MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow

Dan Greenfield argues that, while Barack Obama succeeded in selling leftism to the American public, he did it by concealing his real identity behind a masque of reasonable moderation. When leftists fail to conceal their leftism, Americans still find them totally repulsive.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up.”

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

Why does the left, which is so adept at putting its agenda across in mainstream media outlets fail spectacularly when it puts away the disguise and begins saying what it really thinks?

George Orwell described the phenomenon in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The behavior he is describing is so familiar that it’s worth pausing to remember that it was written 77 years ago in 1937.

“I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals,” Orwell wrote, explaining why the left was failing to make headway with more sensible people. “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler… sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!”

A must read.

From Time Magazine’s Michael Crowley:

DougRoss has the data.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Dr. Thompson, with gun, on bike.

In 2008, James Poulos (who takes the aesthetic Bohemian approach to American political life) bought into Barack Obama’s BS. He knows better now and can be found wistfully imagining the fun if Dr. Thompson was still around to observe and comment on the hideous smoking-and-burning wreck that the current administration has made of both the American economy and democratic government. Picture Hunter Thompson, stoned on several different potent substances, writing up an essay, which Rolling Stone could not bring itself to decline, on Michelle Obama’s covert 50th Birthday Party, conducted in the manner of Elagabulus, but obligingly neglected by the lapdogs of the MSM.

Hunter Thompson is fun and easy to abuse for one’s own political purposes, but we are woefully all the poorer for having lost him in 2005, before he had a chance to discover that the power dynamic he railed against at the peak of his powers was still with us, smarter and dumber than ever. …

[T]here are now so few Democrats with even a wistful, nostalgic connection to the days when Freak Power thrived on the left. On a bad day, the landscape resembles a shameful two-species ecosystem: old corporatist behemoths casting long shadows over flea-bitten packs of communists so young and frustrated that they’re always on the verge of bursting into tears. …

We were on the back half of the Bush years. Something new, possibly even wonderful, would soon be in sight. Sure enough, the impossible happened—Hillary Clinton was beat, fair and square, by someone so sonorous about the possibilities of choice and resilience that he received the Kennedy stamp of approval, and then America’s.

Innocent times. Now, that special someone has left the crown of hope in the gutter, overwhelmed and infected by the propaganda of neediness and choicelessness that fuels the rule of fear over so much of our daily life. Progress has somehow gone from an inspiring option to an individual mandate—a grim necessity we are obliged to grind out. …

This was the touchstone of Obama ’08. Now it goes all but untouched. There was a dazzling gonzo streak to Obama’s insurgent campaign—a sense not of historical inevitability but of people, real people, going off on an incredible tangent, so crazy it just might work. The mood of the moment was nearly the opposite of today’s Obama, with his nationalistic claptrap about how “America doesn’t stand still.”

No, Mr. President, we don’t. We shift with unease from one foot to the other. We fretfully pace the floor. America is becoming a waiting room.

We’re waiting for more shoes to drop. The nagging, nervous energy that dominates our personal and political lives belies the harsh lesson of executive action: the more constant the crisis, the more impotent it is apt to grow.

Two hundred years ago, the French liberal Benjamin Constant saw the same pathology in Napoleon Bonaparte’s waning days of despotism. Trapped in the cycle of permanent emergency and perpetual action, he wrote, “servitude has no rest, agitation no pleasure.”

Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny” (1992).

Via Roger Kimball.

Rico reports:

What a Deal!….I got an email the other day from a Nigerian prince.

nigerian prince
He’s got a MILLION DOLLARS
and he wants to give it to me for FREE!
All I have to do is give him all my bank account
numbers so he can make it happen!

I was about to do it, but then I got ANOTHER email,
this time from a KENYAN prince.
Kenyan prince
He wants to give me FREE healthcare for life!…
All I have to do is give him all my bank account
numbers so he can make it happen!

Sounds like a familiar scam….huh ??