What the (Bleep) Just Happened?
Read What the (Bleep) Just Happened? Online
Authors: Monica Crowley
THE HAPPY WARRIOR’S GUIDE TO THE GREAT AMERICAN COMEBACK
MONICA CROWLEY
BROADSIDE BOOKS
An Imprint of
HarperCollins
Publishers
www.broadsidebooks.net
FOR MY COUNTRY
If ever the Time should come, when vain & aspiring Men shall possess the highest Seats in Government, our Country will stand in Need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its Ruin.
—Samuel Adams, 1780
Part II: THE SKINNY SOCIALIST IS A BIG FAT LIAR
Part IV: DR. STRANGELEADER OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP CARING AND LOVE AMERICAN DECLINE
AMERICA, INTERRUPTED
W
hat the @$%&! just happened to America? What the @$%&! happened to our strength and greatness? What the @$%&! happened to our powerful free market system? What the @$%&! happened to our traditional rocket path of growth? What the @$%&! happened to American jobs? What the @$%&! happened to our prosperity? What the @$%&! happened to the greatest health care system in the world? What the @$%&! happened to our constitutionally limited government? What the @$%&! happened to our superpower status? What the @$%&! happened to our ability to be respected and feared? What the @$%&! happened with multiple bailouts and unprecedented spending? Sixteen trillion dollars in debt?
What the @$%&! just happened?
This is the question most Americans are asking. It’s the question that has been driving us bananas since November 4, 2008, when a newly elected president and Democratic Congress went full steam ahead with a radical plan to transform the United States into Absurdistan. Americans have greeted each day since with an incredulous “What now?” What epically anti-American, destructive, and weird policy, announcement or development are we going to get hit with today?
Team Obama and his determined band of leftists have played a skillful game of political whack-a-mole (or Barack-a-mole). They would pop up with one insane policy and before anyone could even begin to address it, they would pop up with another crazy initiative, and before anyone could begin to address that, up they would pop with yet another maniacal proposal. Nobody could keep up with the leftist madness, which of course was the point. Before we knew what actually hit us, most of us felt like strangers in a strange land.
The last few years have been a bizarre stroll through a surreal landscape. America hasn’t been
looking
like America. It’s been looking like an America painted by Salvador Dalí, all dripping landscapes, liquid clocks, and warped reality … like what Paul Pelosi sees when he wakes up every morning. It’s as if America has fallen down the rabbit hole. It’s America in
The Twilight Zone
.
More important, America hasn’t been
feeling
like America. Everything we once thought we knew for sure is no longer true, and that in turn has rocked us to the very core. We used to know that if we lost our job, we would be able to find another one. Or that if we chose to, we would stay in the same home over the course of a thirty-year mortgage or longer. Or that after a recession we would have explosive comeback growth. Or that our children would have it better than we did. Or that despite downbeat times, we would return to our sunny national outlook soon enough. None of those things holds true today.
The shattering of those assumptions has shaken us. We aren’t used to feeling this strange kind of prolonged uncertainty and fear. We aren’t used to being off-kilter, wobbly on our feet, unable to count on our exceptional nation to buoy us.
The Tea Party grew out of this irrepressible sense that something isn’t right, not because of an external threat, but because of an internal one. That’s why the Tea Party went from being an incipient movement to representing mainstream America—it stood in opposition to all of the things that lent to that sense that something was wildly off: out-of-control spending, taxes and debt, bailouts, widespread government intervention in the private sector, and explosive government. Many Americans, looking at this long litany of offenses, decided to do as William F. Buckley once exhorted, and “stand athwart history, yelling, ‘Stop!’” Which, incidentally, is the same directive most massage therapists utter when former vice president Al Gore disrobes.
The American ability to self-correct is one of the most elemental reasons for our nation’s survival. The Declaration of Independence is famous for its high-concept principles of individual liberty and basic human dignity as well as Thomas Jefferson’s lyrically beautiful prose. But the core of the document is actually the lengthy list of abuses committed by King George, which served as the rationale for the taking up of arms against England in the name of independence. We have a different kind of fight before us now, this time for the very survival of what the Founders built.
What the @$%&! just happened to their—our—country?
One day in 1984, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. He was at the height of his fame, with his album
Thriller
well on its way to becoming the best-selling album of all time. The Reagan White House had asked Jackson for permission to use his smash hit, “Beat It,” in a campaign to combat teen drinking and driving. Jackson obliged, and he arrived at the White House to receive a public-safety award and personal thanks from the Reagans.
The now-iconic photograph of the three of them reveals much about the towering personalities and even more about America. Jackson stands between the Reagans, wearing a tamer version of his famous sequined faux-military costume. Hands clasped in front of him, he waits silently as the president finishes making a point to Mrs. Reagan and she responds. His eyes as wide as saucers as he gazes up at the president, Jackson makes obvious his legendary offstage shyness as he stands mere inches from the Leader of the Free World. The world’s greatest performer had discovered himself on a stage even bigger and more profound than the ones to which he was accustomed. His awe is palpable. And Reagan, the experienced showman, looks just as dazzled to be in the presence of a young man who had set the world (and earlier, his own hair) on fire with a raw, sheer, devastating talent.
