Sunday, November 23, 2003

Leni Riefenstahl redux

The Brownshirt Barbie strikes again:
In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats' other big idea -- too nuanced for a bumper sticker -- is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There's Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew -- along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering.

How exactly is Lieberman's Jewishness a form of "pandering" anyway? Should he stop being Jewish just so Democrats can't be accused of sucking up to the Jews? And should Howard Dean get a divorce so that no one will think he's pandering?

But most noticeable is this undercurrent: Coulter seems to believe that the only reason Jews would vote for Democrats is that because they're too stupid to recognize pandering for its own sake. Kind of the same reason blacks vote Democratic, right?

This is, throughout, a column reptilian in its nastiness. Its core thesis is that Democrats try to score political points by exhibiting compassion. What she clearly misses is that Republicans fail to do likewise not out of principle, but because, frankly, they rarely bother to exhibit much in the way of compassion themselves, unless it is for environmental polluters, Enronesque corporate outlaws and drug-addicted right-wing talk-show hosts.

Most of all, she finishes up with this little bon mot:
If the Democrats start extolling you -- get a gun.

And who would you recommend they use it on, Ann?

Oh, right -- those nasty, pandering liberals.

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