‘biting and vitriolic’

One would not make personal appearance remarks to Quasimodo, after all, Mr. Bones!

Remarks to militant GOP extremists about Governess S. Heath-Paling of Alaska fall in the same category. So let's leave the Wonder of Wasilla™ alone, shall we? Obviously that is what Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh is hopin’ to get everybody to do.

Ordinarily a decent political grown-up might feel countermotivated by suggestions from far out in the fever swamps, but I, at any rate, can make an exception when invited to bash Miss Piggy Noonan of the Wall Street Jingo [1]. Neocomradess M. E. Noonan is especially fun to bash because thirty-odd years ago she was politically indistinguishable from myself, a "Reagan Democrat." And now she is politically hard to distinguish from Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh, both of them bein’ ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’ and, more specifically, belated adherents to the Hate-’68 Movement™. [2] "There but for Father Zeus . . . !"

Apostasy pays! It pays very well indeed if you are Miss Piggy, but Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh has not done so very badly. Though far from as well as Miss Piggy has done, for you won’t soon find M. E. Noonan reduced to addressin’ pajamatarian audiences!

R. Radosh, bein’ so reduced -- or rather, never havin’ been promoted any higher, his carefully turned coat notwithstandin’ -- appears to have decided that if he is in for a penny, he is in for a pound. He dumps on his Big Management Party neocomradess almost as if he were a pajam [3] himself:

Peggy Noonan’s recent biting and vitriolic editorial attack on Palin [lies that] Palin has never learned how other people see things; she was out of her depth in a shallow pool, she 'didn’t read anything,' she could see no truth in anything others had to say. Moreover, she pretended to be working-class when in fact she earned a salary on the high end of American wage-earners; she was clearly middle-class in upbringing; she graduated from a good college, etc. (...) Palin [was] a creature of the Republican elite, from party operatives to journalists like Bill Kristol who championed her. [She] can and will never learn anything, who will be able to name the president of Pakistan but who will never 'know how to think about Pakistan.' She is a gift to both the mainstream media and the Democrats, who will keep her popular in order to knock her down and assure a left-liberal future. So ... we as a nation need a serious and responsible Republican party, not a frivolous one whose appeal is based on the kind of resentment Palin followers respond to.

(( I have tried to sift out the radoshchina that is not about M. E. Noonan so much as about America’s Otherparty generally. ))

The honourable and gallant renegade’s Miss Piggy problem is clearly much like my own: all three of us are insufferable elitists who not only "know how to think about Pakistan" ourselves, but are appalled at the idea of handing the conduct of our Uncle Sam’s foreign and aggression policy over to somebody who does not. Hence it is no surprise that R. Radosh can not bring himself to say anything positively encouragin’ about the Governess. Miss Piggy, it seems, is not mistaken about Neocomradess S. H.-P., she is only speakin’ out of turn: Si tacuisses, O Porcula, Republicana mansisses! Though of course the publicist’s standin’ as a Jingo-level Republican is simply not assailable. Piggy would have to wander off a lot farther in the same direction before she is in the slightest danger if gettin’ herself excommunicated from the First Church of Rio Limbaugh the way Neocomrade General C. L. Powell recently was. [4]

The bulk of the R. Radosh scribble strikes me as an attempt to teach the pajams (and, in principle, teach M. E. Noonan as well) by example: let them be silent about Mizz Sarah and moan and whimper instead against "both the mainstream media and the Democrats, who will keep [S. H.-P.] popular in order to knock her down and assure a left-liberal future." That is the sort of advice, I fear, that begs to be labeled ‘tactical’ in the sense of ‘insincere’. Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh only too plainly hopes that if silence can once be procured, why, the Wonder of Wasilla™ will just fade away. Naturally the governess-crazed pajams are not broadcastin’ on that wavelength at all. Hence R. R. must warn his culturally inferior neocomrades that they will be playin’ into the hands of the enemy if they do not shut up.

Whether that is of any value as practical advice, who knows? But meanwhile, one could scarcely hope for a better example of the de haut en bas Elitismus perpetually operative inside the Party of Grant and Hoover. Even Miss Piggy’s own Heath-Paling scribble was only an (almost) equally good example of "Be humble and quiet, O ye dhimmís, and acknowledge yourselves to be small!" [5]

On a different front, a suggester might suggest to Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh that he himself may be injurin’ the Party of Big Management in a fashion parallel to his account of Miss Piggy’s potential damage: if the enemy pays too much attention to this sort of thing, they (we) will be reminded of certain facts about how the militant extremist racket works that can be used against it. Especially the great gulf fixed between the economic OnePercenters proper-- the Owners of America along with their agitprop artists like M. E. Noonan and R. Radosh, along with their organized packs of AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and Catoholics and WSJingos (&c. &c.)--and the obscure mass of dhimmís and pajams and Heath-Paling groupies down below the waterline. Between dupers and dupes, roughly speaking. [6]

