| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| VDH: The Politicization of Everything |
| 2013-11-23 |
| h/t Instapundit The Obama presidency has had very little legislative success. Even the signature Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is imploding, and was dubbed a "train wreck" by one of its own Senatorial authors. The lead-from-behind retrenchment abroad from America's traditional leadership role has won few adherents. The Benghazi tragedy and the series of alphabet-soup debacles involving the IRS, the NSA, and the AP journalists are the most disturbing political scandals we've seen since the Nixon administration. What, then, is the Obama legacy? An insidious politicization of almost everything. Obamism has become a holistic concept of "fundamentally transforming America" that, like all ideologies, cannot be assessed solely by concrete laws and policies, but rather through a change in the mentality and spirit of Americans and those who govern them. ...What energizes this effort at holistic transformation is real anger at the perceived unfairness of the current democratic capitalist state--what Michelle Obama once referred to when she characterized America as "just downright mean." Most of us unfortunately are unaware of these tensions in our otherwise "uninvolved, uninformed" lives. Indeed, in the words of former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, we are mere adolescents "just like your teenage kids" who "aren't acting in a way that they should act." The government defines "should"; the people do not. The antidote has been for Obama administration technocrats to reexamine the way Americans go to the doctor, borrow money, pay their taxes, secure their borders, protect their country, explore space, and contemplate the weather. In each case, it turns out that someone wealthier and more privileged than the majority has done something wrong. The remedy is to provide more power and money to an all-knowing government elite who alone has the wisdom and morality to make things fairer by making them more equal. In our present landscape where everything must be political, the government's hunt for victims and their oppressors has become ceaseless. Personally, I hope his legacy won't include Iranian nuke. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 I hope his legacy won't include Iranian nuke. Me too. But I'd be surprised if it doesn't. It will be far easier to tally up the short list of things that turned out ok, than to enumerate the hundreds, thousands of things that could not have gone any worse. |
| Posted by: RandomJD 2013-11-23 03:55 |