If you believe in these campaign fairy tales, welcome to Fantasy Island

By David McElroy · August 26, 2011

We don’t see traveling men selling snake oil as a cure-all anymore, but we still see plenty of people peddling it. The hucksters no longer drive from town to town in wagons. They appear on television and ask us to elect them president.

It’s no surprise that politicians tell lies. We talked Thursday about the fact that they’re just following the incentives the voters give them. The more interesting question is why people believe the claims. My view is that they believe because believing the fantasy is easier than confronting the truth.

The latest snake oil to catch my attention is a scheme to balance the federal budget that’s become popular among the Republican presidential candidates. It’s called “Lean Six Sigma,” and at least six GOP candidates (or recently dropped out candidates) fell victim to the goofy ploy.

So what is it? It’s the vaguest plan for deficit reduction you’ve ever seen. The founder of Strong America Now, which is the organization pushing the plan, says 25 percent of all federal spending is waste, so his plan is that a president simply unilaterally cut 25 percent of spending — without changing any federal output.

And what’s this figure based on? Well, he doesn’t say. We’re just supposed to trust him. I’d be happy saying that 80 or 90 percent of federal spending should be slashed — as a start — but to claim that the government can continue to do the same functions (and hand out the same “entitlements”) while slashing spending by a fourth is a sheer fantasy. There’s clearly plenty of waste in government — even if you approve of the purposes for which the money is being spent — but it’s the incentive structure that comes with a monopoly that makes it impossible to change, for as long as we have a coercive state. (Does anyone even remember the famous ’80s Grace Commission report produced for the Reagan administration? It produced a thick book — which I still have — but no results. This is a rehash of that same idea.)

Here’s what the Strong America Now website says about the GOP candidates who have signed the pledge:

When he signed the pledge in June, Tim Pawlenty said integrating Lean Six Sigma into the federal government “would be one of the most important things that the next president and Congress can do.” Newt Gingrich, Gary Johnson and Herman Cain have also signed the pledge. Last week, Rep. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum joined the club as well. “They’ve all come to our training classes,” George said.

Snake oil is snake oil. Fantasy is fantasy. Candidates are promising these things because people don’t want to hear the truth.

This isn’t unique by any means. We talked recently about Michele Bachmann’s empty populist promise about reducing gasoline prices. We saw it in the last election when Barack Obama promised to bring American troops home from foreign wars. (How’s that working out?) We see it in pretty much every election when candidates promise “energy independence,” better schools, lower taxes, better health care and whatever other lies they can squeeze into 30 seconds.

Stop believing in fantasy. Deal with reality. The truth is that what these people are promising — pretty much all candidates — isn’t possible. If you’ve gone down the path of believing something that you know is wrong, you’re under no obligation to continue supporting the same nonsense. You might have been falling for the same lies every four years (or every two years in the case of congresscritters), but you can open your eyes.

You can change your mind. You can change your life. Nobody else can do it for you. First, though, you have to accept that the snake oil you’ve bought isn’t going to help you — now or ever.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts