NO, You Can’t!

This article in this morning’s Washington Post by the extreme-left Kathleen Sibelius inspired today’s post.  The title is “How we can protect our youth from Big Tobacco.”

In my view this title (and the article itself) illustrates two themes that drive and motivate the left: First their desire to use government to protect people from liberty (in this case both the parents and the “youth” themselves,) and second, their vilification of “Big” anything of which they disapprove:  “Big Energy”, “Big Oil”, “Big Pharma”, and so on.

You will note that they never seem to complain about “Big Unions”, “Big Government”, “Big Enviro-whacko-nutjobs”, “Big Education”, or any of the things of which they approve.  (You’ll also notice that with very rare exceptions, conservatives don’t use these kinds of labels—although one of the notable exceptions is Rush Limbaugh’s satirical use of some of these terms.)

Part of the vilification theme relates to the topic of my last post, where I wrote about the left’s innate need to impugn the motives of anyone who has the temerity to disagree with any element of their ideology.  As I concluded there, it’s one thing to disagree with someone, it’s another thing entirely to constantly impugn the motives of those who dissent.

But as bad as that is, it’s still less pernicious than their desire to use government—and especially government at the federal level—to protect people from themselves.  Take, as another example, the First Lady’s “war on obesity”: on the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with her having her own cause—all modern First Ladies have done that.  But on the other hand, at one point she claimed that childhood obesity is a “national security” issue—presumably to justify action at the federal level—which is patently ridiculous. 

And the same theme runs through many of the policies advanced by the left:  the new federal law that mandates “graphic” packaging for cigarettes, the federal ban on incandescent light bulbs, and—of course—the federal mandate that we all must by state-approved health insurance. 

I probably should write another paragraph or two about how the left continually opposes parental rights and has loads of policies that actually damage the family as a basic unit of society, but I’m trying to keep my blood pressure at a reasonable level.

Nevertheless, I’m starting to think that the President got his slogan a bit mixed up: it really should have been “NO, YOU CAN’T.”