Thursday, January 17, 2008

THE VICTIM FOLLIES

After taking the past few years off from thinking, George Will returns


January 17, 2008 -- "HILLARY Clinton's campaign, useful at last, has in recent days added to the nation's stock of harmless merriment. It has done so by floundering around, like a dinosaur drowning in a tar pit, with the sticky problem of being as "sensitive" as good liberals, our multicultural role models, are supposed to be.

For decades, liberals, believing that "self-esteem" is a universal entitlement that is endangered by nearly universal insensitivity, have striven to make everybody exquisitely sensitive to slights. Liberals have become industrialists as an indignation industry has burgeoned. It writes campus speech codes, infests corporations with "sensitivity training" workshops and "consciousness-raising" retreats, and generally enforces the new right to pass through this vale of tears without tears or even being peeved.

It is unfair, and wonderful, that Clinton has been castigated for her insensitivity in uttering the incontestable truth that President Lyndon Johnson, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., was indispensable to enactment of the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.

To his credit, Barack Obama seemed not quite able to conceal his boredom with his assigned role of slighted victim in the charade of being offended. His campaign, however, methodically played a muted part in the required dance of agreement.

Clinton's clanking, wheezing political jalopy, blowing its gaskets and stripping its lug nuts, has moved on from faulting Obama for a kindergarten essay (in which he supposedly revealed a presidential ambition that was unseemly around the teeter-totter) to accusing him of wanting to be reasonable, even likable. Is there nothing the man will not stoop to?

America has passed another milestone on its march to equal opportunity thanks to Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, who this week proved that a black billionaire can be just as witless as are certain white billionaires who think their wisdom is commensurate with their net worth.

Introducing Clinton at a rally, Johnson called Obama a "guy who says, 'I want to be a reasonable, likable Sidney Poitier in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." ' " For the uninitiated, that's how you call someone an Uncle Tom in an age that has not read "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Harmless merriment indeed. Until we've been once again Clintonized into virtual somnambulists and the bad guys sneak past the ennui to kill thousands of Americans.

Let's face it; the Clinton's ARE fun. A philandering pig of a husband hitched to a screeching, profanity spewing cow of a wife would make a terrific sitcom.

But since it really isn't a casting call for Married With Clinton's, these horrid people can actually re-gain control of virtually everything so laugh while we may, but remain on guard lest the beasts that ate D.C. initiate a terrifying sequel to their dark comedy of errors.

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