Demonic (3 page)

In 2007, Democrats in Congress banned the incandescent lightbulb, currently scheduled for elimination in 2014. Indeed, banning Thomas Edison’s invention was among the very first acts of the new House majority elected in 2006, in a bill cosponsored by 195 Democrats and only 3 Republicans (two of whom are no longer in office). When Democrats came up with the idea of banning the lightbulb, what image appeared in their heads? A lit candle? Only four Democrats voted against the bill in both the House and then Senate, with the vast majority of Republicans voting against it in both chambers.

Consider that the two industries that provoke the most fear and loathing in liberals are two of the most innovative: the oil and pharmaceutical industries. When a majority of the country objected to national health care because, among other things, it would mean the end of innovation in medicine once the government took over, liberals stared in blank incomprehension. (It was almost as if they’d been drugged.) They believe every drug, every diagnosis, every therapy, every cure that will ever be invented has already been invented. Their job is to spread all the existing cures, not to worry about who will discover new ones.

The only traditions liberals are eager to smash are moral and sexual ones, such as monogamy and protecting the unborn. Crowds are too impulsive to be moral, according to Le Bon, which explains why liberals are mad for innovation with respect to thousand-year-old institutions like marriage, but, when it comes to scientific innovation, they are hidebound traditionalists.

Indeed, the only way to get liberals interested in novel scientific research is to propose going after human embryos. When adult stem cell researchers had already produced treatments for eighty different diseases,
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while embryonic stem cell researchers were stuck in the dark ages, the failed researchers won liberal hearts by pointing out that their method destroyed human fetuses, while adult stem research did not.

As long as Democrats can win elections by demagoguing the mob, they are perfectly happy to turn America into a banana republic. With the country drowning in debt and Medicare and Social Security putting us on a high-speed bullet train to bankruptcy, the entire Democratic Party refuses to deal with entitlements. Instead, they will gin up the mobs to throw out any politician who cuts these increasingly theoretical “benefits.” The country will have the economy of Uganda, but Democrats will be in total control.

Rich liberals want chaos for everyone except themselves, confident that they can afford a “green” lifestyle and their children will still attend Sidwell Friends. The rest of us are forced to live in a lawless universe of no energy, gay marriage, girl soldiers, and marauding criminals because liberals can’t enjoy their wealth unless other people are living in complete havoc. They promote anarchy, believing the middle class should live in squalor, while liberals will be protected by their wealth from the mob.

The seminal event of the New Testament—Jesus’ crucifixion—is a dramatic illustration of the power of the mob.

When the mob was howling for Pontius Pilate to sentence Jesus to death, even Pilate’s wife couldn’t convince him to spare Jesus. After having a dream about Jesus, Pilate’s wife sent her husband a note saying Jesus was innocent—a “just man.” Pilate knew it to be true and that the mob hated Jesus out of “envy.” But not his wife, not even his own common sense, was enough for him to resist the mob.

Three times Pilate told the “multitude” that Jesus was innocent and should be spared. He pleaded with the mob, proposing to “chastise him, and release him.” But the mob was immovable, demanding Jesus’ crucifixion. Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insurrectionist—in other words, someone who incites mobs. Again, the mob “spoke with one voice,” demanding “with loud shouts” that Jesus be crucified.

Capitulating to the mob, Pilate ordered Jesus’ death.

Even one of the mob’s victims, a thief being crucified alongside Jesus, joined the mob’s taunting, saying to Jesus, “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.” The other thief rebuked him, noting that they were guilty, whereas Jesus was not. He said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when thou
comest into thy kingdom.” And Jesus said, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
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Pilate gave in to the mob out of fear. The thief joined the mob to side with the majority. The mob itself was driven by envy.

Although it all worked out in the end—Jesus died, darkness fell over the Earth, the ground trembled, and the temple veil was ripped in two, and three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, giving all people the promise of everlasting life—here was the stark choice, to be repeated like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: Jesus or Barabbas?

Liberals say Barabbas: Go with the crowd. C’mon, everybody’s doing it—it’s cool. Now let’s go mock Jesus. (As is so often the case, the mob said, “Kill the Jew.”)

Conservatives—sublimely uninterested in the opinion of the mob—say Jesus.

TWO
AMERICAN IDOLS:

THE MOB’S COMPULSION
TO CREATE MESSIAHS

T
he mob characteristic most gustily exhibited by liberals is the tendency to idolize their political leaders, while considering “as enemies all by whom [their beliefs] are not accepted.”
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The creation of an idol is textbook mob behavior. Crowds, Le Bon says, can only grasp the “very simple and very exaggerated.”
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They respond to images that “assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape.”
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And so, just as Clinton and Obama, for example, represented everything good to the mob, Reagan and Bush represented everything loathsome.

Manifestly, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama, even Hillary, Liz Holtzman, and John Lindsay—they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, or Jesus, depending on which cliché liberals are searching for. As Le Bon says, the “primitive” black-and-white emotions of a crowd slip easily into “infatuation for an individual.”
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Nearly seven decades after FDR was president and five decades after JFK was, we still have to listen to liberals drone on about their stupendousness. It’s as if Republicans demanded constant praise for Calvin
Coolidge. Even Republicans are forced to pretend to admire these profligate Democrats in order to court Democrat voters. Republicans don’t mention Reagan as much and he was a better president.

Liberals worship so many political deities that they’re forced to refer to them by their initials, just to save time—FDR, JFK, RFK, MLK, LBJ, and O.J. When’s the last time you heard a conservative get weepy about “RWR”?

