
 |
The Kosher Gourmet by Megan Gordon With its colorful cache of purples and oranges and reds, COLLARD GREEN SLAW is a marvelous mood booster --- not to mention just downright delish
April 18, 2014
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Clarifying one of the greatest philosophical conundrums in theology
John Ericson: Trying hard to be 'positive' but never succeeding? Blame Your Brain
The Kosher Gourmet by Julie Rothman Almondy, flourless torta del re (Italian king's cake), has royal roots, is simple to make, . . . but devour it because it's simply delicious
April 14, 2014
Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer: Passover frees us from the tyranny of time
Eric Schulzke: First degree: How America really recovered from a murder epidemic
Georgia Lee: When love is not enough: Teaching your kids about the realities of adult relationships
Gordon Pape: How you can tell if your financial adviser is setting you up for potential ruin
Dana Dovey: Up to 500,000 people die each year from hepatitis C-related liver disease. New Treatment Has Over 90% Success Rate
Justin Caba: Eating Watermelon Can Help Control High Blood Pressure
April 11, 2014
Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Silence is much more than golden
Susan Swann: How to value a child for who he is, not just what he does
Susan Scutti: A Simple Blood Test Might Soon Diagnose Cancer
Chris Weller: Have A Slow Metabolism? Let Science Speed It Up For You
April 9, 2014
Jonathan Tobin: Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame?
Samuel G. Freedman: A resolution 70 years later for a father's unsettling legacy of ashes from Dachau
Jessica Ivins: A resolution 70 years later for a father's unsettling legacy of ashes from Dachau
Matthew Mientka: How Beans, Peas, And Chickpeas Cleanse Bad Cholesterol and Lowers Risk of Heart Disease
April 8, 2014
Dana Dovey: Coffee Drinkers Rejoice! Your Cup Of Joe Can Prevent Death From Liver Disease
Chris Weller: Electric 'Thinking Cap' Puts Your Brain Power Into High Gear
April 4, 2014
Amy Peterson: A life of love: How to build lasting relationships with your children
John Ericson: Older Women: Save Your Heart, Prevent Stroke Don't Drink Diet
John Ericson: Why 50 million Americans will still have spring allergies after taking meds
Sarah Boesveld: Teacher keeps promise to mail thousands of former students letters written by their past selves
April 2, 2014
Dan Barry: Should South Carolina Jews be forced to maintain this chimney built by Germans serving the Nazis?
Frank Clayton: Get happy: 20 scientifically proven happiness activities
Susan Scutti: It's Genetic! Obesity and the 'Carb Breakdown' Gene
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Sept. 7, 2009
/ 18 Elul 5769
Pledging allegiance to our beloved Obama
By
Mark Steyn
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
On Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of The New York Times, apropos President Obama's plans to beam himself into every schoolhouse in the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will find this an enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters James C McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote:
"Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader."
Oh, dear! "A Canadian author": Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don't know what's crueler, the "Canadian" or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that's one way of putting it. Here's what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim:
"Obviously we're not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale."
Close enough for Times work.
But, if the Times wants to play this game, bring it on. The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: the conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous. In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few weeks after the regime's fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily taking down the huge portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall, I visited an elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly empty picture frames piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The education system's standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids called Hassan and Amal a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane proudly holding up their portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of an Iraqi education:
"O come, Hassan," says Amal. "Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, 'Our beloved Saddam.'"
"I come, Amal," says Hassan. "I come in a hurry to chant, 'O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.'"
Pathetic, right?
On Friday, Aug. 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah in the name of "education" showed her young charges the "Obama Pledge" video released at the time of the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other big-time celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize, "pledge to be a servant to our president and to all mankind because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek."
Altogether now! Let us chant for mankind and use our pens to write, "O beloved Obama, our courageous president, we are all servants defending the hope for you and marching to change."
And, unlike Saddam's Iraq, we don't have the mitigating condition of being a one-man psycho state invented by the British Colonial Office after lunch on a wet afternoon in 1922.
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a "servant" to the head of state, would reply, "Get lost, creep." And, if they still taught history in American schools, he'd add, "Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776."
To accompany President Obama's classroom speech this week, the White House and America's "educators" drafted some accompanying study materials. Children would be invited to write letters to themselves saying what they could do to "help the president."
My suggestion: "Not tell people what I really think about his lousy health care plan."
Well, after the unwelcome media attention, that exercise was hastily dropped.
For the rest of us, the president does not yet require a written test from grown-ups after his speeches, but it's surely only a matter of time. The New York Times managed to miss my point: Far from "accusing" the president of "trying to create a cult of personality," I spent much of my airtime on Rush's show last week "accusing" the president of doing an amazing job of finishing off his own cult of personality in record time. Obama's given 111 speeches, interviews and press conferences in which he's talked about health care, and the more he opens his mouth the more the American people recoil from his "reforms." Now he's giving a 112th to a joint session of Congress and this one, we're assured, will finally do the trick. That brand new Chevy may be rusting and up on bricks by the time he seals the deal but America's Auto Salesman-in-Chief will get you to sign in the end.
The president has made the mistake of believing his own publicity or, at any rate, his own mainstream media coverage, which is pretty much the same thing. They told him he was the greatest orator since Socrates, but, alas, even Socrates would have difficulty playing six sets a night every Open Mike Night at the Soaring Rhetoric Lounge out on Route 127. Even Ashton Kutcher's charms would wane by the 112th speech.
"Mr Obama," wrote Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, "has grown boring." Amazing, but true. He's a crashing bore, and he's become one in nothing flat. His approval ratings have slumped not just among Republicans, not just among independents, not just among seniors, who are after all first in line for the death panels. But they've fallen among young people the starry-eyed members of the Hopeychangey Generation who stared into the mesmerizing giant "O" of his logo and saw the new Otopia. According to the latest Zogby poll, Obama's hold on the young is a wash: 41 per cent approve, 41 per cent disapprove. Zogby defines "young" as under 30, so maybe the kindergartners corralled into his audience this week will still be on side, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The President's strategy on Jan. 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall stimulus, auto nationalization, cap'n'trade, health care and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren't finding it quite so charismatic, and they're beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting, prosperity-throttling, future-beggaring big government policies.
No wonder the poor chap's running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America's schoolchildren is to suggest what you'd like him to do in his next speech. Here's mine: Call in sick, sir. You'll be doing your presidency a favor.
The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president's speech.
But, if we have to trudge down this grim road, go on, kid, I dare you: "That's all, folks!"
Oh, wait. You have to rank the three most important words in order:
1) Try
2) Something
3) Else
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Mark Steyn is a syndicated columnist. Comment by clicking here.
• ARCHIVES
STEYN'S LATEST
"America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It"
It's the end of the world as we know it...
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steynthe most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking worldshows to devastating effect in this, his first and eagerly awaited new book on American and global politics.
The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the Westwedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivionis looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.
Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West has one, belongs to America alonewith maybe its cousins in brave Australia. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope.
Steyn argues that, contra the liberal cultural relativists, America should proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and culture than our enemies, and we should spread America's influence around the worldfor our own sake as well as theirs.
Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funnybut it will also change the way you look at the world. It is sure to be the most talked-about book of the year.
Sales help fund JWR.
|
© 2009, Mark Steyn
|
|
Columnists
Toons
Lifestyles
|