O'Malley: WiFi a Human Right

Right up there with eating, sleeping and breathing:

Good news from would-be president Martin O’Malley: “WiFi is a human right”

Jon Ward of Yahoo News wonders if the next human right is the right to Frosted Flakes.

“Baby boomers and older were often told that if we specialize in terms of our skills, we will be more secure and prosperous, that the definition of ‘making it” was living out in the suburbs as far way as possible with the biggest lawn possible,” he said. “Young people have flipped that on its head. Younger people are choosing to live in cities. They realize that connections to each other are making us better. That WiFi is a human right. That proximity is important to entrepreneurship, access to capital and talent and diversity. There is an opportunity there for us as a nation to embrace that new perspective.”

I don’t follow Maryland politics so I can’t say whether O’Malley might be capable of believing something this stupid on the merits. Let’s be charitable, then, and assume that it’s just his goofy way of getting liberals’ attention while he’s busy trying to decide whether to primary Hillary. . . .

I'm kind of forced to follow Maryland politics, and I assure you that O'Malley is indeed stupid progressive enough to imagine that anything that could he could steal tax from one group (usually a rural group who doesn't vote for him)  to give to another group, particularly an urban group who votes for him, is indeed, a "human right", while it serves its purpose. Governors in Maryland, and O'Malley in particular have acted essentially as governors for the urban core of the state, and the plantation owner of the rural fringe.

The point isn’t really to propose WiFi as a human right, it’s to signal in an unusually clumsy way that he’s to the left of the Clintons; and since it’s young progressives who are most likely to drive a left-wing primary challenge to Hillary in 2016, it’s young progressives whom he’s most eager to pander to. He did something similar on immigration a few months ago. At the height of the border crisis, Hillary called for sending young illegals back to their families in Central America as soon as possible after they crossed the border. O’Malley pounced on that, arguing that we should give them every procedural opportunity to make their case for asylum in the U.S. Maybe that’ll win him one percent of the Latino vote against her instead of the expected zero. And hey, if Clinton ends up passing for whatever strange, surprising reason, this sort of hyper-progressive slobbering will leave O’Malley well positioned in the primaries — until Elizabeth Warren jumps in and sends him to the back of the pack again.

Really? Can he make Hillary look better? He just might.