Anita Dunn at the Comedy Club *UPDATED*
Bookworm on Oct 16 2009 at 8:24 am | Filed under: Leftist morality
Obama’s media attack dog, Anita Dunn, was caught saying that Chairman Mao is one of her two favorite political philosophers, with Mother Teresa occupying the other spot:
Dunn is now claiming, in effect, that, “Hey, I was only joking to make a rhetorical point.”
A joke, huh? Well, if that’s Dunn’s idea of a joke, I’ve written her an act that will knock ‘em dead at the comedy clubs:
Hey, everybody. It’s great to be here in the Mao Tse Tung Capitalist Recidivist Re-Education Camp. [Tongue flicker.] I love performing here, ’cause there are always some new faces in the crowd. And by the way, you guys, the ones who have been here for a while — you know who you are! — your diets are working great! [Tongue flicker.] Okay, is everybody ready go have a good time?! If you are, stand up with me and cheer. Oh, wait. You’re chained to your seats? Never mind. Just rattle your chains. We all know you’re excited. [Tongue flicker.]
So, I was walking down the street in Beijing the other day, and this capitalist reactionary mongrel came crawling up to me with two Revolutionary Guards behind him, and he said, “Help, they’re going to kill me.” [Manic giggle.] Wait, wait, the joke’s coming. I just gotta stop laughing myself here. Okay, okay. [Tongue flicker] So I looked at this bourgeois excuse for a human being and then, right next to me, I saw on the wall this saying from Chairman Mao: “We must thoroughly clear away all ideas among our cadres of winning easy victories through good luck, without hard and bitter struggle, without sweat and blood.” [Tongue flicker.] And just as I was about to read it to him, one of the Guards shot him! Yeah. That’s really what happened. Is that great or what? Can I have a rim shot here? [Tongue flicker.]
[Silence in the room]
Wow. You are a tough crowd here tonight in the re-education camp. [Tongue flicker.] Maybe I can have some of the guards tickle you a little bit with their bayonets. Huh? Huh? That should make you laugh. [Tongue flicker.]
[Strained laughter filters through room.]
You guys are so easy. At the last re-education camp I performed, it took three guard tickles and ten dead bodies to get the laughter going. [Tongue flicker.] You so prove the truth of Mao’s saying that “We are confronted by two types of social contradictions – those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves. The two are totally different in their nature.” [Tongue flicker.]
Oh, wait! [Tongue flicker.] I see that my time here is up. I’m hoping a transport plane to Pyongyang, to do a gig at the Kim Jong Il Capitalist Recidivist Re-Education Camp. [Tongue flicker.] I hope that they’re as good a crowd as you guys have been. [Manic giggle.] So until I’m back, you just keep reading your Little Red Books.
UPDATE: At Newsreal, David Horowitz weighs in, explaining why it matters thata White House Communications Director looks to Mao Tse Tung for her political philosophy:
Mao is the greatest mass murderer in human history. Jon Halliday and his wife who have written the definitive biography of Mao estimated that he killed 70 million people.
In the Sixties only the Progressive Labor Party, a minority sect derided by everybody else was Maoist. Dunn’s comment is a reflection of the continuing intellectual degradation of the left. There are plenty of Maoists teaching in universities however. The radical caucus of the Modern Language Association (professors of literature) is run by Maoist Barbara Foley.
My point exactly, and I’m going to wrap up here by quoting from language I used in a post explaining why it’s no excuse for Kevin Jennings (the “Safe Schools Czar”) that NAMBLA involvement is only a part of the Harry Hays gay rights mythology. That post, incidentally, pre-dated the report about Dunn’s admiration for “Mao, the Philosopher.”
There comes a point when someone’s reprehensible side is so extreme that simple decency means that you can no longer hold that person up as an example because of his less reprehensible side. To take extreme examples to make the point, we don’t use Hitler as a poster child for vegetarianism, Mao as a model for physical fitness through swimming, or Ted Bundy to make the point that clean-cut guys can get the girls. Because reputation matters, when a person’s evil outweighs his good, we toss him from the role model pedestal.
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12 Responses to “Anita Dunn at the Comedy Club *UPDATED*”
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Maybe all the tongue-smacking was her audition for the remake of “V”?
Ms Dunn is going Hollywood!
JOKER IN BATMAN 3 TO BE PLAYED BY BRILLIANT NEW ACTRESS!
http://naturalfake.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/joker-in-batman-3-to-be-played-by-brilliant-new-actress
She’s like a lizard. Cold blooded too.
Her name is misspelled – it’s with a ‘g’ – D-u-n-g.
If it was a joke, it was VERY well concealed. In the video she comes across not as a humorist, but as a humorless schoolmarm, which is also my default opinion of liberals. That she chose Mother Theresa AND Mao-Tse Tung together might imply a certain amount of cosmic humor, as those two are rarely put together.
Since Mao’s delusions of grandeur regarding his agricultural genius resulted in the starvation of an estimated 30-50 million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward, one might think that she might have thought that using Mao for an example might have been a tad inappropriate. After all, if one wants an example of a vegetarian or a dog lover, and one is trying to promote same, one does not give the example of the famous dog lover and vegetarian named Adolf Hitler. Not coincidentally, both Adolf and Mao suffered from delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately, millions of others also suffered from their delusions.
