Saturday, July 23, 2011

Reality Time. “How Can We Not Love Obama?”

Andrew Klavan: Why the country’s Bill Mahers say what they say.

Comedian-commentator Bill Maher has been getting a lot of attention lately for trying to get a lot of attention. He generally goes about this by using sexist hate speech against attractive, powerful, and intelligent conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, calling them female vulgarisms, for instance, or, as most recently, hosting comedians who fantasize aloud about sexually abusing them. Yet another attractive, powerful, and intelligent conservative woman (gee, there are a lot of those, aren’t there?), Ann Coulter, who is Maher’s friend, feels that these childish displays should be ignored. “I am sick of this show getting so much free publicity just because they use the f-word, the c-word, say something stupid,” Coulter said on FOX News’s late-night show, Red Eye. “All they are saying is, ‘I hate Michele Bachmann,’ ‘I hate Sarah Palin.’ Except they’re saying, ‘I [expletive] hate Michele Bachmann,’ ‘I [expletive] hate Sarah Palin.’ And then conservative blogs and this show say, ‘Oh, they use the f-word,’ and then they get 8 billion times more viewers.”

As so often, Coulter makes a good point. Maher, who is only just so funny and only just so bright and only just so popular, seems rather desperately to be turning himself into a moral Elephant Man in an attempt to draw the gawkers. The dignified reaction would be to walk on by, warning the children not to stare at the poor fellow because he has an affliction, God bless him.

I suppose it would also be self-diminishing to allow oneself to feel frustrated by the fact that the leftists of the so-called mainstream media regularly twist themselves into knots to make conservative speech sound hateful while ignoring the routine and open hatefulness that permeates the speech on their side and theirs alone. Sarah Palin is upbraided as violent for “targeting” congressional districts; Tea Partiers are called racist (often by Maher) for criticizing Barack Obama’s policies; I myself was recently accused of advocating violence toward women after I joked along with a silly video made by left-wing comedian Jimmy Kimmel in which Speaker of the House John Boehner doinked former speaker Nancy Pelosi on the head with the speaker’s gavel. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compares Republicans to terrorists, Jon Stewart implies that Michele Bachmann’s husband is a homosexual, and Maher hurls his filth at conservative women, and we’re more or less obligated to turn a blind eye so as not to encourage them.

But with a bow to Coulter’s wisdom, there does seem to me to be one thing worth saying about Maher and the others. Their ugliness seems to be escalating day by day, and with it the dishonesty, distortions, and bullying anger of their mainstream-media fellow travelers. There’s a reason for this, I think. It’s the increasingly apparent failure of Barack Obama. With the notable exception of Osama bin Laden’s execution, the Obama presidency has resembled nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Bean, one slapstick misadventure after another. The stagnant economy, the rising unemployment, the staggering, soon-to-be-crippling debt—hiked more under Obama than under every president from Washington to Reagan combined—these can no longer be blamed on his predecessor but are his to own.

This has to be fantastically humiliating for our left-wing media. If you’ve forgotten what they were like during Obama’s 2008 candidacy—the weirdly sexual thrills up their legs, the unreasoning comparison of Obama with America’s greatest men, the pseudo-religious idolatry—you have only to turn to August’s edition of Esquire to find a representative reminder that has to be read to be believed. It’s a column from Canadian writer Stephen Marche hilariously titled “How Can We Not Love Obama?” and subtitled “Because like it or not, he is all of us.” At one point, Marche writes: “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” And later—and I swear I’m not making this up: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

What might once have been dismissed as an embarrassing lapse into bobby-soxer squealery now has to be recognized as a desperate attempt to keep a dying euphoria alive. Likewise the increasingly low and vulgar meanness of Maher and all his cronies. It may, on the one hand, be the tactic of second-rung celebrities desperate for more attention, but it may at the same time represent the dismay of yet another generation of leftists waking from yet another utopian daydream to find themselves in a disaster of their own making.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a chain saw sitting on my work bench. Been there now for three years.

Chinese POS, single screw held the choke butterfly to the shaft, came loose, swallowed and seized engine.

I still have this fantasy that I'm going to fix it.

What I should do is toss the thing through a chinese embassy's window.

Still though, it pisses me off I was ripped off. Until I throw the thing in the scrap can, I won't be admitting to myself that is what happened.

But that is only half of the story, I bought a cheap tool without doing any research into what I was buying.

I got what I payed for.

Dakota said...

Sorry ... but I am getting very tired of "Ann Coulter's" overview of politics. When she endorsed giving the POTUS dictatorial power by endorsing the McConnell "Plan", if you can call it a plan. Sorry Ann baby but bypassing the power of the purse strings of the House and giving over that power is not a plan to follow the Constitution and only weakens it.

Being a friend of Maher's ... that socialist POS vile M F and she hangs out with him? Go to hell Ann! You can't be the Conservative "babe" and sleep with the enemy! No more book sales to this cowboy.

Mt Top Patriot said...

Bravo!
Very well said and poignant to a wonderful degree.
The only thing messianic about obama belongs to the truth he is a travesty of epic biblical proportions.

What where all those people thinking when they pulled the lever for such a maniac and false profit.
Did they all overload the single brain cell they had to be sharing that fateful day they elected an utter fool, blindly choosing a "leader" at the behest of the most sinister propaganda machine in modern times, installing a usurper and deranged demi god in the house of the only Liberty the earth has known, the likes of which will go down in history as the singular stupidest thing they have done in their entire lives?

ParaPacem said...

"How can we not love Obama" - I am waiting to hear the same author ask, in bleating tones, "Will... will you be a... a FATHER to us?"
( If you don't recall that execrable piece of staged emotion at one of Clinton's fake town hall meetings, you are better off. )

Anonymous said...

Ann Coulter seems to be losing it big time. I suppose now she is glomming onto Maher we can confirm her love fest with Chris Christie has maybe cooled some what ?

Toastrider said...

Actually, Dakota, Coulter is dead right. Maher is like a kid that keeps acting out for attention. He's not gonna get spanked, so the best thing we can do is ignore him.

Dakota said...

Sorry Toastrider, I don't see it that way. Slutting with the enemy while telling others to leave the poor misguided dumbass alone don't work for me.

Her endorsement of that traitorous ass Mitch McConnell's plan to turn the purse strings over to the enemies of the Constitution is a plan to show everyone that the Conservatives cannot lead. Usurping the powers of the House is never to be considered a plan.