Hendrik Hertzberg's mid-December comment, "Alt-Newt"
[I]magine, if you will, a man who, as Speaker of the House, orchestrates the impeachment of a President for an adulterous affair with a White House aide twenty-six years his junior while he himself is conducting an adulterous affair with a congressional aide twenty-two years his junior, having earlier left the first of his three wives while she was hospitalized with cancer.
Imagine a man who attributes these behaviors to “how passionately I felt about this country.”
Imagine a man who, told he can’t sit in a front section of Air Force One, shuts down the government.
Imagine a man who becomes the only House Speaker ever to be disciplined for ethics violations.
Imagine a man who, in a country just staggering out of the worst recession of the past fifty years and facing the threat of worldwide economic collapse, proposes to hire small children to work as janitors, mopping floors and cleaning toilets in their schools (or their orphanages, perhaps).
Imagine that man as Commander-in-Chief. It’s no stretch for him. His fantasy life is so rich that he has already compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and (for sheer perseverance) Ho Chi Minh.
.....
President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.”
The New Yorker illustration by Tom Bachtell.
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