Posts Tagged ‘America’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16K6m3Ua2nw

Beginning scene of the new HBO series The Newsroom explaining why America’s Not the Greatest Country Any Longer… But It Can Be.

The Europeans — and the American intellectuals who yearn to be European — have long believed that America was doomed. It goes way back. There was already a significant literature on the inferiority of Americans during the colonial period, replete with scientific proof: those who lived in North America were held to be shorter, weaker, and stupider than those who stayed put under the old regimes. In the view of the transatlantic intellectual elite, we never really had a chance.

Even though the American Revolution is the only durable success among the Big 3 — ours, the French, and the Russian — the intellectual elites on both sides of the Atlantic rarely admit that America is the only truly revolutionary country in the world, and they routinely reserve the term for Russians, Cubans, Iranians, and even Chinese. No matter that they are all failures, and that the only good news from those unfortunate countries is the result of the occasional leader — the great bridge player Deng Xiaoping, for example — who emulates American revolutionary principles.

Read more by Michael Ledeen at PJ Media

If we forget our basic ideals or shrug them off, we no longer deserve to be great.

Presidential elections are America’s season for serious chats around the national dinner table. The sick economy, health care and the scope of government are the main issues. But another is even more important. Who are we? What is the United States? Recently Gov. Mitt Romney urged us to return to “the principles that made America, America.” But too many of us don’t know what those are, or think they can’t work.

Read more by BY DAVID GELERNTER at Wall Street Journal

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama’s character, today’s left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-’60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America’s exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America’s greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

by Shelby Steele in The Wall Street Journal