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AJ
DiCintio
Hope Run Amok
February 5, 2010
Among the poems Emily Dickinson wrote
under the heading "Life” is one about hope, which the poet imagines as a "little
bird” that sings to her even "in the chillest land/And on the strangest sea,”
never asking "a crumb” in return.
Well, there’s no disputing the poem’s
message because the irrepressible, selfless nature of hope is
inarguable.
However, it must be said that the Power
who has given us hope asks us to use His gift judiciously by employing
our reason and experience to assess not just possibility but
probability, no matter how painful or unpleasant the exercise.
Now, all this business is on my mind
today as a result of "The Perot Option,” a piece which David Brooks
opens as follows:
"There is a specter haunting America:
the specter of a saner, updated version of Ross Perot. . . lurking out
there, ready to ride the free-floating anger and distrust of Washington
[caused by selfish politicians who have] put the country on a highway to
a fiscal crisis [with] no exit ramps.”
It’s not, however, Brooks’ hope that a
new, improved, debt-condemning Ross Perot is actually "out there” that
is of concern.
No, the problem arises when an
embarrassingly hopeful Brooks asserts that Obama’s State of the Union
speech represents a "good start” in the president’s "reclaim[ing] the
mantle of the permanent outsider.”
And what a humdinger of a problem it is;
for the belief that Obama is capable of making a 180 with respect to
becoming an "outsider” who is a fiscally responsible, common sense agent
of change must, of necessity, be based entirely upon a foolish, perilous
hope.
After all, the simple truth about Barack
Obama, who recently proclaimed "I’m not an ideologue,” is that he has
been an ideologue of the hard left his entire adult life — in his
relationships with religious leaders (think Reverend Wright), political
strategists (think devotees of Alinsky), journalists (think Frank
Marshall Davis), social activists (think Bill Ayres), and political
figures (think big shots of the Chicago Machine and its branch in
Springfield.).
Of course, Obamaphants who feel a thrill
running up their legs even when their champion intones a sonorous "the”
will argue that Obama is a changed man since he was elected.
Trouble with that fawning lie is that it
shuts its mind to the following host of truths about the real President
Obama:
He ordered up a "stimulus” bill written
entirely by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid so that it could be stuffed with
$800 billion worth of the most rancid pork ever earmarked into law.
He socialized two of the nation’s auto
companies, cutting a very special deal for the union that helped send
those corporations under.
He worked with congressional Democrats
to provide a 10% "catch-up” increase in funding for Federal agencies and
to staff those agencies with additional employees who have sent Federal
employment numbers to record levels — while the rest of the country
suffers the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
He has tried to Federalize (not reform)
healthcare with an insanely expensive, madly unfair plan so full of
bureaucratic monstrosities and ugly payoffs to politicians, trial
lawyers, and unions that it has caused a political earthquake across the
fifty states.
He has sent the nation’s debt climbing
to levels so menacingly high that only Paul Krugman and his ilk aren’t
worried about the looming economic and cultural calamity that lies
ahead.
He has implemented policies regarding
national security and foreign affairs so dangerously dogmatic in their
devotion to the notions of the Pollyannish Left that they require enemy
combatants to be read their Miranda rights immediately upon being
captured and their trails to be held in Federal courts located in our
most crowded cities.
He has appointed to important Federal
positions radicals so far-left that they make the Radic-Libs of the
sixties look like Moderates.
Those are the truths that David Brooks
must ignore in a piece that ends with this message to the president:
"He’s out there — that saner Ross Perot.
He’s a-comin’. The country would be better off if it were you.”
What is there to say about such hope run
amok except to advise Mr. Brooks to think about the full wisdom of the
Yiddish proverb that observes, "If my grandmother would have had
testicles, she would have been my grandfather.”
On second thought, there is nothing
funny about where Obama is taking the country.
Therefore, it is far more appropriate to
suggest Brooks meditate deeply upon two other aphorisms, the first of
which was coined by the Romans:
Pardus maculas non deponit.
(The leopard does not change his spots.)
And the second by the quintessential
American named Ben Franklin:
He
that lives upon hope will die fasting.
About AJ DiCintio
A.J. DiCintio is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal. He first exercised his polemical skills arguing with friends on
the street corners of the working class neighborhood where he grew up.
Retired from teaching, he now applies those skills, somewhat honed and
polished by experience, to social/political affairs.
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