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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Virulent Venom of Frustrated Rage |
| 2004-06-08 |
| [The title sums up the Left perfectly, doesn’t it?] EFL by Wesley Pruden The lot of the no-account eastcoast libsnob longhaired artsyfartsy slagpunk francophile comsymp is not a happy one. Best description of the LLL I’ve ever read. Preach it, brother! Not this week. All of America and much of the world is celebrating the life of a man who actually changed the course of history, and, for once, for the better. But not quite everyone. Ronald Reagan’s body is not yet mouldering in the grave, and already the tattered remnants of the counterculture are crying tears of baffled frustration that the passage of only a little more than a decade has begun to confer universal recognition of greatness on the 40th president of the United States. ... Waaaaaaah. (Tough shit.) What turns these unworthies a shade of crispy brown is not that they think Ronald Reagan actually fits any of their purple descriptions, but that he transformed, and transformed irretrievably, the politics not only of his country, but of the world. Yes. And the Left HATES that. Only they get to transform politics. And certainly not in the direction Reagan did. Margaret Thatcher got it right when she said more than a decade ago that Mr. Reagan’s greatest accomplishment was that "he has achieved the most difficult of political tasks, changing attitudes and perceptions about what is possible" ... He changed attitudes about communism. Someone else seems to be trying to change attutudes about what’s possible in the Middle East, with the same attending derision from the chattering classes. But I digress. The 40th president is rightly remembered in tributes and praise for rebuilding both the economy and the nation’s defenses, and doing both simultaneously. But before he could cut taxes, free the market or order a single bullet, bayonet or Pershing missile, he had to change calcified attitudes. In his diaries, he often said he moved forward with an initiative, sure of successful outcome, only after "I felt it in my gut." What he felt most in his gut was that America was what Lincoln said it was, with all its faults "the last best hope of mankind," that America was good and the Soviet Union was bad, and it was time to say so and act on it. This is the blunt assessment that the nation was waiting to hear, and if this caused heartburn in Paris or Bonn (Berlin was still red and half-dead) or Brussels, that was just too bad. Deja vu, anyone? (or more likely deja pfui) The man the chattering class regarded as bumbling, dumb and already moving into the outer suburbs of senility understood what the intellectuals of academe and the smart alecks of the media did not, that the bulging muscle of Soviet arms was all cattle and no hat, that Soviet economic might was a myth and the Russians were ripe to be taken down. "He was right," the Economist observed the day after Mr. Reagan died. "By the year he left office the Russians had lost Eastern Europe; two years later they abandoned communism. ... A large part of the chin-stroking classes of America and Europe had thought the clumsy fellow’s Cold War policy unnecessary and dangerous. When it worked, it became retrospectively obvious." "chin-stroking classes" - perfect description, if from a surprising source. Not bad for an old guy moving through his eighth decade, the champion of small-town America values of freedom, faith and family, the man the remnants of the counterculture regard as hopelessly inferior in all the ways important to eastcoast libsnob slagpunk comsymps etc. Everything about the life and accomplishments of Ronald Reagan says to the embittered critics choking on his dust: "I may be slow, but I’m miles ahead of you." Gee, that sounds like another President I know, but his name escapes me at the moment.... |
| Posted by:Barbara Skolaut |
| #4 Awesome article! Wow - perfect. Thanks, Barbara!!! Mail this link to everyone you know! It rocks! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-06-08 6:33:06 PM |
| #3 The lot of the no-account eastcoast libsnob longhaired artsyfartsy slagpunk francophile comsymp is not a happy one. Has Wes been visiting Rantburg? Nice swipe at that f*ck-wit Rall too. That idiot is need of a serious @$$ kicking. |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2004-06-08 6:25:51 PM |
| #2 Wes Pruden really knows how to turn a phrase. Also, pretty good at picking the spades from the deck. |
| Posted by: GK 2004-06-08 4:53:29 PM |
| #1 Fred - thought I put this on Page 2 - can you move it? |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-06-08 4:39:44 PM |