Jonah Goldberg has his thumb on the fear-mongering administration

Some guy named Patrick commented on an earlier blog posting about a quote I had lifted from the late, brilliant Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken. In fact, it is one of the quotes the current, brilliant Las Vegas Review-Journal editorialist and columnist Vin Suprynowicz uses as a signature on his e-mails. That’s how I found it quickly when occasion warranted.

The quote was:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

I was using it as a reference point for our goings on in Carson City, but Patrick — still stuck in the past, waging this past year’s political campaign for the presidency, as if there were no other affairs of government worthy of scrutiny — asked: “Apt description of the former presidential administration's practices, but do you see evidence of it in the current one?”

So gave him a long litany that you can drop down below on that posting and see for yourself if you are so inclined, but you can probably list a dozen or so yourself.

But in trying to refresh my memory on some of the woe-is-us and run-run-away and we-are-the-ones-we’ve-been-waiting-for rhetoric of the current administration, I ran across a Jonah Goldberg column that I’d read in the L.A. Times or Investor’s Business Daily, because we’d not published this particular one. Can’t squeeze them all in.

I like to share such gems with you. So link away.

Here are snippets to whet your appetite:

“Rule No. 1 of the Obama administration: … ‘Never allow a crisis to go to waste,’ White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times right after the election. ‘They are opportunities to do big things.’ Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told members of the European Parliament, ‘Never waste a good crisis.’ Then President Obama explained in his Saturday radio and Internet address that there is ‘great opportunity in the midst of’ the ‘great crisis’ befalling America. …

“The real scandal is that this administration thinks crises are opportunities for governmental power-grabs. …

“Franklin Roosevelt said that all we have to fear is fear itself. Now Barack Obama all but admits that all he has to fear is the loss of fear itself.”