Chain of Fools

Mark Steyn is in top form in this essay that makes fun of just about everything we have seen so far in this Democrat primary season. It is indeed a wonder and an amazement to watch as the old blunderbuss and the cotton-candy messiah duke it out over the nomination while the Elite Media Monoculture fawns in breathless anticipation over the prospect of "Amerika" finally confessing its White Guilt to all the world as it should.

The Democratic primary season seems to have dwindled down into a psycho remake of Driving Miss Daisy. The fading matriarch Mizz Hill’ry (Jessica Tandy) doesn’t want to give up the keys to the Democratic-party vehicle but the dignified black chauffeur Hokey (Morgan Freeman) insists it’ll be a much smoother ride with him in the driver’s seat, full of gear change you can believe in, etc. Yet, just as he thinks the old biddy’s resigned to a nomination as Best Supporting Actress, the backseat driver plunges her hat pin into his spine, wrests the wheel away and lurches across the median.

Is the Democratic presidential process a Karl Rove plot? Right now, neither Mizz Hill’ry nor Hokey can win without the votes of the “super-delegates,” whose disposition is apparently in flux. The gay super-delegates, as I noted a week or two back, are apparently sticking to Hillary like the Hello, Dolly! waiters to Carol Channing. But others are said to be moving Barackwards. Are they jumping to a stalled bandwagon? One Historical Guilt gives upscale white liberals a chance to demonstrate their progressive bona fides in unison and with nary a thought. Two Historical Guilts shrivels from transformative feelgood fluffiness into sour tribalism. Like Hillary’s “I Am Woman” routine, Obama’s cult of narcissism — “We are the change we have been waiting for” — would have been a shoo-in against Biden, Dodd, and Edwards. But the gaseous platitudes wafting up to Cloud Nine are suddenly very earthbound. “Yes, we can!” is an effective pitch if you’re the new messiah, not so much when you’re pulling in a very humdrum fortysomething percent against a divisive and strikingly inept campaigner.

Go back to that Maureen Dowd line: “People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater.”

“People won’t, Democrats will,” the blogger Orrin Judd responded. “People will elect John McCain in November, demonstrating that we don’t share their guilt.”