The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.