Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Is @BarackObama un- or anti- American?

This post's title came from Charles Murray's American Enterprise Institute blog:

That brings me back to the creepiness of it all. It is as if a Dutch politician—an intelligent, well-meaning Dutch politician—were somehow running for the American presidency, but bringing with him the Rawlsian, social-democratic ethos that, in the Netherlands, is the natural way to talk about a properly run society. We would listen to him and say to ourselves, “He doesn’t get this country.” That’s the thing about Obama. Time and again, he does things and says things that are un-American. Not evil. Not anti-American. Just un-American.
Not to be persnickety, but John Rawls was, unfortunately, an American philosopher. Indeed, Rawls was Ayn Rand's  bête noire  (or, one of them, at least, along with Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc etc). In her book: Philosophy: Who Needs It




Rand denounces John Rawls' work: "A Theory of Justice":


This obscenely evil theory proposes to subordinate man's nature and mind to the desires (including the envy), not merely of the lowest human specimens, but of the lowest non-existents [...] demand "equal results" regardless of unequal causes, and who propose to alter metaphysical facts by the power of whims and guns [...] Rawls is easier to defeat -- particularly in this country [USA], which is the living monument to a diametrically opposite philosophy (he would have had a better chance in Europe [as Murray intimates above]).  If there is any spirit of rebellion on American campuses (and elsewhere), here is an evil to rebel against, to rebel intellectually, righteously, intransigently:  any hint, touch, smell, or trial balloon of A Theory of Justice and of the egalitarian movement. If rational men do not rebel, the egalitarians will succeed.  Succeed in establishing a world  of shoddy equality and brotherly stagnation? No -- but this is not their purpose.  Just as Kant's purpose was to corrupt  and paralyze man's mind, so the egalitarians' purpose is to shackle and paralyze the men of ability (even at the price of destroying the world).


Dinesh D'Souza follows along Murray's line of attack and asserts that the dream Obama inherited from Barack Sr was a foreign anti-colonial dream. Obama simply transferred his father's animus from the UK to the US.




From Glenn Beck 's interview of D'Souza:


D’SOUZA: An interesting way to get at this is to ask what is Obama’s dream. Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King’s dream? And the beauty is we don’t have to guess. Obama tells us himself in his book. You pick it up: Dreams From My Father[...]
D’SOUZA: Right. I’m not writing about my father’s dreams. I’m writing about the dream I got from my father. And who was Barack Obama, Sr.? Once we look at this and once we look a little more closely at him and some of the things he’s written, by the way, which are not well known, he wrote an interesting article in the East Africa Journal in 1965 about African socialism. He lays out a bunch of themes. He talks, for example, about what’s the ideal rate of taxation, what is the highest permissible rate of taxation.
GLENN: You’ll love this, America.
D’SOUZA: And he comes to an interesting conclusion: 100%. Now, 100% taxation. Now, you might say this is crazy, what rational person. But look at the anticolonialist premise. The anticolonialist premise is that the rich guys got rich by ripping off the poor. So Glenn, if I got rich by coming to your house and stealing your furniture, what tax rate should be put on me? It’s not my stuff. I’ve taken it from you unjustly.
GLENN: Right.
D’SOUZA: So no limit to, you can come and get it all back.
GLENN: Right. Now listen, if you, if you want to look at Barack Obama and make sense of his policies, you cannot. For instance, last week the federal government okayed a billion dollar loan to Mexico to drill for oil in the Gulf where we have where we’ve stopped drilling. Why are we loaning them a billion dollars to drill where we can’t? Deep sea, I told you this about five months ago. We’ve made a gigantic loan to Brazil so they can go and do deep sea drilling off the coast of Brazil. What was it, twice as deep as what we had a problem with? And we shut down all of our oil rigs? Now, why would we take our money and give it to Brazil and give it to Mexico to do the things that we are telling that a president is telling us is too dangerous for the environment to do?
D’SOUZA: This is absolutely critical and in fact I think even Obama’s own supporters are misunderstanding him. They think he’s a conventional liberal. They think he a he like Al Gore: He thinks the planet is too hot, he thinks that energy consumption for the world is too high, he wants to decrease it across the board. But then we see no, he doesn’t. He wants to decrease energy consumption by us while increasing energy availability and consumption by them. In other words, he wants to decrease the wealth of the colonizers, the rich West, and increase the availability of wealth and energy. That’s why he proposes huge global transfers of wealth from the wealthy west to the rest. So this anticolonial key opens the lock.



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