President Caulfield

From Kevin Williamson on whether President Obama really doesn't much like his country:
There is a personality type common among the Left’s partisans, and it has a name: Holden Caulfield. He is adolescent, perpetually disappointed, and ever on the lookout for phoniness and hypocrisy. His is the sort of personality inclined to believe in his heart the declaration that “behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (He also believes that this is a quotation from Honoré de Balzac, whose works he has not read, when it fact it comes from Richard O’Connor’s The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur.) He believes with Elizabeth Warren that the economy is a rigged game based on exploitation and deceit rather than on innovation, productivity, and competition. He believes with Barack Obama that the only reason (e.g.) Staples does not pay its part-time associates more or schedule them for more hours is so that it can pad its executive pay and protect its “billions” in annual profits. (He believes that Staples, whose financials he has not read, makes “billions,” when in fact it does no such thing.) Say an admiring word about Steve Jobs and he’ll swear that there are four-year-olds working 169 hours a week in Chinese sweatshops producing iPods at the point of a bayonet. He believes that most people get into Harvard and Yale because they have influential parents (that’s the University of Texas, unfortunately), that rich Americans mostly inherit their money (in reality, about 15 percent of their assets are inherited, less than for middle-class families), that the U.S. goes to war abroad to enrich contractors at home, and that the entire history of Latin America must be understood through the prism of the United Fruit Company’s maneuverings in 1954. 
Give Holden Caulfield a television show and you’ve got Chris Hayes.

2 comments:

Grim said...

We never read Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager -- it wasn't banned, we just read other things -- and I've never gotten around to it.

I don't know the answer to the question of whether or not the President loves America, but I know he doesn't love the America I do. He's made that plain enough, often enough.

Anonymous said...

I remember that Michelle Obama had "never felt proud of this country" until her husband was either nominated or elected, I forget which.

"Course, she was raised on the Rev. Wright, who was slandering America every step of the way.

Both of the Obamas act like nothing has changed in this country since before 1963. These people are ignorant of both recent US history and world events.

Valerie