Original Sin

Fresh out of a White House meeting in which President Obama passed on his preferred talking points to sympathetic journalists, Juan Williams revealed what one of those talking points is.

The attacks, I think this is just, again, more attacks coming from Republicans who don't like the plan.... It's what the White House now calls the original sin. They cannot work or expect Republicans to work with them to fix the plan.

Anne Althouse quips, "The Republicans are exiled from the Garden of Legislating. They cannot be worked with, for they have committed The Original Sin." She accompanies this with an appropriate illustration, courtesy of Michelangelo.

Of course, this is pure psychological projection. If you think of political sins, particularly in the context of cooperation between the parties, it is the Democrats who originally sinned by shoving through ObamaCare on a party-line vote, with dubious parliamentary procedures and against the wishes of the American people. Then there is the biggest political sin of all: lying to the American people in order to get your legislation passed, telling them that "If you like your plan, you can keep it," when at least 80 million people are projected to lose the plans they like.

Then there is the sin of arrogance, as in a recent push among backers of ObamaCare to get their supporters to harass their relatives with pro-ObamaCare talking points at Thanksgiving dinner—which isn't an isolated idea but is part of a coordinated campaign that has White House backing. (In response, Ace from the Ace of Spades blog offers his own Thanksgiving talking points.)

Arrogance is always a form of overcompensation for one's insecurities. So beneath this noxious campaign to get impressionable young people to propagandize at the dining room table, there is a deeper sin: the way the backers of ObamaCare are seeking to compensate for the manifest failure of their program by increasing the stridency of their advocacy. There is an air of Baghdad Bob to it, a desperate attempt to avoid having to face up to a reality that doesn't match their preferences.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand said that "There are no evil thought except one: the refusal to think." In her philosophy, that is the original sin—original, not in the sense of being innate, but in the sense of being the origin of all other sins. That is the original sin of the statists who are refusing to face up to the actual consequences of their scheme.

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