July 07, 2009, 4:00 a.m.
I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin
The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again.
By David Kahane
One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.
Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley.
Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?
And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.
You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn’t even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!
Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.
In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.
If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.
You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?
Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Remember, I live and work in a town where, “Hello, he lied,” isn’t a joke; we men of the Left are perfectly comfortable lying, cheating, and stealing — hello, Senator Franken! — in order to attain and keep political power. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, “By Any Means Necessary.” You see, we’re the good guys, and for us the ends always justify the means. We are, literally, shameless, which is why Bill Clinton is now a multi-millionaire and Eliot Spitzer is already on the comeback trail.
In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.
Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.
And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.
What you clowns need, in other words, is a Rules for Radical Conservatives to explain what you’re up against and teach you how to compete before it’s too late. Luckily, since I care about money even more than I care about politics, I have just such a book in the proposal stage, currently making the rounds of various publishers, assuming any of them are wise enough to take me up on it.
And, yes, this time it really is personal.
— David Kahane is pushing for a new national holiday to commemorate the destruction of Sarah Palin, and is hopeful that his senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, will co-sponsor it, along with Henry Waxman in the House. You can second the motion at kahanenro@gmail.com or on Facebook.