Springtime for Hillary

Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

CARL REINER: I’d like you to meet the German representative from Nartzi? Narzi? Narzi! From the Narzi Film Company, Herr Adolph Hartler.   Good afternoon, Herr Hartler!

MEL BROOKS: Heil Hartler, how are you?!

* * * * * *

REINER: Sir, you’re wearing your bathing suit, I noticed. And as you scratched your head, I noticed a little “SS” tattooed under your arm. What does that mean?

BROOKS:  Oh, uh, uh, well, wait — oh, that’s the “Simon Says!”

REINER: The what?! The what?!

BROOKS: “Simon Says.” We play that on the beach. I’m the captain of the Simon Says Team und that’s vhere ve get SS from!

REINER: You think it’s worth tattooing on your arm, just to be a Simon Says leader?

BROOKS: Oh, vell, I’m serious about the game, I love it, and so I had myself tattooed Simon Says!

REINER: How did you feel about Stanley Kramer’s motion picture, Judgment at Nuremberg?

BROOKS: Unfair!

REINER: Why did you consider it unfair?

BROOKS: Well, because he didn’t tell the whole truth. Vhat vas the picture about? Really about? A misunderstanding really, wasn’t it? I mean, look: you send people to camp don’t you, in the summer?  We sent a few people to camp! I don’t know what the whole…fuss is about!  Send some nice people to camp. Mostly in the summer!

—From the comedy album Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival, 1962.

Hillary Clinton wants to send all Americans back to camp because they are not having enough fun.

In another paid speech, Clinton addressed a group of camp counselors Thursday. She lauded the camp experience for teaching important life skills and fostering personal growth.

“As I have gotten older, I have decided we really need camps for adults,” Clinton said.

The former Secretary of State lectured the audience, telling them that Americans need more fun.

“I think we have a huge fun deficit in America,” Clinton said.

Clinton did not explain why she felt Americans were not having fun but it is not difficult to understand her reasoning after going through Clinton’s list of hobbies.

“Her favorite fitness activity, according to her MySpace page, is speed walking. Her hobbies include crossword puzzles, Scrabble and gardening. Organizing her closets is stress relief. Sleeping in until 7 a.m. is her idea of being naughty.”*

—“Hillary Clinton Says to Fix The ‘Fun-Deficit’ in America, ‘We Really Need Camps for Adults,’” the Washington Free Beacon, yesterday.

As a normal, sane, red-blooded American, I am, of course, dreading the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency, just as a super-majority of Americans previously were in 2007. As a blogger, journalist, and editor, assuming I don’t wind up in one of Hillary’s reeducation fun camps, I am positively thrilled about covering the insanity that will emerge. The amount of crazy schemes and cover-ups to emerge from Team Hillary will dwarf the Blogosphere, especially since the MSM will be too in the tank to cover most of it.

Update: In case anyone is surprised by Hillary’s latest brainstorm, recall her past attempts at totalitarian spitballing:

Orwell’s was a daddy-dystopia, where the state is abusive and bullying, maintaining its authority through a permanent climate of war and the manufacture of convenient enemies. Huxley’s is a maternal misery, where man is smothered with care, not cruelty. But for all our talk these days about manliness, individualism, and even the ‘nanny state,’ we still don’t have the vocabulary to fight off nice totalitarianism, liberal fascism.

With that distinction in mind, let us revisit It Takes a Village. On page after page, Clinton extols the idea that just about everything is a health issue. Divorce should be treated like a “public health issue” because it creates stress in children. The very basics of parenting are health issues because “how infants are held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at”determines whether our brains can be “hijacked”by our emotions, potentially making us murderously violent. Mrs. Clinton tells us that Janet Reno issued a report which found that gang violence and gun use are the products of people with badly imprinted brains who become “emotionally hijacked”with little provocation. Quoting doctors, friendly activists, social workers, and random real Americans, in chapter after chapter she argues for interventions on behalf of children from literally the moment they are born. Children need “[g]entle, intimate, consistent contact” to reduce stress, which can “create feelings of helplessness that lead to later developmental problems.”Even well-to-do parents need help because after all everyone feels stress, and “we know that babies sense the stress.” It’s fair to say that a state empowered to eliminate parental stress is a state with a Huxleyan mandate. And a state with an extreme mandate must logically go to extremes.

Hence Clinton argues for the diffusion of parental training into every nook and cranny of public life. Here’s one such suggestion: “Videos with scenes of common-sense baby care—how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable—could be running continuously in doctors’ offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any place where people gather and have to wait.” Imagine if these sorts of ideas were fully implemented at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the passport office, and other places “where people gather and have to wait.”Giant flat screens at the airport pumping breast-feeding advice? The JumboTron at football games? At what point would the Brave New World seem to be heading down the pike?

And in-between Madison Avenue letting its inner Socialist Justice Warrior out to run amok during the commercials of the most recent Super Bowl, and Starbucks unleashing its own crusading socialist evangelism, the off-ramp for Brave New World certainly appears well within sight.

Exit question: Has Hillary nailed down the name for her camps yet? Why not go with a proven winner, such as “Strength Through Joy”?

* Huh — so Hillary’s just a babe in the woods when it comes to knowing about her husband’s ideas of “being naughty,” I guess. And how does “sleeping in until 7:00 am” fit in with promising to be on the job and ready to swing into action when the phone rings at 3:00 AM?