Kamala Harris' cackling brings up a question I have often asked in the past 20 years.
What if Democrats — along with leftists the world over — turned out to be nothing but sophomoric individuals snorting with laughter as they stick it to the man, as they fool the grown-ups (ain't that what the 13 Rules for Radicals are all about?!), and, with the true teen-age mentality they possess, as they love to cosplay as senators, presidents, governors (remember the glee of Katie Hobbs at the Arizona inaugural after "defeating" Kari Lake?!), diplomats, filmmakers (on both sides of the camera), and — last but not least — esteemed debaters and professional journalists?
What if all that leftists love to do is cosplay as heroic individuals and knights in shining armor — fighting, among other things, to protect various minorities, to save democracy, and to defeat the West's inhumane monsters, i.e., racists, sexists, Nazis, fascists, and other Adolf Hitlers? (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)
This is why leftists have dystopian fantasies (we must display our intelligence!) and are crisis creators (we must display our bravery!), and it is why those virtue-signallers can't debate and regularly refuse invitations from the right to do so (unless, perhaps, they use "neutral" moderators (sic) to assist them while said moderators attempt to demonize their opponents): the Drama Queens know that their fairy tales would be eviscerated in no time. Regularly, Dennis Prager and Larry Elder recount how they have often, over the years, suggested a debate to various leftists, famous or unknown — even one in which they are outnumbered 5 or 6 to 1 — and the leftists do not dare take them up on it. (Indeed, this is how Larry Elder "turned" Dave Rubin…)
As Jonah Goldberg
wrote in Liberal Fascism,
That is how the liberal Gleichschaltung
works; contrary voices are regulated, barred, banned when possible,
mocked and marginalized when not. Progressive voices are encouraged,
lionized, amplified — in the name of "diversity," or "liberation," or
"unity," and, most of all, "progress."
No matter how sincere their tears and anger seem to be, for instance, over the melodrama of the poor members of the gay and transgender minorities, along with their pronouns, the whole LGBTQ+ gig (not least including that ridiculous name) seems to be a joke or a prank against the bourgeois, something which all leftists seem to recognize somewhere deep inside (and I don't doubt that Dave Rubin, Brandon Straka, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Richard Grenell would agree).
Needless to say, the cosplay imagery has been used before, slightly differently, notably by Iowahawk for years now, with his oft-Instapundit-linked lefties manual on how to take over "a respected institution" and thus all of society ("while demanding respect" is a synonym for "while requesting you to shut up"), with David Burge's phrase wearing the "carcass as a skin suit" equivalent to my description of a cosplayer:
From London, a jokester enjoying “the wisdom of calling Donald Trump weird” writes with mirth that
When running for the Senate, [Lyndon Baines] Johnson let it be known that one of his
opponents enjoyed the carnal pleasure of one of his farmyard sows. “That
isn’t true,” one of LBJ’s aides said. “I know,” LBJ replied, “but I’m going to make the bastard deny it.”
I don't deny that this sounds funny or that it is worth a chuckle. At the same time, all of us — especially those raving endlessly about defending democracy — should ask, is calling your opponent a pig-humper (or, for that matter, the rapist of an unbalanced woman in a department store's changing room) truly the way to engage in debate? But Democrats and leftists don't ask that sort of questions; after all, the virtue-signallers are engaged in demonizing opponents, i.e., fighting the "bastards" that said opponents truly are…
Margaret Thatcher once said “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is
particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one
personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” (Truth to tell, many of them had no political arguments — beyond fairy tales — to begin with.) I wish that during his debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump had responded to her every personal attack with calm words such as these: "I want to thank Kamala Harris for her personal attack, because that means she has no policies to offer — beyond those far left policies, of course, that she wants to hide from the American people."
The LBJ story is somewhat reminiscent of Harry Reid telling tall tales in 2012 about the Republican candidate not paying taxes and then rebuffing criticism in interviews with the words, Mitt "Romney didn't win, did he?" This is acceptable, indeed desirable, in a simplistic (i.e., in a sophomoric) worldview consisting of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.
This explains in turn Donald Trump's mean tweets, along with his (alleged) "petty insults and his dark obsessions" — they are only mean in that they describe exactly the kind of people that he sees on the Left. Just like the boy at the end of The Emperor's New Clothes. After the boy's outburst, according to what Hans Christian Andersen seems to have expected, the boy and all the bystanders in the streets ought to have referred to the tailors as scam artists and to their ruler the emperor (in the original Danish, he is a king) as some variant of a fool.
Alas, as Winston Churchill wrote, "Men [and women] occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
In real life, according to modern-day Western mores and thanks to the eggings-on, overt and other, of the tailors themselves and the scam artists' (willing or not) allies and sympathizers, the boy was probably vilified as a "tailorphobe" and canceled for daring to have the gall of engaging in hate speech and other types of hate-filled rhetoric. UPDATE: It turns out that I have used the Hans Christian Andersen analogy in the past, as did Mark Steyn during a September 2015 visit to Copenhagen…
The Economist's Lexington column writes, with unhidden glee, that after
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and now Ms Harris’s running-mate,
started calling him [Trump] “weird”, and as she and other Democrats joined in,
the former president foolishly took the bait.
"Foolishly took the bait"? Is that supposed to be part of a debate in "defending democracy"? (Maybe "debate" for the Left in fact means "the bait" pronounced Italian-style?!)
In last week's editorial — the very one bemoaning Trump's "petty insults and his dark obsessions" — The Economist went on to say that
It may seem unfair to criticise Ms Harris for being sparing about her
policies. Her overriding task is to defeat Mr Trump, and it is a vital
one in which guile and cunning are permitted.
A "vital [task] in which guile and cunning are permitted." In the wake of a(n in)famous Bernie Sanders quote ("No, I don't think she's abandoning her ideals. I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election"), leave it to a "respected" MSM outlet to spill the beans and tell the truth about the basic psychology ruling the members of the Democrat Party and other leftists — not excluding (as we can see) the mainstream media outlets themselves — the world over.