Oh well, Mao was responsible for the unnecessary death of 30-50 million Chinese, but the same faith in his judgment also enabled him to take the reins of power in 1949.
It also might show the gross ignorance that many Demos have towards history. Back in the 60s and 70s, the Little Red Book was common on campuses. I bought the Collected Works of Mao @ $$1.25 / volume, but read no more than 10 pages. dreary reading.
At the time, Mao’s culpability in the Great Leap Forward Famine was not widely known. It has been widely known for over 30 years. I would think that anyone who had previously thought that Mao should be cited as a “favorite political philosopher” would take the famine into account. Perhaps Anita Dunn was not aware of Mao’s role in the famine. If so, that does not say much for her.
After all, another famous philosopher said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
I wish conservatives would be clearer in their criticisms.
Dunn’s point is coherent and laudable. Find your own way. When faced with adversity, be optimistic and creative. That’s an American message.
While quoting Mao is inherently disturbing and provocative, many others have done it to make points we can agree with.
What is beyond the pale, is that she claims to see Mao as a great political philosopher. Why is that so offensive? Because Mao’s philosophy was that behaving in a humane way makes you predictable, and therefore weak. By behaving in ways which are so inhumane that the people around you, allies and enemies alike, can not predict–you will prevail against all odds. And he did.
It’s the same message, by the way, as the one the Cohen Brothers used in No Country For Old Men: Pure evil is unpredictable and therefore nearly impossible to stop.
It is the reason we were morally obligated to take out Saddam and it is the reason we are still obligated to take out Kim Jung Ill, and Iranian nuclear capability.
There is also an important teachable moment that conservatives are missing. In the battle Dunn describes between Chang Kai-sheik and Mao– the context in which those specific quotes were made– Mao had high level spies working for the State Department of the United States and the US Army. Through his spy’s numerous false reports from the field, he was able to effect Chang’s ability to act. Through his spies, Mao disrupted Chang’s American support, effectively harassing his supply lines and his will to act.
In other words, Joseph McCarthy had it right. But he set out on what could easily be called a witch hunt because Americans at that time had no why to tell who was a Commie sympathizer and who wasn’t. Nearly everyone had some sort of links to communism/socialism. Heck, Chang Kai-sheik got his military training in Moscow!
Joseph McCarthy was in a difficult position. He felt that he had to get the spies and the fellow travelers out of the State Department and out of the US Army fast. Calm persuasive arguments about why we all should reconsider our past allegiances were not going to fix the problem in short order. So, as the saying goes, he painted with a broad brush.
We are in a long war. We have the time to make our case, and tools of communication far superior to anything McCarthy had. Let’s be responsible.
Scott — so nice to hear from you again. And, as always, you make several valid points. Let me just glom onto why people find Dunn’s allusions to Mao offensive. Mao did, of course, make good points. Murderous megalomaniacs are often very good judges of human nature, because they study it to abuse it. You don’t do what Mao did without some good insights.
However, there comes a point when the source is too horrible to acknowledge, despite the fact that, periodically, the source has a point. That Dunn would admire Mao, murderer of 70-100 million people just because he made some good points is horrific. I’m sure that other, more savory people than Mao, had precisely the same insights, but Dunn likes to boast about hanging on the words of a mass murderer. We know how horrible Mao was, but Dunn just gave us a look into her own entirely corrupt soul.
>>What is beyond the pale, is that she claims to see Mao as a great political philosopher. >>
Exactly. What she said (I’m not positive as I don’t have sound at home, so can’t refresh by watching it again) was that these were points made by her two “favorite” philosophers.
If she had stated that lessons can be learned from any source, whether it’s a positive or negative lesson, she’d have been ok. It wasn’t a bad lesson…it was the fact that Mao was a person she _admired_ that was shocking.
Gotta wonder about the Mother Theresa link, though. “know your enemy”,maybe? Feminism and successful female roles?
[...] Bookworm had some great comments inspired by David Horowitz’s discussion of Maoism. After reproducing Horowitz’s comment Bookworm concurred: My point exactly, and I’m going to wrap up here by quoting from language I used in a post explaining why it’s no excuse for Kevin Jennings (the “Safe Schools Czar”) that NAMBLA involvement is only a part of the Harry Hays gay rights mythology. That post, incidentally, pre-dated the report about Dunn’s admiration for “Mao, the Philosopher.” [...]
Aside from their moral cowardice, most leftists I know are physical cowards, too. Not only in the sense of confronting opponents in a manner that could lead to grave bodily harm or death, but also a repugnance for engaging directly in their murder.
That’s why monsters in training like Dunn enjoy a frisson when they quote a seasoned monster like Mao. Now there was a guy who knew how to mete out final closing arguments!
Her mention of Mother Theresa is supposed to signal that she’s really on the side of the angels. But her extensive citing of Mao is transparent. She is using him, as all cowards who cite him do, to establish her creds with the left as a hard-hitting, hard-thinking, daring political philosopher.
For a cultural and entertainment perspective, read this.
Link
[...] about communism’s death hasn’t assuaged anyone’s worry that he, like Anita Dunn, who quotes Mao with the best of them, looks for moral and practical guidance to some pretty rotten people with really bad [...]