I have to laugh at you wingnuts, especially those of you “deep thinkers” who sit around endlessly debating whether His Serene Majesty the Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, Master of the Greens, Bringer of Kinetic Military Action, Vacationer-in-Chief, Slayer of Osama, Atomizer of the Economy, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, is Chauncey Gardiner, the anti-hero of Being There, or the Manchurian Candidate III: This Time, It’s Personal.
Why can’t the answer be both? I mean, it’s laugh-out-loud funny to watch you and your legions of Faux News “Rethuglican campaign consultants” twist yourselves into post–Labor Day pretzels trying to figure out Hussein — and, by extension, all those on the morally superior Left — by trying to shoehorn him and us into your standard white-bread political molds. Because the truth is, Troglodytes are from Mars and Progressives are from Venus and until you get that through those thick Neanderthal skulls of yours, you’ll never understand us, much less defeat us.
Advertisement
As you know from my legendary book on the subject, my task in this life is to make you smarter, more worthy adversaries, instead of the pathetic, mewling sacks of Romneys that you are. This is the job I have been given by my father, the sainted “Che” Kahane, who’s still living down there in Florida in Lanskyland with his brother, my Uncle Joe, plotting the revolution and savoring the triumph of how far we’ve come, and how fast.
But so far I’ve failed miserably, since you idiots continue to live in a prelapsarian past, one in which the Right and Left shared similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the U.S. of KKKA, and you still think we can hash out our differences over a cup of Morning Joe. We used to meet for lunch by day and at the Rotary Club by night, a time of shared cultural values, Cold War paranoia, and endemic racism. Horrible as it may seem today, we lived in the same neighborhoods, sent our kids to the same schools, and once in a blue, gibbous moon even married each other.
Luckily, those days are gone for good, and I’m proud to say it’s our side that has made it so. We’ve self-segregated, not only into New York City apartment buildings and neighborhoods, but into whole states — commie “Red” for you (yuk, yuk — thanks, media!) and patriotic “Blue” for us. It’s like Underworld, where werewolves and vampires fight it out for global supremacy, but we’re evolving into Lycans and you’re evolving into a half-witted Caesar from The Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
But don’t worry: We’re not about to request partition, like India and Pakistan, or the Irish or the original Kardashians. We’re taking you over one state at a time, by any means necessary, moving from state to state like the aliens in Independence Day, sucking the life from one body politic after another and then, insatiable, moving on to the next one. We won’t rest until, like Dracula, we’ve extracted the life essence from all 57 or 58 states and leave your Christianist artifact of the so-called “Enlightenment” as dead as the Holy Roman Empire, and as little mourned.
Let me put this in terms you morons might possibly understand. For activists and advocates of my father’s generation, there were two career choices back in the ’60s through which they could effect their desire for fundamental change. The first was the law, the second (for the less intellectually gifted) was journalism. The tolerance-teaching Southern Poverty Law Center — founded on the belief that there would always be racist-caused poverty, now and forever, amen — or the New York Times — the only place on earth where it is always 1964 and that premature anti-Republican Lester Maddox is still taking a baseball bat to the black patrons of his Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta.
Those too stupid to do either went into academe — but you knew that already, because you probably had some of them for teachers. But, luckily for us, they taught both disciplines.
Mr. Kahane -- truly, you address something I've wondered about for a very long time: What "normal" Democrats can be thinking. I'm not talking about the Saul Alinsky following, Marxist types, but those who still love America and want it to prosper. Don't they think that if the U.S. collapses their own kids will be affected? Or do they simply not look that far ahead? I think it's the latter. They cannot face what's actually happening because then they might have to question their way of being in the world. It's easier to lash out at the SOB's in the Tea Party so they can continue to blame someone for our dire straits. I guess those SOB Tea Partiers are to blame for collapsing economies in Greece, Italy, Ireland and Spain too.
There are no normal democrats. They take the benefits and cover of their philosophy so they will pay the price.
I'm a big believer in Nuremburg rules. A great wind is coming, a wind that will sweep the streets clean. My only fear is that the form will be that of the Khmer Rouge rather than a moderated social change. The democrats can choose.
Oh, Mr. Kahane, thank you for the best laugh I've had in a long time. You and Ann Coulter are the best at using spot-on humor to skewer the left mercilessly. You rock!
Not sure if this was suppose to be humorous, but it wasn't. Didn't laugh once. Definitely a departure from the regular stable of NR writers.
I guess you have to try new things every now and then, but now that this guy's writings have been tried, we should move on to something else and hope for better.
Art...you must be a newbie. Mr. Kahane has been gracing the pages of NRO for quite sometime. If you don't enjoy parody or are ignorant of leftist history you may never acquire a taste for David's satirical wit. NRO is a buffet of delectable delights that includes the freedom to not consume the raw oysters.
I enjoyed this satire. Until the end. "Your society is reeling, sick, possibly terminal —" That gave me chills. I wonder: have we not gone too far "down the road" with this nefarious and pre-meditated collapse of our culture and economy? The Left has been painstakingly brilliant in their patience and method, and we, the "silent majority" have been asleep. Now, they own the MSM, academia (for the most part) and in large measure, the courts. Should BHO win a second term, he will be able to appoint even more left-leaning, activist jurists to SCOTUS and GOD HELP US then.
Susan, you didn't laugh at the end because the line was not meant to be funny.
Our society *is* reeling sick, possibly terminal. If you look at history, once a civilization is in decline, the direction is seldom--if ever--reversed.
Toqueville said it best (I'm paraphrasing): once a majority of the population figures out they can vote themselves largesse from the public fountain, society collapses under its own weight.
But in our case, it's much more than that. Go back in time, and you'll see very few "advanced" societies in which education brought out two-dimensional specialized insects (at best), in which the traditional family was demonized and actively deconstructed, in which morality was scorned and legalism elevated, in which manifest enemies were not mentioned for fear of offending them, while being invited in by the tens of thousands, in which citizens were taught by the bien pensants that their country was an illegitimate experiment founded on slavery and rightfully hated at home and abroad, in which job-creators were demonized and parasites celebrated...
I could go on and on, but this cycle has gone too far to reverse it. Sure, nations rebound, eventually, but there needs to be a next cycle. We won't see it in our lifetime.
In the meantime, we can find temporary solace from defeating the barbarians (of all kinds) whenever we can, just to poke a finger in their eye. But barring a major catastrophe, the direction in which our society is going is not the one you and I would have chosen. And it's only going to get worse.
So enjoy today, because it's as good as it gets.
G.K. Chesterton wrote an excellent book called "What's Wrong With the World" in which he observed that it makes no sense to propound "solutions" to society's "problems" until we first come to some agreement about what sort of society we wish to create in the first place. Without such a consensus there can be no common governance.
We conservatives would do well to heed the wisdom of Chesterton. Leftist public policy isn't repugnant to conservatives for being a less-efficient means to an end upon which we all agree. It's repugnant because it's a reasonably efficient means to an end we detest.
As improbable as it may seem, a decent percentage of our population actually wants to be ruled by a smug, all-encompassing bureaucracy that trivializes individual thought and liberty and casts out religion. This contingency likes the idea of a society composed of brainless and homogenized eunuchs eking out a modest and largely irrelevant existence at the pleasure of a Secular Deity.
Well we don't. And we need to stop playing footsie with those who do.
A very interesting point specifically that: "we first come to some agreement about what sort of society we wish to create in the first place. Without such a consensus there can be no common governance."
My own $0.02 opinion here is that when speaking in ideals and abstractions, those just to the right of center-right tend to have a vision of society that does not differ markedly from those of the center-right, center and center-left.
But what I observe is that our politics demand allegiances and many on the right: (1) inaccurately (as Mr. Kahane does here) collude all left with far-left, even when the reality is that the center-left has very little by way of ideals in common with the far-left and (2) get pulled away on the "wedge", where: the GOP just must win the day, and to win it must wedge, which means that whenever the left and center recognize a good right-originated idea and embrace it, the entire right drops the idea and shifts rightward.
The result is a small group of far-rightists with an incoherent ideology that few, even on the right, can agree with or defend, and a larger group comprising almost everyone else still on the right that votes that way as a practical matter while divorcing itself from its own ideological cousins who are actually more to the left, but just may have the audacity to identify with a different political corporate entity (eek! ... Democrats!) who are competing for the job of governance.
It is not obvious or self-evident that the free-market distributes the fruits of prosperity fairly. Most of the GOP historically has agreed with that proposition. Most, I think, still do. But the GOP is being piloted by ideologues who insist that the free market absolutely distributes the fruit of prosperity freely and all aspects of progressive taxation and redistribution are both socialism and wrong. Do you really think so?
Numbers are numbers. The wealthy DO pay the most taxes. Because they DO make the most money.
And canards repeated over and over again or not, the wealthy DO NOT use their money to create jobs in the United States of America. They invest it elsewhere where their ROI is higher.
Your ideology cannot change the fact that the interests of the wealthy have often, in this century, fallen into mis-alignment with the interests of the nation as a whole.
We do not owe something special to the wealthy here. We owe them fairness - of course - but we do not owe them something special and know this: they do not feel nor act as if they owe the US and its hard-working, war-fighting citizens anything special.
The right - everyone short of "far right" needs to reflect on the CONSEQUENCES of their policies and ideologies. There is an American middle - it is crying out. It may be in its death throes. If the consequences of your policies continue to help the wealthy at the expense of the middle (just keep telling yourself: "a rising tide, ..."), then you have talked yourself into habits that are part of the problem.
Your rant is mostly incoherent but appears to mainly advocate that the GOP throw out both our rich elites and the Tea Party in favor of moderate swing voters. Such advice is patently idiotic.
"Closer to the truth?" Where, and/or in what way, exactly, is he wrong? (I find Mr. K a hard read because he is, if anything, too close to the truth in the effects and effectiveness of the progressive agenda, if not in what actually motivates it.)
I have always wondered what about Kahane makes me dislike him and you have nailed it. He uses liberal tropes in ways that mimic authenticity, but he completely blows the effect by saying too much which is true. To me he is painful to read, not funny.
I could not laugh because unfortunately, it is true. Academia, the law, the arts are filled with Far Lefties for whom there seem to be few consequences for their screwed up pernicious actions. It is the "little people" who suffer from the harebrained schemes of the crazy Lefties. On the bright side, they are aborting themselves out of existence.
Sigh. More Kahane prose tripping over its own feet trying to outdo itself in snark. Mr. Kahane should study the prose of, say, Michael Walsh, and then copy its clear focus and steady tone.
