The following execerpt – puslished in the  September 19 – 20, 2009 weekend editon of the Wall Street Journal – is one of a number of excerpts gathered from essays that appeared over the years in the WSJ by Irving Kristol, who died recently at the age of 89. Mr. Kristol, a one time  member of the Democratic party, later a member of the  Replublican party, and a critic of both, is (as noted in the WSJ):  “[M]ost often credited with leading the movement in American politics that came to be called neoconservatism.”

The following excerpt of Mr. Krsistol’s, published in 1972, was then and remains today a spot on critique of what liberalism is, or, more to the point, has become.

Symbolic Politics and Liberal Reform (excerpt), December 15, 1972, by Irving Kristol

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .

It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call "the New Politics" is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings—we must "care," we must "be concerned," we must be "committed." Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.

While written nearly 37 years ago, this critique remains relevent to virtualy the entirety of today’s liberal agenda, and most especially relevent to the current liberal push for ‘Health Care/Health Insurance reform’  Yes, it would be compassionate and caring to ‘reform’ the  ‘Health Care/Health Insurance’ system so that everyone receives easily affordable (or free) government (read ‘taxpayer’) funded access to the best medical care.  But such reform is also a pipedream, since the bottom line reality is that the United States simply cannot afford to pay for such a system.  As a result, trying to implement such as system will, ultmately, lead to diminished health care for all and, just (if not more) importantly, will: most definitley lead to difficult, almost certainly lead to dire, and very possibly lead to disastorous financial repercussions for the U.S. econonmy in general and middle class taxpayers in particular. 

But the current ulta-liberal administration and its lackey ultara-liberal Democrat controlled Congress isn’t worried and, frankly, doesn’t care about such bottom line, real world practicalities (or, more to the point, the lack thereof).