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Right: die. Which brings to mind Mitch McConnell’s observation today:
WASHINGTON—The Senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, accused the Obama administration and its allies of undertaking a broad effort to push conservatives off the political playing field by trying to identify and harass their donors and force them into silence.
Mr. McConnell, in a pointed speech before a mostly conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups was one element of a broader attempt to vilify the political right.
President Barack Obama and his allies, he said, citing the IRS matter and other actions, had created a “culture of intimidation … around any person or group that spoke up for conservatism—or against the direction the president and his administration wanted to take us.”
It’s about time the mastodons of the GOP finally realize what they’re up against, and what they have been up against for a very long time. For the Obama administration is not simply politics-as-usual, in which both sides of the aisle gather to welcome us — the marks — to their weekly poker game, and we’re the guys who leave without our pants. No, this time (as my faux-leftist character, David Kahane, likes to say) it’s personal. Thanks to a combination of timing, good luck, and the incredible stupidity of the Republican Party, which nominated not one but two sure-loser candidates against him, Barack Obama and his brain trust have finally succeeded where previous generations of radical Leftists had failed, and that is the successful neutralization of the conservative movement, which must perforce lead to its ultimate destruction.
Time to wise up, suckers
As “Kahane” writes in the introduction to Rules for Radical Conservatives:
I want you to get mad. Good old-fashioned all-American furious, as you realize that we’ve been playing you for suckers for decades now, relying on your good will and sense of fair play and willingness to entertain any theory, no matter how ridiculous. Slow to anger, that’s you guys, whereas our side usually resembles nothing more than visiting day in the insane asylum, what with all the shouting, shrieking, screaming, begging, whining, imploring and general carrying-on. Whereas you tend to sit there, smiling and nodding, welcoming us into your homes via the evening news, and into your children’s noggins via the state-controlled educational system, and into your purses and bank accounts via the ever-expanding reach of the federal government and its insatiable appetite for your money and your property. Not realizing that slowly we are squeezing the life out of you and what used to be your country, slow-boiling the frog, delay-poisoning you with our arsenic biscuits, the way Miss Madeleine Smith eventually rid herself of her inconvenient lover, Emile L’Angelier, in long-ago Scotland.
I want you to understand that very little of what you are about to read has happened to you by accident, that most of it was done with malice aforethought – not in any vast-left-wing conspiracy sort of way, controlled from Moscow Center by a giggling psychopath stroking a white cat, but still deliberately – and with the clear intention of bringing down your society and replacing it with something else. Something that will still be called “the United States of America” (maybe; we haven’t decided yet) but will bear as little resemblance to the land of Lincoln as 19th-century Britain does to its 21st-century incarnation.
I want you to understand that with each passing day, as we wrap our tentacles more tightly around you, binding you with a million small pieces of petty legislation, harassing legal tactics, intrusive law enforcement, and the criminalization of just about everything, we are doing this for a reason: to weaken you enough so that in the unlikely event you actually do decide to fight back, you won’t be able to.
And that’s basically the leftist strategy for America and has been since I was in college at the end of the turbulent Sixties.
When I heard Obama nattering on about “fundamental transformation,” I knew exactly what he meant, as could any of my cohort from that era. Just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s Barry back in 2008:
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And now here we are, just five years later, snooped on, spied on, singled out for special attention by the IRS, with every evil imputed to us and nowhere to turn for succor but to ourselves. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of Obama — our “spokesmodel” president, as I called him today over at NRO — but the fact is that he’s already gone a long way to accomplishing the goals his handlers have set for him. And, now that he’s free from electoral scrutiny, you can bet he’ll go a lot farther in the time remaining in the second term. More words of wisdom from Kahane:
I want you to understand that when we say it’s for your own good, we mean that it’s for our own good.
I want you to understand that when we use a term like “social justice” what we really mean is that payback’s a bitch.
I want you to understand that when we start babbling on about advocacy and activism – only we men of the Left could invent out of whole cloth the twin non-professions of “activist” and “advocate” and have them taken seriously in the pages of the New York Times – what we really are talking about are what used to be known as “agitators.”
I want you to understand that whenever we accuse you of something nefarious — and our usual litany includes such well-worn staples as racism, sexism, ageism, heightism, weightism, carnivoreism, antidisestablishmentarianism, homophobia, tridecaphobia, hydrophobia, and glossolalia — or of adopting a particularly mean, dirty and low-down tactic, it simply means that those are the very things we are thinking of at that exact instant, and would actually indulge in ourselves if we thought you weren’t looking.
I want you to understand that when we say “hate speech” we pretty much mean every word that comes out of your mouths.
I want you to understand that when we speak of such as things fierce moral urgency, our “morality” is based on absolutely nothing more than whatever suits our purposes, and bears only an accidental resemblance to anything found in such traditional sources of morality as churches and synagogues.
I want you to understand the truth of Frost’s observation that a liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in an argument.
I want you to understand the truth of Chesterton’s observation that tolerance is the only virtue left to the man who no longer believes in anything.
I want you to understand that, though we may profess to celebrate life, in fact we are little more than a suicide cult, intent on doing in our rage as much damage as possible before finally shuffling off into the darkness that we are sure awaits us.
I want you to understand that we will not be happy until you agree with us.
I want you to understand that you have met the enemy, and he is us.
Here endeth the lesson, for now. Much more to come.
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