Ballad of a Blind Man

James N. writes:

Reading Dana Milbank’s uncomprehending screed in the Washington Post, “GOP’s Utah and Maine conventions show a party coming unglued,” I am reminded once again of Dylan’s words. I bet Dana Milbank DOES walk into the room like a camel, then frown.

You walk into the room
With your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked
And you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard
But you don’t understand
Just what you’ll say
When you get home.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

You raise up your head
And you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says
“It’s his.”
And you say, “What’s mine?”
And somebody else says, “Where what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God
Am I here all alone?”

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?….

Well, you walk into the room
Like a camel and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket
And your nose on the ground
There ought to be a law
Against you comin’ around
You should be made
To wear earphones.

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

LA writes:

I had noticed the headline of the Milbank article somewhere, and thought, right, like this guy has any grasp of what’s happening at a GOP meeting, he looks at a party that is gaining in force and confidence and he sees it coming unglued, and I didn’t bother reading it, which now I’ve done. The Dylan song well describes Milbank’s total incomprehension, that of a man inside an establishment mindset, who can’t grasp anything outside it. For example, he says the Republicans are “insane” because they fear the spread of one world government. He’s not aware that there are rational reasons for such fears, for example, that American taxpayers are going to be required to pay tens of billions to help bail out Greece—a country that, by the way, has been hostile to us for decades—in order to help rescue the transnational EU? He thinks that when conservatives express fear of one world government, that’s as irrational as fearing an invasion by Vikings. And he thinks that to believe that global warming is a myth is further proof of “insanity.”

In other words, Milbank is so locked into liberal orthodoxy that he’s not even aware of how the mainstream itself is now debating that orthodoxy, with many mainstream people questioning global warming, with many people saying that the EU helped create both the Greece crisis and made that crisis dangerous to the EU as a whole, and with others saying that the problem can only be solved by creating a true super-government for all of Europe and eliminating whatever remains of national sovereignty.

Milbank thinks another mark of the GOP becoming “unglued” is that they turned out Sen. Bennett of Utah, who had a fairly high conservative voting record. Evidently he hasn’t read Tony Blankley—not exactly a frothing at the mouth type—who said that the defeat of go-along Republicans like Sen. Bennett is necessary if the GOP is to confront and turn back the Obama revolution.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 15, 2010 01:10 PM | Send