April 21, 2008
Obama’s rivals may now be competing with him for the prize of uttering the stupidest remarks about the working stiffs in our state. Dee Dee Myers, who is a close personal friend of Hillary and was a confidante of Bill during his presidency, has spoken with great terseness on MSNBC about Obama’s widely publicized concerns about non-yuppie white “bitterness.” Dee Dee was presumably a mouthpiece for Hil, when she observed that working class people feel “frustrated.” “For years they”ve looked to the federal government for economic packages and haven”t received them.” Consequently small-town people are turning to “unimportant things like abortion, guns, religion, homosexual marriage,” and other such trivia, when what they really desire are social programs. It’s nice to have Dee Dee, a noted feminist hermeneuticist, spell out what the working class should be looking for, despite their fixations on the immutable essence of marriage, the moral problem of feticide, and being protected under the Second Amendment.
But there is also the Republican hopeful John McCain who has responded to Obama about the working population of small-town PA, exactly as one might have expected. Because of McCain’s loquacity, we now have the authorized neoconservative retort to Obama’s lament about heterosexual, gun-owning Christians in Altoona and Lewistown. According to McCain, “these people have fought to make the world safe for democracy,” and because of their willingness to risk their lives in our continuing Wilsonian mission, we should cut them some slack. Apparently Mack can”t control the habit of speaking in neocon tropes, even when, according to FOX’s announcements, he is working 24/7 to “bring the conservatives in his party back on board.” What we really see is Mack’s compulsive fawning on the Left, exemplified by his admonition to South Carolinians not to exhibit the Stars and Bars and his mea culpa to a black gathering earlier in April that voting against the MLK national holiday may have been the “single greatest mistake” in his senatorial career. Perhaps Mack is now planning other conciliatory gestures toward the Right, e.g., by putting the partial-birth abortion advocate Joe Lieberman on his ticket or by blowing up Teheran in order to make the world even safer for democracy.
I am appending this commentary as a supplement to Marcus Epstein’s timely warning about the activities of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. Almost all of the character assaults by this cultural Marxist organization (I use this term descriptively having written a book on the subject) are dangerous as well as usually wide of the mark. Representing the left wing of the liberal establishment, the Center is taken seriously in the liberal press, even if Harpers and other moderate left-of-center publications occasionally expose its excesses. The fact that the SPLC, like its twin in defamation, the Anti-Defamation League, goes after neoconservative publicists every now and then, together with our side, should provide us no consolation. It doesn”t make one bit of difference if the SPLC scolds David Horowitz or other neocon luminaries. These targets are the talking partners of the liberal establishment and will continue to appear on network TV and on FOX and to be published in the national press. No matter what the SPLC says about their insensitivity, their multinational sponsors and special interests will continue to lavish infinite resources on the neocon powers that be as “moderate conservative” spokesmen. In short the attacks on particular neocon journalists leveled by the SPLC will have about the same effect as a protest launched by Latvian émigrés in Minneapolis might have had on the Soviet empire in 1955. The effect will be nothing that is even measurable.
It is the assaults on our fragile side, which is struggling for survival, which can be deadly. Well-placed attacks by cultural Marxist groups can conceivably result in stripping us of the thin layer of resources that keeps us in business. Therefore the heads of paleo websites are terrified to be in the radar range of the SPLC or the ADL. Since the neocons have joined with the official Left in marginalizing the real Right as nativist and extremist, attacks from the totalitarian Left can hurt us in a way they will not likely do to “movement conservative” spokespeople. This may be an unfair situation; nonetheless, we”ll have to keep it in mind, until we”re in a more powerful position to fight back.
