Stop Me Before I Vote Again

A comment by Bro. Flugennock on an earlier post led me to prowl around on You Tube for a video of JFK's famous Rice University speech -- possibly the silliest moment in a very silly reign; the moment when postwar American hubris really jumped the shark and we decided we could treat the spacious firmament on high as if it were the Caribbean:

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

There are so many things to enjoy about all this. There's the preposterous boyish Tom Swiftery of it all -- Kennedy might as well have been a fictional President somewhere in the oeuvre of Robert Heinlein. There's the sanctimonious bilge about "freedom" and "peace", uneasily coexisting with the imagery of coming in first and exercising "leadership". There's the trademark shallow but grandiloquent Kennedy rhetoric -- "man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred."

But I think the best part is Lyndon Johnson, squirming irrepressibly behind the boy President, and obviously barely able to keep from laughing out loud. He so badly wants to elbow somebody in the ribs and say, "He wants to go to the moon? He's already on the moon!"

... is apparently haunting the egregious Michael Moore: vide this "open letter", passed along by our pal Mike Flugennock:

Dear Caroline,

We've never met, so I hope you don't find this letter too presumptuous or inappropriate.... Barack Obama selected you to head up his search for a vice presidential candidate.... The media is reporting that Senator Obama has narrowed his alternatives to three men: Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Tim Kaine. They're all decent fellows, but they are far from the core of what the Obama campaign has been about: Change. Real change....

What Obama needs is a vice presidential candidate who is NOT a professional politician, but someone who is well-known and beloved by people across the political spectrum; someone who, like Obama, spoke out against the war; someone who has a good and generous heart, who will be cheered by the rest of the world; someone whom we've known and loved and admired all our lives and who has dedicated her life to public service and to the greater good for all.

That person, Caroline, is you.

I cannot think of a more winning ticket than one that reads: "OBAMA-KENNEDY."

Moore maunders on in this vein, mingling gross flattery with maudlin sentimentality, for more than a thousand unbearable words.

Now I don't know any harm of Caroline Kennedy. But this fantasy of Moore's certainly does reveal the vulgar, cartoonish infantilism of the liberal imagination -- a mental world where wishing can make it so, and magic really works. Moore observes in passing that Caroline's father JFK "died because he wanted to serve his country" -- a fantasy construct fully equal to Moore's preposterous obiter dictum that "the core of the Obama campaign" was "Change. Real Change."

Moore, it seems, shares old Reagan's view that "facts are stupid things."

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I'm rusticating in coastal Maine for the rest of the month, and gratefully missing a lot of this silliness. SMBIVA will slow down until after Labor Day; but we shall return reinvigorated to the attack in September.