“Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me”
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Looking Like a Night Out With Former Boss Tip O'Neill |
This week’s Chris Matthews Show, political television’s answer to Jerry Springer, was but the latest example of the preeminent preoccupation of the Media and the Left (please, again, pardon the redundancy) with popularity. A “PLEASE sign my high school year book” nervous giggly-ness thinly veiled behind the tarnished veneer of their lazy man’s approach to reporting and governing, the poll.
(Clinton)'s was a profoundly sorry Administration, for any slight, real or imagined, that his wretched nation had in the past perpetrated. |
Matthews, in discussing the looming departure of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, breathlessly proffered that he “entered office as one of Britain’s most popular Prime Ministers ever, and he remained so until his numbers plummeted when he became one of President George W. Bush’s staunchest allies in Iraq”. The roundtable discussion than became a panting fest of jubilant revelry at the political passing of one of our nation’s great allies in time of war.
That these supposed Media seers would so rigorously adhere to this partisan search for utterly worthless global popularity, while steadfastly ignoring Blair’s and Britain’s assistance with the heavy lifting that comes with the battle, reveals little but the sophomoric approach the Left has towards international opinion of the United States.
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A Member of the Leftist Brain Trust |
The Liberal intelligentsia (please pardon the oxymoron) has always wrong headedly, indeed dangerously, confused our nation’s popularity with its prestige. They speak often of how our international regard has plummeted since their Age of Clinton salad days. Bill Clinton was a man rigorously focused, indeed like a laser, on the popularity poll. No policy would be wrought were it to put these numbers asunder.
To that end, the High Chair President spent his tenure, and continues in his rubber chicken eating, $250,000 speech-making retirement, spanning the globe in the throes of perpetual apology for the United States having been the United States, rather than more like the likes of France or even Botswana. His was a profoundly sorry Administration, for any slight, real or imagined, that his wretched nation had in the past perpetrated.
Or in which it is egregiously guilty of again engaging. How dare, he says, his successor have the audacity to attempt to defend us without the full slate of global despots and European flatware behind the endeavor.
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And Then the Pope Says, "No Thanks, I Don't Smoke" |
Clinton, international man-about-towns and the King of worldwide American popularism, was (and is) also an intercontinental punch line. Rarely if ever did we have such low prestige cache as when he manned our mantle. Sure they liked us; we were the ones they pants-ed in the hallway between classes.
In Sydney, Australia, Clinton’s Madame Tussaud wax dummy (pun intended) had to have its slacks’ zipper sewn shut [1], and was eventually removed from exhibition, because visitors were repeatedly engaging in mock reenactments of some of His Majesty’s Oval Office glory days.
Clinton, the entire Liberal panoply and the Media, Matthews included, appear utterly flummoxed by Bush’s supposed go-it alone (never mind the aforementioned United Kingdom, plus Australia, Japan and the twenty-seven other nations that joined our forces), Cowboy approach to the War in Iraq that is rendering him so domestically and globally unpopular.
How, they ask, could he DO this? Doesn’t he know they don’t like us anymore?
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The Media, Circa 1997 |
He does indeed. For Bush, however, there are things of far greater import than his “You like me - you really like me!” meter, and in how high regard his date for prom is held by the jocks who peaked at age seventeen.
He is even less concerned with this gaggle of gainsayers, who had to attend their pageants stag, or with their cousins or moms.
The Clinton Administration’s perpetual search for popularity led to our rightly being taken unseriously by the likes of Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il and the Iranian mullachracy, and their marches towards surreptitious ascendancy on his morally and strategically nomadic watch left us with a much more dangerous world with which to deal.
Now Bush is forced to wade in to clean up the mess, all the while being heckled by the roommates sporting the dirty boxers, empty beer cases and pizza boxes.
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Our WMD? Right This Way |
Contrast the strides these fonts of evil took then to the incrementals towards freedom made now. As Bush began to lean into the push towards global Caliphate. Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and Mohammar Qaddafi’s Libya rolling over and asking for its stomach to be rubbed were but two of the positive unilateral steps taken in response to this President’s attempts at a return to national prestige.
Progress was halted only when his mistakes in Iraq allowed the UnGlee Club (the Democrats and the Media) to jump up and down atop his head and ensure that he, and we, were left with neither popularity nor prestige.
This is devastating to us as a nation abroad, but what does the Left care so long as it is electorally gratifying here at home.
Taking your country’s security more seriously than one’s own class ranking may not get you invited to the right Washingtonian parties, but it is a sure way to raise one’s global respect amongst those wishing us the greatest ill of all. Unless and until the effort is undone by a Left who does not mind the country failing so long as a political opponent goes down along with it.
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Feel the Love |
For all the guff this President has taken for his alleged ineffectiveness at university, he at least has grown up and left the days of keggers and panty raids behind. Not so for the Democrats and the Press, who apparently care not a whit if our enemies blow themselves up in our midst, if only they will say they love us before they do.