Thanks for the memories, Barack: Or, how to bankrupt a country in three easy steps

July 26, 2010 - by Roger Kimball

“Europe’s prospects brighten as U.S. fades.” Thus a headline in Reuters this morning.

German business confidence is soaring while U.S. consumer sentiment sinks.

Britain’s second-quarter economic growth was almost twice as fast as expected, the strongest in four years.

Meanwhile, economists have steadily marked down forecasts for Friday’s U.S. gross domestic product report.

Thanks a lot, Mr. President. And thanks to you, too, Secretary Geithner. You inherited the richest, most productive country in history. And you have set it firmly on course for economic stagnation.

It’s all part of your effort to “fundamentally transform the Untied States of America,” isn’t it, Mr. President? That’s what you promised in October 2008: to change America fundamentally. Who would have predicted you were really serious? (Well, some of us did, but you know what I mean.)

You’ve made it clear that, deep down, you really don’t like the United States. In that, you are like many of your Ivy confrères, all those Harvard-Yale-Princeton types who find the spectacle of individual freedom playing itself out irredeemably vulgar. You all are beyond allegiance to anything so parochial as an individual nation. And when it comes to what (even now) is the world’s nation of nations, the United States, you are more than embarrassed: you are downright impatient.

Samuel Huntington was right to call you “deconstructionists.” He wasn’t talking about the reader-proof theories of Jacques Derrida but something much more practical. The sort of deconstructionists he had in mind were politicians and academics and policy makers who

promoted programs to enhance that status and influence of subnational racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. They encouraged immigrants to maintain their birth-country cultures, granted them legal privileges denied to native-born Americans, and denounced the idea of Americanization as un-American. They pushed the rewriting of history syllabi and textbooks so as to refer to the “peoples” of the United States in place of the single people of the Constitution. They urged supplementing or substituting for national history the history of subnational groups. They downgraded the centrality of English in American life and pushed bilingual education and linguistic diversity. They advocated legal recognition of group rights and racial preferences over the individual rights central to the American Creed. They justified their actions by theories of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity rather than unity or community should be America’s overriding value. The combined effect of these efforts was to promote the deconstruction of the American identity that had been gradually created over three centuries.

Taken together, Huntington concluded, “these efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”

Read the rest at: Roger's Rules

The new, improved Obama

You have to hand it to US President Barack Obama. He is relentless. Just when you thought he was shifting gears - easing up on Israel and turning his attention to Iran's nuclear weapons program - he pulls out a zinger.


His recent courtship of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu led some Israelis and supporters of Israel in the US to believe the administration had seen the light. After 18 months, we were told Obama finally realized that contrary to what he had thought, Palestinian statehood is not the most urgent issue in the Middle East, Iran's nuclear weapons program is.


In the past week alone, two prominent commentators - Aluf Benn from Haaretz and Ehud Ya'ari from Channel 2 both wrote articles claiming that Obama's Middle East policy has undergone a transformation. As Benn put it, "President Barack Obama's campaign of wooing Israel reflects a fundamental about-face in US policy in the Middle East."


And in Ya'ari's words in an article in the Australian, "The foreign policy team of US President Barack Obama is undertaking a reassessment of its policy all over the Middle East, including Israel."


Both claimed the administration has resolved to cooperate with Israel as an ally rather than attack it as an obstacle to peace, and that Washington has recognized that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.


The basic notion informing both of these nearly identical articles is that the Obama administration's foreign policy is fundamentally pragmatic rather than ideologically motivated. Both Ya'ari and Benn, like many of their fellow commentators on the Left, argue that Obama's decision to invite Netanyahu to Washington and treat him like an ally rather than an enemy is proof that when stripped to its essentials, his foreign policy is pragmatic.


After a year and half in office, Obama recognized that his previous view of the Middle East was wrong. And as a pragmatist, he has embarked on a new course.


Yet before the ink on their proclamations had a chance to dry, Obama demonstrated that their enthusiasm was misplaced. Late last week the administration decided - apropos of nothing - to upgrade the diplomatic status of the PLO mission in Washington.


From now on, the PLO will be allowed to fly its flag like a regular embassy.


Its representatives will enjoy diplomatic immunity just like diplomats from states.


Indeed the PLO delegate in Washington Maen Areikat claimed that the administration's move equates the PLO's diplomatic status in the US to that of Canada and states in Western Europe.

Read it all at: CAROLINEGLICK.com

How About A Drink?

Bt William Warren