| Submit your comments on this article |
| Government |
| Champ conscripts Mandela to reivive his fading progressive cause. |
| 2013-12-11 |
| [Daily Caller] President Barack Obama wrapped himself in Nelson’s Mandela’s mythical reputation today as he used the media-magnified memorial service to jab at the GOP and to praise his own progressive ideology. A eulogy used as a sermon, how innovative. “There are too many people who happily embrace [Mandela’s] legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality,” he said, without mentioning GOP House Speaker John Boehner by name. The panderer in chief explaining the concept of pandering. Instructive indeed. Through his peroration, Obama declared that Mandela’s political choices are relevant to other countries, including the United States. And he shielded his own progressive agenda with Mandela’s saint-like reputation. “Regardless of our station or our circumstance, we must ask: How well have I applied his lessons in my own life? It’s a question I ask myself, as a man and as a President,” Obama told the rain-soaked crowd in Johannesburg. Yes, yes, if I had a father, he would look like...... “In America… our work is not yet done,” he said. And right after his bit of theater, we're headed to Hawaii for holiday. “We still see children suffering from hunger and disease. We still see run-down schools. We still see young people without prospects for the future,” according to Obama, who has presided over a slow-growing economy in which nearly all the gains have gone to his political allies in the top 1 percent income-bracket. “Around the world today, men and women are… still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love.... "Madiba" is a tribal clan name. “It’s tempting I think to remember Nelson Mandela as an icon, smiling and serene, detached from the tawdry affairs of lesser men… ‘I am not a saint,’ he said, ‘unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying,’” Obama pronounced. Channeling Mother Teresa? “Let me say to the young people of Africa and the young people around the world — you, too, can make his life’s work your own,” he pleaded in his speech, which will likely be shown to millions of students at American schools. Millennials, wake up! The “Over 30 years ago, while still a student, I learned of Nelson Mandela and the struggles taking place in this beautiful land… [They] woke me up to my responsibilities to others and to myself, and it set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today.” Obama’s support among young people has recently crashed, partly because of the stalled economy, but also because of his “you can keep your plan” lie about Obamacare. Not to mention a long list of other lies. The speech included slightly-cloaked jabs at the GOP, whose discordant coalition of social-conservatives, libertarians and business lobbyists has stymied Obama’s congressional agenda after 2010. Poor Champ, "discordant coalition" is Greek to these people. They are an entire nation of 95 percenters. He even hinted that the American people are somehow culpable for not supporting his failing agenda or for not boosting his dropping poll ratings. Rural and suburban mostly. Urban America, not so much. “There are too many of us on the sidelines, comfortable in complacency or cynicism when our voices must be heard,” he said. “Let us search for his largeness of spirit somewhere inside of ourselves,” he lectured his listeners. More selfies, more Horatio Alger stories please. “ And when the night grows dark, when injustice weighs heavy on our hearts, when our best-laid plans seem beyond our reach, let us think of Madiba and the words that brought him comfort within the four walls of his cell: ‘It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 President Barack Obama wrapped himself in NelsonÂ’s MandelaÂ’s mythical reputation Well, Venezuela's President Maduro has Chavez as a political cloak... |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-12-11 18:49 |
| #1 “There are too many people who happily embrace [Mandela’s] legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms..." That's because racial reconciliation in SA (and not elsewhere!) was the only area where Mandela might conceivably have been right. Mandela was an apologist for cleptocracy and brutal clannish despotism as practiced in e.g. Cuba and Libya. Among other things these policies lead to economic decay and poverty. "Around the world today, men and women are... still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love" And 'Madiba' has been the persecutors' staunch ally, apologist, accomplice and enabler throughout his political life. ‘I am not a saint’ He was no saint indeed. He might have gotten some things right about SA but he was also conducting amoral realpolitik. He collaborated with political criminal and he didn't care one bit about his allies' victims. |
| Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 2013-12-11 16:28 |