Liberating America from the Evils of Homophobic Waffle Fries

“And So It Begins …,” Patrick Richardson writes at the Tatler:

So it turns out the shooter, excuse me, “alleged shooter” at the Family Research Council in Washington DC said “I don’t like your politics,” before opening fire.

Long decrying so-called “hateful rhetoric” from the right, the left has blamed us for everything from the Gabby Giffords shooting to the Aurora massacre. So where is the left now? Where are the liberals saying “hateful rhetoric” from the left caused this “tragedy?”

Where are the lefties decrying the labeling of FRC a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Since the beginning of the Occupy Movement, and all the leashed violence across the nation it generated, I’ve waited and watched, wondering when the real violence would begin. So you tell me, is this the beginning? Will the left, so enamored of an ideology which has killed millions across the world, finally show their true colors?

“If you seriously think this election is about gay marriage or affordable contraception, you’re about to do to America what Gavrilo Princip did to the Habsburg Empire,” Mark Steyn writes in his weekly column:

Mr. Corkins decided to shoot people because of a chicken sandwich chain owner’s position on same-sex marriage. That’s what Floyd Corkins thinks is the most pressing issue facing the United States. Perhaps he saw himself as the Gavrilo Princip of our time. Like Floyd Corkins, young Princip was not the sharpest knife in the transgender clinic – the cyanide pill he took after the assassination was past its sell-by date; to evade capture, his co-conspirator jumped into the River Miljacka, but it was only five inches deep, and a man standing up to his ankles in the middle of a river in a large city tends to attract attention. Nevertheless, Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand plunged Europe into war and brought down the Austrian, German, Russian and Turkish empires with consequences that plague us to this day (not least the post-Ottoman Middle East). History does not record whether Princip embarked on his mission with 15 pieces of Wienerschnitzel or Sachertorte in his backpack, but he changed the course of history. Perhaps Floyd Corkins had similar dreams: He would be the flamer that lit the fuse to liberate a continent from the oppressiveness of homophobic waffle fries.

I’m not blaming Floyd Corkins’ actions on the bullying twerps at the Southern Poverty Law Center or those thug Democrat mayors who tried to run Chick-fil-A out of Boston and Chicago. But I do think he’s the apotheosis of narcissistic leftist myopia. He symbolizes that exhaustion of the other possibilities – the dwindling down of latter-day liberalism to ever more self-indulgent distractions from the hard truths of a broke and ruined landscape. Our elites have sunk into a boutique decadence of moral preening entirely disconnected from reality: A nonhomophobic chicken in every pot, an abortifacient dispenser in every Catholic university, a high-speed rail corridor between every two bankrupt California municipalities.

I tend to think of America — or America-Lite, as David Gelernter dubbed its 21st century incarnation — as more the modern-day equivalent of the Weimar Republic than the Habsburg Empire at twilight, but either way, the end times are certainly upon us when stories such as these make the news:

Fortunately, the president has America’s moral and fiscal crisis well in hand, if this hard-hitting, take no prisoners interview is any indication.