To be sure, the Radoshchian harm would be done indirectly, unlike the Piggish. M. E. Noonan imagines that most Homelanders™ will see lots and lots of Heath-Palin’ites exuberatin’ on the tube and find the spectacle on balance unedifying. Not even MurdochNews has access to the inner conclaves of the Big Management Party at which decisions about how the indispensable dupin’ is to be accomplished are discussed and resolved. (The rest of the Monster Media would be glad to broadcast such material if they could get it, but they can’t. Though not infallible, the secret-or-private sector can be pretty good at maintain’ its secrecy.)

Yet hostile publicists do not need to catch the OnePercenters in flagrante, actually admittin’ in so many words that there is Klassenkrieg right here in the Heimatland Gottes and that they are doin’ their damndest to win it. There is fourteen decades’ circumstantial evidence to that effect readily available, after all. [7] The risk Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh incurs is rather that of bringin’ to enemy attention the most likely fracture points in the anatomy of the elephant.

I incline to guess it is the neocomrade renegade’s optimism that accounts for this inadvertance. One can see him worryin’ with Miss Piggy about how swing voters may react to further doses of Governess S. Heath-Paling. If one choose to be optimistic for the good guys, though, the question is rather whether we cannot take away from the militant extremists even what they still possessed in November 2008. [8]

Happy days.


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[1] Loyal Goldwater-Atwaterites may prefer to accept the Radoshchian alternative and bash their Vice President instead. "Maybe some other time," say I.


[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neokonservatismus


[3] proletarian : ‘prole’ :: pajamatarian : ‘____’ (Stress on the ultima, please!)


[4] The student of neocomradology should mark that excommunication is not now what it is rumored to have been once. As long as he sticks to Jingoland and the country-club circuit, Neocomrade C. L. Powell can go on forever as if nothin’ much had happened. Fortunately for himself, the neocomrade general prefers that turf to (say) Port St. Lucie FL.


[5] IX:29: Hattae yu‘Tú l-jizyata ‘an yad.in wa-hum Sághirún.


[6] The rough part of this draft that seems not to merit a lot of polishing time is that to speak of ‘dupers’ suggests that upmarket and anti-governess Republican Party extremists are conscious and deliberate liars or cynics. That is absurd: they are simply not smart enough, with the exception of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney and possibly a handful of others. It is just coincidence (sort of) that what Noonans and Radoshes (and you and me) say meshes so well with what benefits them/us.

That "sort of" is very tricky to elucidate. I pass it over especially because if it were carefully elucidated, the piece would eo ipso place itself outside the realm of practical holy-Homelandic™ politics. But let there be no mistake! Nothing above should be taken as questioning the subjective sincerity of any Big Party neocomrades, whether OnePercenters or agitproppers or mere rank-and-file base-and-vile. Father Zeus forbid that any serious analyst should do that!


[7] The Big Party of Grant (and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater) is best dated from 4 March 1869, the first inauguration of Ulysses XVIII. Before that, palæocomrades of America’s Otherparty called themselves Federalists or Whigs, or else they were preoccupied with the Evil Slavocrats in a manner irrelevant to present-day concerns.

There is nevertheless a clear thread of illiberalism and antidemocracy runnin’ straight through from their General A. Hamilton to their General C. L. Powell, and especially that constant quest to make sure that respectable dollars get to vote and not trailer-trash organisms alone. Still, there is no practical point in dredging anything up from very far in the past with a crew still spellbound by Their Ford’s admonition that history is bunk, which they have lately reworded a little to "That was THEN; this is NOW!"

But Father Zeus knows best about wingnutettes and wingnuts!


[8] Ev. sec. Luc. IV:25: Qui enim habet, dabitur illi; et qui non habet, etiam quod habet auferetur ab illo.

(( Excursus. Behind the Radoshchian panglossism may lurk the specter of Neocomrade Magister S. Rasmussen’s neomethods of public opinion pollin’, which have pscientifically established beyond the faintest doubt that in November 2012 not more than 2,309,168.41 Homelanders™ at most would vote to re-elect Barák Husáyn XLIV, and probably far fewer.

(( For reasons I cannot guess, none of the neocomrades have yet distinctly noticed that this means that America’s party will nominate somebody else instead. But who shall it be?

(( "President Lieberman?" "President Zell?" Boggles the mind at these prospects at least as much as at "Presidentess Heath-Paling." A furore guinnuttorum, libera nos, Domine! ))