Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [5]
In 2006, Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “oilmen” in public office for high oil prices—and hearing Pelosi try to craft a syllogism is like watching Michael Moore attempt ballet. She said, “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” That’s all liberals needed to know. Two “oilmen” in the White House—cause and effect. Strangely, though, a barrel of oil costs the same on the world market for all those other countries that were not being run by “oilmen.”
A few years earlier, she had blamed Bush and DeLay for the blackout throughout the Northeast United States and parts of Canada—presumably because they are both from Texas—saying they had “put the interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American people.”14 In fact, the blackout was due to a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has written more than a dozen columns making hazy connections between Bush and the corrupt and collapsed Enron—“Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of Enron indictments to the Bush family’s loyalty code”15—despite Bush’s having absolutely nothing to do with the company, other than being from Texas. By contrast, Krugman was on Enron’s advisory board while he was writing encomiums to Enron in Fortune magazine.16 Once a year, when I don’t feel like writing a column, I think I’ll reprint Krugman’s column singing Enron’s praises—although, again, in fairness, he was being paid by Enron at the time.
Democrats wouldn’t make such absurd statements if absurdity didn’t seem perfectly logical to their base. This is how Democrats communicate with their constituents: They use mob tactics to rile up the irrational masses. Crowds can’t grasp logic, only images. “These imagelike ideas,” Le Bon says, “are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other.”17
Republicans love Wall Street—oh look, Wall Street just made historic campaign contributions to Obama; he must be really cool.… Republicans hate the poor because they’re trying to block government policies promoting easy mortgages.… Oops, I wonder why the economy just tanked. It’s because Bush drove it into a ditch! Enron collapsed and Paul Krugman says it’s Bush’s fault. Krugman was paid by Enron and Bush wasn’t? Bush lied, kids died! … Oil prices went up under Bush—it’s his fault—he’s an oilman! Oh but then oil prices went down under Bush.… Hey, look over there! A shiny object!
Despite their perennial enthusiasm for revolution and “change” in almost any form, Le Bon says, crowds are wildly conservative when it comes to scientific progress. Want to scare a liberal? Mention nuclear power plants, genetically modified fruits, new pharmaceuticals, food irradiation, or guns with plastic frames. We could probably get a crowd of liberal protesters to scatter just by coming at them with a modern vacuum cleaner. It certainly works on dogs and cats. The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute.
Le Bon says that the mob’s “unconscious horror” of “all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted.” While mobs go about changing the names of institutions and demanding radical changes to society, he says, when it comes to scientific progress, crowds have a “fetish-like respect” for tradition.18
Thus, according to Le Bon, if “democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.” It is lucky “for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.”19
Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined.