If there’s one thing I’ve learned this past year or so watching the Angry Ones’ movement build is that it’s hard to keep up. You can’t just stake out a position, no matter how wild and exciting it might be, and then sit pat. Pretty soon someone will overtake you, and you’ll look like an old fuddy-duddy.
I mean, first we had Rush Limbaugh saying outlandish things, and everything was jolly for a while, but then along came back Glenn Beck, going Rush one better, or two better, harking back to old conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers, and the Federal Reserve, and the gold standard, and National Socialism, and pretty soon Rush was looking like yesterday’s news.
Or we had Sarah Palin, pretty and perky, declaring she’s hip to foreign policy because she can see Russia from her window, and that was jolly for a while, and the Republicans loved her, or tried to. But now along comes Christine O’Donnell, prettier and perkier, and talk about flaky!
But that’s the way it goes.
Never mind seeing Russia from your kitchen window. Christine, candidate for senator from the great state of Delaware, wants us to know, “American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains,” as she declared on Fox Propaganda a couple of years ago.
Mice with human brains! How’s that for conspiratorial paranoia?
Karl Rove, longtime Republican hatchetman, laments that she says “nutty things that don’t add up,” apparently not having learned that’s exactly what the Angry Ones like. The nuttier the better.
And now this witchcraft thing.
Maybe you remember when Sarah was running for governor, an African witch-hunter visited her Pentecostal church in Alaska — Thomas Muthee, he was popular among Pentecostalists for a while — and he prayed over her, saying, “Give her men and women who will buck her up in the name of Jesus … we come against every hindrance of the enemy … every form of witchcraft is what you will rebuke in the name of Jesus,” which was a big hit on YouTube for a while.
But, in fairness, Sarah didn’t say anything herself. She just stood there with her head bowed and let herself be prayed over by this Christian revivalist witch-hunter from Nairobi. And besides, you could argue, the whole point of the prayer was against witchcraft, not for it.
But look what we have now. We have pretty and perky Christine O’Donnell talking about how she herself “dabbled in witchcraft” some years ago, although, ahem, she never joined a coven.
A letter in this newspaper yesterday accused me of having an “agenda.” I’m not sure what that means, maybe some kind of fixed ideology — the writer also called me “the Gazette’s liberal columnist” — or maybe some kind of goal I want to achieve. I’m not sure.
But no, ladies and gentlemen, I’m just running to catch up. The Angry Ones are moving so fast, I keep falling behind. I just about get used to Rush and think I understand him, and then Glenn Beck comes from out in the ozone.
I believe I have Sarah figured out, and now Christine comes with her over-equipped mice.
Not to mention Carl Paladino, candidate for governor, with his horse-and-woman photos and his promises to clean up Albany.
What could my “agenda” possibly be? Only to run faster, that’s all.
Unlike, say, that miserable hack Charles Krauthammer, who appears in this newspaper by way of syndication. There’s somebody who doesn’t run at all but just gets into a rut and stays there, churning and churning, like a rat in a laboratory.
Case in point: His column the other day in which he referred to the tea party movement and “the mainstream media’s scurrilous portrayal of it as a racist rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians.”
Isn’t that beautiful? I mean, not just how the syllables tumble off the tongue but also how utterly divorced it is from reality, how utterly stuck in an ideological rut.
As I’ve pointed out over and over, it’s the teapots themselves who constantly bring up the subject of racism in order to beat their breasts in denial. Nobody else calls them racists, at least not that I’m aware of and at least not in the “mainstream media.”
There may be websites somewhere that call them racist, but nothing that I read or listen to calls them that. It’s a non-accusation that they are singularly obsessed with, and it’s what this ideological robot of a columnist mindlessly echoes. Who here has an “agenda”?
Further, just think of Charles Krauthammer sneering at the “mainstream media” in the first place. Charles Krauthammer, who works for the Washington Post, one of the most prominent newspapers in the land, who is syndicated in some 200 other newspapers and who is a regular panelist on rich and powerful Fox Propaganda. If he is not the “mainstream media,” who is? Certainly not me, here in Schenectady.
Teapots forward me his columns sometimes and urge me to read them, thinking no doubt that I will be impressed and perhaps convert to rut-thinking and right-wing cliches, but I don’t need them forwarded to me. I read them on my own, and love them.
“Racist rabble of resentful lumpenproletarians” — who could not love such language? Even though, please note, it’s not quoted from anywhere. It’s not a horrible “mainstream media” outlet saying such a thing and Krauthammer righteously debunking it. No, it’s him, the real mainstream media, the Washington Post and 200 other respectable newspapers, including this one, saying it, spreading the falsehood that that’s what the poor beleaguered tea partiers are up against.
It’s just awful, ladies and gentlemen, just awful.
But getting back to the idea of going the other fellow one better so as to get to the head of the line, the most beautiful example for me was the recent article in Forbes magazine by Dinesh D’Souza, analyzing Barack Obama as the embodiment of his long-absent father’s dreams.
May I quote the conclusion of it, so you can savor the sweet nutty flavor?
“Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist [referring to Obama’s father], who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.”
So never mind our president being a socialist or a Marxist. D’Souza and Forbes have leapfrogged that now-stale rhetoric and landed way out ahead of anyone else. Our president is a shade, reincarnating the tribal, anticolonial dreams of the father he never knew.
I would defy anyone to top that except that I expect sooner or later someone will. We’re on a very wild ride, ladies and gentlemen.
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