OPINION:
It is probably too early in our 45th president’s tenure to evaluate how his critics are appraising him, both those on the left and those on the right. Among his critics on the right, such as Bill Kristol and George F. Will, their criticisms have calmed down a bit, and of course their criticisms are relatively chaste. At least they have abstained from speaking of President Trump in terms that conjure up images of oral sex and incest. Not that I can imagine Bill or George resorting to such luridities, not even in commenting on Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. A conservative audience simply does not tolerate such stuff, and it is to a conservative audience that Bill and George still appeal.
The American left is another matter. Already the wits of the left have employed references to oral sex and even to incest in joking about our president. I cannot recall any other president suffering such public ribaldry, even President Abraham Lincoln, and he had among his critics that forerunner of the modern American entertainment industry, John Wilkes Booth.
Just last week such comic geniuses as Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert cracked har-hars about Donald Trump and his daughter, which is a little inconsistent. So far as I can tell, both were grievously distressed upon hearing of the president’s locker room braggadocio with Billy Bush, though the boasts were taped years ago and clandestinely. I doubt the president would talk that way today even in private. But Mr. Maher and Mr. Colbert talk that way in public, and they get a lot of laughs from their audience. That is inconsistency to the point of bizarreness.
Yet the left is increasingly bizarre. Do you remember the kind of things that their commentators were saying about Barack Obama? They remarked on his pants and claimed to suffer the raptures from his rhetoric, and much more. They were actually eager to speak in public of his inscrutable effect on them.
Remember Chris Matthews telling Keith Olbermann back in 2008 that upon hearing one or another of Mr. Obama’s solemnities, “I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean — I don’t have that too often.” Maybe Chris’ bethrilled leg came after hearing one of Mr. Obama’s own equally bizarre declarations. For instance, after he said, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” or something about “the rise of the oceans,” and “our planet began to heal” or at least feel a lot better.
Or how about the time David Brooks informed the New Republic that “I remember distinctly an image — we were sitting on [Senator Obama’s] couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, (a) he’s going to be president and (b) he’ll be a very good president.” It’s a good thing that Mr. Obama was not wearing pantyhose. By the way, my guess is that David still thinks Mr. Obama was a “very good president.”
And then there was the time that a columnist wrote that Mr. Obama was “A Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” But the columnist was writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, so maybe it does not matter.
So to return to my point about conservative critics and their equivalents on the left, they are very different and apparently they speak to very different audiences. I think that what makes them different is that the values of the conservatives are relatively constant. What was beyond the pale yesterday is likely to be beyond the pale tomorrow. With the audience of the left and its commentariat all is chaos. Today they make lewd jokes about the president that are not funny. The jokes are merely shocking, and the dolts in the audience respond with laughter but not amused laughter. Ask a leftist what is so funny about oral sex and my guess is the leftist would have no plausible answer. Nor would the leftist have a plausible explanation for the idiotic reactions of Mr. Matthews and Mr. Brooks to the equally idiotic statements of Mr. Obama. The world of the left is in chaos.
You might recall, I said as much some years ago in a book happily entitled “The Death of Liberalism.” The evidence keeps coming in.
• R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson Inc.
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