Vassar Bushmills

Over Easter weekend my wife and I watched a half-dozen Easter and Passover-themed films. Among them was the 1968 film “Shoes of the Fisherman” which actually laid out the then-current state of liberalism in Hollywood. The Catholic Church, played by Anthony Quinn, as it’s new pope, agreed to give away the Church’s entire wealth; land, reliquaries, art, cash, in order to feed the starving millions of a failed Marxist experiment in China, in order to avoid a war with what Liberals viewed at the time as a stable Marxist experiment in the USSR, played by Sir Laurence Olivier as its General Secretary. America was only a bit player in this drama, but still portrayed as interventionist because of our role in Vietnam, which was depriving China of its rice bowl. In shorthand, if a China-USSR war turned into a world war, it would be America’s fault, which has been a continuing Liberal chant since Ike.

If you weren’t alive in ’68, there are some things you wouldn’t have known, namely that Maoist China and the USSR actually were bitter rivals, with regular firefights along their shared border. I was a newly commissioned infantry lieutenant and we knew.

The theme of this film wasn’t war, however, but on the fantastical notion that the Liberalism of the 1960s should still willingly give its own money away to cure cataclysms such as famine. That noble sentiment would soon die, however, as LBJ cured Democrats of this delusion with his Great Society plan, in favor of the socialist notion that using other peoples’ money was less painful to give away, in fact, even profitable for the middleman.

In 1968 Hillary had not yet drawn the attention of Saul Alinsky, Cronkite had not yet declared the war in Vietnam lost, but American liberalism in Hollywood was already in its thirtieth year of its love affair with Soviet Marxism…only, as the next 30 years would prove, it never fully fathomed the darker side of its lover,, and the role extraordinary cruelty would have to play in holding onto power once all its other schemes have failed. As they invariably do.

Democrats are rehearsing for that eventuality now.

Hillary’s class blamed the failings of Soviet communism on the coarse Russians which held it. Hillary’s class could have done much better. In her class’s scheme, all Marxism needed was the steadying hands of a super-educated, insulated, spoiled rotten class, like Hillary and Barack, who could manage the administration of a multi-trillion dollar economy almost as well as it could their own personal checking accounts.

This was the original “separate reality” of the Left that has spawned all other separate realities ever since. It was predicated on the notion that their class was not a small but exclusive moon orbiting our “free and independent” planet, but rather America’s sole source of light and heat. Our sun.

(Trust me, that was an easy sell to Hillary’s class.)

Over the next 30 years since the Clintons the ruling class lost sight of the most significant difference in the two realities, size, or that even people of ordinary sense would ever notice it.

By 2016 we did.

Today, back on horseback, constitutionally in charge again, while they are now afoot, this has been our first clear look at the America landscape since the Liberals-cum-Left began trying to lay it bare in the 90’s[…]

Continue Reading