Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

12 February 14

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hings are lining up sweetly for conservatives in the 2014 midterm elections. The congressional strategy of throwing sand in the gears in working splendidly. The party's real owners have indicated that they will spend whatever it takes to make all their dreams come true. Then why in the same of Hephaestus's iron oysters are conservatives so outright hysterical about things? First we have Ross Cardinal Douthat, Archbishop of Dorkylvania, rousing himself in 800 of the 1800-odd words he writes per week to warn us that we're all becoming lazy slobs who don't want to work as hard as he does.

One of the studies used to model the consequences of Obamacare, for instance, found a strong work disincentive while looking at a population of childless, able-bodied, mostly working-class adults - a demographic that's already becoming more and more detached from steady, paying work.

The study in question came from the American Enterprise Institute, the wingnut intellectual talking-points factory, which His Eminence oddly declines to mention to us, probably because we all know that, if you asked the "scholars" at the AEI to study the effect of sunlight on a field of daisies they would conclude that Obamacare contained a strong work disincentive. But His Eminence's concern for our vanishing work ethic is nothing compared to Kevin D. Williamson at National Review, who is hearing the thumpety-thump of jackboots in the not-too-distant future. First, though, he would like you to know that he's had enough of what political correctness has done to Versailles, mom.

I was a bit taken back by the company's current billboard in Tribeca: "The French aristocracy never saw it coming either." Patting Manhattanites on the head for being good little Democratic doggies is one thing, but flippant cheerleading for what was, let's remember, mass murder is quite another. For those of you keeping score, the number of people slaughtered during the Terror included 16,594 killed in the guillotine alone, along with tens of thousands more victims of summary execution by other means.

The ad in question:

You have to be stupid or behaving like a complete charlatan to conclude that a storage company is "cheerleading" for the Terror because of a joke it made on a billboard in 20-fking-14. I have been on TV with Williamson. He is not stupid. Unfortunately, it all gets worse.

At a time in which the Left is rediscovering the joy of totalitarianism in the pages of Rolling Stone, when Occupy activists are attempting acts of terrorism, and the organs of the state are being turned against the president's political enemies, it is worth keeping in mind who and what the Left is at its heart. The Left gets good PR, but it is not really about the minimum wage or Head Start or bigger school budgets. Its agenda is control and domination, and it has been known to endorse and use political violence to achieve those ends. When part of the Left's corporate arm is happily contemplating the Terror, we should take note, and perhaps ask our progressive friends under which other circumstances execution without trial seems to them an admirable course of action.

This is sub-Glenn Beck bullshit, and working with Jonah Goldberg is no excuse for writing it -- especially in a week when a Republican member of Congress sat there like a bobblehead German Shepherd while one of his constituents argued that the president be hung. First of all, if Manhattan Mini-Storage is "the Left's corporate arm," then the Left is pretty well screwed, I'd say. I missed Rolling Stone's turn to Der Sturmer, but I'm willing to bet it had something to do with Daft Punk. The Occupy terrorists are those poor saps in Cleveland who told an undercover FBI agent that they'd like to blow up a bridge, all of whom are in the federal sneezer from now until the end of time. And, of course, you recognize the scary set decoration that Williamson has hung on the IRS dumbassery, which fell on Left and Right alike, and which, anyway, is a chicken that the Right has pretty much fked to death at this point. The rest of it is something Ann Coulter argued in that book where she pretended to be a Christian scholar. Frankly, if I wrote for National Review, I'd be less worried about summary executions, and more about what might happen in civil court, but that's just me.

If the Left ever gets the revolution it wants, the owners of multi-million-dollar downtown lofts surely will be among the first to the guillotine. Perhaps they will be comforted by the words of Robespierre: "Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country."

Jesus, man, have some warm milk and go to bed. If I got the revolution I want, we'd have single-payer health-care, no Keystone pipeline, and a top tax rate back where JFK left it. Then I'd be happy. If you're looking at the American Left now and seeing Robespierre, then, by all means, buy your mushrooms somewhere else. It used to be that people thought that allowing the base to live in the information bubble was all right because, sooner or later, the more serious conservative intellectuals would be there to rein in the wilder impulses of the tribe. At this point, I don't know who's outside the bubble any more.