And you thought a wacko interrupting the president was the most embarrassing thing that would happen to The Daily Caller this week.
Not even close.
This is quite literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
Bryce Harper is a conservative hero. The star rookie for the Washington Nationals has woken up Major League Baseball, and watching it unfold has reminded me of nothing so much as the collapse of the old political paradigms and the inevitable and upcoming rebirth of conservatism in November.
This became clear to me on May 26 of this year. The Nationals were playing Atlanta, and in the fifth inning Harper, with his team leading by two, singled to right. The ball was hit to Braves right fielder Jason Heyward. Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were walking to the corner for a paper.
Harper promptly headed for second base. Heyward suddenly woke up and fired to second base, but too late.
More than one sports writer has noted that this moment was no small thing for baseball. It was like the part in the movie “Awakenings” when the guy who was asleep for 30 years wakes up.
To me, the play carried even greater symbolic importance. Heyward’s bungle showed a complacency, if not indolence, that Harper threatens to destroy, but it also could be a metaphor for the collapse of the old liberal order. Heyward was like one of those public school teachers who, because they are a union member, can’t be fired and so are relegated to the “rubber room” to sit and read the paper and gather a check for the rest of their lives. Or even Obama, who went from Hawaii to Harvard to the White House and never seems to have had to slide head-first into a base his entire life.
Believe it or not, it actually gets much worse from there!!! Including this gem of a paragraph:
If America is to be solvent and healthy, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing since the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. We have to do things differently, just as Bryce Harper is not playing baseball the old way. Harper is not going to sit back and accept what the status quo tells him to accept (where does he get off stealing home?). And conservatives are not going to expect to retire at age 65 or to send their kids to the college of their choice if it costs $50,000 a year. We are going to adapt. (In a strange way, conservatives are not only like Bryce Harper, but have become like the do-it-yourself punk rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Don’t have a record label? Start your own. Are the old rock groups bloated and sloppy? Boot them off the stage.) Meanwhile, liberals occupy everything so that they can demand — what was it again? Oh yeah, peace. And taxes.
I have no expectations of good work from any conservative outlet in 2012. But even expecting this to be awful, I was completely blown away. I mean there is no way that the greatest comedy writer in America could create a parody of the conservative worldview better than this.
….In comments, Kathleen notes, “It would have been better if he said, “Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were a young buck sidling up to the checkout counter to purchase T bone steaks with food stamps”. SEK said more or less the same thing. Showing that because my first impulse is to look for class bias, I can sometimes miss the obvious racism.
