Caesar Obama

Cross Action News ^ | 11/02/09 | Robert Spencer

[Victory111]

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said last week that “Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” He didn’t mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, is also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America has a president whose supporters talk about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il.

[jongaltsr]

Et Tu Brute?

[SC DOC]

I WON, I TAXED, I REDISTRIBUTED

[ThirdMate]

“Gallia est omnis divisa in partres tres. (All Gaul is divided into three parts)” Julius Cesaer The Conquest of Gaul

“I divided Afghanistan into three parts” Cesaer Obama, The Defeat in Afghanistan

[Verginius Rufus]

They both like Latin aphorisms.

Caesar: Veni, vidi, vici.

Obama: Vero, possumus (2009 campaign slogan)

Caesar wrote a work attacking Cato the Younger (after Cato's suicide) called the Anti-Cato. (Unfortunately it wasn't preserved so we don't know exactly what Caesar said about Cato.)

Obama's memoirs should be called Anti-Bush since that is the main theme of his administration, as well as the reason for his Nobel Prize.

Cato died rather than to live under Caesar's dictatorship, and became a symbol of the Roman Republic. Despite his shortcomings in some areas, President Bush was a real patriot who believed in the American Republic. If Obama has his way, we may look back to Bush the way the Romans looked back to Cato, as a symbol of the lost Republic.