From time to time we all love to rant and rave at the folly and excesses we see going on around us. Let’s face it, a little rant is oftentimes good for the soul…it acts as an emotional catharsis and allows us to efficiently function (nice alliteration, LOL!) in a world that seems at many junctures to have simply gone mad.

Recently the object of scorn has been the evil bank executives who handed out billions of dollars in bonuses, while their banks were teetering on the edge of collapse. Or it could be the Citi executive who blew through over a million bucks to redecorate his office, or the latest outrage of the company attempting to take delivery of a corporate jet after the bank had to be “bailed out” by the government. And then there is the favorite whipping boy of the press, Exxon-Mobil which again managed to post record profits in the midst of an economic downturn. Ranting at their excesses or complaining about the money they blow through on “frivolous” expenditures is only natural, when many of us are actually hurting financially. We look at that money, calculate how much it could have helped regular folks, and we rant. And I can live with that, because I understand it…heck, I even rant about some of this stuff myself!

The danger in that ranting, though, is when people turn that frustration into a political position or platform. Too much of the populist sentiment we see coming from television commentators like Bill O’Reilly or some politicians who stoke anger at a perceived lack of judgment on the part of corporate execs is easily transformed into demagoguery. People get so emotionally caught up in vilifying the evil executives that all sense of fairness and fact checking get lost in the rush to see who can condemn the “profligate spending” the loudest. For example, the Citi corporate jet was not costing the taxpayers anything, since it was ordered and the payments were being made when the company was in good financial shape. And in the case of the million dollar office make-over, none of that money had anything to do with the TARP funds that the government was handing out like candy on Halloween. While it may have been a bit over the top, the renovations were done before the company went in the crapper and it was done on the company’s dime…so where does President Obama get off carping about it!

Which leads me to the biggest danger in the whole rush to embrace populist sentiment, and that is the fact that populism almost always leads to a more intrusive government. Think about what you’re hearing now: Levin saying that the government should not allow Citi to take delivery of their plane or Obama weighing in on how much money corporate executives should be allowed to earn. At the end of every populist campaign is a call for the government to intercede and “set things right”. Populism leads into an ever more intrusive government presence in business and industry and in our personal lives as well, like night leads to day. I have yet to see a populist yet whose solution to whatever problem he is ranting about encompasses any type of market based, or individual responsibility based solution; it is always, “We have a problem with X, so we need the government to do Y!”

So when you see these people railing against Exxon, or Citi, or Big Tobacco feel free to share their sentiments, just don’t get caught up in their “solutions” because those solutions will likely lead to the erosion of our freedoms. And that is the true peril of populism.

Yesterday I watched with undisguised glee as the $700 billion bailout bill died an ignominious death in the House. Being the good conservative that I am, I watched the news coverage on Fox News and was actually surprised by something I heard there. One of the Fox news anchorettes was actually bemoaning the fact that this travishamockery of a bill had gone down in the flaming defeat it so richly deserved. She was saying that this was a time when the members of Congress had to lead the American people instead of listening to their constitutents...you know, "We the People." Then this morning on Fox and Friends all purpose political expert Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia was on saying the the President had failed to sell the bill properly to the people, and that whoever was able to tag the bill a "bailout" had effectively killed any chance of it passing the House. His idea was that if it had been called a "rescue" or "recovery" that the people would have gone along with it, because it didn't sound as if the government was trying to fix the mistakes of private businesses.

1. The American people just forced the Congress to lead us (at least for the time being) away from the precipice of eternal government bailouts of private enterprises. The American people were not going to stand by and watch these entities get free  oney for running their companies into the ground, all in the quest for ever rising profits. And for the second time in a couple of years We the People imposed out collective will on those elected to represent us.
2. The system worked as designed on this bill, since the members of the House, including a sizeable number of the Democratic Party, refused to vote for a bill that they knew the people were opposed to...just like the way it went down with Harriet Meiers and immigration. The Congress responded to the people and did their business, instead of trying to advance their own agendas.
3. The President was never going to get this passed, because he has no political capital left to get this done! George W. Bush could be the greatest salesman in the world, but the People were not going to buy this crock of crap, because we all saw it for what it was. And how could any of the Democrats in the House really be seen supporting this White House backed proposal, after spending the last 7 years telling anyone who would listen what an incompetent boob "Dubya" is? How good would it have looked to the constituents of those anti-Bush House members up for reelection to be out trumpeting  the Bush Plan?
4. Larry Sabato and others need to understand that We the People are not some group of dolts who can be easily fooled b calling something by a different name. They tried that with their immigration proposals, but we all knew that "comprehensive immigration reform" was just a fancy way of saying "amnesty". No one was fooled then, and to think that calling this a "rescue" would divert attention from the fact that this is just a bailout of poorly run corporations is foolish. You can put a dead possum on a plate and call it filet mignon, but that doesn't change the fact that it's roadkill!