The Politics of Rage

And revenge.

The conservative British writer Peter Hitchens has a clever phrase for those who those who insist on seeing no connection among events that might appear at a glance to have something in common: These people, says Hitchens, are coincidence theorists.

When Bill de Blasio campaigned for mayor on a promise to institute universal pre-kindergarten schooling and fund it with a surtax on the rich, coincidence theorists scoffed at the notion that de Blasio cared more about punishing the well-off than uplifting the poor by offering them a 14th year of dismal education instead of merely 13. Now that Gov. Cuomo has said that the state can fund pre-K without any tax increases, de Blasio promised to push to raise taxes anyway.

De Blasio is, in other words, insisting on applying a painful remedy despite the absence of any underlying disease. Try to apply that kind of logic to any other situation you can imagine.

“I see you have gangrene on your toe. I’m going to have to amputate it. Oh, that’s just some black paint you stepped in? Well, I’m going to amputate anyway. Because that’s what I said what I was going to do.”