Wednesday June 20, 2012

YOU KIDS GET ON MY LAWN! I see that Michael Gerson has a column about how Obama is the guy who really started the culture war. To Gerson, culture war is working out a way for non-observant employees of Catholic organizations to get birth control while Republicans try to keep it away from everyone, no matter who they work for.

But those of us who've been watching the war for decades know it's not about who Alinskied who, but really about wish fulfillment. Case in point -- Roger L. Simon:

Are Liberals the New Squares?

They've been working this angle since "South Park Conservatism," and it never gets over. And this one isn't going to break the streak:

I mean – do you think Deborah Wasserman-Schultz is hip? This is one of the meanest things I’ve ever put in print or online, but that’s the girl who was standing in the corner at the sixth grade cotillion and you said, “Oh, no. Do I have to dance with her?”

I can see a Simon reader asking "what's a cotillion?" and, after Simon's patient and dreamily nostalgic explanation, asking "Who's Deborah Wasserman-Schultz?"

But give Simon credit --  he seems to have figured out that selling Mitt Romney and Grover Norquist as hipsters is a losing proposition, so he comes up with ringers:

Of course, most can’t countenance this. They continue to believe that government spending is cool, that it is a good thing (how square is that?), but out of the corner of their ears they are beginning to hear a different song: 

Libertarians are the cool guys.

Alas, he never explains this; I like to imagine he was thinking this shot of the Potsie and Fonzie of Freedom would render all argument moot:

The libs don't know, but the Heartland Institute understands.

Surely no actually youngperson will go for this, so you have to wonder who Simon's audience is. The answer: Conservatives of a certain age who remember when the girls thought Alex P. Keaton was dreamy, Nancy Reagan had taste, and Poverty Sucked -- that is, when they were cool. They can't even pretend anymore, but they can sure sit around the klavern and tell each other how not cool the new jacks are. Which is kind of sad, because cool is something that it's only cool to obsess over when you're a kid. 


(I do hope Simon stays on this track, though, and tells us next week he's seen Girls and thinks Mamet's kid looks pretty now that she's stopped dressing like a tomboy.)