The Goodness Grift

By David Bittinger

July 6, 2025

Their smiling faces seem not quite happy. Their talking points are deep as a bumper sticker.

They remind us that the children are our future, regard The New York Times as gospel, attend correct parties, and soak in virtual bubble baths of goodness. They always voice concern for the needy — by supporting all the needed government programs that always need increased funding. (Otherwise, people will die!)

They’re 21st century liberals, and they are very good people. Just ask them.

As liberals overact more frantically in their political morality play, they become more difficult to watch. Are they serious in progressing from venerating Teslas to vandalizing them, blocking drivers just trying to get to work, using profanity as a validation of integrity, turning malevolent hatred into a crusade? Yep. They’re berserk-serious.

When they decide a corporate executive or prominent Republican doesn’t deserve to live, liberal audiences now can cheer their barbarity. Where is such etiquette taught? Late-night TV, with advanced programs on campuses.

In the previous century, liberals were seldom sociopathic. For those unfamiliar with admirable liberals of that era, here are two examples of this vanished species:

John F. Kennedy was a naval hero of World War II who went on to be an effective, if brief-serving, president. His policies, including significant tax cuts, reversed a recession and strengthened America’s economy. A committed anti-communist who faced down Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, he still recognized dire CIA problems after the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco. Kennedy privately threatened to challenge the CIA but did not live long enough to do so.

Eugene McCarthy, a baseball player and poet as a young man, became a highly principled professor and senator. In 1967 he was the only Democrat brave enough to challenge President Lyndon Johnson’s despotic, doomed war in Vietnam. In 1980 McCarthy endorsed Republican presidential candidate Reagan over the incompetent liberal incumbent of his party Jimmy Carter. Explaining his unexpected endorsement to a curious Reagan aide, McCarthy said he based it on policy issues and character.

A word’s meaning can change over time. “Awful” once meant “worthy of awe” as in “God’s awful majesty.”

The original meaning of “liberal” and “liberalism” would confound the panelists of The View (if it could somehow be explained to them).

“Lliberalism” originally derived from the word “liberty.” Scottish economist Adam Smith, the Enlightenment author of liberal economic theory, wrote that greater wealth and liberty are realized by keeping supply, demand, prices, and competition free from government regulation and by basing a society’s progress on material self-interest rather than altruism (much less, enforced altruism).

Modern “liberals” — with their illiberal hostility to private enterprise — turn Smith’s productive liberalism on its head. Their stone-dumb liberalism is based on constantly expanding government and spending: more taxation, more regulation, and more busy bureaucrats who have no experience managing a business yet are always trying to manage everything from multi-billion-dollar government agencies down to the endangered dung beetle.

Despite decaying cities, out-to-lunch governance, and worse-than-useless federal agencies,” progressive” dolts somehow keep preaching their fantasy that collectivist liberalism produces good government.

The one thing it does produce is debt, ours nationally racing now from $36 trillion toward $37 trillion.

Twenty-first century liberalism is not only fake good; it’s also truly flexible. Boy, is it flexible. A few whiplash examples:

Liberals championed equality for women’s sports through Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.  (So did President Nixon, but the libs probably thought he looked suspicious signing the bill.) How did they react when athletes born with male musculature and other obvious equipment began demanding they be allowed to overpower females in competitive sports and watch mortified girls undress in locker rooms? Feeling they now had one more minority sure to vote for them, Democrats felt so much goodness that they did everything but champion a Creepy Men Education Amendments of 2012.

Once upon a 1960s time, liberals made a hero of César Chávez, who famously campaigned for legal immigrant seasonal workers and actively opposed illegal immigration, which he recognized drove farm wages down and harmed the workers he represented. Illegal immigration was also sensibly opposed — until around 2020 — by popular liberal Barack Obama and unpopular liberal Hillary Clinton.

What happened when Democrat power brokers began to see that their economic policies, increasingly harmful to working class Americans, threatened Democrat electability? They threw the southern border wide open, welcoming ten – twenty million people, almost all impoverished and unidentified.

That number is so uncertain because it was arranged to be uncertain. What is certain is that few of these new residents have the work experience required of legal immigrants but do have great appetites for free American benefits and entitlements.

