Progressive Chameleons

Jim Geraghty of NRO explores “The difficulty of beating an opponent who doesn’t believe in much of anything:”

The legislative branch matters, until it doesn’t. The filibuster matters, until it doesn’t. Yesterday’s positions get dropped if they interfere with today’s needs. The Right is dealing with extremely adaptive foes who, for the most part, have no hesitation about lying to get what they want.

In the Obama-era Left, a promise repeatedly emphasized with passion and vehemence can and will be suddenly dismissed with a shrug. The highest-profile example of this is “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” Even today, long after the promise has been declared the “Lie of the Year,” the White House website has a page labeled “Reality Check” that proclaims the accuracy of the pledge: “Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors. To the contrary, reform will expand your choices, not eliminate them.”

But even before Obamacare was committed to paper, the individual mandate that is now Obama’s signature domestic achievement represented a useful wedge issue in 2008’s Democratic primaries — from the position of opposition. He ran attack ads against Hillary Clinton: “What’s she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t.” Yesterday’s intolerable outrage becomes today’s sensible policy.

Positions change 180 degrees within the blink of an eye. You may recall, during the Obamacare debate, the administration and congressional Democrats insisting, on a stack of Bibles, that the penalty for not having insurance wasn’t a tax. Then, the moment they had to defend it in court, they insisted it was a tax — just part of Congress’s ordinary, constitutionally sound tax-law-writing authority.

When Democratic members of Congress were recently reminded of their promise that the “Affordable Care Act” would “save $2,500 per family,” they responded with awkward silence and then laughter.

Why, it’s almost as if they don’t really believe anything they say.

Read the whole thing, which dovetails well with the cover of the new issue of National Review on Dead Tree:

That cover reminds me a lot of the Photoshop I created in mid-January for one of Steve Green’s weekly articles on the latest Obamacare disasters, I don’t think it was an intentional swipe; Three Card Monte and shell games sum up Obamacare and the Obama administration’s games-playing on a host of issues sadly all too well:

Both pieces of artwork are reminders that “If you sit in on a poker game, and you don’t see a sucker at the table, get up. You’re the sucker.”

As with the leftwing MSM’s increasingly nonchalant admissions of lying to the public, and Wall Street’s increasingly nonchalant flipping the bird to their clients, the nihilistic postmodernism of the 21st century does not bode well for this country’s future.