MR. DRISCOLL:  This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and we’re talking with Monica Crowley of Fox News, and the author of What the (Bleep) Just Happened Again, which is now out in paperback and Kindle editions, with a new forward on the 2012 presidential election.

And Monica, thank you for stopping by today.

MS. CROWLEY:  Great to be here, Ed.  Thank you.

MR. DRISCOLL:  Monica, in November of 2010, after California bucked a trend towards conservative and center-right candidates in the mid-term elections, Dennis Prager said, “Okay riddle fans, here’s a toughie:  what’s the difference between California voters and the passengers on the Titanic?  The passengers on the Titanic didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.”

In November of 2012, not just California, but a majority of the American public knowingly voted to hit the iceberg.

To borrow from the title of the new edition of your book, Monica, What the Bleep Just Happened — Again?!

MS. CROWLEY:  Yes!  We added the word “again” to the title for the paperback edition.  What the (Bleep) Just Happened … Again?  I have been grappling with this question since that night in November when we saw that the race had been called, once again, for Barack Obama, and he was reelected.

And as I write in the new foreword to the book, the new preface, I really believe that Obama’s objective from the beginning — and it’s not just him, it has been the objective of the far left for a very long time — which is to change the very nature of America.  America, the gift that the Founding Fathers gave to us and we just celebrated Presidents’ Day, where we celebrate two of our greatest presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — the founders gave us a nation that was exceptional because it was based on an idea.  And the idea, instead of being based on the ambitions of men, the idea was centered on the concept of limited government and individual freedom.

And those two things are deeply interrelated.  You can’t really have tremendous individual freedom when you have a big government.  The idea of the last few decades has been to try to transform that fundamental Americaness, that great American idea that has given us tremendous prosperity and tremendous power, not just to — in order to change America into a great nation, but made America into a good nation, the far left has been on this mission to strip away both of those elements:  the limited government part and the individual liberty part.

And for many years they had success in putting up these big, huge entitlement pillars, dependency pillars, pillars that would change the way the government related to the individual, big redistributionist pillars like Social Security and like Medicare, like Medicaid.  But they were never able to sort of put the whole thing together and do a dramatic socialist overhaul of the country until they found their perfect marriage of man and mission in Barack Obama.

And so from the beginning, and from day one of his first term, Obama and the far left set out to change the very nature of America, to change our character.  And by that I mean strip away the self-reliance that underpins limited government and individual freedom.  Strip that away and replace it with massive dependency; dependency on government.

So over the last four years, what they have done, and they have largely succeeded, is change the balance between the government sector and the private sector, change the relationship between the government and the individual, and created and expanded this massive dependency society.

And what happens, Ed, when you take the sting out of a bad economy by supporting people and getting them dependent on government, when you take the sting out of high unemployment, you take the sting out of not having health insurance because, here, we’re going to give you health insurance or we’re going to cover you in some way, then you end up getting reelected.  You don’t get punished the way people like Jimmy Carter had gotten punished for a bad economy in the past.  You don’t get punished, you get rewarded.

So to answer your question — this is a long way of answering the question, but I think it’s necessary to try to flesh out what we’re talking about — when you take the sting out of a bad economy by creating a massive and evergrowing dependency culture, then you get rewarded for that.  And when people realize that they can vote themselves benefits and all kinds of things, material things, money out of the public treasury, they will do it and they will continue to do it, and it will grow on itself.

And so here we are.  And although it really pains me to say this Ed, and I don’t think it’s all lost, but I do think Obama and the far left have had enormous success in changing the character of this country.