I heard a brief segment of the Mark Levin show on Tuesday. And really, a very brief segment is about all I can take of this man’s loud and whiny rants. This is the host, after all, who recently had the following angry exchange with a caller that ended on this note:

LEVIN: Answer me this, are you a married woman? Yes or no?

CALLER: Yes

LEVIN: Well I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.

This is what Levin had to say about health care reform on Tuesday:

…[Obama] uses the language to turn things upside down. He’s for reform. Well since when is big, massive, bureaucratic, inefficient, costly government reform?… That’s not reform. That’s big government! Were the Founding Fathers against reform when they wrote the Constitution that they wrote, because it divided power, it balanced power, it checked power?…

Just like Limbaugh and other conservatives, Levin has been portraying his massive opposition to reform as simply a principled opposition to only “reform that destroys,” whereas, according to Levin, “conservatives actually believe in real reform…reform that improves.”

Well, that’s kind of funny, because Levin’s statement about reform and the Constitution contains an amazing irony that he apparently fails to see. Does Levin not realize that the creation of the Constitution itself was rather controversial; because it was not some simple improvement, as was initially intended, but rather a huge overhauling change that actually created a new, larger and more powerful central government? Whereas, the initial intention was much less extreme; i.e., simply address and revise certain parts of the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists decided to throw out the Articles altogether and create a new form of government. At both points, though, at the heart of the whole thing was Federalists’ dissatisfaction over the weakness of the central government under the Articles. 

Accordingly, I’ve gotta wonder how Levin would have viewed the Constitution at its inception. Has he ever considered the possibility that his fearful and angry attitude about federal government power (at least when a Democrat is in the White House) is more in the spirit of the Anti-Federalists – who opposed the Constitution – than the Federalists, whom he now venerates? The Anti-Federalists opposed the Constitution in part for fear that it served to create an overly powerful central government and particularly an overly powerful executive at the expense of the sovereignty of the states. Some such opponents even claimed the Federalists were pulling the wool over the states’ eyes in what amounted to an unnecessary power grab.

Hmm, now why does that last bit sound familiar? Ah yes, because that is exactly what Levin and his buddies always claim the Democrats are trying to do with “unnecessary,” “destructive” reform. Of course, the Anti-Federalist-esque attitudes of guys like Levin concerning the federal government seem to end right where Republican presidents begin. In that case, a super powerful executive coinciding with big time military spending and force are a few of these guys’ favorite things. They just start getting pissed when people want to try all that other “tyrannical” stuff. You know, like publicly providing for the common welfare.