The Distinctions

 

At the core of any political position is a set of beliefs.

It is quite vogue today to say that a politician is not ideological, which is odd given that ideology is at the core of ones views.    On this page we explore a few viewpoints on what is key for the administration in office. 

 

 

Out of Mani, One The philosophical roots of the Obama cult.    Link

"What's going on," she said, "is you have billionaires who are trying to buy this election because they understand that Gov. Romney will put in place policies that put more dollars into their pockets while taking dollars out of the middle class. And you have contributors to President Obama's campaign who are doing it because they want to grow the economy for everyone in a fair and equitable way."

 

Note carefully what is being asserted here. It's not just that Democratic ideas are morally superior to Republican ones or that Barack Obama is a better president, or a better man, than Mitt Romney or would be, or is. Rather, the claim is that whereas billionaires who support Romney are greedy and selfish, those who back Obama are altruistic--or, to the extent they have a selfish motive, it is a relatively benign one, a simple desire to be in the presence of the Dear Leader.

 

It's a leftist cliché that money corrupts politics. These leftists, however, believe that their politics somehow purifies money--that writing a check to Obama for America is an act of moral money-laundering.

 

This makes sense of the disconnect between Obama's largely uplifting 2008 campaign and his unrelentingly vicious 2012 one. Then, he presented himself as "the Ideal," the bringer of "hope and change" whose promise was "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

 

What won him the election was that the voters were as "opposed to the actual" as he was. But they didn't want fundamental transformation, just peace and prosperity, which he has manifestly failed to deliver. This time around, he's still running as "the Ideal" opposed to "the actual," but he's lashing out and blaming others because he is constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures in office, which he may not even perceive as failures. What difference does it make if unemployment is the 5.2% his advisers promised or the 8.2% it actually is when you've got a country to fundamentally transform?

 

 

An excerpt from Atlas Shrugged is pertinent and even predicted the quote "you did not build that":

“He didn't invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Rearden.  He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his?  Why does he think it's his invention?  Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

 

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn't anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

 

- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

 

 

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