The Middle-Earth Compendium to Campaign 2012

This is too delicious for words. (Personally I think Palin would look fantastic in armor. Anyway, her name is just strange enough that she could be her own Middle-earth character: Palina Shield-maiden.) I’m guessing Perry is Aragorn.

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Source: Pajamas Media

One ring to rule them all/one ring to find them/one ring to tax them all/and in indebtedness bind them.

Two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal likened congressional Tea Partiers to hobbits:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against…Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

[emphasis mine]

The trope took off the next day when Senator John McCain (R-AZ) read the article approvingly during debate on raising the debt ceiling. Liberals reveled in this GOP establishment belittlement of the party’s fiscally conservative faction, but that didn’t stop journalists from finding allegedly-offended Tolkien scholars who sliced and diced the metaphor more quickly than Aragorn did the Mouth of Sauron. And like one of the Nazgûl, the issue refuses to die — not two days ago McCain snubbed a call to recant from  a Tea Party Gaffer at a town hall meeting back in Arizona.

So the GOP establishment, via the hobbit metaphor, dismisses Tea Partiers as diminutive Don Quixotes; simultaneously, many Tolkien fans and scholars take umbrage at the very notion that hobbits were anything but bucolic deadbeats longing for official Gondorian government subsidies of their mind-altering pipe weed. Neither is entirely correct. (Nor, for that matter, was Senator Rand Paul in calling John McCain a “troll”— a doctor should know that it’s McCain’s debating skills, not his skin, that turns to stone in the sunlight.)

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Read the rest on the Pajamas Media website.

Comments

  1. Lola J. Lee Beno says

    I thought this was very amusing . . .