By Paul A. Anthony, Editor in Chief

“Liberals love humanity but hate people.”-Dick Armey, retiring House majority leader, R-Texas.

In the days since last Tuesday, many a political commentator has tried to place a reason on why the Democrats basically blew it in an election cycle that favored them. After all, a first-term president almost always loses, and loses big, in the midterm congressional elections.

The Democrats, in their post-election confusion, watched House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) resign his post in anticipation of a presidential run. And they replaced him with Nancy Pelosi, a hardcore liberal who represents San Francisco.

That was the worst thing the Democrats could have done.

Liberalism is inherently flawed. It calls for restrictions on free trade, when free trade strengthens weak markets and leads to the global cooperation we see today.

Liberalism calls for higher taxes to increase government programs. But higher taxes have shrunk the economy, taking more money from the people liberalism purports to help.

And liberalism says it loves humanity. It wants affirmative action because it supposedly gives black people an equal chance; it wants welfare to give more money and require less from its recipients; it wants universal health care. And it never, ever wants to go to war.

Liberalism is a sham, purporting to love humanity while holding back the very people it’s supposed to help. And electing someone like Nancy Pelosi as the Democratic voice in the House is not the way to get the Democrats back into the good graces of the majority of the American people.

If the Democrats push left as a result of their shellacking Nov. 5, look for them to deride the Bush tax cuts as being slanted to the wealthy. Look for them to try to destroy the 1996 welfare reform bill that’s up for reauthorization. And look for them to push hard for universal health care and against partial privatization of Social Security.

These are failing, illogical positions that have plagued modern liberalism for years.

Americans support the Bush tax cuts and recognize them as what they were-an economic stimulus that kept the country from a longer recession. The welfare reform bill has decreased the number of children in poverty by forcing accountability onto the states administering the welfare systems.

Universal health care is a pipe dream, possible only in countries of smaller populations where the waiting lists and unmotivated physicians that have resulted are apparently not as big of a problem as they would be here. And the government has proven it is incapable of managing Social Security; the main culprit being Lyndon Johnson, who raided the Social Security fund in four years of presidential liberalism.

If Democrats want to see George W. Bush in power until 2008 and Republicans in control of Congress for the next 10 years or so, they only need to keep drifting further to the left, where liberal idealogues like Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton will greet them with open arms and a kiss of death.