Demonic Read online

  Based on their public commentary, it appears that not one liberal has the vaguest idea how the economy imploded. The only thing liberals know is—as President Obama explained—“Republicans drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”11 (It was always a “ditch” and not a “pond” because a pond would have been offensive to Teddy Kennedy.)

  A liberal would stare at you slack-jawed if you explained that the federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lending policies on the banks—policies that were attacked by Republicans but ferociously defended by Democrats—and that the banks’ suicidal loans were then bundled into mortgage-backed securities and dispersed throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy, bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and destroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.

  In light of the Democrats’ direct role in creating the policies at the heart of the nation’s financial collapse, it’s not surprising that they prefer metaphors to facts. What’s strange is that the image of a car in a ditch is sufficient for the bulk of Democratic voters and commentators to adjudge themselves experts on the economic crisis and refuse to listen to explanations that aren’t images of Bush driving a car into a ditch.

  Image is all that matters to the mob. Obama can take in the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, as he did in 2008, but the mob will never believe he is in the pocket of Wall Street bankers. The top-three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top thirty donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse Group.12 In 2008 alone, Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama—nearly $1 million—than any other employer, with the sole exception of the entire University of California, which has 230,000 employees—ten times more than Goldman.13

  And still Republicans are called the Party of Wall Street. Bush let Lehman Brothers go under—what else do Republicans have to do?

  Liberals latched on to the image of Bush, Cheney, and even Representative Tom DeLay as “oilmen” to blame them for everything from Enron’s collapse to blackouts and high oil prices.

  In 2006, Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “oilmen” in public office for high oil prices—and hearing Pelosi try to craft a syllogism is like watching Michael Moore attempt ballet. She said, “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” That’s all liberals needed to know. Two “oilmen” in the White House—cause and effect. Strangely, though, a barrel of oil costs the same on the world market for all those other countries that were not being run by “oilmen.”

  A few years earlier, she had blamed Bush and DeLay for the blackout throughout the Northeast United States and parts of Canada—presumably because they are both from Texas—saying they had “put the interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American people.”14 In fact, the blackout was due to a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

  The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has written more than a dozen columns making hazy connections between Bush and the corrupt and collapsed Enron—“Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of Enron indictments to the Bush family’s loyalty code”15—despite Bush’s having absolutely nothing to do with the company, other than being from Texas. By contrast, Krugman was on Enron’s advisory board while he was writing encomiums to Enron in Fortune magazine.16 Once a year, when I don’t feel like writing a column, I think I’ll reprint Krugman’s column singing Enron’s praises—although, again, in fairness, he was being paid by Enron at the time.

  Democrats wouldn’t make such absurd statements if absurdity didn’t seem perfectly logical to their base. This is how Democrats communicate with their constituents: They use mob tactics to rile up the irrational masses. Crowds can’t grasp logic, only images. “These imagelike ideas,” Le Bon says, “are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic-lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in which they were placed one above the other.”17

  Republicans love Wall Street—oh look, Wall Street just made historic campaign contributions to Obama; he must be really cool.… Republicans hate the poor because they’re trying to block government policies promoting easy mortgages.… Oops, I wonder why the economy just tanked. It’s because Bush drove it into a ditch! Enron collapsed and Paul Krugman says it’s Bush’s fault. Krugman was paid by Enron and Bush wasn’t? Bush lied, kids died! … Oil prices went up under Bush—it’s his fault—he’s an oilman! Oh but then oil prices went down under Bush.… Hey, look over there! A shiny object!

  Despite their perennial enthusiasm for revolution and “change” in almost any form, Le Bon says, crowds are wildly conservative when it comes to scientific progress. Want to scare a liberal? Mention nuclear power plants, genetically modified fruits, new pharmaceuticals, food irradiation, or guns with plastic frames. We could probably get a crowd of liberal protesters to scatter just by coming at them with a modern vacuum cleaner. It certainly works on dogs and cats. The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute.

  Le Bon says that the mob’s “unconscious horror” of “all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted.” While mobs go about changing the names of institutions and demanding radical changes to society, he says, when it comes to scientific progress, crowds have a “fetish-like respect” for tradition.18

  Thus, according to Le Bon, if “democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.” It is lucky “for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.”19

  Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t merely want to block scientific progress, they want to roll it back. Al Gore’s global warming fantasy book Earth in the Balance called for the worldwide elimination of the internal combustion engine within twenty-five years.20 (Which, if nothing else, would have ruined Obama’s “car in the ditch” catchphrase.)

  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 inn
ovation 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,21 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.”22

  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

  The 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.”1

  The creation of an idol is textbook mob behavior. Crowds, Le Bon says, can only grasp the “very simple and very exaggerated.”2 They respond to images that “assume a very absolute, uncompromising, and simple shape.”3 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.”4

  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”5—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.’ ”6 The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”7

  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.”8 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,”9 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.”11 (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.’ ”12

  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.”13 (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?