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And Rightly So
February 12, 2010
This Bulletin goes to press just a few days after
Scott Brown's astonishing victory in the Massachusetts
Senate race. I don't know about you, but I couldn't really
believe he was going to win until the results were final.
Despite all the polls showing Brown's lead . . .
despite Coakley's cascading blunders (sneering at Brown for
shaking hands with voters at Fenway Park, looking on as one
of her goons manhandled a conservative reporter,
misspelling Massachusetts, using a photo of the Twin Towers
to represent greedy Wall Street, calling Curt Schilling a
Yankees fan, opining that Catholics probably shouldn't work
in emergency rooms, accusing the Republicans of election-
day fraud in a letter dated the day before the election) .
. . despite the overwhelming anecdotal evidence of
enthusiasm for Brown and near-universal disgust with
Coakley in Massachusetts . . . it just seemed too good to
be true. Who could imagine that the voters of Massachusetts
-- Massachusetts, for crying out loud -- would put a
Republican into the seat that the Kennedys had controlled
since 1952? But the people of Massachusetts showed that it
was their seat, after all. And went some distance to
proving that America is fed to the teeth with the
Democratic Party, the Obama Administration, and their plans
to remake America as a bankrupt second-rate power.
Not that they see their plans that way. They just want
to guarantee everybody healthcare, restructure American
finance, persuade anti-American dictators across the globe
to love us, run the car industry from Washington (for the
benefit of the unions whose contributions keep them in
office), stop the oceans from rising -- and borrow another
couple trillion dollars in our name whenever they run out
of money to spend. They can’t imagine why anyone would
doubt their competence to carry out this rather ambitious
agenda, or their right to wreck America’s credit in its
pursuit.
Seriously, a lot of the Democrats -- I'm pretty sure
Barack Obama is among them -- are motivated in large part
by good intentions. They want sick people to be able to get
medical care; they want to punish the greedy and uplift the
downtrodden; they want good relations with other countries.
But they're horribly handicapped by their ignorance, which
is both a result and a further cause of their arrogance.
The more you watch the Obama Administration stumble from
one disaster to the next, the more they seem to be
suffering from appalling naivety.
Because the Obamas nobly bypassed corporate careers
for (highly remunerated) "public service," they don't know
how business really works. So it doesn't seem to occur to
the President that the enormous uncertainty he's
continually introducing into the business climate -- first
cap and trade, then Obamacare, now bank reform -- might be
staving off the recovery and especially the jobs that he
must so desperately want.
Obama's a product of the modern education system
shaped by the Left. In fact, he's the first President we've
had whose entire education was in institutions radicalized
in the 1960s. In that kind of education, history is nothing
but a series of conflicts in which some oppressed,
marginalized, discriminated against, or colonized group
wins equality with the help of enlightened Leftists and
government intervention. Education like that nurtures the
mindset Obama seems to be operating out of, as he marks his
disrespect for Winston Churchill and the Queen of England
while kowtowing to non-Western rulers and currying favor
with seedy dictators. So how should we expect Barack Obama
-- when, say, confronted with dangers from abroad -- to be
able to draw on the kinds of historical lessons that past
Presidents were able to draw on, from their wider
historical knowledge?
And we certainly can't expect Obama to profit from the
insights of Adam Smith, or F. A. Hayek, or Milton Friedman.
Of course he's heard free market arguments in some form, or
at least he's heard of them. But how could ever it occur to
him to take them seriously? In the circles he's always
moved in, those are simply the ideas of the naysayers and
the bitter clingers.
Given the unexampled ignorance of today's Left,
there's little hope that Scott Brown's election will
inspire a course correction by the Obama Administration or
its allies in Congress. The hope is that the American
people will take enough power out of their hands to stop
their agenda. Starting this past Tuesday.
--Elizabeth Kantor
andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com
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