Welcome to Memorial Day 2016 — everybody hates each other.
It’s not just Democrats loathing Republicans and vice-versa. We’re used to that. Democrats are loathing Democrats and Republicans are loathing Republicans and everyone’s despising Libertarians, assuming they know who or what Libertarians are and that’s difficult because the Libertarians have nominated as their vice-presidential candidate William Weld, who is about as libertarian as Salvador Allende.
Got that?
Well, if you do, you’re ahead of me, but we’re all snarly angry, living out our hostilities, ideological or otherwise, in this Year of Living Furiously. It’s as if the whole country had adopted one big murderous Twitter handle to tell their dopey neighbors what for. Some wag right here on PJ Media is calling himself Vlad the Impaler. I don’t think I want to run into him on a dark Saturday night. (Okay, maybe he’s a nine-year old kid with a laptop. What do I know?)
It’s gone so far that even Bernie Sanders has taken his gloves off (sort of) and is finally talking about Hillary’s emails, which formerly he considered off limits or, shall we say, treif? (For gentiles and people who don’t come from New York, that’s non-kosher food.) Maybe old Bern’s been lying in the weeds, waiting for the inspector general to tee up old Hill so Bernie can nail her and steal the nomination right from under the nose of Joe Biden.
Needless to say, the Clintonistas aren’t too happy with old Bern, claiming the Brooklyn Vermonter is “almost inciting violence.” In their world, only Trump himself can truly incite violence.
One of those endangered species (aka Hillary supporters) named John Smart who, like 98% of Los Angeles tells us he works in the film business, had this to say: “The tone of Bernie Sanders in the last three weeks to a month has been horrible and destructive and mean-spirited and arrogant. And I don’t know what he’s up to. … I think it’s completely ego at this point.”
Gag me with a spoon… One thing about this anger is it has the capacity to make even John “Smart” simple-minded. He probably would have gone ballistic if Bernie had pulled off his dream debate… with Donald. Drudge was calling it the “debate of the century.” It would have kept them up all night from Sandusky to Kuala Lumpur. Could there possibly be a “debate of the century” that would include Hillary? (Opening question: which is better, Ambien or Lunesta?) Luckily for La Chappaqua, Trump pulled out.
But speaking of endangered species and Trump (and why not — if you don’t speak of Trump, no one reads it), Donald, who has been out here in California a lot of late, has declared our drought to be a phony and the result of the redirection of water away from the agricultural fields of the San Joaquin Valley to preserve the Delta smelt or what Donald calls a “three-inch fish.”
Of course in The Year of Living Furiously, the liberal media, in this case USA Today, hates Trump and considers any idea he has, ahem, dead in the water. Their article goes on and on to inform the great unwashed that, despite some improvements, there is a real drought and, presumably, the fish had nothing to do with it. They add by way of authority: “Trump’s comments come weeks after Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order updating water restrictions.”
But, almost unbelievably for a major newspaper, there’s an inadvertent punch line at the very top of the article in bold: Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of California’s governor.
How many years has Jerry been in office? I would love to have seen what they wrote. (Bill Maher?) Does hate make you blind or does hate make you blind?
Happy Memorial Day! I hope we can all agree on that.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His next book – I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already – will be published by Encounter Books on June 14, 2016. You can read an excerpt here. You can pre-order the book here.
(Artwork created using multiple Shutterstock.com images.)
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