Government Goes For The Easy Answer, Not The Hard Solution

Simple, Not Easy

May 29, 2013 by Ben Crystal 

PHOTOS.COM

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before. I call it “the politics of ease.” It’s the liberal tendency to blame every hitch in society’s collective gallop on someone or something other than the actual offender. Guns cause crime. Freedom causes terrorism. Wealthy people cause poverty. Your SUV causes bad weather. Junk food causes Michael Moore’s waistline. And criticizing those who hold the aforementioned nonsense to be true is racist.

With the accumulated wisdom of the human tribe available to anyone with even a spark of curiosity, it’s hard to imagine that anyone beyond the creepiest of the tinfoil-behatted basement dwellers actually still believes the above nonsense. Yet such addled creatures walk among us in numbers large enough to populate an entire “Occupy” riot with enough left over to fill to the local sex offender registries with the sort of people you wouldn’t allow within miles of your children.

Following the Newtown, Conn., massacre, liberals — goaded by their Democrat shepherds — decried gun ownership, the AR-15 rifle and even the National Rifle Association for their purportedly central role in the horror and demanded draconian prophylactic infringements on the Bill of Rights. Oddly, the millions of legal gun owners nationwide were uninvolved in Newtown, the AR-15 in my gun safe had nothing to do with it, and there were no Wayne LaPierre sightings in the Newtown area that terrible day, but no matter. Passing useless laws (like the ones Connecticut already had), restricting law-abiding Americans’ rights and blaming unrelated third parties is counterproductive or worse; but it is dramatically easier.  After all, blaming guns for the violence that has turned cities like Chicago and Detroit into gladiator arenas is unlikely to cost the Democratic Party machines the support of the gladiators. That’s dishonest, and dishonesty is easy.

As the civilized world reeled in horror at the savage brutality of the islamofascist murder of British soldier Lee Rigby, our leftward-leaning friends raced out to reassure us that Muslims present no danger.  Even as the Woolwich murder shook our collective sense of security, the blessed socialist paradise of Sweden was rocked by anti-integration riots perpetrated not by xenophobic red-State types (they don’t have those in Sweden) nor even racist Republicans, but Muslim immigrants. President Barack Obama, who bizarrely declared to the United Nations in the wake of the Benghazi, Libya, massacre that “the future does not belong to those who insult the prophet of Islam,” delivered a speech late last week that condemned terror without acknowledging the religious identity proudly crowed by both the Woolwich butchers and the Stockholm savages. Not only did Obama take pains to avoid insulting “the prophet of Islam” (presuming the prophet of Islam gives a whit about Obama’s mewling), but he went in the opposite direction. “But this war, like all wars, must end… the core of al-Qaida… is on a path to defeat.” I’m guessing the war to which he referred is the war on global terrorism, which will end only after the last terrorist’s passage is booked to the afterlife. And if al-Qaida’s core is on the path to defeat, that path must be as long as the Quran, and it must detour from Benghazi to Boston and all points in between. Following the Boston Marathon attacks, the Democratic Party’s hate machine offered naked wishes that the perpetrators would be “white Americans.”

I’m not suggesting Islam and terrorism share a direct causal relationship. I am noting liberals tend to worry more about hurting the delicate feelings of Tawhal, Dariq and Hassan than they do about reporting the identity and motivation of those who seek to murder Tom, Dick and Harry. We live in a nation that not only tolerates the blatant religious hatred proclaimed by islamofascists like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Nation of Islam, but offers those hatemongers Constitutional protections. Moreover, the President of the United States is almost as worried about slighting Muhammad’s minions as he is about straightening out his putting stroke. That’s ignorance, and ignorance is easy.

The list of similar hypocrisies goes on. Liberals show an odd preoccupation with despising rich people — at least, rich people who don’t host fundraisers for Obama. To the left, wealth is a zero-sum concept. If, say, George Soros has billions of dollars, then someone in Compton, Calif., must be living in squalor. Soros does have billions of dollars, and there’s no shortage of Comptonian squalor. But the latter has nothing to do with the former. And villainizing the former isn’t going to move the latter to Bel Air.  here’s nothing wrong with envying those who are better off, as long as that envy inspires you to improve your surroundings and not degrade theirs. That’s greed, and greed is easy.

I recently ran across an ABC News report about a 9-year-old girl named Hannah Robertson. Hannah interrupted the annual McDonald’s shareholders’ meeting to “confront” CEO Don Thompson and accuse him of everything except driving past playgrounds and offering Happy Meals to little kids. The story did everything but favorably compare little Hannah to Joan of Arc. Yet the report omits a central fact: McDonald’s didn’t invade Hannah’s home; Hannah invaded McDonald’s. Moreover, McDonald’s doesn’t force-feed anyone. There’s no doubt that obesity is a health issue in today’s America. Our diets are, to put a fine point on it, as crappy as our fitness regimes. But we’re the couch potatoes who eat Big Macs while watching the Oprah Winfrey Network. Blaming our flabby midsections on the Chicken McNuggets and large fries we ate for lunch misses the fact that we ate the McNuggets; the McNuggets didn’t eat us. That’s denial, and denial is easy.

When an oversized semi hit a bridge in Washington, the bridge didn’t collapse because the GOP hates infrastructure spending. When Congressman Darrell Issa interrogated Attorney General Eric Holder, he wasn’t acting out of bigotry; he was expressing outrage over Holder’s arrogant mendacity. When the Internal Revenue Service deliberately targeted citizens over politics, the victims didn’t bring the harassment on themselves. Those may be easier explanations for the low-information set to swallow, but they’re not true.

It’s human nature to seek the simplest answers. Indeed, Occam’s razor, a scientifically fundamental axiom, holds that the simplest explanations are likely the correct ones. So perhaps we should forgive our liberal friends for their folly. But the explanations that they consider simple are nothing of the sort. In order to keep their herds in check, the left has conducted logical contortions worthy of Cirque Du Soleil. The idea that the guns in my gun safe are secretly biding their time for the right moment to shoot up a liquor store is sillier than blaming bad weather on a theory that has required multiple name changes in fewer than 40 years; yet both those inanities are taken as gospel by liberals from Haight-Ashbury to the Hamptons.

The solutions to most of the problems we face as a Nation are, in fact, quite simple. Blame criminals for crime. Blame terrorists for terrorism. Blame the culture of envy for the rise of poverty. Blame the responsible parties for the problems they create. That might not be easy, but it is simple.