Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [4]
The advantage of slogans like these—“working families,” “economic justice,” “unbridled corporate greed,” and “invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education”—is that liberals never have to talk about the actual issues being discussed. You’d never know in the fog of jargon that the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was only asking government employees to start paying 6 percent of their pension contributions (up from zero percent) and 12 percent of their health care insurance (up from six percent).10
Similarly, the pro-abortion movement depends on never ever using the word “abortion”—only cant, such as “choice,” “family planning,” and “reproductive freedom.”
The Left’s robotic speaking style helps explain why liberals have never been able to make a dent in talk radio, despite many tries. Apparently, even the people who get bused in to their rallies can’t be paid to listen to liberals hectoring them on talk radio. Being endlessly lectured by deadly earnest liberals is boring. Ask any Cuban.
Based on their public commentary, it appears that not one liberal has the vaguest idea how the economy imploded. The only thing liberals know is—as President Obama explained—“Republicans drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”11 (It was always a “ditch” and not a “pond” because a pond would have been offensive to Teddy Kennedy.)
A liberal would stare at you slack-jawed if you explained that the federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lending policies on the banks—policies that were attacked by Republicans but ferociously defended by Democrats—and that the banks’ suicidal loans were then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and dispersed throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy, bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and destroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.
In light of the Democrats’ direct role in creating the policies at the heart of the nation’s financial collapse, it’s not surprising that they prefer metaphors to facts. What’s strange is that the image of a car in a ditch is sufficient for the bulk of Democratic voters and commentators to adjudge themselves experts on the economic crisis and refuse to listen to explanations that aren’t images of Bush driving a car into a ditch.
Image is all that matters to the mob. Obama can take in the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, as he did in 2008, but the mob will never believe he is in the pocket of Wall Street bankers. The top-three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top thirty donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse Group.12 In 2008 alone, Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama—nearly $1 million—than any other employer, with the sole exception of the entire University of California, which has 230,000 employees—ten times more than Goldman.13
And still Republicans are called the Party of Wall Street. Bush let Lehman Brothers go under—what else do Republicans have to do?
Liberals latched on to the image of Bush, Cheney, and even Representative Tom DeLay as “oilmen” to blame them for everything from Enron’s collapse to blackouts and high oil prices.