You're Only As Good As Your Dreams

Bob Herbert calls out Carl Paladino, running for NY governor, on what he thinks are good clean fun e-mails he forwards. He then drops this paragraph:

As for the poor, Mr. Caputo (Paladino's press secretary--PW) said that Mr. Paladino has at times not fully explained his expansive plans for welfare recipients, failing public school students, and men and women who receive unemployment benefits. He said a Governor Paladino would ask parents of struggling students to send them to state-sponsored boarding schools, which would also house children taken from their parents “because of social service or child welfare reasons.”

He said all recipients of long-term unemployment insurance or welfare services (except for the disabled and mothers with small children) would be required to work (or be re-trained) in government programs in order to get their benefits. This would include, he said, those who are already very well educated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28herbert.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1285669050-wDDuvho3a8w1fPXHUbRVHw

Well. Seems to me that an expansion of boarding schools and workhouses for children from 'dysfunctional families' would require a bit of expansion of the state, and the spending of, er, money. Not to mention an, er, expansion of intrusive state power over families and communities. And those government retraining programs and employer-as-last-resort jobs would, too, cost money and involve the state in, er, job creation that would cost, er, money.

Entirely consistent with tea-party conservatism, isn't it?

Now, you're only as good as your dreams, and Paladino has shown how good he is beyond a shadow of a doubt. But he's also crazy. Nuts. Reality-challenged. At utter odds with himself. And nobody in the Republican Party is saying so. He's recommending policies so entirely contradictory that he couldn't conceivably implement them, even were they the right thing to do.

But, again, we're not talking policy here. We're talking Self and Other, one virtuous and productive, the other parasitic, evil and dehumanized. And that's easy to implement. And needs to be called by its name, and fought.