Obama in a nutshell
Bookworm on Nov 01 2008 at 11:48 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
In four paragraphs, Mark Steyn hones in on Obama’s core communist ethos:
The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice.” Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”
But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around — hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf’n’turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.
The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.
In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.
Related posts:
- The Obama tax plan in a nutshell
- Jonah Goldberg also keys in on the issues
- Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth *UPDATE*
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4 Responses to “Obama in a nutshell”
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In a recent discussion I had with two old friends–we go back 20 years through our kids’ participation in a co-op nursery school–the topic of bailouts for the subprime market came up.
They asserted that “a compassionate society” would come to the rescue of people, who because they were duped or stupid (or, yes, even a bit greedy), took on loans that they couldn’t pay unless everything went perfectly well.
I asked them to explain how it was “compassionate” to take money from productive people who were not credulous or greedy to kiss the boos boos of people who were. What lesson would both groups learn?
They looked at me like cows chewing their cud and didn’t answer.
I asked them how they equated government with “society,” since government is incapable of compassion, only coercion (no matter how velvet-gloved).
Same bovine-in-the-headlights look.
Now you know why I’ve sworn off milk.
C’mon Charles. You’re giving cows a bad name.
suek, LOL.
You’re right, I was too hard on some very nice critters.
Obama says he is being criticized “for sharing my peanut butter sandwich in second grade.” I don’t think many conservatives object to the kindly second-grade Obama who shared his sandwich. Rather, the objection is to another kid–let’s call him “Billy O’Grabba”–who persuaded the teacher to collect all the sandwiches and give them to him and his friends–who then decided how much shoud be returned to the original sandwich-owners and distributed the rest to the playmates they thought deserved them–reserving a substantial peanut-butter commission for themselves, of course, and enjoying the prestige that comes from being in charge of the distribution.
I doubt that the real Barack Obama would have done this on an individual level–but it’s a pretty good analogy for what he want to do to the nation.