And liberals coined one of their epic euphemisms, which liberal media (almost all media) repeated endlessly. These people weren’t illegal immigrants; they were worthy “undocumented” migrants.

The left already had an affectionate nickname for young or formerly young border hoppers: “dreamers.” Apparently leftists were able to infer that, back in 1963, what Reverend King had actually been dreaming of was a day when the Democrat party, seeing its once-reliably overwhelming support among Black and Latino American citizens begin to erode, would import millions of poor foreigners expected to replace those lost votes.

Democrat bean counters silently assumed the many millions of its invited illegal immigrants would provide them two valuable assets: increasing the number of easy-win congressional districts for Democrats, and soon enough voting for their party.

Here’s another liberal about-face from the era of one Democrat imperial, big-government presidency (Johnson’s) followed by a Republican imperial, big-government presidency (Nixon’s). Both presidents left office disgraced, their terms differing in some details but joined in the Vietnam disaster.

Nixon’s misdeeds, as enthusiastically reported by The New York Times, Washington Post, and Dan Rather-sound-alikes, were muscled up by federal justice and intelligence agencies. Nixon ordered the FBI to stay out of the Watergate problem. He and J. Edgar’s boys were so enemy-conscious that they even collaborated on tracking and trying to deport that dangerous subversive — wait for it — John Lennon.

Did every liberty-loving Democrat — and responsible Republicans — deplore Nixon’s political misuse of agencies designed to fight crime and protect national security? Of course they did, properly.

Flash forward to 2013. (Good move. This passes over the Carter presidency and the disco era.) Liberals’ attitude toward politicization of justice and intelligence agencies magically shifts from con to pro.

His Obamaness is showcased by Greek columns and worshipful media. His Attorney General calls himself “the president’s wingman.” Obama’s court is in the forefront of Democrats’ psychosis about Donald Trump, pushing the CIA and FBI to investigate — actually, to completely invent — a Trump collusion with Soviet spooks to rig the 2016 election.

How eager was the Obama administration to subvert perceived enemies? It secretly eavesdropped and leaked conversations of liberal Democrat congressman Dennis Kucinich, who dared oppose Obama’s unofficial war against Libya’s Qaddafi regime.

In 2012 Obama’s IRS targeted conservative activists singled out by IRS tax exemption picker Lois Lerner. After the election was over, a pointless apology was offered.

(In 1970, Nixon asked an aide to look into using the IRS as a political weapon. The answer then was no.)

In 2023 the Biden Handlers Administration became so eager to censor speech that it even went after longtime liberal journalist Matt Taibbi. Matt’s sin was reporting on the administration pressuring social media to censor speech it deemed unacceptable. The very day Taibbi was scheduled to give congressional testimony on that subject, the FBI came knocking on his door.

The Goodness Grift, full of sound and virtue signifying nothing, has two possible destinations:

A failed destination was shown by last year’s Kamala Harris zombie presidential campaign. The frantic infusion of a billion dollars — most of it from America’s real oligarchs — plus all the doomsday hysteria the left could muster, persuaded 14% of America’s counties to favor the cackling queen of goodness. Just 14%! Well, they love big, wasteful spending.

The other destination would be Grift success, triumphing over the republic established 238 years ago. The colossus behind the con is collectively powerful: the media machine trained by journalism schools and almost all other academia, the celebrity machine dominating Hollywood and the laugh track of television, the dependency of those inclined to work little or not at all, the self-interest of over 20 million government payrollers, plus the ego gratification of wealthy lefty posers. Tough to defeat.

But do what you can for victory. Push our country in the direction preferred by 86% of America’s counties. That’s the path of a nation truly good, not grifter good.

Afterword: That “children are our future” trope liberals love to keep crooning needs an extra verse, one about that $36 trillion-plus debt we’re bequeathing to those beloved children.

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Decades ago David Bittinger moved from Chicago to a land of sleepy supper clubs and Democrats less corrupt than Illinois’. Though he regretted leaving behind easy access to great Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts and occasionally good White Sox games, with every passing year he’s become more wary about even driving down there. Now he enjoys writing guest columns for JKN and posting articles on curveballcommentary.com, also being challenged by cosmology studies and his grandson James.

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