The Kennedy Center awards and the crisis of the times

The Obamas’ theatrical giving of the Leftover-from-the-’60s awards at the Kennedy Center — Led Zeppelin, which today provides the nerve-racking background noise in grocery stores, and Dustin Hoffman who hasn't had a real job since 1967 — fully manifests the crisis in Washington, D.C. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R) asked recently about something else with some honest frustration, saying, "We need new people." You'd think President Obama would do better as he is second-generation himself and doesn’t belong to this crowd and in his campaign autobiography clearly crowned the Leftover-from-the-’60s Democrats as his target to displace so as to awaken again a new and vital liberalism. So how's that working out?

Markos Moulitsas, with hopes of ushering a generation of Iraq war veterans into the political process, well represented new and better thinking and suggested Virginia’s then-Gov. Mark Warner, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, Gen. Wesley Clark and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean at a time when Obama began to rise and Hillary hovered around zero percent at Daily Kos (really).

"Will these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?" asked Kos in a Washington Post essay in the day. The answer is not so easily will they go into the good night, and herewith lies the crisis. Young conservatives should ask today as well as once — oh, so long ago — Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who landed his helicopter near the White House last week in symbolism more coarse and conspicuous than any we have seen the likes of since the Soviets claimed to have invented Corn Flakes, "Will these Bush-era Republicans ever go away?"
 
The answer to both questions is YES, but DeMint is right to ask. Conservatives are better off with a presence and suggestion of new people: Sen. Rand Paul of Tennessee, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Joe Miller sure to rise in Alaska and the most talented and energetic Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, and possibly the one to establish the new paradigm in conservatism. Because today’s Republicans are not conservative: They are anti-liberal. And today’s Democrats are not liberal, they are anti-conservative. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, they go over the waterfall together.

There is no conservative party in America today, but Ron Paul is Gray Champion to the new thinking which arose in the Tea Party and will awaken in what Grover Norquist calls Tea Party II: In six words, states’ rights, sound money, constitutional government. It forms a new matrix for new people and a new generation.
 
We enter this month an endgame as per the Mayan prophecy. The fall is at hand, but things don't break because storms challenge New York or comets obliterate the earth. They break because cultures, liberal or conservative, refuse to let go. They cannot adapt to new thinking and cling instead to the old, the worn-through, the irrelevant. And this year they marched David Letterman into the Kennedy Center. David Letterman? Previous awards have gone to Leontyne Price, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, Count Basie, Alvin Ailey, George Burns, Merce Cunningham, Isaac Stern, Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney. These celestials today welcome Letterman into their sanga. Can there be any greater harbinger of the end times?

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