titanicWhere the hell is the Norwalk Virus when you need it? You see, those delightful anachronisms who people the National Review Online took to the high seas last November for a little ideological cruise adventure and it has been brilliantly sent up by (*cough*) The New Republic. (hat tip to HTML Mencken)

Sigh. The worst thing for me about writing up an NRO Cruise is picking a damn headline. “Ship of Tools”? “Boat to Nowhere”? “Calling All Icebergs”?

Of course, on the whole, the jokes really sort of write themselves, like the fact that Kate “Ol’ 60 Grit” O’Beirne informs us that for a time, only the starboard (That’s the right side, ya landlubber!) engines were operative, which caused their ship to sail in circles. Or the fact that after days of spewing virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, the passengers disembarked in Mexico for some shore-leave.

TNR:

Several days later, the nautical counter-revolution has docked in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where passengers will clamber overboard into a nation they want to wall off behind a 1,000-mile fence. One expresses horror at my intention to find a local street kid to show me around, exclaiming, “Do you want to die?”

Then we get a hi-larious cameo by Dinesh D’Souza, who explains to us that while all immigrants are created equal, some are more equal than others:

D’Souza summarizes the prevailing sentiment by unveiling what he modestly calls “D’Souza’s law of immigration”: An immigrant’s quality is “proportional to the distance traveled to get to the United States.” In other words: Asians trump Latinos.

You have to wonder how in the hell these people make it through the day with so many contradictory and nonsensical notions crammed into their pointy little heads. Apparently, one of the side effects of the kind of cognitive dissonance they experience is irrational aggression. Here’s American Psycho Norm Podhoretz getting all stroppy with Big Bill Buckley:

Following the break, Norman Podhoretz and William Buckley–two of the grand old men of the Grand Old Party–begin to feud. Podhoretz will not stop speaking–”I have lots of ex-friends on the left; it looks like I’m going to have some ex-friends on the right, too,” he rants[.]

[…]

Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been “an amazing success.” He waves his fist and declaims, “There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. … This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn’t have gone better.” He wants more wars, and fast. He is “certain” Bush will bomb Iran, and “thank God” for that.

[...]

“I keep telling people we are in World War Four,” Podhoretz declares. He fumes at Buckley, George Will, and the other apostate conservatives who refuse to see sense. He again declares victory.

Bug. Fuck. Crazy.

You’ve got to give these old fossils some credit, though. At least they’re consistent. Their solution to every problem seems to involve bombing someone, even Germany:

I drop the news that there are moves in Germany to have Rumsfeld extradited to face war crimes charges. A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, “If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to cite the Pinochet precedent, and O’Beirne snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: “Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.” “Exactly,” adds O’Beirne’s husband. “And he privatized Social Security.”

Yes, that’s right. Pinochet hagiography. On the next NRO cruise (featuring special guest speaker John Bolton!), can we expect to hear about what a great, misunderstood world leader Pol Pot was? How about John Derbyshire soliloquizing Vlad the Impaler?

Of course, the real point of the whole business was to get a bunch of Righty Demagogues off in one very private place so that they could talk about The Damn Muslims and how they’re going to take over Europe and kill us all:

The table nods solemnly before marching onward to Topic A: the billion-strong swarm of Muslims who are poised to take over the world. The idea that Europe is being “taken over” is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles’ cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt.

Bleargh. I know drag queens with mercilessly plucked eyebrows and two-inch long French manicured nails who won’t wear their sunglasses on top of their heads because it looks “too gay”.

Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races”–i.e., white people–”are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be “large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015″ as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.” He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures–he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping–to “prove” his case.

Oh, ye of little faith. It could happen. Really.

Well, here’s hoping that the next NRO cruise (July 29th to August 5th, sign up now! Screw Yearly Kos!) gets well out to sea only to have the entire crew abandon ship or get abducted by aliens so that the damn boat is forced to endlessly roam the Pacific like some kind of modern day Flying Dutchman. I wonder if we can convince Anns Althouse and Coulter that what they really need is a nice long cruise to round out their summer. Go on, ladies. It’s only a couple grand. You’re worth it!

Bon voyage!

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