Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Karma, Irony, and Truthiness in Massachusetts

We awaken today on the cusp of an historic election in Massachusetts.  Republican candidate Scott Brown is poised to defeat Democrat candidate Martha Coakley to fill the senate seat left vacant by the late Edward M. Kennedy.   The Bay State hasn't elected a Republican to the U. S. Senate since 1972.  How did we ever get to this place?

Karma is catching up with the Democrats in Massachusetts.  My computer dictionary defines karma as "the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding the fate in future existences."  Several years ago in Massachusetts, when Republican Mitt Romney was governor, Democrats took away his authority to appoint a replacement in the event that a U. S. Senate seat became vacant.  Remember that in 2004, MA Senator John Kerry was supposed to defeat President George Bush.  That of course did not happen, but when  Teddy Kennedy died last year leaving a U. S. Senate seat vacant and Democrat Governor Deval Patrick unable to name a replacement, Democrats changed the law once again.  Karma exacts a heavy price for dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

Irony runs as thick as a Southie accent in Massachusetts.  Once again, my computer tells me that irony is "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing."  In 1972, Massachusetts was the only state in the country that did not participate in Richard Nixon's landslide victory, voting for Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern instead.  They did however re-elect Edward Brooke, the first African American ever elected to the U. S. Senate, and the last Republican from Massachusetts to sit in that august body.  Fast forward to today where there exists the very real chance that a Scott Brown victory will kill any chance of Obamacare ever becoming a reality.  The irony of an iconic senator's lifetime pursuit, health care reform, being passed in his memory and then defeated, again due to his death, is remarkable.  Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Truth is a hard thing to swallow.  Stephen Colbert coined his phase truthiness, as "a truth that a person claims to know intuitively 'from the gut' without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts."  The truthiness of Obamacare, cap and trade, private industry bailouts, big government and big labor, indeed the entire progressive agenda, as demonstrated by President Obama and Governor Patrick, or any other Democrat that wishes to follow same, is a recipe for disaster and quickly becoming an anathema to a growing majority of Americans.

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