Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
dirtbag
climber
|
|
DT, I don't get tired of those t-mobile ads!
|
|
apogee
climber
|
|
Me, either. If AT&T's acquisition means I get to see that hottie all the more, I'm good with it.
|
|
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
|
|
Republicans...Please explain why you expect so much from Obama when you didn't give a sh#t what Bush was doing...? Why are your panties all dry and bunched up...? You watched America going down the tubes but remained silent when Bush performed his miracles..? Nothing has changed much with Barry but you republicans howl like a bunch of self righteous , slighted chimps... Is this yet another Republican double standard or is it just an angry crowd of wankers pissing in the wind..?
|
|
apogee
climber
|
|
Hotter than Carly
Edit: rj, with all due respect, we're postin' the hotties right now...
|
|
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
|
|
Carly Folkes...! Thanks Donald...!
|
|
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
|
|
Sorry App Ogee...I can dig it..! Not talkin bout shaft..
|
|
rottingjohnny
Sport climber
mammoth lakes ca
|
|
Donald..You spelled Foulkes wrong...You must have used the Canadian version...? Getting my mind right...?
|
|
Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
|
|
Did somebody say "Hotter than Carly"? How could that be?
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
i know you libs think shelby steele isn't really black because he thinks for himself, but...
Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism
Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline
By SHELBY STEELE
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.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.
Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
Duuuuuuuuuude!!!!!!!!!!!!!
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
he should just shut up.
Maybe you should just shut up, step out of the way, and let folks try to solve problems.
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
Jeff, you do not have the intellect to factually debate a high school kid.
You know only vague, unsupported talking points.
You are THE prototypical modern day Republican: incredibly ignorant, void of any depth,
and capable only of regurgitating shallow nothingnesses.
You offer NO solutions to any problems, and stand behind a political party who's fiscal
policies have driven this country into record high deficits and exploding national debt.
Everyone on this forum is tired of your childish schtick, you have zero credibility.
How ever did YOU beat out 40 million other sperm and get there first?
You really ARE a dumb fuk.
|
|
Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
|
|
More on idiot Obama's disastrous socialism:
The collapse also exposed the folly of stimulus programs that venture too far downstream into areas where governments are trying to pick winners, he said. Solyndra had received a $535 million federal loan guarantee.
"I
think this is a leading indicator that there is going to be a lot of disappointment about (public) investments in downstream renewable energy that were touted as building new sectors that would create thousands of jobs," Borenstein said.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/top-stories/ci_18798500
And now he wants to make another speech/proposal on "jobs", he should just shut up.
The evil one
This is an interesting concept.
One often hears about all the money wasted on the NASA moon program, how it would be the height of idiocy to try to go to mars. The counter argument is always, "look how much technological gain we've made from that", the same from the advanced weaponry research, etc. All of that is financed by the gov't.
No one ever wants to look at the efficiency of the research: how many things did NOT work, how much money got spent on things that did NOT pan out. Space blankets, pocket laser pointers, freeze-dry backpacking food, whiz-bang stuff. Wow?
How much did this really matter?
So now we look at one program, and it's attack city? Shut down the defense dept!
|
|
Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
|
|
Tough problem? Like Osama bin Laden?
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
hilda solis, barry's sec of LABOR has a new car--a chevy suv (and, no, it's NOT a hybrid):
"What better example could I set if I encouraged my staff to go and purchase and seek how we could acquire a vehicle that would for me would send a signal that we're for supporting our American workers, American-made products, fuel efficient as well," she told the Monitor's Dave Cook, who provided this video of her answer.
uh, madam secretary, umm...er...the chevy equinox is made in CANADA by CANADIAN workers
these people are idiots
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
Obama IS the President.
Obama beat the crap out of 59 times on Meet The Press media darling John McCain.
Obama WILL beat the crap out of whomever the Repub. nominee is and go another four.
Obama has ALREADY "WON", and YOU, Fattrat, do nothing but "lose" for your candidates.
---
YOU, Jeff, are THE prototypical "conservative": NO solutions to any problems.
You are factually ignorant and could not debate a high school kid.
But mostly your brain is ruled by "fear", fear of change of any kind, fear of progress,
fear of your own ongoing "failures", fear of being "wrong".
You have the intellect of a child.
Fuking GROW UP will you?
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!