THE RUMBLE IN THE CORNER….As regular readers know, I’m a fan of NRO’s The Corner, which I think of as sort of a direct pipeline into the conservative id. Lately, as an Obama victory has become more and more likely, the Cornerites have started going completely around the bend, venting their frustration in lunatic conspiracy theories and manic love notes that are increasingly untethered from the real world. This afternoon, after reading their latest bunch of posts about Obama being a secret Maoist, I thought maybe I should finally write something about it. In the end I was too lazy to do it, but luckily Hilzoy came through with a post that hits all the high points I was going to make anyway. Go check it out to get a sense of how the impending doom of an Obama victory is sending conservatives into cloudcuckooland.
But why are they going so stone batty? My theory is that Obama is driving them crazy the same way that Ali drove Foreman crazy in the Rumble in the Jungle. You remember that fight, don’t you? Foreman was the heavy favorite, a brawler who had dropped Joe Frazier in two rounds and seemed likely to beat Ali to a pulp. But Ali won by playing mind games on Foreman. He sat on the ropes, took hit after hit, and then taunted Foreman in the clinches to hit him even harder. An enraged Foreman kept swinging wildly, but nothing worked. Ali took everything he could dish out, and the furnace-like heat finally did Foreman in. In the eighth round, drained and exhausted, he was knocked cold by an Ali combination that ended the fight.
The same thing is happening to McCain and his supporters. They’re throwing everything they have at Obama, and he’s just taking it. Nothing seems to have an effect, so they keep swinging ever more wildly. But that isn’t working either, and it’s driving them crazy. Who is this guy? Why won’t he go down? It’s enraging. They just can’t believe they’re losing to this punk. And so they become ever more unhinged, making up wilder and wilder stories and becoming more and more enraged when they can’t get any traction with them. At this rate, their next stop is a padded cell at Arkham.
Personally, I wish Obama were doing more than playing rope-a-dope: it’s going to win him an election, but it might not win him the war. Still, it is pretty likely to win him the election, and it’s driving lots of conservatives crackers at the same time. We could do worse, I guess.
