Whatever Sandra Wants, Sandra Gets?

Mark Steyn does a brilliant riff comparing Democratic Party convention speaker Sandra Fluke to...Lola Montez?

Any space aliens prowling through the rubble of our civilization and stumbling upon a recording of the convention compatible with Planet Zongo DVD players will surely marvel at the valuable peak airtime allotted to Sandra Fluke. It was weird to see her up there among the governors and senators – as weird as Bavarians thought it was when King Ludwig decided to make his principal adviser Lola Montez, the Irish-born "Spanish dancer" and legendary grande horizontale. I hasten to add I'm not saying Miss Fluke is King Barack's courtesan. For one thing, it's a striking feature of the Age of Perfected Liberalism that modern liberals talk about sex 24/7 while simultaneously giving off the persistent whiff that the whole thing's a bit of a chore. Hence, the need for government subsidy. And, in fairness to Miss Montez, she used sex to argue for liberalized government, whereas Miss Fluke uses liberalism to argue for sexualized government.

But those distinctions aside, like Miss Fluke, Miss Montez briefly wielded an influence entirely disproportionate to her talents. Like Miss Fluke, she was a passionate liberal activist who sought to diminish what she regarded as the malign influence of the Catholic Church. Taking up with Lola cost King Ludwig his throne in the revolutions of 1848. We'll see in a couple of months whether taking up with Sandra works out for King Barack. But what's strange is that so many people don't find it strange at all – that at a critical moment in the affairs of the republic the ruling party should assemble to listen to a complacent 31-year-old child of privilege peddling the lazy cobwebbed assumptions of myopic narcissism. Lola Montez was what botanists would call a "sport" – morphologically distinct from the rest of the societal shrub. The tragedy for America is that Sandra Fluke is all too typical.