Posted on 09/15/2010 7:37:26 PM PDT by Red Steel
An article Democrat Chris Coons wrote for his college newspaper may not go over so well in corporation-friendly Delaware, where he already faces an uphill battle for Vice President Joe Bidens old Senate seat.
The title? Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist.
In the article, Coons, then 21 years old and about to graduate from Amherst College, chronicled his transformation from a sheltered, conservative-minded college student who had worked for former GOP Delaware Sen. William Roth and had campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980 into a cynical young adult who was distrustful of American power and willing to question the American notion of free enterprise.
Coons, the New Castle County executive who is running against GOP Rep. Michael Castle for the states open Senate seat, wrote of his political evolution in the May 23, 1985, edition of the Amherst Student.
The source of his conversion, Coons wrote, was a trip to Kenya he took during the spring semester of his junior yeara time away from America, he wrote, that served as a catalyst in altering a conservative political outlook that he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with.
My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists, Coons wrote, noting that at one time he had been a proud founding member of the Amherst College Republicans.
[I]t is only too easy to return from Africa glad to be American and smugly thankful for our wealth and freedom, added Coons. Instead, Amherst had taught me to question, so in turn I questioned Amherst, and America.
Dave Hoffman, a Coons campaign spokesman, said the title of the article was designed as a humorous take-off on a joke Coonss college friends had made about how his time outside the country had affected his outlook.
Hoffman said the trip to Kenya helped lead to Coonss decision to become a Democrat.
Chris wrote an article about a transformative experience during his semester in Kenya more than twenty-five years ago, said Hoffman in a statement to POLITICO. After witnessing crushing poverty and the consequences of the Reagan Administrations constructive engagement with the South African apartheid regime, he rethought his political views, returned to the America he loved and proudly registered as a Democrat.
In one passage of the article, Coons explains how in the months leading up to the trip abroad leftists on campus and college professors had begun to challenge the basic assumptions he had formed about America.
A course on cultural anthropology, noted Coons, had undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West, while a class on the Vietnam War led him to suspect that the ideal of America as a beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world was not exactly based in reality.
For Coons, Kenya was an especially jarring experience that significantly influenced his already-changing political beliefs. He wrote that he was particularly troubled by his experience with Kenyan elites, who he said were utterly dismissive of the poor.
I became friends with a very wealthy businessman and his family and heard them reiterate the same beliefs held by many Americans: the poor are poor because they are lazy, slovenly, uneducated, wrote Coons. I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America were largely untrue.
Coons wrote that upon his return to Amherst for his senior year he realized that, while he had discovered the faults of his country, he had also returned to loving America.
was the name of the paper called a coon in kenya?
Well, then, what now?
O’Donnell will win, for one simple reason:
Coons is a vote for the 0bama agenda.
O’Donnell deprives 0bama of that vote.
When it comes down to it, that’s what matters in the voting booth.
He looks like Opie (Ron Howard) with a little more hair
This jackanapes is 11 points ahead in the polls? From the looks and the sound of him by next week at this time he’ll be 11 points behind and gasping for air.
Flaming progressive who went to Amherst College. That was all I needed to know!
Interesting, all the talk about Kenya, I must say!
That sentence makes zero sense. So, his experiences in Kenya, where he observed severe poverty and the attitude of the wealthy, those experiences led him to believe there were not "boundless opportunities" in the US, in comparison to Kenya?
What any rational person observed in Kenya would have convinced them that opportunities in the US were boundless in comparison. Sounds like just another self-loathing, guilt-ridden white leftist of the sort that has done so much damage to US already.
I’ve read and Christine O’Donnell said today in an interview, that several weeks ago she led Coons in the polls, and only fell behind him after the Republicans ran their smear campaign against her, the smears Karl Rove kept repeating last night.
Or, as the saying goes...."being mugged".
Seven years before he went to Kenya, I had worked for a half-year in Commie China. I saw up close and personal the oppression, tyranny, thought control and destruction of human spirit under Communism. I came back changed, too — even more strongly conservative and a firm believer in America and her potential.
He claims he went as a conservative and returned as a marxist. Others discovered the destruction of marxism and came back champions of liberty.
He’s a despciable putz.
...such as seeing the bottom line on your 1040 over a span of 10 or 12 years.
You would think that this article and Reid calling Coons his peg would be enough to make him unelectable even in Delaware.
Poor Coons only dreamed (in vain) about snuggling and did not win. Next chapter: November 2, 2010: A humiliated Coons is defeated by O'Donnell and stops appearing in daylight.
In the United States a Kenyan can be elected and sworn in as POTUS and no one who stays in Kenya can do that!
He wasn’t really a conservative. He simply regurgitated the conservatism of his environment growing up, and then started to regurgitate the leftism of his new environment on campus.
Another Democrat who hates America.
It is not an intellectual transformation. It is simply a need to be one of the herd.
Check the date of the article.
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