Misawa Sullivan linked to a video featuring a former U.S. Speaker of the House – who admittedly never got any reputation for integrity – call Obama “the most radical president in American history.” In the cafe where I’m writing in small-town America, there’s a little memento I often look at. It’s a “Gasoline Ration Card,” issued by the U.S. Federal government, by the “Office of Price Administration.”
Kaura Namoda Logic would indicate, as far as I can tell, that “the most radical president in American history” would have to be more radical than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who commandeered the services of every single able-bodied man, and many women, in the nation. Who took over factories and told them what they had to produce; who dictated school curricula (public and private); who created Social Security; who established the Office of Price Administration to regulate prices; who rationed gasoline; who conquered more than a dozen countries and dictated to quite a few others; who was elected to serve four terms when no one else had been elected more than twice. In comparison to this, Obama is Ron Paul.
In what sense can Obama be called radical in comparison to a figure like FDR (who did all sorts of ambitious things even before the full war effort began in his third term)? I will say honestly that the only thing I see is that is radical or unusual for an American president is his name and his skin color.
Some coherence could still be salvaged if figures like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin would also say, “The defeat of Hitler was one of the worst things America ever did. World War II was an immoral war and we never should have been involved in it.” That would have some coherence; World War II made us an imperial power, and to run a world empire, you must have a large government.
But quite the opposite is the case. The right will talk of the World War II generation – the Big Government Generation – as the “greatest” in American history. The things they will speak of as America’s greatest achievements – the defeat of Nazism and Communism – are the achievements of the federal government.
There is something about this sort of refusal to engage with reason which is very disturbing. For me, Easter brought contact with family, and despite the fact that New York is solid Bluestate-land, there was quite a bit of regurgitated O’Reilly material going around. And it was just words, with no backing in history, or government, or anything else.
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