Forget the post-partisan era
The Politico reports some statements by President Obama in Europe:
“America is changing but it cannot be America alone that changes,” he said. He ticked off exactly what steps the U.S. was taking — closing Guantanamo Bay prison, ending torture, trying to confront climate change…“We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.”…
Obama looked back to a nation that elected him just a few months ago and said it, too, had at times “showed arrogance” and “been dismissive even derisive” toward its European cousins. “In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world,” Obama said.
James Lewis in The American Thinker responded to that last comment:
those arrogant Americans. First they rebel against King George III and all the crowned heads of Europe. Then they welcome tens of millions of poor and persecuted people from the Old World. Then they fail to bow down to Europe’s greatest figures — from Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck to the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin. Then they fight a civil war, losing half a million people to liberate black people in America. Then they diss the man the BBC considers to be the greatest philosopher ever, one Karl Marx, whose followers killed 100 million innocents in the 20th century. And then, to top it all off, they liberate both the Western half of Europe (in 1946) and the Eastern half (in 1989).
The post-partisan era is over before it began. Pew: “Barack Obama has the most polarized early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The 61-point partisan gap in opinions about Obama’s job performance is the result of a combination of high Democratic ratings for the president — 88% job approval among Democrats — and relatively low approval ratings among Republicans (27%)…there was a somewhat smaller 51-point partisan gap in views of George W. Bush’s job performance in April 2001.”
The issue of the Obama bow and the lack of reaction in the MSM is a perfect miniature of the deep divide in the country today.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:18 am
1. According to Pew, the unprecedented size of the gap is primarily due to Republican negativity. Yeah, that’ll win over the swing vote…just like it did with Bill Clinton.
2. McCain was on track to pull off an upset until his intemperate reaction to the financial crisis. The GOP has no one to blame but themselves, but they remain impregnably entrenched in denial.
3. The Republicans refuse to return to their limited-government roots. My impression is that they seize any pretext to be authoritarian. They have abandoned the Franklin concept of a tradeoff between liberty and security. (For the children, of course.)
4. I conjecture that the “religious right” has deliberately allied with the GOP’s big-government corruptocrats.
************
Although I’m eager to vote for competent limited government, IMHO everyday life under a Democratic big government is better than the quality of life under under a Republican big government.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
I’m willing to vote for any form of limited government (except libertarians, who don’t seem willing to recognize the realities beyond our borders), but it’s not on the ballot. I fully expect this to get worse, not better. I might not live to see it, but the American era is coming to an end.
With luck, half the country will return to the ideals of our founders.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
I hope that dinocrat.com allows comments from a Canadian.
Americans elected this Obama bastard because too many thought that McCain was going to be as a blind jerk as his predecessor.
But this bastard was elected ( I say bastard because it is a mean word and if these idiotic comments coming from Barry Bowbama were from kucinisch or dean or palosi or franks or kennedy or pierre trudeau or jack layton ( canadian left wing freak politician ) I would not be too surprised).
Americans say that they are the greatest people in the world – I believe it but tell your leftwing and right wing friends to nominate great people. Not has beens or neverwases or wannabes.