The White House now says that Anita Dunn was “joking.” Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. But, for the sake of argument, try a thought experiment:
Midway through Bush’s second term, press secretary Tony Snow goes along to Chester A. Arthur High School to give a graduation speech. “I know it looks tough right now. You’re young, you’re full of zip, but the odds seem hopeless. Let me tell you about another young man facing tough choices 80 years ago. It’s last orders at the Munich beer garden — gee, your principal won’t thank me for mentioning that — and all the natural blonds are saying, ‘But Adolf, see reason. The Weimar Republic’s here to stay, and besides the international Jewry control everything.’ And young Adolf Hitler puts down his foaming stein and stands on the table and sings a medley of ‘I Gotta Be Me,’ ‘(Learning to Love Yourself Is) The Greatest Love of All,’ and ‘The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow.’” And by the end of that night there wasn’t a Jewish greengrocer’s anywhere in town with glass in its windows. Don’t play by the other side’s rules; make your own kind of music. And always remember: You’ve gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”
Anyone think he’d still have a job?
Well, so what? All those dead Chinese are no-name peasants a long way away. What’s the big deal? If you say, “Chairman Mao? Wasn’t he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?”, you’ll be hounded from public life for saying the word “Chinks.” But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any school room in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it’s so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.
Which is odd, don’t you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.
Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of
Reason, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren’t we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?
Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left’s long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There’s the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.
Rush Limbaugh’s remarks are “divisive”; Anita Dunn’s are entirely normal. But don’t worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2009 Mark Steyn< Back 1 2 
