Quoted from the Wall Street Journal  


Best of the Web Today - May 2, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO

You Bet Your Life
ABC doesn't put transcripts of "This Week With George Stephanopoulos"
on its Web site, which means it goes pretty much unnoticed except for
TiVo-equipped political junkies. Fortunately for you, dear reader,
your humble columnist is just such a junkie, and we sit through "This
Week" so you don't have to. Anyway, here's a hilarious exchange from
Stephanopoulos's interview yesterday with Nancy Pelosi, the House
minority leader:

Stephanopoulos: Why should American people trust the Democrats [on
Social Security] if you don't have a specific plan?

Pelosi: The American people should trust the Democrats because we
originated Social Security. This was a very entrepreneurial idea of
the New Deal and Democrats will not allow the Republicans to turn this
great deal for the American people into a raw deal for them by what
they are proposing. They've never really supported Social Security,
and the way to damage it, I'm trying to select my word carefully, is
to destroy the universality of it. The genius of Social Security at
the time was that everybody supported it in terms of the working
families of America because they got a stream of income commensurate
to what they put into the program.

So the Republicans have "never really supported Social Security" even
though at the time it originated "everybody supported it." Granted,
the GOP was the minority party in 1935, but like the Democrats today,
it never quite ceased to exist.

Even funnier is Pelosi's statement that "the American people should
trust the Democrats because we originated Social Security." Sounds
great, except that Claude Pepper died in 1989, and every other New
Deal-era Democrat we can think of predeceased him. Even Robert
"Archaeopteryx" Byrd arrived in Congress almost 18 years after the
passage of the Social Security Act.

Pelosi's comment has overtones of Marx--not Karl but Groucho, who in
"A Night at the Opera" uttered this line: "Nix on the love-making
because I saw Mrs. Claypool first. Of course, her mother really saw
her first but there's no point in bringing the Civil War into this."

"A Night at the Opera" came out in 1935--the year Social Security was
born, 70 years after the end of the Civil War, and 70 years before
Nancy Pelosi's Marxian performance on "This Week."

The Oral Minority
A reader called our attention to a pair of strangely similar quotes
from Democratic senators. On March 5, North Dakota's Byron Dorgan said
of President Bush's Social Security ideas, ''This is a big wet kiss to
Wall Street." Then, last Thursday, Nevada's Harry Reid, the minority
leader, said of Majority Leader Bill Frist's filibuster compromise,
"It's a big wet kiss to the far right."

We found several other examples of liberals referring to their
opponents' actions as "wet kisses":

" 'South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias,'
by Brian C. Anderson of the conservative think tank the Manhattan
Institute [available at the OpinionJournal bookstore], gives a wet
kiss to one of the funniest and most foul-mouthed series on
television."--Frank Rich, New York Times

"Ron Reagan, the president's son, on a talk show wondered why
[Florida's state Rep. Dennis] Baxley was giving a big wet kiss to the
National Rifle Association with the 'use of force' bill."--Tallahassee
Democrat

"A sloppy wet kiss to the credit card industry."--Loren Steffy,
Houston Chronicle, on the bankruptcy-reform law
Naturally, we wondered if American liberals have an oral fixation.
About.com describes the Freudian "oral stage," which normally lasts
from birth to age 1 1/2: "Because the child's personality is
controlled by the id and therefore demands immediate gratification,
responsive nurturing is key. Both insufficient and forceful feeding
can result in fixation in this stage."

Here are the symptoms of oral fixation:

Smoking
Constant chewing on gum, pens, pencils, etc.
Nail biting
Overeating
Drinking
Sarcasm ("the biting personality") and verbal hostility
Seems to us we may be on to something here, though as we're sure Bill
Clinton would hasten to point out, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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It just keeps getting better and better!!!!

Roll on Democrats!!!

--
Scott in Florida