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| Mark Steyn: Pledging Allegiance To Our Beloved Obama |
| 2009-09-05 |
| 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." Uh OH -- Times taking on The Steyn? 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. Nailed 'em with that "indefinite article," Smarter than they? Yes, he is 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? Putting thoughts into Obama's head, are we Mark? 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. Hey, wondered if the Times authors even grasp the brilliance of this paragraph, Steyn's grasp of history of Iraq, woven into 30 words. Word of advice to Time's writers, don't get into a battle of words with The Steyn 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." With kids today declaring Columbus guilty of war-crimes, one does have to wonder if they have even heard of the Year 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. But not forgotten. WTimes on 3/19/09 As he empathized with recession-weary Americans, President Obama arranged in the days just before he took office to secure a $500,000 advance for a children's book project, a disclosure report shows. 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. Of course they missed Mark's point -- his vocabulary is far above the average writers of newspapers, whose readability level is usually written on the 5th grade level 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. From a commenter at Lucianne.com "Only a 45% approval rated president would give a speech to a Congress with a 20% approval rating and think something good will come of that. Will all those commissar czars be invited?" 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 his side, but I wouldn't bet on it. "While the older generation could still waver, the younger generation has pledged itself to us and is ours, body and soul." Adolf Schicklgruber -- Nuremberg Rally, 1934 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. The Rev Wright didn't preach "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." 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. Please read that paragraph again! 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 ©MARK STEYN |
| Posted by:Sherry |
| #3 In the United States, the oath of office for the President of the United States is specified in the U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 1): I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. The oath may be sworn or affirmed (in which case it is called an affirmation instead of oath). Although not present in the text of the Constitution, it is customary for modern presidents to say "so help me God" after the end of the oath. For officers other than the President, the expression "So help me God" is explicitly prescribed, but the Judiciary Act of 1789 also explains when it can be omitted: (specifically for oaths taken by court clerks), "Which words, so help me God, shall be omitted in all cases where an affirmation is admitted instead of an oath."[21] The Constitution specifies in Article VI, clause 3: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." For other officials, including members of Congress, it specifies they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution." At the start of each new U.S. Congress, in January of every odd-numbered year, those newly elected or re-elected Congressmen - the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate - must recite an oath: I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.[22] This oath is also taken by the Vice President, members of the Cabinet, and all other civil and military officers and federal employees other than the President. While the oath-taking dates back to the First Congress in 1789, the current oath is a product of the 1860s, drafted by Civil War-era members of Congress intent on ensnaring traitors. In 1789, the 1st United States Congress created a fourteen-word oath to fulfill the constitutional requirement: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States." It also passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established an additional oath taken by federal judges: I do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me, according to the best of my abilities and understanding, agreeably to the Constitution, and laws of the United States. So help me God. The outbreak of the Civil War quickly transformed the routine act of oath-taking into one of enormous significance. In April 1861, a time of uncertain and shifting loyalties, President Abraham Lincoln ordered all federal civilian employees within the executive branch to take an expanded oath. When Congress convened for a brief emergency session in July, members echoed the president's action by enacting legislation requiring employees to take the expanded oath in support of the Union. This oath is the earliest direct predecessor of the modern version of the oath. When Congress returned for its regular session in December 1861, members who believed that the Union had as much to fear from northern traitors as southern soldiers again revised the oath, adding a new first section known as the "Ironclad Test Oath." The war-inspired Test Oath, signed into law on July 2, 1862, required "every person elected or appointed to any office ... under the Government of the United States ... excepting the President of the United States" to swear or affirm that they had never previously engaged in criminal or disloyal conduct. Those government employees who failed to take the 1862 Test Oath would not receive a salary; those who swore falsely would be prosecuted for perjury and forever denied federal employment. The 1862 oath's second section incorporated a different rendering of the hastily drafted 1861 oath. Although Congress did not extend coverage of the Ironclad Test Oath to its own members, many took it voluntarily. Angered by those who refused this symbolic act during a wartime crisis, and determined to prevent the eventual return of prewar southern leaders to positions of power in the national government, congressional hard-liners eventually succeeded by 1864 in making the Test Oath mandatory for all members. The Senate then revised its rules to require that members not only take the Test Oath orally, but also that they "subscribe" to it by signing a printed copy. This condition reflected a wartime practice in which military and civilian authorities required anyone wishing to do business with the federal government to sign a copy of the Test Oath. The current practice of newly sworn senators signing individual pages in an oath book dates from this period. As tensions cooled during the decade following the Civil War, Congress enacted private legislation permitting particular former Confederates to take only the second section of the 1862 oath. An 1868 public law prescribed this alternative oath for "any person who has participated in the late rebellion, and from whom all legal disabilities arising therefrom have been removed by act of Congress." Northerners immediately pointed to the new law's unfair double standard that required loyal Unionists to take the Test Oath's harsh first section while permitting ex-Confederates to ignore it. In 1884, a new generation of lawmakers quietly repealed the first section of the Test Oath, leaving intact the current affirmation of constitutional allegiance. |
| Posted by: Sluns and Tenille8706 2009-09-05 22:06 |
| #2 Steyn RULES! Great in-line, Sherry. "Smarter than they? Yes, he is." Not to disparage Mr. Steyn, but a cabbage is smarter than they are, |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2009-09-05 20:06 |
| #1 Brilliant. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2009-09-05 18:18 |