The Madness Of Opie

I've gotta say this for the Breck Girl: the, er, man is relentless.

Last Thursday he gave a speech in Chicago that has to be quoted (even third-hand) to be believed:

Edwards spoke for about thirty minutes, beginning by calling poverty a moral issue which he said had become "the cause of my life." He then told a story about a single mom he met in Kansas City recently who worked full-time for $9.50 an hour but often had to choose between putting gas in her car and heating her home at night. "How can this be in today's America?" Edwards says she asked him.

I don't suppose he inquired of this woman how she ended up in such an untenable socioeconomic situation - naw, that'd be "judgmental." Even raising the possibility that she might bear some personal responsibility for her circumstances would be the antithesis of "compassion." I also don't imagine that Opie offered to give her a lift, or arranged for same going forward, or even encouraged her to move to the eastern seaboard, where Uncle Hugo provides heating oil for free.

No, for libs, charity is never personal. And that trait is evidently proportional to how much ill-gotten boodle they're sitting on. Kinda gives you an idea of how much of an abstraction, and PR prop, this woman was to Captain Hair.

Edwards used the anecdote as a chance to refer to the phrase "silence is betrayal" from Dr. Martin Luther King's speech at the Riverside Church protesting the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967. Edwards said he felt that on the issues of poverty, healthcare, and the war in Iraq, remaining silent was indeed a betrayal.

There was the pandering to the black vote - check.

Edwards then ran through the outline of his plan for "ending poverty in America," which is the centerpiece of his Presidential campaign and the subject of a recent book he co-edited. He concluded with a plea for everyone to get involved, slightly misquoting Gandhi by saying "you have to be the change you believe in."

Brain-dead Great Society re-hash - check. Debasing the words of a beloved, respected historical figure for his own crass partisan purposes - check. And then came the following:

"Today the White House said that the President intended to veto a proposed compromise on Iraq. The Congress has met its responsibility by submitting the President a funding bill on Iraq in support of the troops that had a timetable for withdrawal.

"Congress has done the will of the country, the President is trying to thwart the will of the American people by vetoing this bill. What the Congress should do is submit another funding bill with a timetable for withdrawal. If the President vetoes that, they should stand strong and firm and submit another funding bill with a timetable for withdrawal.

"This President has made it absolutely clear that he cannot not be negotiated with and there is no compromise in him, and we should not be compromising anyway. This is not politics. This is about life and death. This is about men and women whose lives are on the line and it's about war. And the American people have given the Congress a mandate and it's really crucial that the Congress stand up to this President and end this war."

The "compromise on Iraq" is slow-motion defunding of the war. Not much of a compromise, in reality. And Opie - who, remember, voted for the Iraq war resolution - would respond by reinserting the mandatory troop withdrawal timetables in the full knowledge that each and every last one of them would be vetoed. Yeah, THERE's a [*ahem*] guy we can do business with.

Whether the "will of the country" is to surrender to al Qaeda and Iran - which is what "ending the war" means - is debatable, although I fear it is all too true. But following the nutroots-pandering course Opie now purports to advocate would be to vastly overplay his party's hand by indellibly leaving Donk fingerprints all over Iraq's corpse and the countless thousands of American corpses that would result from it. It could also generate an unexpected pro-Bush backlash by making it easier for the White House to be seen as defending the troops. Far better to maintain a low profile while still compelling the President to obstruct funding bills spiked with unacceptable anti-war provisions.

It's sheer recklessness, almost a throwing of caution to the wind. Opie's vaunted and balleyhooed "anti-poverty" meme is the same way. If he got everything in that platform enacted into law, federal spending would erupt by an additional trillion smackers, or a 36% increase, in under eight years. Bear in mind that this would be concommitant with complete repeal of the Bush tax cuts, which Edwards also advocates, and no action to address the looming actuarial disaster of already existing entitlements programs.

So, then, an Edwards presidency would be a race to see whether America would be brought to its knees by unopposed Islamist terrorist onslaught or home-grown economic collapse - or, most likely, a combination of both. Given that it's difficult for me, at least, to believe that a snake like Opie really, truly believes in anything other than power, greed, and narcissistic self-aggrandizement, I can only conclude that he knows Hillary Clinton has a death-grip on the '08 Democrat nomination and is taking what is, pragmatically, the best remaining route open to him. Aka the Ned Lamont template taken national.

Still, even if Edwards' raucus neoBolshevism is all just a means to an end, one still has to wonder at the blackness of soul that prompts the, um, man to say something like this:



Three out of every five surveyed Democrats believe that George W. Bush colluded with Osama bin Laden in the 9/11 attacks, and rather than exercise some adult responsibility, show some actual leadership, even muster some modicum of personal decency and the patriotism he insists nobody question, John Edwards essentially says, "Yeah, it could have happened."

Opie will never be more than Hillary's HHS Secretary, if he is willing to endure that massive a pay cut. But his embrace of this poisoned pathology is indicative of its spiralling ascendancy. That is the imminent peril America faces, leavened only by the degree to which We, the People, can manage to revive the Reaganian lessons of the past generation before they have to be re-learned at a prohibitive price.

UPDATE: Here's a choice morsel regarding the hedge fund from which Edwards made the bundle he'd deny everybody else:

The hedge fund that employed John Edwards markedly expanded its subprime lending business while he worked there, becoming a major player in the high-risk mortgage sector Edwards has pilloried in his presidential campaign.

Edwards said yesterday that he was unaware of the push by the firm, Fortress Investment Group, into subprime lending and that he wishes he had asked more questions before taking the job.

He also insists that this inconvenient little detail that HE KNEW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT should not be construed as undermining his "commitment to helping the poor." Other than, you know, the ones that got "screwed" by "predatory lending practices." That, you know, HE ABSOLUTELY WAS NEVER, EVER AWARE OF.

A pity that hypocrisy and incompetence are celebrated in Donk ranks rather than punished, or Opie might actually be in some deep doo-doo.