Barack’s Socialist Mop

The president made a speech the other night before a friendly venue, in which he deployed what he no doubt imagined to be a witty and effective metaphor:

Another way of putting it is when, you know, I’m busy and Nancy [sic] busy with our mop cleaning up somebody else’s mess — we don’t want somebody sitting back saying, “you’re not holding the mop the right way.” Why don’t you grab a mop, why don’t you help clean up. “You’re not mopping fast enough. That’s a socialist mop.” Grab a mop — let’s get to work.

The left loves it, of course:

As a counter to the brain-dead, disingenuous, hypocritical, and often baseless criticism from the people whose messes he is cleaning, it doesn’t get any better than this.

“It” being the phrase “grab a mop.” In fact, they like it so much that they’ve used it as the basis for a political ad.

As an aside, I find it amusing that it is viewed by one of his acolytes as “some of the most partisan words I’ve ever heard from him.” She must have missed the entire campaign last year and most of the continuing campaign speeches he’s given since taking the oath of office nine months ago. Wasn’t she as thrilled when he said that the people who had “created the mess” should “just stop talking“? Or when he said that “he won“?

As is often the case, and particularly with those enthralled and leg entingled by whatever the president says, they like the way his words sound and make them feel, sans any critical analysis, such a thing not being their forte.

But do they really want to use this metaphor? Have they no fear whatsoever that it could backfire on them? In order to have no such fear, of course, you have to buy in to the underlying worldview — that this entire mess really is the exclusive responsibility of those evil Rethuglikkkans who ran the country for the past eight years. You have to willfully deny the reality that the Congress was run by Democrats for the last two of those years. You have to completely ignore the role played by Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and Chuck Schumer.

And most importantly, you have to believe that the voters share your warped worldview. The latter was not necessarily a bad assumption in the olden days, when it was reinforced by the legacy media, but the White House’s quagmire in its war on Fox News and Andrew Breitbart’s recent taking of ACORN’s scalp might indicate that it’s harder to keep people uninformed than it used to be.

For those of us in the real “reality-based” community, as the “progressives” fantasize themselves, let’s actually think about it.

I’m guessing, based on his biography, that the president doesn’t actually have any real-world experience with janitorial services, other than perhaps writing a check for them. He seems to have been pretty much coddled from childhood; he wouldn’t necessarily know which end of a mop to hold. But speaking as someone who worked in a service station in high school, in which one of the duties was to clean the floor of grease and brake fluid at the end of the shift, and later as a househusband under the direction of a diligent clean-floor czar, I know my mops and mopping.

And you know what? The mopping technique really does matter. The kind of mop and cleaning solution you use really does matter. I had people criticize my mopping as a kid, as a station attendant, and as an adult. My response was not to say, “I didn’t make this mess. Stop criticizing me, and grab a mop.” If I had said that, I suspect that I’d still be mopping. Instead, I listened, learned, and got the floor clean. But I’m afraid that this president isn’t really all that much into listening or cleaning floors. He seems to be more into using what he imagines is the right mop, his way. And he’ll apparently brook no criticism.

But Barack and Nancy (and Harry) don’t seem to know much about floor cleaning. They seem better at exacerbating messes than cleaning them up. When the president took power in January, his very first act was not to grab an effective cleaning solution. Instead, he pulled an old one off the shelves that the Democrats had been wanting to use for years, even though it has always proven ineffective against the type of mess that we were in (the mess having been caused by it in the first place). In too much of a rush to read the label on the bottle (generously assuming that the label was accurate), they dumped the whole thing into the bucket without diluting it. Then, in their rush to use it, they tripped over the bucket and spilled it all over.

They got out their harsh (yes) socialist mop and started to use it to “spread the wealth around,” doing nothing but redistributing the mess, shoving it all over the floor into a thin, egalitarian smear and actually increasing the “mess” (unemployment) to almost ten percent, when they claimed that the label that they didn’t have time to read would keep it down to eight.

And the real problem is that it turns out that the floor didn’t need mopping at all. This particular floor is self-cleaning by nature, if you don’t gum up its works with toxic cleaning solutions and overscrubbing.

So my rejoinder to Barack and Nancy’s hysterical call to “grab a mop” is to calm down and put down the mops. Stand aside and let someone who actually understands this kind of cleaning problem fix the mess. Next November, we’ll get our chance to make sure they do.