Permanent Crisis Mode

via Instapundit: At Transterrestrial Musings, a discussion that deals with the scary but at this point pretty obvious idea that in order for Obama and his cronies to succeed, America must first fail. That is, the America that most of us know and love. The America that was built with blood and toil by our anscestors, the America that has symbolized freedom and properity and hope for hundreds of years. America, the land of opportunity.

In order to Obama and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of them to transform America into their vision of what it should be, the “old” America must first me torn down, to be rebuilt in the image of every other failed socialist totalitarian state. The discussion started with a post linking to a “12-Step Guide to Destroying the Economy” from Roger Kimball, and then moved on to another concentrating on Rahm Emanuel’s pretty blatant admission of what I’ve stated above:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity…And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

Emanuel even helpfully specified the issues where the opportunity would be most helpful to the new administration – “health care area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area – things that we had postponed for too long that were long-term are now immediate and must be dealt with.”

However, the main point to all this comes from a comment from Transterrestrial Musings reader Carl Pham, that Glenn Reynolds highlights:

I bet if the entire Obama Administration and Democratic Congressional Leadership were sentenced to hang on December 1, 2009, if the stock market were not above 9000 and unemployment were not below 7%, they would become raging tax-cutting pro-business libertarians overnight.

That is, I don’t believe they are so stupid and deluded as to believe their own hogwash right down to their core. They know very well they’re hanging a millstone around the economy’s neck, costing jobs and punishing capital markets. But they don’t care. They have ambitions — more government power for themselves, better status and pay for their supporters — and they actually don’t care that a bunch of plumbers and HVAC men are going to pay for it with their jobs, 401k’s, life savings invested in the new house. Can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, y’know. (emphasis mine)

He’s absolutely right, and it’s a scary scary thought. These people don’t see America as a beacon, as the last hope for democracy and freedom, they don’t see it as a land of opportunity or a defender of the defenseless. They see it as a hold out against the prevailing world order, a last stronghold against complete government control over the world’s population.

To give them a little credit, I think they probably do believe that what they’re trying to do is for the greater good. Like Carl said, they’re trying to make an omelot. But whereas a conservative, American vision of the greater good is to lift up as many people as possible as high as they can go, their vision is to bring everyone down (except themselves) to a common level. As long as everyone’s equal, it doesn’t matter how low they are.