One of the other site editors pointed me at this with the observation that the author, National Review Online's Mike Levin had, and I quote, "completely lost his mind." Now, National Review has become something of a pet to us here at Daily Kos, in recent months -- with fading morale and dwindling ranks on the right, it's become a lot harder to find the truly inspirational snippets of nuttery. There used to be a wanna-be Jonah Goldberg on every internet street corner; now, they're still there, but the mutterings just haven't been as, well... comically gifted.
So I popped on over to see what the fuss was about...
[...] I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.
There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. [...]
Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved [...]
And there's some other stuff thrown in there too, stuff about the press, and more stuff about socialism, and we're all going to die, or at least get placed in different tax brackets. With malice!
Sigh. How disappointing -- I went there expecting to see mega-crazy, the kind of crazy that you could take a picture of for posterity, so that fifty years hence you could drag it out of an old shoebox and say "see, grandkids? That's the kind of crazy that crazy people used to aspire to, back in my days. They put strawberry jam in their shoes, and wore hats made out of pastrami, and they danced crazy jigs in the middle of busy intersections. And when they needed a little spending cash, they advised Presidential candidates."
But alas, no. Instead, it's just normal National Review crazy, though admirable in dramatic scope. Poor Mark, good conservative that he is, is intellectually just stumped as to why, after the last eight miserable, no-good, scandal-plagued, war-ridden, economy-melting, soul-crushing, budget-raping, government-butchering years, anyone would possibly be switching sides in this election... and presumes it's because Obama and his campaign have some sort of crazy warlock power that's fooling all these poor dumb used-ta-be-conservatives.
Because there's just no way a popular Democrat would be ahead if the media was doing its job. Or if Katie Couric hadn't asked Sarah Palin mean questions. Or if young people weren't wearing pro-Obama shirts, or Colin Powell still held fast to his own sanity. And it's all because SOCIALISM BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA! MARX! STALIN! THEY'RE COMING FOR YOUR STAR WARS COLLECTABLES, TO REDISTRIBUTE THEM TO THE COMMON MASSES! PIRATE FLAPJACKS! KITTENS WITH HOWITZERS! BE VERY AFRAID RIGHT NOW!
It's almost cute. The last refuge of a broken spirit.
(I've not seen the young people in camouflage marching in military formation for Obama, though -- and it is odd that I would have missed such a thing, given that it is being presented as one of the defining characteristics of the scary and militant Obama movement. So I can only presume that Mark, despondent and perhaps slightly tipsy, fell asleep watching the History Channel again.)