WSJ's Big Con on Flight Cancellations

Big Con fellow traveler Greg Anrig is ranting again [1]:

spectacle of watching enraged conservatives flailing their fingers in every direction without pausing to look in the mirror only reinforces that the movement's day of reckoning is rapidly approaching. They, not appeasers on the left, are responsible for the debacle in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. The hostility of Alan Greenspan toward regulation, rather than the anti-redlining legislation that people like Larry Kudlow keep spewing about, played a huge role in the subprime fiasco. And the tax cuts for the rich that were widely applauded by the [Wall Street] Journal and the right greatly exacerbated soaring inequality while delivering none of the promised economic benefits for the rest of the country.

Of course, I ranted in much the same fashion earlier this morning [2] on the subject of the right's hysterical misdirection of blame for the subprime crisis. Greg's proximate subject is air safety:

In the right's latest attempt to blame liberals for the failures of conservatism, today's Wall Street Journal editorializes that Congressional Democrats are responsible for the widespread cancellation of American Airlines flights for re-inspections for wiring problems. Years of lax, airline-friendly FAA oversight of the sort that the Journal and the conservative movement has long advocated apparently has nothing to do with the mess....

Quoting the WSJ:

There's a lesson here, and it reverberates beyond the FAA and the airline industry. Mr. Oberstar and other Democrats in Congress would just as soon do to the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product and Safety Commission and other "consumer protection" agencies exactly what they've managed to do to the FAA inside of a month's time. We thought we'd left this hypernanny state mentality in the 1970s, but with this Democratic Congress it is back with a vengeance. The FAA fiasco gives us a glimpse of what the world would look like under this re-regulatory assault. It would mean that every business misstep, no matter how rare, could potentially result in industry-wide repercussions. Congress would call for more rules and greater enforcement, in the name of "safety."

Ah, yes. The dreaded "safety." Cursed liberals!

You might want to click on the Journal [3] editorial yourself because you probably won't believe it when I tell you the non sequitur by which the editors "support" their "argument" that aircraft safety rules shouldn't be enforced: that it's safer to fly than it is to drive if you measure it "per 100 million miles traveled," and that it's much safer to fly now than it was in 1930.

I hope John McCain adopts that for a campaign slogan.

Even more hilariously, the graph they display to show all's hunky dory would seem to show—fun with logorhythms!—gains in airline safety have progressively decreased every year since around 1983.