People love to recite Wise Sayings. But they seldom apply them to the real world.

“Follow the money” is pretty obvious, and when someone wants to impress you he can trace imaginary money through Swiss banks to financing Evil. He is fully convinced that a vice president who already has several hundred million dollars has no interest in power for its own sake, but just wants to make more for the oil company he partially owns.

They will Follow the Money around the world but never across the street. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have never made a dime anywhere but in supporting causes. Our president is one of them.

But the flow of money in this case never gets a word.

You can see it everywhere. You can see National Review replacing the World Communist threat with a World Arab Threat. You can see all the tens of thousands of people who made their livings as Friends of Peace, i.e., of the Communists, instantly transformed into Environmentalists.

But no one mentions it. They want to discuss the “frame of mind” that makes a person go from one cause to another.

In the real world, the people in the Save the Whales, if they had a job before, generally had a job saving something or, as Obama’s resume only says, “social activist.”

The Left doesn’t denounce common sense statements like this. It ignores them.

If you want to make a living as a respectable conservative, you follow the guidelines set down by the establishment media. As the first publisher of National Review for over thirty years, William Rusher said, “The staff of National Review doesn’t believe anything until it is published in the New York Times.”

So there are no articles about how people who are now middle aged and have never made a living outside of activism make a living.

But this is pure Follow the Money. If you read the articles, it is as if these people existed on air.

Which makes so much absolutely clear, in fact obvious, to me that which seems so strange for people who are looking for the Latest Conspiracy or the Big Excitement.

In 1994, the House of Representatives went Republicans for the first time in forty years, during which its leadership kept wisely saying, “The votes are in the middle of the road.”

In fact, the House had been controlled by the Democrats for all but four years since 1931.

Its Republicans leadership gave regular lectures on How to Win Elections by Being Moderate.

There were about fifteen thousand Democratic House employees, in Washington and in the District. About ten thousand lost their jobs.

Where did they go? Damned few went where the computer specialists went when that industry collapsed, to MacDonald’s or Wendy’s. They retired or got jobs in the same industry in the same city.

This is the only place you will hear those thousands mentioned as a political factor, because this is following the money across town rather than around the world.