Sara(h) Smiles, Part 34: Bernanke and Boobs

I ventured unwittingly yesterday afternoon into a neck of the woods that probably went in 2008 for ObaMao — as those of us who recognize that, if he had his way, he’d turn us into the People’s Republic of America, like to call him, though our strong preference would be not to call him anything at all, as the mere thought of him, with his Ivy League elitism and lefthandedness and teleprompter, make any sensible person want to purge, in the binge-and-purge sense.

What an eye-opener it was! Most of the people on whose ratty screen doors I tapped were up in arms — at least those not too depressed to get up off the sofa — about the imminent termination of their unemployment benefits. Several were outraged because the federal government seems quite happy to toss them out into the street, as they put it, a little melodramatically, even while not repealing George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.

As to the latter, I pointed out recently that few of us would want to live in a society that doesn’t shower perks and privileges on its wealthy. As for the former — the unemployment teat going dry — have these people ever thought that maybe, instead of rhymes with which-ing and moaning, they ought to go out and get jobs? I’ve also pointed out that the less we tax our wealthy, the more gardeners and domestics and so on they’re likely to hire to work in and around their 5000-square-foot houses with more bathrooms than inhabitants. Common sense tells us that keep the rich folks’ tax cuts in place is exactly the way to solve the unemployment mess, not exacerbate it.

I can’t imagine how anyone, not even the closed-mindedest liberal elitist, could have been unimpressed by Sarah’s intellectually nimble, seamlessly eloquent debate with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Meet the Press Sunday morning. She evoked Ronald Reagan (in his 1984 debate with Fritz Mondale) when, in response to Bernanke’s predictable recitation of the sort of monetarist dogma we’ve all had coming out of our ears since Milton Friedman’s self-appointment as America’s pre-eminent economist, she sighed, “There you go again.” It was deeply pleasurable to see Bernanke — he of the degrees from Harvard and MIT, Jewish in spite of his ambiguous (that is, berg-less, stein-less) surname — hemming and hawing when Sarah defied him to explain in terms of classical monetarism the unhinging of the inflation-driven growth of the 1990s’ money supply, and the failure of Friedmanian policy to stimulate the economy to nearly the extent projected between 2001 and 2003. I can imagine her critics might have expected her to gloat — to chirp, “Gotcha!” in that adorable way of hers, or just to wink. I don’t suppose she’ll be accorded the credit she deserves for being the picture of graciousness.

Attentive readers may have noticed that I have said nothing about Sarah’s alleged breast augmentation, though a few of the younger bachelors I’ve spoken with on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 have seemed to want to talk more about them than about her fiscal policies. I personally disapprove of breast augmentation, but do not question that they may come in very handy when she’s locked into what are invariably described as Frank Discussions with other world leaders. If one endorses heterosexuality — and the alternative, as we’ve discussed, is too disgusting to contemplate — then even one who is sensitive to women’s distaste for objectification will acknowledge that a glimpse of a well-filled black lace brassiere might serve to render Vladimir Putin or even Hugo Chavez less recalcitrant, less hostile to America. Thus, we common-sense conservatives applaud Sarah pre-emptively for her sacrifice. In the words of John McCain, “Country first!”