IBD Editorials

June 15, 2010

Big Government: In a "fireside chat" to quell concerns about the Gulf oil disaster, the president announced the appointment of an oil czar. Is more bureaucracy the answer to every problem?

The media elite just can't comprehend the anger of the Tea Party movement. The New York Times this week enlisted a professor of philosophy to write an article with a resounding conclusion: "In truth, there is nothing that the Tea Party movement wants; terrifyingly, it wants nothing. .. . (T)hey are nihilists."

In fact, the Tea Party movement is pretty clear about its demands, exemplified by a protester's placard with a photo of a crying baby and the message, "Stop Spending My Money — I Haven't Even Earned It Yet!"

But that message — you politicians have finally gone too far; shrink government now — is so incomprehensible or so unwelcome to those in power in politics and the media, they caricature Tea Partyers as empty-headed hysterics.

What exactly is nihilistic about reacting with fear and anger to hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of your money being spent in a financial bailout, then hundreds and hundreds of billions more spent on a stimulus package that obstructs economic recovery?

How can outrage over Washington owning and running investment banks and car manufacturers and the health insurance industry be depicted as believing in nothing?

The president on Tuesday evening proved himself tone-deaf to this popular disenchantment, manifested in his sinking public approval ratings. He double-downed on his status as the federal government's expander in chief by announcing the establishment of an oil czar who will join the nearly 30 other czars running various sectors of the American Leviathan absent public accountability.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs described the newest czar as being "in charge of a recovery plan, putting a recovery plan together ... when we get past the cleanup and response phase of this disaster."

It kind of begs the question: Why not a cleanup czar in the meantime? First things first.

This is quintessential Rahm Think. Before the president was inaugurated, incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, cutthroat even by the Chicago machine standards that spawned him, infamously declared that you should "never let a serious crisis go to waste."

The Democrats in power used a financial crisis — of their own making, being the culmination of years of politicized housing policy — to fulfill every taxpayer-funded fantasy on their wish list. Now the president is using the BP oil gusher crisis to justify yet another new taxpayer-funded agency.

Newt Gingrich's Center for Health Transformation illustrated the 159 new programs, commissions, boards and bureaus the ObamaCare government takeover of health insurance establishes. In signing the bill into law in March, the president waggishly looked to see if the sky was falling, as those nutty Republicans had warned.

This president may not still be in office when the fiscal ceiling caves in and when that crying baby on the placard grows up in an America with a Europeanized economy, where jobs are a lot harder to get, and dreams a lot harder to achieve.

But millions of Americans would like to hear a reporter ask this president, "Can you solve anything without asking for more government?"

And the signs are that this fall those multitudes, behind a Tea Party vanguard, will make the political sky fall for his party in Congress.