Ah, yes. Magic and Superstition explain anything that benefits conservatives.

That might explain why Michael Moore is so adamantly anti-Bush. As we all know, Jedi mind tricks don't work on Hutts.

You know, I always wondered why those hippy feminists burned bras back in the sixties. It all makes sense now. Thanks.

I see this as a natural progression. The origin of leftist thinking was Marxian socialism, which propounded "scientific" ideas for the complete totalitarian restructuring of society. It may be hard to believe, but Marxism was once sold on the basis of its scientific approach to the optimization of an economy.

Well, we know how that worked out. But Marxism turns out to be a pile of jackstraws; remove any one of them, and the rest collapse at once. So with the scientific rigor of the thing no longer defensible, its proponents, who had become addicted to the pursuit of power, had to buttress it some other way. They tried pseudo-moralism, then the claim that socialism would bring international peace, then an ascetic ethic that holds that people ought not to be well off, because it distracts them from "what really matters."

All of it has gone down to defeat. Command and control have produced nothing but darkness and despair. Free markets and individual liberty have triumphed. But the Left isn't willing to give up its totalitarian dreams. So even if it can't argue coherently for its own ideology, it must prevent onlookers from intelligently studying why freedom works. It must cloud men's minds about the causal mechanisms that underpin the free society.

So leftists use terms like "magic," "miracles," and "luck."

Classically, magic has involved either hidden laws of nature or the intervention of superhuman creatures. Clearly, the Left would prefer that we not think about the laws of nature. But what superhuman creatures did Reagan have at his beck and call? The public wants to know!

But what superhuman creatures did Reagan have at his beck and call?

The USMC, The US Navy, The US Air Force, the US Army, SAC, and, perhaps the most insidious, powerful Daemon at his command, Adam Smith.

Hell, claiming magic, miracles, or luck is better than what Slugman and his ilk normally do:

Offer a hand wave and remind us that everyone knows that trickle down economics is hogwash. Are you gonna believe the perfesser, or your own lyin' eyes?