Statist Delusions [Mark Steyn]

The president of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kan., last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness archeologists of the future sifting through the rubble of our civilization will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.

“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc. remain the most inviting target and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to reelection and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess . . . . And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules . . . . It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”

This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student-loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation.

Excerpt, read more at National Review

Obama’s speech in Osawatomie was spoken in code to his occucommies and pro-occucommies, he is rallying them for a massive occucommie push next year. Even the place he chose for his very definitive speech, Osawatomie, is code to his
Bill Ayers, Weather Underground, types.

We’ve got a VERY violent next year ahead of us!

I think Steyn has gotten it only partly right on this one. The US has been moving to a sort of soft-welfare state since the time of the “Great Society,” but Obama and his crew - or actually, his leaders - have taken it to an entirely different level, and thinking of this as just the same-old same-old call for a little more welfare and a few more bennies is a big mistake.

Osawatomie was the name of the paper published by the Weathermen (or Weather Underground, by that time, I guess) in the 1970s. Its big focus was “anti-racism,” since the Marxists had latched onto the radical black power groups and presented violent, radical blacks as the “vanguard of the Revolution.”

Osawatomie, KS was also where John Brown and other abolitionists holed up and prepared for their attacks, and in fact Brown took the name Osawatomie and was known as Osawatomie Brown. The fact that they were fighting Democrats seems to have been lost on Obama.

However, the newspaper Osawatomie, with which Bill Ayers and his lovely wife Bernadine Dohrn were involved, felt that the usual leftists of the time (meaning hard-line Dems and unionists) were just too old fashioned and didn’t understand the need for violence and class warfare. This was a constant theme of the paper Osawatomie.

I think, for once, perhaps Steyn didn’t do enough research. This goes way beyond the welfare state. It was Obama’s call for class warfare and the purging of non-revolutionary influences, just as Bill Ayers no doubt told him to do. It was meant to be the beginning of the destruction of the US, and I think you’re going to see an increasing number of leftists taking up the call.

1960s campus spoiled brats and their totally corrupted ideological offspring did this to America.
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Bill Ayers and his wife Bernette Dohrn were promoted and mentored to positions of power by people of my father's generation ( born 1913). These two were **known** and self-confessed terrorists.

The rot was in place long before the 1960s. Joe Mc Carthy was right!

That is a great post. Thank you. You are right about Steyn needing to get "the rest of the story."

"Bring it all down, man."

I remembered the Kansas-Brown connection but not the significance of Osawatomie nor did I recall the significance of Osawatomie (and the newspaper) for the 1960s campus spoiled brats and their ideological issue, BHO.

Thanks again.

RE: "The rot was in place long before the 1960s. Joe Mc Carthy was right!"

You are right and it was in place even before the '50s.

However I believe that as I understand David Horowitz explain the emergence of the New Left it was never so radical and violent as the 1960s. When word of Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about the real Stalin reached America it turned many American Communists away from the CP/USA and many "red diaper babies" rejected all but the most revolutionary versions of Communism. Thus the New Left.

I recall both McCarthy and the 60s when the MSM gushed admiration for the demonstrators as the most intelligent generation ever.

This oft-posted cartoon shows the rot in the '30s.

As a struggling copywriter, Steyn continually gives me inspiration to improve:

“In my most recent book, which makes an attractive and thoughtful Christmas gift for the apocalyptically minded loved one in your family, ...” HA!

“(Obama) figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to reelection and four more years of even bigger Big Government.”

Paint that mind-picture, white man!

“However....His is completely wrong about Obama’s eligibility. Deliberately so I believe. As a result, I don’t fully trust him.”

Just what did Mark Steyn say about Obama’s eligibility that upset you so?

I have heard him say that he doesn’t want Obama removed on a technicality. He wants him defeated because his policies are bad.

That would be a greater victory. If he is removed because of ineligibility, he becomes a martyr to the left. If he is voted out by the American people, it is a victory in the hearts and minds of the American people. They have seen the light, and have rejected the fascist/socialist policies of the left.

Mark Steyn is right.

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