Morning Bell: If You Cant Beat Them, Silence Them

Conn Carroll / October 11, 2010

The Progressive Movement is desperate. The 2008 election was supposed to be the dawn of a new liberal era. An enlightened bureaucratic elite in Washington was supposed to enact a broad and transformative agenda that would save the economy, return the nation to prosperity, and legitimize big government for a generation.

But only the enactment of the agenda occurred, without any of the promised benefits. President Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus and trillion-dollar health care entitlement are now law. The leftist bureaucrats have been empowered … but their policies have failed. Health insurance premiums are rising, poverty is up, and the nation’s unemployment rate hovers near 10%.

Faced with the obvious failure of their policies, the left is now desperately seeking to avoid accountability by blaming others. So President Barack Obama told a crowd in Philadelphia this weekend that “special interest groups” like the Chamber of Commerce are “spending unlimited amounts of money on attack ads.” The President continued: “It could be the oil industry. It could be the insurance industry. It could even be foreign-owned corporations. You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose. … Now, that’s not just a threat to Democrats – that’s a threat to our democracy.” (more…)