As the ice starts to crack: What is our cry?

Ever since the insult of the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats have maintained a remarkable discipline to agree on everything.

They all agreed that it was monstrous to impeach Clinton on lying about sex. Then they were outraged by the tie election of 2000, especially as they all agreed that George W. Bush was an idiot.

They all agreed that the election was stolen; then they all agreed that 9/11 was Bush’s fault, failing to connect the dots. They all agreed, after voting for Iraq, that Bush lied and people died on his hands. They all agreed that Bush won the 2004 election by “swiftboating” John Kerry.

They all agreed that Iraq was a disaster and Afghanistan was the right war. They all agreed that Bush was to blame for Hurricane Katrina. They all agreed that Bush was responsible for the Crash of 2008 by letting the banks go wild.

That’s what you get to do when you are the ruling class; the whole point of a ruling class is to define what can be thought and said.

The stronger the ruling class the more it can control the public square, and the more it can freeze out alternative voices.

Of course, the last 20 years do not consist of an ideological ice age, but more like a very long arctic winter with very thick sea ice. There were leads and polynyas in the ice, but you’d better not let your ship get caught when one of them closed up after a change in the political weather.

This is a week when President Obama gave laughable and profoundly unpresidential answers to Fox News Bill O’Reilly at the Super Bowl. A week in which the Congressional Budget Office finally admitted that Obamacare was going to cost the economy 2 million jobs (not really 2 million jobs, just 2 million job equivalents, says the mainstream media). It was also week in which the liberal reporters on the news side of the New York Times washed their dirty linen in public.  Apparently they don’t think much of the editorial page at their newspaper. Who knew?

The experts are telling the Republicans to focus on nothing but jobs and the economy, but I wonder: One of the jobs of any opposition is to fan the spark of partisan indignation into a national brush fire. Republicans, because they are not that interested in the power and perquisites of a ruling class, are not as good as Democrats in such pyromania.

But I think that Republicans will find a deep resonance in the American people by asking the question: How could they do this to the American people? How could they mislead the American people on Obamacare and put out dummy web pages in Oregon? How could they care so little about getting the economy moving? How could they turn the nation over to the banks with QE and ZIRP? How could they bury students in debt? How could they leave four Americans out to die in Benghazi? How could they hold up the Keystone pipeline and its jobs and its lower gas prices on the say-so of a rich California billionaire? How could the IRS target ordinary Americans trying to organize to petition their government according to the law?

What is our cry? That’s what the political operatives Taper and Tadpole kept asking in Disraeli’s Sybil, or the Two Nations. And that is what Rigby needed to know before he could write one of his “slashing articles.”

Here’s what should be our cry: “How Could They?”