frakt are classic big government supporters who don’t even begin to flinch from the idea that a central authority should control healthcare for 315 million people.
Aaron Carroll’s posts on the blog reek of liberal arrogance. He’s the very model of the arrogant technocrat who finds it perfectly reasonable that decision-making power for all of us should rest in the hands of people like him.
Carroll and Frakt consider themselves to be empirically driven as they “contemplate healthcare with a focus on research, an eye on reform.” Of course, as Carroll and Frakt are predictable, conforming liberals, they ignore the evidence of the last hundred years proving that centrally-directed economies don’t work, so we need not pay too much attention to their nonsense about “evidence.”
In 2013, Carroll and Frakt considered changing the name of the blog and solicited comments from readers. Given their desire to expand the power of the state, an appropriate name for the blog would be “The Determined Statist.” As I have pointed out before, a cute subtitle could be “We Heart Big Government.”
WISE BOY – a.k.a. Ezra Klein, a liberal writer and blogger for the Washington PostVox, who also bears an uncanny resemblance to the esteemed Alfred E. Neuman (as seen in his WaPo photo.)
Actually, Wise Boy’s name comes from the New Republic (see here), which did a fawning profile of Klein in 2013. According to TNR, presidents and at least one Nobel Prize winning economist talk to Wise Boy on a regular basis. The piece also included photos of Wise Boy in several hip poses, although TNR somehow neglected to include a photo of Wise Boy in the obligatory barefoot pose.
Of course, like Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt (see The Determined Statist above), Wise Boy is hardly wise in so far as he fails to understand one of the most fundamental social truths: that market economies always outperform centrally directed economies. Markets marshal and coordinate fragmented and widely-dispersed knowledge in society better than any group of central planners and competition in those markets brings about the greatest efficiency.
Klein’s failure to understand these basic facts leads him to support policies that place 315 million Americans under the thumb of the central authority for almost every activity under the sun, including the one-sixth of the economy that we call healthcare. Wise Boy’s support for an expansion of the central government is support for economic stagnation and eventual decline. Indeed, even Alfred E. Neuman has better sense than this.
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