To hear liberal mouthpieces in and out of the administration tell it, a sweet rationality guides the minds of those who agree with Barack Obama's economic policies, not an emotion so debilitating it prevents even the acknowledgment of their consequences.

Fortunately, a great many Americans recognize such drivel for what it is: propaganda spewed by wolfish shills whose job is to quash the notion that much public opinion is being driven by an understandable, transient fear that the president and his liberal allies in Congress are happily (actually, ecstatically) taking advantage of.

Those wolves, by the way, come dressed in all manner of sheep's clothing, a fact exemplified by White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, who, sporting a suit, tie, and two glittering diplomas, answered a reporter's question about how the administration can speak of “fiscal rsponsibility” when it is creating a “spiraling debt” with this low-down, pusillanimous lie: “I don't know what spiraling debt you're referring to.”

But to return to the point at hand, those of us who are actually trying to be reasonable about the president's proposals are accumulating plenty of evidence to support the notion that fear has frozen millions of minds.

How?

Simple. We listen carefully, finding that almost invariably, expressions of concern about the consequences of the president's policies elicit responses that are nothing short of astonishing in their intellectual deficiencies.

Common among those responses is “He [Obama] has got to try something,” an embarrassingly vacuous utterance that allows us to immediately draw two conclusions:

(1) It can't claim even a distant relationship with any rational idea.

(2) It does, however, shout its sister and brotherhood to the kind of childish irrationality that responds to a “why” with an implacably resolute, perfectly smug “because.”

Just as simply, we state facts and ask questions as follows:

(Fact) At a minimum, an astounding ten trillion dollars needs to be borrowed, printed, and taxed to finance the mad spending (much of it permanent) and suffocating bureaucratic expansion (all of it permanent) required to fulfill Obama's dream of transforming America from a land where liberty, individualism, and free markets reign supreme to a place thoroughly worthy of the term “nanny state.”

(Question) How many of those who currently support the president's agenda would put an immediate end to their stunningly incurious acquiescence to such a transformation if every penny of the ten trillion were borrowed, taxed, spent, and stuffed with power at the state and local levels?

(Fact) The federal government, the level of government most remote from the people, is incorrigibly corrupt, having wreaked thousands of depredations upon the people's rights and wealth — including the particularly vile act of siphoning every last dollar of the more than 2 trillion dollars the people have deposited into the “Social Security Trust [sic] Fund.”

(Question) Isn't it, therefore, an incontrovertible truth that only a paralyzing fear could drive the mass of citizens to exponentially increase the power and the money they entrust to federal politicians and bureaucrats, whose most recent example of “service” to their country consists of having been fully complicit in the destruction of its financial system?

With that last question, this piece could end; for every reasonable American will agree that the behavior of otherwise sensible folks who risk breaking a leg or worse as they rush to bestow huge “performance based bonuses” upon the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Harry Reid, and Alan Greenspan seals the deal for the “fear argument.”

However, it cannot end without mentioning the motivation of liberals, who with every bit of their being support Obama's plan to enormously increase the size and strength of the monstrosity whose obscene tentacles already probe the nation's every nook in a ceaseless search for more power and wealth to stuff into its insatiable maw.

That motivation, of course, is the love of power.

It explains why liberals, who make a religion of politics and gods of politicians, do not react to Obama's grandiose plans (domestic and global) by quoting the world's great creative spirits, including Dante, Swift, and Twain — all of whom honored politicians either by damning them to hell or mocking them with a hellish fury.

It explains why, in the midst of a mindless, selfish, “eat, drink, and be merry” orgy of borrowing that has the Chinese concerned about holding American debt, liberals have not a word to say about history, for example, about what happened — economically, socially, and politically — to Germany in the twenties when the Reichsbank set its printing presses to max speed and ordered operators to print marks 24/7.

And it explains why the nation's self-proclaimed intellectual giants inundate us daily with this kind of sycophantic gushing:

Michael Moore: “He [Obama] has the massive will of the American people behind him -- and he has been granted permission by us to do what he sees fit.”

Maureen Dowd: “President Obama [like a good Nanny-in-Chief?] must nurse us through our [addiction to materialism] . . .”

Now, that kind of “thinking” — not something relatively simple such as rehabilitating and then properly regulating the nation's banks — is worthy of filling all Americans who consider themselves heirs of Jefferson's legacy with a profound fear.

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio