I’m sure glad you wingnuts have finally figured out there’s nothing wrong with this rotten country of ours that can’t be fixed with a two-step, three-step, twelve-step program, five-year plan, or more. For decades, we’ve been hammering you with our army of think tanks, policy wonks, and lawfare experts, browbeating you into submission with the sheer force of our intellect and, of course, our unique whingeing whininess as we present program after program designed to “benefit” widows and orphans and then defy you Daddy Warbuckses to gainsay us. Which you never do, even though we both know we haven’t got a dime to pay for any of it.
Because, let’s face it, three hours alone with Frances Fox Piven reading the collected works of the Frankfurt School aloud and you’re ready to start quoting Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer in the original Austrian. And all because you haven’t the guts to defy us in the court of public opinion, starring our royal eunuchs as ostensibly independent press arbiters. You’d rather be liked than president, which is why you’re going to lose next year and will keep on losing until you grow a spine and face up to the fact that we’re the Wizard of Oz and you’re the little dog, Toto, and all you have to do is pull that curtain away but you’re too darn dumb.
Yes, no one can churn out yards of pseudo-intellectual codswallop, tomfoolery, bafflegab, and just plain bumf as we can. Our mastery of the fog machine of politics has been so absolute that we can hardly credit the evidence that you’ve decided to fight back. And yet now along come not one but two combative wind machines on your side, making enough noise to fit right in with the New York Philharmonic during a performance of Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote.
I’m talking, of course, about SpongeBob and Willard Mitt, your two prize candidates for the thankless task of trying to unseat 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, Killer of Qaddafi, Atomizer of the Economy, Sultan of the Slippers, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago.
As Adorno said of Strauss, “His music soars, yet is down to earth; a product of the dawn of aviation, it dupes the bourgeoisie into believing it to be both better than and different from what it is.” And there, in a crypto-commie nutshell, is your problem with both Say-Anything Mitt and Mr. Newt, neither of whom is better than or different from what he really is. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but we do our damnedest, whereas you don’t even try.
There’s nothing we progressives prize more than the talent to flap one’s jaw, because it’s just that skill — plus our daddy’s checkbook! — that got us where we are today. We demand credentialism before brains, because after all credentialism is something we can actually achieve with money and the right connections, whereas brains are, you know, handed out by Gaia or somebody. But the ability to bloviate on command is what really impresses the journalists.
So it’s nice to see your guys getting into the act. As Adorno said about the late Reichsmusikkammer bonze, “ruthlessness, violence, lack of solidity [are] the complements to that detestable respectability of the middle bourgeoisie,” whatever that means — and I graduated from Columbia with a major in Marxism-Leninism! But what I think it means is that all conservatives are hopeless thug tools of the petite bourgeoisie whereas we men of the Left are foursquare saints in our support of the lumpenproletariat and, of course, the really rich people on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in Hollywood who never went to college but somehow still made plenty of money.
In other words, in the battle between good and “evil,” you are the bad guys and, like Colin, God of Sex in Love Actually, you must accept it, so we can get on with the business of crushing you once and for all, and finally making all of us in the top 1 percent who are faking to be part of the 99 percent proud of our downright mean country at last.
So it really doesn’t matter how many 39 steps or 59-point plans you toss out there, or that on Day One, you’ll issue a 57-state waiver from Obamacare. So what? By then, the poison will have worked its magic, the patient will be writhing like Mozart on his deathbed, and Obamacare will still be on the books, where — let’s be frank — it will stay forever. I mean, if you can’t get a silly light-bulb ban off the books, how are you going to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Go ahead — I dare ya!
Because the dirty little secret is, we can beat either of those two clowns with David Axelrod’s combover tied behind our ears. It’s almost as if they were both plants, enemy agents of an organization of spies out of a Hitchcock movie designed to lull you morons into a state of contented stupefaction while the business of looting the country goes on unabated. And that’s our job.
Take Willard. If he sweated more, he’d be this generation’s Tricky Dick Nixon in golden underpants: shifty, evasive, a guy trying to pick your pocket even though you’ve grabbed his other hand and are yelling for the cops. There’s that nervous, giveaway laugh whenever he gets asked even the simplest question about Romneycare or Bain Capital — he’s the guy who’s been running for president for six years and has yet to offer even a single persuasive reason why he should sit in the Oval Office except for saving some stupid Olympics that nobody watched and putting the working class out of work by buying up their crappy companies and putting them out of business. Forget about the anti-Mormon vote; the anti-phony vote will do him in.
Which hasn’t stopped us from fitting him for the fall-guy jacket. What do you think Occupy Wall Street was all about? This picture, that’s what. Why, even now, former Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle himself is out there, hammering away at Willard, softening him up, belittling him, demonizing his accomplishments — in other words, our usual ad hominem playbook delivered in that sanctimonious, unctuous tone that we’ve all mastered to keep our moral bona fides burnished.
And then take SpongeBob — please! Mr. Newt is relying on the congenital amnesia of the American public to forget this, this, and this, which would be fine except that we’re going to keep reminding voters of this. I mean, the man has more ideas than John Kerry’s wife’s late husband’s family had varieties, when all he really needs is some ketchup to put on that hot dog. If Newt keeps rising in the polls, we’re going to puncture him like one of those balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, and the fallout will make the end of Ghostbusters look like a dewy morning in the Cotswolds.
Don’t think we can’t retrain our guns on Gingrich in a flash. Unlike our stealth candidate in the ’08 election, Newt’s got a past and a half, and we’re not going to let you forget it. As the Great Axelrod (why you morons don’t take a closer look at his past is a mystery we’re all still chortling over) just said, “The higher a monkey climbs on a pole the more you can see his butt.” Classy!
So while you may think you can break with history and beat somebody with nobody, I would just ask you to sit down, take a deep breath, and figure out whether you really want to go through with this. Newt’s baggage may be in Bangalore at the moment, but it’ll be back in Washington pretty quick — just ask his former couchmate, Maerose Prizzi! The only question is how late in the cycle we drop the October surprises.
Really, it’s all too easy. Here we’ve handed you the most vulnerable incumbent since Jimmy Carter, and you’re going to blow it, all because you have too many 59-point programs and not a single four-year plan for winning elections.
Which is weird, because you folks often compare the office of president with that of a CEO of the nation. But let me ask you this — since when are the candidates to run one of your rapacious Rethuglican corporations self-selected? Do they simply show up in the boardroom, like contestants queuing up for American Idol? Do your directors just sit there and wait for some idiot to come along? Or do you have folks working behind the scenes to make sure the right nobody is the right man in the right time and place?
That’s what we did, the last time. You could do worse.
Then again, maybe you couldn’t.
— David Kahane is thrilled to be part of the Obama ’12! reelection team, Hollywood division. His new campaign movie, The Manchurian Candidate IV: This Time, It’s Personal, is about to start shooting in Hsinking. You can beg for a part by writing to him at kahanenro@gmail.com, becoming his “friend” on Facebook, or following him on Twitter @dkahanerules. Remember: Don’t speak to him on the set.