The common theme on the Left: denying that there's a problem.

To hear people like Harry Reed say it there's no problem with social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the national debt, government spending. Everything must go on as it has in the past because there is no problem and anyone who tries to change these programs wants to kill the elderly and the poor.

Harry Reid has much in common with other Leftist like Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain who has decided not to run for re-election after a recent opinion poll showed that more than 80 percent of Spanish voters have lost their trust in Zapatero, making him Spain’s least popular prime minister since the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1975. You can almost hear Harry Reed talking ….

... Zapatero wasted valuable time and energy denying that there actually was a problem. Spanish Socialists, like many postmodern relativists, believe that all problems are by definition imaginary and can be wished away by avoiding negative thoughts. In an effort to downplay the scale of Spain’s economic troubles, the Socialist government has established a seven-year track record of using an arsenal of postmodern euphemisms to avoid unpleasantries and to create a virtual Spanish reality.

In an interview with the Socialist mouthpiece El País, for example, Zapatero famously asserted that the idea that Spain was actually in trouble was “opinionable” and said that “it all depends upon what we mean by crisis.” He said that those warning about an impending economic crisis were being “unpatriotic” and that such talk was a “fallacy, pure catastrophism.” Zapatero also warned: “Let’s not turn economic forecasting into a fetish.” Think positive, he said: “To be optimistic is something more than a rational act. It is a moral requirement, an act of decency and, if I may say so, elegance.”

Thanks to Socialism and Liberalism, Spain is one of Europe’s PIIGS, a state on the brink of economic failure. A textbook example of national leadership that lives, like Obama, in a fairyland of their own creation.