...Rocco Landesman Addresses Grantmakers in the Arts (NEA Chairman Compares Obama to Julius Ceasar)

...Which brings me to President Obama, our Optimist in Chief. He is a writer, an artist but we’ll come to that later. His second book had a title that would resonate with Lionel Tiger: “The Audacity of Hope”. This is much more than a felicitous phrase that he found in a sermon: it is the manifesto of this presidency and will lay the groundwork for the most arts-supportive administration since Roosevelt.

Again, optimism presumes positive outcomes, the exigencies of the real world notwithstanding. The Obama campaign, and now the Obama presidency, has always been about aspiration: the idea that our current reality, our circumstances, if you will, need not determine our future.

OK, I’m sure that by now you are all wildly optimistic. Well, maybe not all of you. There might be a couple of you, way in the back, that are saying to yourselves, “That’s all very sweet, very arty, but what does it have to do with the budget of the NEA?”

My answer is pretty simple. There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. (emphasis added)If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists...

Here's a bit of history of Julius Ceasar:

After assuming control of government, he began extensive reforms of Roman society and government. He heavily centralised the bureaucracy of the Republic and was eventually proclaimed "dictator in perpetuity" (dictator perpetuo). A group of senators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus, assassinated the dictator on the Ides of March (15 March) 44 BC, hoping to restore the normal running of the Republic. However, the result was another Roman civil war, which ultimately led to the establishment of a permanent autocracy by Caesar's adopted heir, Gaius Octavianus. In 42 BC, two years after his assassination, the Senate officially sanctified Caesar as one of the Roman deities.

Source

You really have to wonder if Mr. Landesman thought this analogy through before he made it. Or perhaps Mr. Landesman actually wants Mr. Obama to be a "dictator in perpetuity." Who knows? Many Libs have stated that they fear for Mr. Obama's life and yet, here's one of their buddies equating him with a Roman dictator who was murdered in office by political opponents. Is this really what Mr. Landesman intended?

I'm sure that Mr. Landesman's intent was to find a powerful world figure who wrote well to whom he could compare Mr. Obama. But, Julius Ceasar is the best he could do? Yikes! Was Jefferson too passe? Were Stalin and Hitler (both powerful leaders who were authors and supporters of the arts) a little too obvious? Of course, Mr. Obama's White House communications director had already claimed Mao Tse Tung for her own so...what, Julius Ceasar was the only one left? This just goes to show that there is a vast difference between being educated and being smart.

Here's one closer to home (0bama's):
Robert Mugabe--Zimbabwe
After leading a successful anticolonial war of liberation, Mugabe was elected the first president of independent Zimbabwe. It was hoped that, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Mugabe would guide Africa to a new era of democracy. But with each year that has passed, he has turned increasingly dictatorial, and he has run his country into the ground. Since 1988, life expectancy in Zimbabwe has plunged from sixty-two years to thirty-eight.

Or how about:
Paul Biya--Cameroon
Every few years, Biya stages an election to justify his continuing reign, but these elections have no credibility. In fact, Biya is credited with a creative innovation in the world of phony elections. In 2004, annoyed by the criticisms of international vote-monitoring groups, he paid for his own set of international observers, six ex-U.S. congressmen, who certified his election as free and fair. [Now, if this doesn't certify that Congress people can be bought, nothing we say could do so.]
From Huff Po

World's Ten Most Corrupt Leaders.

Worlds Most Notorious Despots.

Maximillien Robespierre
Robespierre was the mastermind of the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), the dark underside of the French Revolution that perverted its lofty ideals of democracy with fanaticism and inhumanity. Robespierre, leader of the infamous Committee of Public Safety, turned France into a police state, sending "enemies of the nation" to the guillotine without benefit of a public trial or legal representation. About 40,000 French men and women were executed or died in prison, and another 300,000 were imprisoned. Only Robespierre's own beheading ended the slaughter.

Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier
Up to 60,000 Haitians died under the 1957–71 reign of Duvalier, and millions were exiled. With his henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen"), Duvalier terrorized and murdered potential political foes and ordinary Haitians. Trained as a doctor—hence his ironically paternalistic nickname—Duvalier declared himself President-for-Life in 1964 and portrayed himself as a semidivine, voodoo-empowered ruler . . . a portrait shows him posing with Jesus Christ. His corrupt policies spawned a fabulously wealthy elite and a dirt-poor populace—Haitians' per capita annual income under Duvalier was $80, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. After his death, his pudgy, somewhat dim son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was enthroned, and carried on his father's venal policies until he was driven out of the country in 1986.

Pol Pot
Radical Marxist leader of Cambodia from 1975–79, who butchered his own people. The four years of nightmarish Khmer Rouge rule led to the state-sponsored extermination of citizens by its own government. Between 1 million and 2 million people were massacred on the "killing fields" of Cambodia or were worked to death through forced labor. Pol Pot's radical vision of transforming the country into a Marxist agrarian society led to the virtual extermination of the country's professional and technical class—anyone wearing glasses, for example, was murdered. Pol Pot died in 1998 without remorse, declaring, "My conscience is clear."

I kind of think Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein [Muhammad] 0bama is a mixture of the worst of the worst. But then, I am an angry mob of one grey-haired Senior Citizen on Medicare who is struggling to keep what I earned from being snatched away from me by a Mufti-Caliph who wants to change the US Constitution and stamp people like me out of existence. And yes, I believe that because I am a child of "the Greatest Generation" and I remember their stories.
[PS to you trolls: Bite Me.]

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