Whack! It's Out of the Park

Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus on National Review Online

Nordlinger hits it out of the park with this one:

Years ago, at the Oscars, Sally Field said, "You like me, you really like me!" Well, I now say, "They hate us — they really hate us." I'm talking about the Left, and the media elite, of course, and the "us" is . . . Bush supporters.

They really let it all hang out, after Tuesday. A certain amount of politeness or restraint might have prevailed during the campaign, but no longer. They hate us, calling us dumb, dumb, dumb — a bunch of Bible-thumpin' boobs.

I think I've watched Jon Stewart's show twice, both times because a friend was on. I watched it the other night, and there was this comedian — a sidekick of Stewart's, apparently — saying, "We have heard the voice of the American people. I would imitate it, but I don't like to make fun of the retarded."

And on and on.

Maureen Dowd wrote a column that should not have appeared in a respectable newspaper. So did Thomas Friedman. So did Paul Krugman. Of course, all three columns appeared in the New York Times. The Left has a term for the way those three write: "hate speech."

In the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne was Dowd-, Friedman-, and Krugman-like, saying, in part, "This is no time for the independent media to be intimidated by trumped-up charges of liberal bias." "Independent media"? Who's not independent? NPR? PBS? The Stars and Stripes?

And "trumped up"? What do you mean, "trumped up"? Trumped up like CBS's National Guard papers?

Harold Meyerson — also in the Washington Post — wrote that "the Democrats must be able to come off as Americans behind the other guys' lines [i.e., in the red states]." They have to "come off as Americans" — so it's come to that, huh?

Garry Wills — we're back to the Times now — likened us to al Qaeda, which is rapidly becoming a standard line:

Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation? . . .
In fact, we now resemble [modern Europe] less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

And on and on. (Have I said that already?)

Oh, let me give you Hunter Thompson, too. He said over the phone to Sean Penn, "I've got the worst possible news. Colorado has gone to hell like all the other states. They must have all voted the same way they pray."

I love that: They voted the same way they pray.

Yes, people: They hate us, they really hate us. Lots.

Did you doubt it?

For good measure: Let me leave you with Jane Smiley ("The unteachable ignorance of the red states"). (Ms. Smiley started out in Missouri; now she's in California, where she feels that she is with actual human beings.)

At first all of this stuff made me angry. Now I only have thoughts of pity and, yes, humor.