I watched Sling Blade for the second time in almost a decade, and Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of Karl Childers reminded me a little of what Joe Biden might sound like if someone hit him over the head with a baseball bat, shaved him bald, and yanked his pants up to his nipples;"They got me a job with the President...some people calls him a socialist, I calls him the President. Hmmm. He brought two fellars up there from some college that weren't getting along proper..hmmmm. We all drank some beers. Bible says a man shouldn't take to drinking and I figure the good lord knew what he was talking about after we was about done, ah hmmmm. Sometimes the President...some people calls him Obama I calls him the President...he says he'll give me some french fried pataters if I got sense enough not to talk so much. I reckon that's a pretty good arrangement, um hmmmm"
I bring up Sling Blade because, in the movie, Billy Bob Thornton's antagonist, Doyle, is a volatile sociopath whose laid back good naturedness is nothing more than transparent window dressing to hide his otherwise dark and unpredictable nature. Granted, this is a weak segway, but I thought the Biden bit was pretty damn funny.
I recently had a (thankfully) brief rekindling of a friendship with a radical socialist friend of mine, whom I hadn't spoken to in almost a decade. It was a bizarre but telling window into the strange Kabuki theatre of the extreme left and how their perceptions of the conservative movement - and the world for that matter - seem limited to parroting talking points spit out by the callow hacks at the Huffington Post. The HuffPo has always struck me as a kind of cyber saloon where discredited journalists and a rogue's gallery of other has-beens gather together to form tightly packed manure balls to stuff into their Trebuchet of lunacy.
Radicals who get all dressed up trying to look respectable usually use the same MO. I've seen it so many times I can spot it quicker than Columbo on his best day: They whisper about how they're secretly disappointed with the hostile tone of their compatriots on the left, and (not so) subtly remind you that they've been to Europe so they can use terms like "social Swedish-style democracies" and mention, without the slightest trace of irony, "how different the Euro-right is". Then, faster than you can say "Dorothy Hewett on a corndog", they spin around like Linda Blair's head in the exorcist and begin moaning about being stuck in a world of uneducated morons who only listen to Glen Beck and think women shouldn't use "big words". Usually the good people they claim to be so savagely victimized by are tolerant and educated folks whose only crimes are working in the oil industry and not living in a constant state of fear about an imaginary warming trend that will wipe all of mankind off the face of the earth.
Of course, there is the usual stock footage: Frothing at the mouth and throwing cyber feces at Sarah Palin for the unforgivable crime of attending a cancer benefit; Recycling discredited reports by unethical scientists to give each other high five reassurances about how climate change is an undisputed fact; and of course, living in a state of perpetual victimhood.
The thing that really creeps me out is the fervent, almost evangelical, pulpit pounding zeal when they discuss environmental issues. They kind of get, well, all Jehovah's Witness-y on you. I half expect them to whip out some green version of "The Watch Tower" with David Suzuki on the cover.
As the green intelligentsia camp out in Copenhagen - taking advantage of comped CO2 spewing limos and sampling the after hours local delicacies - they're finding themselves up against a tide of scientific elites who have finally found their voice after years of threats and intimidation spearheaded by the tribal mentality of environmentalists. They are also having to answer to an increasingly skeptical public wondering if their "green lifestyles" have been nothing but hollow gestures to prop up a cargo cult that has fueled a multi-billion dollar industry (we'll touch on that later in my Climategate piece I'll have up in a few weeks).
What disturbs me the most about some foot soldiers of the green movement is their glazed-eyed, batten-down-the-hatches, straight-jacket-with-the-sedatives craziness they seem to possess. Environmentalism, to some, is a sort of pre-packaged quasi-socialist religion. Fundamentalist Christians are often ridiculed by the left for believing that if man doesn't change his ways, the end is nigh. They share a lot more with these folks then they would care to admit. The apostles of the environment believe that if man doesn't change his ways it will trigger a global Armageddon juggernaut that will bring floods, famine, and a Mad Max society where we will be using our neighbors' skulls for soup bowls. The biblical end of days doesn't differ all that much from the more secular death and destruction scenario brought to us by the tree huggers (anyone see 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow)?
Oh, but back to the creepy Wilsonian aspect of all of this. Last week in Copenhagen, journalist and documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer was stopped in the middle of a question to Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider by armed UN guards at the request of Schneider's assistant. McAleer, a global warming skeptic, was ordered to stop filming, manhandled, and threatened, even though he had full press credentials. When I asked my socialist friend whether she was disturbed by this, she responded;
"They were inconvenient and irrelevant questions".
It seems the pacifist anti-gun crowd doesn't mind silencing dissent with the butt of a rifle when journalists ask "inconvenient" questions. Armed response to "protect" the environment is OK, but roving wire taps to prevent terrorist attacks is unacceptable.
I wish UNAMIR would have felt as passionate about genocide as the UN as a whole feels about "pointless questions" from journalists. Maybe some of the 800,000 people slaughtered in Rwanda would still be alive today.
Today in Copenhagen, hundreds of bored young Europeans and rich white American progressives are shouting for the global community to amp up it's commitment to reduce greenhouse gases. Several of the protesters are waiving large flags of the former Soviet Union, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the evil ideology that is Communism has killed over 100 million people. I'm sure many who escaped the horrors of Stalin's Gulags could tell these folks quite a bit about waterboarding.
I doubt any of them would listen. They're too busy being victims of invisible bogeymen, shadow governments, and the military industrial complex. If you have a radical liberal on your Christmas list, maybe you should buy them a crowbar. It might help them pry the nails out of their hands and feet so they can come off of their crosses....Oh wait! Crosses are symbols of patriarchal Christian oppression. Scratch that. Buy them a Snuggie instead.
Cordially
Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment