The sights and sounds of the Iowa caucus campaign have triggered a nightmarish flashback for one Power Line reader (the Star Tribune’s Dan Freeborn) whose message definitively dates him as having been born within a few days of me:
Last night I tuned in Hugh Hewitt’s show and he was playing this bizarre tape of Martin Sheen giving what sounded like a mescaline fueled soliloquy down in Iowa yesterday. Afterwards Hugh said that Sheen, Rob Reiner and Howard Dean all were on a campaign bus, apparently traveling the countryside inflicting their weird, thundering blather on the locals. This is something out of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The bus called Furthur. The sign on the back that said “Caution: Weird Load Onboard.”
It’s all clear to me now. These guys are 1960s re-enactors but they have the ethos all wrong. Instead of the summer of love, they’re promising the summer of crankiness. Call them The Unmerry Crankstersl. With his shallowness and frequent fits of girlish pique, Howard Dean is their Un-Kesey. One pill makes you angry and one pill makes you small and the things that Howard tells you make no sense at all. Then, on the news last night, I saw John Kerry, just back from Vietnam, putting his thumb and forefinger to his lips and he sucked in his cheeks — obviously an “If-elected-I-won’t-Bogart” promise. If not Clean for Gene, then [expletive deleted]-A with J.K., I guess.
Dennis Kucinich is already on the peace train. And we all know train hundred and two is on the wrong track and headed for you. And somewhere along the line you can expect to hear the rumble of Harleys as the geriatric Hells Angles roll in to provide “security” while demanding free Lipitor and low-carb, Atkins friendly beer. The re-enactors may be coming to your town, so you better get ready. The long, strange trip is starting all over again, I’m afraid.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.