Dissing Mister Steyn

As an unapologetic Canadian Steynophile (some years back I even won the Free Mark Steyn contest), I've been watching the anti-Steyn backlash that's been brewing south of the border with a mixture of puzzlement and bemusement. Out of the blue, and for some strange reason, a slew of right wing pundits have begun to bash Steyn for--get this--"doom-mongering."

Funny, that's why I enjoy reading him: because he doom-mongers so consistently--and so amusingly.

Here, for example, is a riff selected at random from his "doom-mongering" book, After America:

For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and festishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome and its apotheosis. He was living his own COEXIST sticker: his parents were Kansan and Kenyan, as if paired by an alphabetically minded dating agency; he was Hawaiian and Indonesian; for white liberals he offered absolution from racial guilt, but he wasn't one of those in-your-face types like the Reverend Al and the Reverend Jesse yelling grievance jingles all day long; he was a community organizer from the mean streets of Chicago, yet he was also by some happy if vague process an alumnus of half the schools in the Ivy League, and he had the great good fortune not to live in any of the "communities" he "organized" but instead in the more salubrious Hyde Park, a community organized by John D. Rockefeller's money; he embodied "change," but he peddled the same reassuringly shopworn bromides ("America, this is our moment") whose woozy evasions liberals chose to regard as the second coming of Cicero; he was kinda Christian (albeit of the paranoid, neo-segregationist, Afro-nationalistic branch) but sorta Muslim (from a Jakarta madrassah, but don't worry, not one of the heavy-duty kind); he had a white grandmother but also an undocumented auntie served with an unenforced deportation order. If that's not the all-American resumé for the twenty-first century, what is?

Okay, maybe it wasn't picked at random, but so what? It's merely one example from a book replete with such deliciously "negative" flights of prose.

I submit that, in the wake of the ObamaCare rollout debacle, Steyn's "doom-mongering" is not only appropriate, it's freaking prescient. I further submit that what's really gotten these dissers in a snit is pent-up frustration over the fact that they can't do what Steyn can do, and that Steyn can do it with such grace and apparent ease.

In other words, jealously over Steyn's peerless wit and way with words is what has sparked the backlash.