The boy from Tampico, Illinois, standing with the boy from Gary, Indiana: two children of the Midwest who went on to become among the most influential people the world has ever known. Both men had recognized and seized the uniquely American opportunity that great risks could be met with great rewards. They also understood that great risks could be met with great failure, that there were consequences to risk and chance, to decisions and gambles, to ideas and the execution of them. And still, they chose to hone their talents, work hard, sacrifice, and persevere until they had achieved their wildest dreams. Because, after all, wasn’t that what America was all about in the first place? The wide-open space to succeed or fail? The land of opportunity, where government was small so individual ambitions could be big? The country in which there was no such thing as dreams too wild to pursue?
America cleared the path. Whether you succeeded or failed was up to you. The one thing this country would never prevent you from doing was trying.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama once referred to his biracial background and itinerant childhood and said, “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.” True. But then in 2009, while attending the Group of 20 (G-20) summit in Europe, he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. He replied haltingly, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Not exactly the way President Reagan would have answered, nor, for that matter, Michael Jackson.
The concept of American exceptionalism has been a victim of its own extraordinary success. In just over two hundred short years, the United States went from being a collection of defiant colonies subject to the rule of a distant tyrant to the world’s greatest superpower; hyper-dominant militarily, economically, culturally, politically, and ideologically. Plus, we have Lady Gaga. No other modern nation had been built not on the ambitions of men but on the freedom of the individual. No other nation or empire had achieved so much so fast. No other nation had achieved such greatness while exercising such profound goodness. No other nation liberated more people and defended freedom more aggressively at such great expense in lives and treasure—and asked for so little in return—as the United States of America.
That exceptionalism became such a given—both for Americans and for the rest of the world—that everyone began to take it for granted. America might have its ups and downs, its economic booms and recessions, its strong leaders and weak ones, its periods of dominance and times of retrenchment, its
Godfather
trilogies and its
Harold and Kumar
trilogies, but the assumption was that American power would always be there: reliable, sturdy, clear and present. The idea that American power and exceptionalism might evaporate for good was unthinkable. We had always been the indispensable nation and we always would be. Wouldn’t we?
What made the United States exceptional from the start was its design as a nation of laws, not of men, built on the concepts of individual liberty and equal justice before the law, with freedoms ranging from speech to worship, and rights from gun ownership to assembly. The Founding Fathers institutionalized these freedoms for the individual, so we would be safe from the suffocating burdens and capricious claims of a too-powerful state. Those freedoms would allow individuals to do as they pleased within the reasonable confines of the law and to achieve in ways big and small, the benefits of which would redound to America at large.
Even in extremely difficult times, we had never before lost the ideal—and the reality—of American exceptionalism. Faced with the darkest days of civil and foreign wars, economic depression and recessions, weak leadership at home or aggressive, hostile threats from abroad, the American people always had faith in the uniqueness of our democratic experiment, which produced the greatest engine of economic growth, the most influential culture, and the most far-reaching effects of innovation. In addition to the incandescent lightbulb, the airplane, and the iPad, America gave birth to the ShamWow. And that Chia Pet shaped like Barack Obama’s head.
And yet the man who acknowledged that his story was only even possible in America is intent on destroying many of the very individual liberties and limited government that made it so. Obama has swung a wrecking ball at economic freedom out of the noxious leftist belief that greater wealth redistribution and government-directed enforcement of social and economic “justice” make a fundamentally better nation. He has also swung a wrecking ball at American primacy in the world. He is not seeking the destruction of the free market system and our superpower status for their own sakes. He seeks them as necessary steps to ultimately “remake America” as a European-style redistributive state that seizes ever more power as it cultivates ever greater dependency while it’s forced to wear a dunce cap and sit humiliated in a corner of the world.
In several short years, Obama has fundamentally shifted the balance away from the individual and toward government, and has altered the national psyche from self-reliance to ever-growing reliance on government. It took Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and several other Founders a few months to draft the Declaration of Independence. It took Obama even less time to draft and implement his own Declaration of Dependence.
Obama’s reference to “British” or “Greek” exceptionalism reveals his belief that
the United States does not stand alone with a particular greatness
, but that every nation is great in its own way, and that America is simply one of many nations with something cool to offer. This kind of relativist, multicultural, “we’re all unique in unique ways,” “every kid must win at dodgeball” thinking is the basis for his economic and foreign policies, from his scheme to nationalize health care to his failure to consistently champion freedom for those struggling for it around the world. Unless those struggling include illegal alien abortion doctors who belong to the Teamsters Union. It is the rationale for his Vesuvian explosion of big government and the higher taxes he needs to finance it. It also explains Obama’s irrepressible urge to apologize for past perceived or invented American injustices and ill-conceived foreign “meddling.” In Obama’s kaleidoscopic left-wing view, no nation is better than any other and we’re all socialists
*
now.