In a 1986
Time
magazine cover story on Reagan, reporter Lance Morrow droned on about the sainted FDR, saying he “explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual”—evidently by putting Japanese in internment camps and fighting a war against a race-supremacist regime with a segregated military. Reagan, by contrast, Morrow said, “is testing the lower limits”
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—one assumes by ending Soviet totalitarianism and bequeathing America two decades of peace and prosperity.

The most Reagan-besotted conservative would never seriously refer to his presidency with something as hokey as “Camelot.” But in the bizarro-world of the Democrats’ Camelot cult, all we ever hear about is the youth, the vigor, the glamour, the “Kennedy mystique,” and the rest of the cant. We never hear about the drugs, the prostitutes, a certain mishap at a bridge in Massachusetts, the inept intervention in Vietnam—including ordering the assassination of our ally—and the complete calamity at the Bay of Pigs.

Bill Clinton was called a rock star so often, the expression “rock star” surpassed “perfect storm” as the most irritating cliché of the century. (In fairness, if “rock star” means someone who sleeps with countless groupies, then Bill Clinton was a rock star.)
Newsweek
reporter Eleanor Clift described the doughy Clinton-Gore team as “the all-beefcake ticket,” gasping that she was “struck by the expanse of their chests,” and saying “they could do cameo appearances on ‘Studs.’ ”
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The
Washington Post
’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”
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An infatuated Jonathan Alter babbled in
Newsweek
about the Clinton hug: “Bill Clinton hugs other men. It’s not a bear hug, usually—more like a Full Shoulder Squeeze. Women get it, too, but the gesture is more striking in its generational freshness when applied to the same sex.
He softens the old-fashioned backslap into something more sensitive. These guys are touching each other! It’s unselfconscious, gender-neutral, very ’90s.”
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Either that or it bolsters my theory that Clinton would have sex with anything that had a pulse.

And it wasn’t just Alter and the other ladies swooning!
Newsweek
’s Howard Fineman called Clinton the “first sensitive male chief executive,”
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while Peter Jennings said Clinton “has the kind of hands that people respond to.”
¹⁰
Time
magazine’s Walter Shapiro said that “for the first time in more than 30 years the nation has elected a President with sex appeal.” Shapiro quoted
The Boomer Report
editor Cheryl Russell saying, “Every woman I know is having sex dreams about Bill Clinton.”
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(If you call nightmares about Bill Clinton dropping his pants “sex dreams,” I guess I was, too.)

When Obama came along, guess who liberals started having sex dreams about? Yes, the big-eared beanpole. The
New York Times
’s Judith Warner reported, “Many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.” Warner confessed, “The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs.” (Judith Warner, Chris Matthews—what is it with liberals and their legs?) The Obamas, Warner wrote, were “a beacon of hope, inspiration and ‘demigodlikeness.’ ”
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NBC reporter Lee Cowan—biologically, a man—said he could hardly contain himself when told he was to cover Obama: “When NBC News first assigned me to the Barack Obama campaign, I must confess my knees quaked a bit.… I wondered if I was up to the job. I wondered if I could do the campaign justice.”
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(Cowan then spent the rest of the day scribbling in his reporter’s notebook, “President and Mr. Barack Obama … Barack and Lee Cowan-Obama … Lee Obama … Mr. and Mr. Obama … First Lady, Mrs. Lee Cowan-Obama.…”)

NBC’s Matt Lauer noted that “people” have called Obama “ ‘The Savior,’ ‘The Messiah,’ ‘The Messenger of Change.’ ”
¹⁴
Try to imagine conservatives coming up with such honorifics for Dwight Eisenhower. Being rational individuals, conservatives don’t turn their political leaders into religious icons. Liberals, by contrast, having all the primitive behaviors of a mob, idolize politicians.

Obama was also—in the fresh, pioneering words of NBC’s Andrea
Mitchell—“a rock star!”
¹⁵
To
Newsweek
’s Joe Klein, Obama was “the political equivalent of a rainbow—a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy.”
¹⁶
(If Joe got out of Manhattan more, he’d know rainbows are perfectly natural.)

In one of his more balanced formulations, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews babbled, “They’re cool people. They are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they’re great-looking, and they’re cool and they’re young, and they’re—everything seems to be great.” Strangely, he also said, “If you’re in [a room] with Obama, you feel the spirit. Moving.”
¹⁷
What is it about the Obamas that reduces cable news hosts to babbling, pimple-faced losers at a Star Trek convention?

It is impossible to imagine any conservative describing any Republican in such teeny-bopper patois.
Haley Barbour is like totally the dreamiest! And did you see the way he hugs men?
But it’s never-ending with the Party of the Mob. Reporting on Senator Teddy Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama in 2008, ABC’s David Wright said, “Today, the audacity of hope had its rendezvous with destiny. The Kennedy clan anointed Barack Obama a son of Camelot.”
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On ABC’s
Good Morning America
, anchor George Stephanopoulos said of Obama’s incoming cabinet, “We have not seen this kind of combination of star power and brain power and political muscle this early in a cabinet in our lifetimes.”
¹⁹
(He left out “affinity for evading taxes.”)

It’s almost like a “Can You Top This” game with liberals describing their political idols. In a
Time
magazine cover story, reporter Nancy Gibbs compared Obama to Jesus—and not sarcastically, the way the rest of us do. The article began, “Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope.”
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Of course, as the leader of twelve apostles, even Jesus had more executive experience than Obama. (But I’m sure the risen Christ appreciated the shout-out.)