Mark Steyn - “The Obamateur Hour”
“When the going gets tough, the tough go campaigning. So, almost as if he were still running for office rather than actually running an office, the president arranges a photo-op or a town-hall meeting, where, for the moment, the hopeychangey shtick still plays. ‘I have an urgent need,’ a freeborn citizen of the republic (I use the term loosely) beseeched the president in Fort Myers this week. ‘We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.’
As Michelle Malkin commented of the urgent needer: ‘If she had [had] more time, she probably would have remembered to ask Obama to fill up her gas tank, too.’ Obama took her name — Henrietta Hughes — and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he won’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant associate secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be…
Someday soon this inaugural Obamateur Hour (as one of my correspondents, John Gross, calls it) will end and the ‘events’ phase will begin. Back last spring, some gloomy reflections of mine on multiculturalism prompted a reader to advise me to lighten up: ‘We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.’ A mere nine months later, the first part of that equation no longer seems quite so obvious…
America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality, or it can buckle its mandatory seatbelt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later . . .
Let’s not go there.”
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