I’m not usually a poll-watcher. After all, there are enough people keeping Two Broke Girls and Two and a Half Men on the air, so I’m kind of a cynic about the intelligence of the voting public most of the time. However, even if they don’t have the best taste in comedy, it appears that Americans have finally had it with the bluster, expense and empty promises wielded by the American Left.
The attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin was funded by unions, dramatized by the Left (anybody else remember union workers singing “the song of angry men” in the state capital? It was…er…. interesting) and broadly lauded as what every single person in Wisconsin, yea in AMERICA, wanted to happen. Scott Walker was a villian who hates blue collar workers, hates education, wants public employees to starve to death and on it went. This was such a vicious onslaught against Walker that even conservative bastions like Ann Coulter and John Stossel doubted his ability to overcome. Despite growing concern over public sector unions’ outrageous demands and economic effects throughout the U.S. (ever heard of Stockton, California?) there seemed to be very few prominent, traditional Republicans who wanted to stand up for Walker in a bold way.
Luckily, all the bad press surrounding him and the lies about his policies didn’t really matter. In the end, even people whom I freely judge for their weeknight TV-viewing habits saw through the charade and voted against a free-spending, selfish, unaccountable and out-of-control system, and for a man who’d made a campaign promise and actually kept it. (What a concept!)
Here in California, we voted down a cigarette tax that was supposed to pay for cancer research and oh, by-the-way a new bureaucracy. Californians – easily the dumbest voters in the country, as seen by our unbelievable record – saw straight through what should have been an easy tax on a small and disliked sector of the population and said no. Enough is enough.
Wisconsin’s recall and California’s cigarette tax isn’t all that’s happening. Moderates, liberals, conservatives and i-don’t-cares alike are tired of being lectured on civility by the people who mock strong, confident women. We’re tired of being told that the economy is fine, nothing to see here, by people who are living a posh lifestyle on our dime and don’t seem to care about our struggles. We’re tired of having bills pushed through without votes, a Senate that can’t pass a budget, a President who seems to think that an extra $4 Trillion in spending is no biggie, the economy is fine, shuttup small one.
There are some of us who prefer Ashton Kutcher’s slapstick to an evening with a cigar and The Economist, but I’ll tell you this: even watchers of mainstream sitcoms with little-to-no-redemptive qualities see a problem with the American Left. Even with all the grandstanding about leaving kids with autism out in the cold and why do you hate the government workers children, we’re not falling for it anymore.
So I guess there is something to conservatism. It’s old-fashioned and straight-forward. It’s easy to make fun of because we know it so well. But it works. It makes sense. It doesn’t blame anyone else for its problems and it never demands that another person shoulder its mistakes. That’s a refreshing thing to hear and vote for, from Wisconsin to California.