This quote from Mark Steyn this morning was so lucid and clear-stated that I needed to share it, even if I haven’t quite gotten back to my normal posting schedule [my emphasis added to the best part]:

The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another vast population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another – say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for.  Either way, what you get from government – whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit or a government contract – is a central fact of your life….

In the normal course of events, the process takes a while. But Obama believes in “the fierce urgency of now”, and fierce it is. That’s where all the poor befuddled sober centrists who can’t understand why the Democrats keep passing incoherent 1,200-page bills every week are missing the point. If “health care” were about health care, the devil would be in the details. But it’s not about health or costs or coverage; it’s about getting over the river and burning the bridge. It doesn’t matter what form of governmentalized health care gets passed as long as it passes. Once it’s in place, it will be “reformed”, endlessly, but it will never be undone. Same with a lot of the other stuff: Keep throwing the spaghetti at the wall. The Republicans may pick off the odd strand but, if you keep it coming fast enough, by the end of Obama’s first year the wall will be a great writhing mass of pasta entwined like copulating anacondas in some jungle simulacrum of Hef’s grotto. And that’s a good image of how government will slither into every corner of your life: You can try and pull one of those spaghetti strings out but it’ll be all tied up with a hundred others and you’ll never untangle them

I think this is the most worrisome (and clear) aspect of it all – that it’s all about increasing the political elites’ control over the lives of the citizens. Yes, the motive is important – that the Democrats are just playing electoral politics – but it’s the attitude that’s even more disturbing – that the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Dingy Harry and Barney Frank and all the rest of them don’t care about the consequences of their actions so long as the get what they get to live in a nice townhouse and be on television and have gold-plated health insurance. It’s one thing to play politics, it’s entirely another to be so brazenly cynical about it that you ruin everything that made this country great in the first place – individualism, federalism, entrepreneurism – in pursuit of your own private jet.