The Absurd Report

I’m beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

Call it buyer’s remorse, or fear of the unknown, or simply Pinch Sulzbergeritis, but doesn’t it feel like our nice secure liberal world just left its orbit this week? As Hillary waddled off the stage in defeat Thursday night after the debate, with Barack Obama grinning from ear to ear to ear to ear, I could the sense the Old Guard passing, the end of an era, the moment when old First Ladies never die, they just — aw, let’s just cut to the chase: We’re gonna lose. And we’re gonna lose bad.

I mean, what the hell was the New York Times thinking, running that half-sourced farrago of a Barbra Streisand hit job on John McCain that snarked and sneered and amounted to… what? That eight years ago a sitting senator spent some time with a lobbyist who bore an uncanny resemblance to his wife… and you just know, deep down, that there was some canoodling going on, don’t you? Come on, admit it. Even though we can’t really prove it.

Every wing nut in America’s been saying for weeks that the Times’s endorsement of John McCain in the New York primary was just a ruse, that the minute he had the nomination secured they’d drop the pose of Best Friend and turn out to be Worst Enemy. Problem is, we’ve all seen that movie a hundred times: For crying out loud, it’s the plot of Phantom Lady, and that movie came out in 1944! Not to mention the Peanuts comic strip, where Lucy yanks the football away from that helpless schlimazel, Charlie Brown, and he lands flat on his tush.

Maybe they thought they could get away with it. After all, intrepid Times reporters have been prancing around these past few years like Mr. Peachum in a road-company version of The Beggar’s Opera, happily receiving stolen goods, exposing national secrets, and making returning vets look as homicidally nutty as Bobby De Niro in Taxi Driver.

(snip)

O.K., so both Hillary and Obama are saying exactly that. But you take my point, which is this: The reason Hillary had to go was, well, to put it kindly — she was a dreadful candidate. That grim Nurse Ratched visage, that hectoring, flat, midwestern drone, the stubby finger-pointing: She was every guy’s first wife and his first mother-in-law rolled into a pantsuit. Sure, a lot of you conservatives have been saying that for years, but the scales finally fell from our eyes when along came B. H. Obama, Buffenblu extraordinaire and the pride of Honolulu, someone in whom we could invest our hopes for change.

(snip)

But now the magic is beginning to wear off. Instead of the second coming of Jesus Christ, some of us are beginning to sense the second coming of Jim Jones. Instead of a new redeemer, we’re looking at an undistinguished first-term senator with no paper trail, a wife with a major-league chip on her shoulder, a politician from the insalubrious precincts of Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna’s old hometown of Chicago.

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