This President’s Fraud
Wednesday 9 June 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + POTUS
Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal on the apparent disconnect between President Obama and the American people:
The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
As a former academic I can emphatically state that the academy in America is decidedly left-leaning, and very heavily skewed towards first theorizing then endorsing whatever form of American guilt academics can conjure. I can also emphatically state that many academics simply don’t experience life outside of the academy and live in a theoretical bubble based very loosely on things that actually happen. Academia can be a very toxic environment in the sense that it often fosters not only skepticism of our nation and our government, which is not only very healthy in a free polity but necessary, but also hatred for it (especially when those in charge aren’t the Right People™). They tend to focus only on what needs to be fixed, and conveniently forget that we are a nation which is an international symbol of hope, opportunity, and prosperity, and that oftentimes stereotypes, both good and bad, exist for a reason. That our president is one of those many disenchanted academics living in a bubble where America is little more than an international villain is not only disconcerting, but arguably dangerous. I wouldn’t argue that America hasn’t been aparty to much nastiness which has, inadvertantly or otherwise, been the epicenter of injustice internationally. We most certainly have. Nor would I argue that atoning for our past wrong actions and doing whatever necessary to avoid them in the future shouldn’t be a part of American governance. But to make the academic theory that America is a nation only concerned with the oppression and destruction of those we can exploit the starting point from which to lead our nation is not only highly disingenuous, it’s outright fraud.
2010-06-09 » madlibertarianguy