Liberal thinking in a cup of tea

We are a family of tea drinkers.  As dedicated tea drinkers, we like good tea, which usually means loose leaf tea.  Loose leaf tea, in turn, means special tea makers.  Our favorite is the Adagio Ingenuitea Teapot, which makes one perfect cup of tea at a time.  The only downside of the Ingenuitea maker is that, as you carry it from workspace to sink, a drop or two of tea will escape floorwards.  Since I take my tea black, this is not a problem.  Mr. Bookworm, however, likes a small — a very small — amount of sugar in his tea.  When his roving tea drops dry, the floor is marked by a slight tackiness, which is very obvious underfoot.

What does all this have to do with liberal thinking?  A lot, actually.

You see, Mr. Bookworm holds, as a matter of “scientific” theory, that the amount of sugar he uses in his tea is too small to leave any sticky spots should the tea drip on the floor.  The fact that I can show him the sticky spots on the kitchen floor is entirely irrelevant to him.  Since the sticky fact on the ground doesn’t mesh with the pure theory in his head, the sticky spot cannot exist.  At various times he asserts that I’m imagining it, that it comes from another source, or that I’m trying to gaslight him (that last is his little joke, by the way).

Mr. Bookworm’s thinking, of course, precisely reflects the Ivy League thinking that prevails in Washington.  Obama, and those who surround him, haven’t held real jobs, they haven’t started businesses, they haven’t deal with payrolls.  Likewise, they’ve never lived in a village that has 10,000 rockets aimed at it.  They’ve never spent time in the company of “boot on the ground” Islamists.  Instead, they consort only with the erudite, British-accented academic fifth column that drips constant antisemitic, anti-Israel poison in their ears.  They’ve never spent significant amounts of time in a socialist/communist country (or, worse, that country’s health care system).  Their sole contact with socialism comes from academic elites who are dedicated to the theory of Marxism, facts be damned.

And that’s always it, isn’t it?  Theory will invariably trump facts for the liberal.  Theory is a nice neat package, an NPR story with a beginning, middle, and predetermined end.  It has no icky facts, no unknown variables, no human equation, and no room for the possibility that the liberal’s theory might be wrong.  So just as I’m condemned to tip toe across a tacky kitchen floor, we Americans, in the age of Obamic Progressivism, are condemned to a flailing economy, weak national security, and creeping socialism, all because the Ivy Tower academics in government refuse to acknowledge that their exquisitely crafted theories might not function in the real world.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News