GOP to Stick to its Guns

Offering a hint at the direction he will take the Heritage Foundation as its new president, Senator Jim Demint told reporters today that there is “no truth whatsoever to the lie that movement conservatives are abandoning their laissez faire principles in relation to the marketplace of ideas.”

Said the Senator, “No, we’re not all converting to intellectual communism just because we lost an election cycle. In fact, if the recent elections told us anything, it’s that the marketplace of ideas needs more deregulation not less.

“The 2012 election will go down in history as a study in what happens when non-market forces are allowed to warp the political discourse--when you start saddling one side’s ideas with onerous encumbrances like burdens of proof and science and fact checking and consistency tests.

“What isn’t the left getting about the simple laws of supply and demand? When there’s a demand for the idea that more deregulation fixes the economic problems caused by deregulation you meet that demand. When people keep buying the idea that the deficit is what you fixate on fixing in times of widespread economic hardship for the middle class and below, you keep selling them that idea.

“When you don’t, you catastrophically keep the magic hand of the free market of ideas from steering the ship of state in its natural rightward direction.”

Explained Rick Preston from the Cato Institute, “What happens when the jackbooted liberal idea police throw their monkey wrenches into the works of the free exchange of ideas is that market distortions start popping up all over the place. Suddenly otherwise perfectly viable ideas with a right to life are having to be bailed out in the interest of protecting the integrity of the free idea market.

“It’s not natural for one side to have to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars running an elaborate life support system for the idea that there is such a thing as clean coal, for instance, or that global warming is a myth, or that right-to-work laws have the best interest of workers in mind, or that voter suppression is all about saving the integrity of our Democracy.

“The thing is, the travesty being made of the marketplace of ideas isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s eventually likely to do very real damage to the actual free market. If we allow the demise of the idea that wealth trickles down, how long do you think we can keep basing our economy on that idea?

“So like Senator Demint is saying, no, we’re not about to abandon our conservative love of freedom. We will keep resisting any and all restraints on the ideas we come up with in our struggle to make America safer and safer for the job creators at the top.”

In related news, at a “frank” sit-down in the Oval Office on Thursday to discuss the upcoming fiscal cliff, President Obama reportedly told House Speaker John Boehner that he might be willing to budge a little more on spending cuts if some of the patent lies Republicans keep telling about the economy were put on the chopping block.

According to sources, the Speaker was not unagreeable to the idea in principle, but did express his nonnegotiable unwillingness to include in any deal the patent Republican lie that they are not telling patent lies about the economy.