Masterful Bill Kristol Pens Best Column Yet!
Quiet ye unenlightened Cretans, for the man's tortured quill is ablaze with righteous argumentation! We speak of New York Times "lightning rod conservative" columnist Bill Kristol, of course, the most inquisitive and trenchant commentator in Western Hemispherical History! For his Monday column he tackles whatever the big Saturday news happened to be (as per usual). In this case it's Barack Obama's inflammatory selection of the adjective "bitter." As used in a sentence in liberal San Francisco! Most conservative commentators have been running with thenitwit'sinterpretation: that Obama is an unforgivable liberal elitist elitist liberal elitist. Ballyhoo and tut tut! Kristol takes that extra leap that only a Harvardian of his ethno-brainian historical knowledgo-centrism can understand: Obama is a communist !
He opens his grand thesis as he does most of his grand theses: by noting that he found a book over the weekend that he hadn't read in a while but which perfectly explains the current upper-left corner headline sequence on Drudge!
I haven't read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn't take me long this weekend to find my copy of "The Marx-Engels Reader," edited by Robert C. Tucker -- a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.
Yeah come to think of it, we have not opened or remarked upon that book in recent visits to the local recreation center library. Fortunately Obama made a weird sentence this weekend in a liberal enclave. Now the rec center is packed with interpretive adventurer-investigators!
My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama's now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: "It's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
This sent me to Marx's famous statement about religion in the introduction to his "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right":
"Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people."
There are at least eight different comical thoughts in this excerpt, but the best is probably that he had to re-read his Marx reader in order to find maybethe most widely quoted sentence Karl Marx ever wrote. Maybe you'd recognize it better in German, elitist Nazis?
Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes."
Aye. We are now on the eve of great decisions. About electing a Communist Black!
The stuff he writes about "guns" is also pretty funny. Bill Kristol is funny. He should have a comedy show where he writes funny things and then publishes them in a liberal newspaper.
The Mask Slips [NYT]