DO SOMETHING DIZZY AND NEW, KEEP UP THE HULLABALOO! ALINSKY! ALINSKY! ALINSKY!
It warms my heart to see Saul Alinsky back in the rightwing papers -- and with Hillary Clinton as a bonus! We've been around this mulberry bush before: Remember the 2012 primary campaign, when Newt Gingrich was talking about Obama's "Saul Alinsky radicalism," and supporters of his Republican opponents began calling Gingrich the real Alinsky?
Well, now they've stopped using this mudball as a medicine ball, and are pitching it at Clinton, claiming her youthful correspondence with Alinsky proves that the wife of triangulating trimmer Bill and the candidate who got outflanked from the left in 2008 is actually a dangerous radical. Chief among the complainants is National Review's Stanley Kurtz:
The difference between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren is that Warren flouts her ideology, thrilling the base by making the leftist case as few other Democrats dare. Ever the Alinskyite, Hillary prefers to achieve leftist ends incrementally, in pragmatic guise.
Ah, but that's all her craft and artfulness! It reminds me of what Kurtz said about Obama back in 2011, when our communist President signed a deep-cutting Republican budget:
Here’s my take on the puzzle of Obama’s leadership style. Obama is still every inch the Alinskyite organizer. He talks about uniting, even as he deliberately polarizes. He moves incrementally toward radical left goals, but never owns up to his ideology. Instead, he tries to work indirectly, by way of the constituencies he seeks to manipulate...
Obama is a bad negotiator because Alinskyite’s don’t negotiate, they intentionally polarize. As for their own groups, here they try to placate all factions and hide their own goals. That about describes Obama’s performance on the debt deal, which included a dollop of both of these stances...
The left yearns for Obama to take on the Tea Party in an overt ideological battle. But that is exactly the sort of thing Alinskyite organizers are forbidden to do.
Cutting taxes, deporting immigrants, bombing ISIS -- there's no end to the subterfuges Obama will employ to convince the unwary that he's not really a communist. One might grow old waiting for him to finally rip the mask off, but when you've got the Alinsky tipoff like Kurtz does, you know there has never been anything false about hope.
The brethren have a few years to try and explain to the public who Alinsky is, why he's such a menace, and how he's a hero to the liberals who don't talk about him one-hundredth as much as conservatives do. Go with God, fellas.
UPDATE. Among the many joys of comments, Spaghetti Lee seems to have gotten my titlular reference to Rodgers' and Hammerstein's Allegro, and doubled down with some musical comedy parody lyrics. Here's one to the tune of "Shipoopi" from The Music Man:
Now the girl who goes for a single-player plan is usually a hussy!
And the girl who goes for a strong public option's anything but fussy!
But a girl who goes for the corporate plan --
Won't make demands, even if she can --
She's the girl who listens to the man, the man named Alinsky!
I say we offer these to Mark Steyn.