Worse than the stench of the stable

By A.J. DiCintio

As the three of us drove to the nation's capital Saturday, the suggestion that we should have made a sign saying "I'd Rather Drink Tea Than Kool-Aid" had two of us praising our friend's thoughtful creativity all day.

After all, it is an incontrovertible truth that the dogmatic devotion leftists have exhibited to stupidities since they began praising the "important" ideas to be found in the works of the "great" Karl Marx reeks like the stables of Hercules' Fifth Labor.

But as I read the NY Times' opinion columns the next day, it occurred to me that there is something much more repulsive than the love of a perverse dogma at work deep in the depths of the leftist psyche.

Now, because that conclusion was occasioned by what the columnists have to say about those who disagree with the policies advocated by the nation's Liberal-in-Chief, it is necessary to begin with a few observations about what we saw at the "party" —

Basically, tens of thousands of ordinary Americans — the kind of people who live in your neighborhood, the kind of people who reaffirm your faith in the brilliant good sense of Jeffersonian Democracy every time you serve on jury duty — exercising their right "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What grievances? That story is told by thousands of variously crafted placards that shouted warnings about a number of threats to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," but mainly these two —

. . . centralized government (the essential darling of every leftist "thinker")

. . . the flagrant ignoring of truths bequeathed to us by the Founders, including Washington's excellent advice to "cherish public credit" and this one from among many of Franklin's profound observations: "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

Those are the kinds of ideas that permeated the atmosphere of the Capitol grounds and Mall Saturday.

Here, I admit my complicity in discussions that have sent liberals screaming "O! The horror, the ugly, racist, fascist, Know-Nothing horror of it all!"

Yes, reacting to an "ACORN HEADQUARTERS" sign posted on a portable toilet, I entered into a conversation with a couple standing next to me, the three of us condemning the funneling of tax money to support the insidious "community organizers" who labor under ACORN's far from oaken probity.

We spoke briefly, too, about Federalism and the Federalist Papers.

Such ideas and attitudes are the mark of hateful, miserly, seditious idiots?

Apparently for liberals, because Maureen Dowd was moved to write an entire column not only informing us that "what [she] heard" from Representative Joe Wilson was "You lie, boy!" but also that the racially demeaning term she hallucinated reveals the real motive of the opponents of the president's policies.

That's right, in a perfectly anti-intellectual, disgustingly irrational assertion, Dowd implies that the opposition to Obama's policies is composed of a xenophobic (former DNC chairman Don Fowler's idea) "loco fringe" given to a "shrieking lunacy."

That venom, however, only winds her up to mock protestors as a repulsive bunch of secessionist crazies.

First she quotes Fowler, a SC resident: "A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we're part of the union."

Then, she invokes Congressman Jim Clyburn, D-SC, who continues the race motif by opining that the only purpose of the protestors is "delegitimizing" a black president.

Next up providing all the opinion fit to print is Frank Rich, who correctly bemoans the fact that the president turned the job of proposing a healthcare plan over to Congress.

Too bad Mr. Rich doesn't equally condemn "brilliant," transformational Obama for failing to use some of his genius to explain in exquisite honesty and simple detail exactly how he envisions paying for healthcare reform and the rest of his mad spending — and not just over the next 10 years but the ten or twenty that follow.

However, to return to the subject at hand, the following quotes sum up how Rich characterizes an opposition that has produced nothing more than a "silly summer."

inmates [who have taken] over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse

[perpetrators of] incendiary faux controversies

[a] hard-core base of a leaderless minority party

[a] right-wing fringe . . . so deranged . . .

[participants in] crazed town-hall sideshows

There you have it, Frank Rich standing enormously shallow beside the infinitesimally small Maureen Dowd, who, in addition to sliming Obama's opponents as racists, reacted to ideas that have been hotly and honestly debated in America since the days of the Constitutional Convention with this hateful, ugly, supremely stupid comment:

Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

Ah, liberals and the triumph of reason. What a beautiful thing to behold!

Finally, in "The Recession's Racial Divide," Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad claim to write about the recession's effect on much of the nation's black population.

But the following quotes, the first from the beginning of the piece, the second from its conclusion, tell us all we need to know about what is really on their minds.

A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. . .

So despite the right-wing perception of black power grabs. . .

But if Americans of all races don't get some economic relief soon, the pain will only increase and with it, perversely, the unfounded sense of white racial grievance.

If you are like me, you have wondered, "What is the source of such incredibly contemptible 'thinking'? The love of centralized power? Of ruling? Of being ruled? Of arrogance, pretension, and hypocrisy?"

The questions turn our minds to Gulliver, the self-proclaimed giant who claims to be perfected by reason alone — the pride sickened misanthrope who cannot stand the sight and smell of even his wife and children but delights in his long visits to the stable, where, insulated from repulsive inferiors, he converses with horses, his only perfectly reasonable peers.

The madman does, however, condescend to tell us he has reconciled himself to the rest of humanity — who, unlike him, are subject to every vice — except one kind of person: "a lump of deformity, and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride."

Having uttered that astonishing piece of irony, he then closes with another, equally as disgusting:

I here entreat those who have any tincture of this absurd vice that they will not presume to come in my sight.

Is it a particularly ugly, fetid, pernicious pride that swirls amid neurotic guilt and self-loathing in the deep, dark recesses of the liberal psyche?

Who knows? But whatever roils there, its effect stinks infinitely worse than the stench of the stable.

I, for one, am thoroughly sick of it.

© A.J. DiCintio