Tea Party Would Have Killed Trapped Miners
This is low-down disgraceful, even for an activist liberal hack like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who managed to turn the all-round joyous rescue of 33 Chilean miners into an opportunity to lob cheap political shots at the Tea Party and conservatives.
NewsBusters snags the insultingly offensive claims from Matthews’ segment with guest Richard Trumka, president of the AFL/CIO, when the pair claimed the miners would never have survived if they had followed the “every man for himself” philosophy of the Tea Party.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Okay let’s talk about what the…message to a lot of the people was. The message coming out of the Tea Party people, and lot of them are good people, is every man for himself, basically. “No more taxes, no more government, no more everything. No more safety net. No more health care for everybody. Everybody just get out there, make your buck, save it, screw the government, move on.” Right?
RICHARD TRUMKA: Yeah.
MATTHEWS: You know these people, if they were every man for himself down in that mine they wouldn’t have gotten out.
TRUMKA: That’s exactly right.
MATTHEWS: They would have been killing each other after about two days. This is a story of how people can work together, the people who were down there for two months. The people who were above ground from all over the world, using state of the art equipment not to get rid of the need for manpower but to save manpower in this case.
TRUMKA: You know this is just another example of how radical the Republican Party is becoming, do away with the minimum wage. You just talked about that. Bad policy, it will wreck the economy. If you didn’t have government regulation, you wouldn’t have clean water, you wouldn’t have cars that were safe, you wouldn’t have electricity that you could afford, I mean, just a number of things where you need a good, efficient government and they just throw all that aside.
So basically, without government regulation over nearly every facet of our lives, we are well and truly doomed. One of the central problems with that argument, of course, rests in its premise of a “good, efficient government,” when instead we have a cabal of power-hungry bureaucrats and politicians willing to sell out any semblance of the will of the people to protect their own vested interests and advance their own agenda.
More to the point is Trumka and Matthews’ mistaken assumption that conservatives’ desire for limited government automatically translates into a desire for no government, when in fact the explicit desire is for more liberty and freedoms of personal choice and charity, without it being mandated.
Trumka and Matthews, in other words, apparently believe the only way people would help miners trapped in a shaft – or the homeless, or the needy, or the poor – is if government mandates it and forces their participation in charitable acts.
That’s a proposition almost as ridiculous as it is insulting, but wholly in line with liberal thought.
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