Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Enamored of His Own Reflection

Or how Americans put a serial narcissist in the White House.

Some day when the historians are chronicling the national disaster that is this Administration, I wonder if someone will think to take note of the thousands, nay millions of times this president has used the word "I." It is difficult to recall any public figure so self-referential, so self-absorbed and self-satisfied as this president. And will the historians take particular note of the fact that rarely, if ever, have such a civilized and intelligent populace willingly granted so much power to such an unaccomplished individual. Nor one so economically ignorant.

Point in fact: the president's press conference on Monday where he remarked: "And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans." (emphasis mine)

What the president seems to forget, or perhaps never understood, is that he has the free will to donate that "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in extra income directly to that struggling parent. He doesn't need to wait for the IRS to come and get it and run it through the horrendously and inefficient grinder that is the government bureaucracy. He is free to do with what that money he doesn't need whatever he wants to. That was the whole idea of the American Revolution: the right to produce and earn and keep the fruits of our labor. A rejection of arbitrary taxes imposed by a distant and out of touch and self-absorbed monarchy...We seem to have become a reflection of all that we rejected and fought for over 200 years ago.

We seem to have come full circle.



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