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The Gadarene rush

The Gadarene rush

Last updated on: January 26, 2010 at 5:45 am by Gene Veith

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The Gadarene rush 2010-01-26T05:45:03-05:00 Gene Veith

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I quote George Will here not to vaunt over liberals, as he does, but to relish his language, especially his Biblical allusion in the last of these sentences. Will first quotes the president, who said of the health care legislation, “We are on the precipice of an achievement that’s eluded Congresses and presidents for generations,” and then riffs on the metaphor:

The 2008 elections gave liberals the curse of opportunity, and they have used it to reveal themselves ruinously. The protracted health-care debacle has highlighted this fact: Some liberals consider the legislation's unpopularity a reason to redouble their efforts to inflict it on Americans who, such liberals think, are too benighted to understand that their betters know best. The essence of contemporary liberalism is the illiberal conviction that Americans, in their comprehensive incompetence, need minute supervision by government, which liberals believe exists to spare citizens the torture of thinking and choosing. . . .

If the Democrats' congressional leaders are determined to continue their kamikaze flight to incineration, they will ignore Massachusetts's redundant evidence of public disgust. They will leaven their strategy of briberies with procedural cynicism — delaying certification of Massachusetts's Senate choice, or misusing “reconciliation” to evade Senate rules, or forcing the House to swallow its last shred of pride in order to rush the Senate bill to the president's desk. Surely any such trickery would be one brick over a load for some hitherto servile members of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, giving them an excuse to halt their party’s Gadarene rush toward the precipice.

via George F. Will – Democrats on the precipice of failure – washingtonpost.com.

That last, of course, is a reference to what happened after our Lord cast out the demons from a Gadarene man, whereupon they entered a herd of pigs that then ran off a cliff. Can you think of other examples of a “Gadarene rush”?

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