Even if you should retake Congress this fall, don’t get your hopes up.
I suppose you wingnuts are starting to feel pretty good about yourselves and your chances in November. You’ve managed to claw your way back from the electoral abyss by basically doing nothing, saying no, and not being even remotely related to Barack Hussein Obama II.
Big whoop.
So we blew it — so what? Any fool could have predicted that when you elect a president whose stellar résumé includes playing second-string basketball at the Punahou School in hoops-mad Honolulu and never writing a word for the Harvard Law Review, of which he was the nominal president, you’ve pretty much just hired the prize apple-polisher of the bunch, a perfect 10 on the Obamamometer. And when he fills out his cabinet with other Harvard grads who’ve never even run the apple stand from which he used to liberate the apples he gave to his teachers, his mentors, his rabbis, and the total stranger who baptized his children at the United Church of Christ in Chicago . . . well, you’ve seen the results. Even when you have a how-to manual as plain and prescriptive as the Great Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to follow, you still have to have the foot soldiers to pull it off, not to mention the commander-in-chief.
In other words, I’m saying what we always say when we screw up and you rebuke us at the polls: Our ideas are great, but we just didn’t get a fair chance to put them in action. It’s been that way for decades, ever since those darn Bolshies got the bright idea of “socialism in one country”; had the Germans bought into Marxism, the way Marx intended, we’d all be singing the “Internationale” auf Deutsch today. So even if you hate-mongering teabaggers whale the stuffing out of us come November 2, all it will prove is that the next time we have a shot like this, we’re going to make darn sure we have better people in place to fully effect the “fundamental transformation” of the US of KKKA, instead of clowns like Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, and Larry Summers.
So bring on your Tea Party armies, those roving bands of predominantly white racists, bigots, and homophobes who have nominated a bunch of fringe candidates like that witch in Delaware, the guy who’s come between the fetching Lisa Murkowski and her daddy in Alaska, and that whack job in Nevada who’s trying to prevent us from retiring Harry Reid with dignity by burying him, Dr. No–like, under Yucca Mountain if the bad guys somehow take over the Senate.
We’re ready for them. For if there’s one thing you morons don’t know how to do — yes, I’m talking to you, fancy-pants Republican-party establishment types — it’s fight. Remember that we, the folks who currently run the Democratic party, cut our teeth (literally) during the good old street-fighting days in Chicago, when Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and the other stalwarts went toe-to-toe with Daley’s pigs at the 1968 Democratic convention; when we talk about days of rage, we mean it. And today — Daley’s one of us! Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss, only working for the other side.
You, on the other hand, continue to bring knives to gunfights. You refuse to learn from our example, refuse to get up in our grills, refuse to take an eye for an eye (the only Biblical verse we really believe in), refuse to treat us with the same respect with which we treat you, which is none. As Dracula, the patron saint of entitlement programs, famously said, “Our ways are not your ways.” And on the rare occasions when you actually do get up on your hind legs, bare your teeth, and make growling noises, we simply start weeping like Bernie Bernbaum in Miller’s Crossing and pleading with you not to hurt us. And, of course, you fall for it every time. Your faith that our intentions are good, despite all evidence to the contrary, is touching.
I mean, how many times can we make it clear to you that we hate your God, your flag, and your border-patrolled country with a passion that age cannot wither, nor custom stale? The teabaggers get it, but not you: For nearly 50 years, we have been waging a cold civil war against you and your institutions, and yet, for some weird Judeo-Christianist reason, you’ve declined to engage us, preferring instead to negotiate your freedoms away, one by one, in the hopes of appeasing us. But, like Screwtape at the end of The Screwtape Letters, we are always ravenous for more.
Since even Satan gets tired of winning fixed fights, I’ve decided to give you fools a break. At the instigation of my father, the sainted “Che” Kahane, I’ve written a new book called Rules for Radical Conservatives — the over-the-shoulder acknowledgement of the Apostle Saul is entirely intentional — which takes you on a Dantesque tour of the hell we’ve made of your world over the past half century and offers you some of our own weapons with which to fight us. Indeed, some of you are already calling it a manual for the counter-revolution. After all, the beginning of wisdom is understanding, and, brother, do you ever have a long way to go.
But even if you should retake Congress this fall, don’t get your hopes up. For we have a secret weapon: you. We know your party apparatchiks — excuse me, “elder statesmen” — would rather discuss programs than principles. We know that you’re more comfortable reaching across the aisle than gnawing our arms off. We know that you’d rather lose honorably than win ugly. So I offer you this cross between Paradise Lost and the Alinsky masterpiece in the full confidence that you won’t have the guts to use it. Because if you do, you can break us the way St. Michael broke Lucifer and his legions, and send us plunging into the Lake of Fire, there to lick our wounds and plot our comeback once the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act finishes paving the road to hell. Then a new generation will succumb to our siren song of hope and change, and a new generation of your “patriots” will have to fight us once more. The battle may be over, but the war doesn’t end until the Last Trump.
As a great man once said: The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
