What Do Believers In Global Warming, Supporters Of Obamacare, And The New York Times Have In Common?

Overweening arrogance.

Given the heavy and increasing opposition to Obamacare, Byron York asks in the Washington Examiner, “why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?”

“Because,” he asks “a Democratic strategist” who for understandable reasons wants to remain anonymous,

they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it’s good for the public.

Ben Stein makes a similar point in The American Spectator, referring to climategate.

Based upon a great deal of data, many scientists have come up with a theory that human activity is wrecking the climate of the planet and that if the wise, good people are not allowed to compel the stupid, evil people to change their ways drastically, terrible things will happen.

Never mind “that there is major controversy about whether global warming is really happening in a long-term way” or “whether whatever climate change is occurring is anthropogenic….” If you are in any way skeptical of even the more extreme global warming claims or in fact if you disagree with any of a number of favored liberal nostrums, you are either stupid or evil, or both, and in addition, as I argue in a not quite published piece that I will come back and link later, you are “on the wrong side of history.”

This all-knowing, morally self-congratulatory, superciliously sneering attitude of superiority is now so endemic on the left that it has even begun to attack, and thus offend, some of its natural allies. Thus, with fury supported by chapter and verse evidence, this is how Feminist Law Professors summarizes (HatTip InstaPundit) a “contempt-laden” recent New York Times piece: “From the NYT: You Dumb Women are Opposing the New Mammogram Recommendations Because You Don’t Understand Science or Math.

The left is increasingly embattled and defensive, but circling the wagons and then shooting everyone inside the circle has not historically proved to be a winning tactic.

Say What?