RANDOM THOTS

The Random Thots truffle hound was sniffing among the moss and leaves and uncovered this profound piece of work by Dorothy Rabinowitz writing for the Wall St Journal nearly a year ago. We can only present edited excerpts in this post. We recommend you click the link at the end and read the whole article.

The Alien in the White House
There should have been nothing puzzling about [Obama] to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion.

Those qualities to be expected in a president [are] a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with [ ] his birthplace…

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill [finding] no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America’s attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judiciary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, [ ] that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. “People have different reasons” he finally answered—a response he repeated three times.

[ ] Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, [] compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor, during a human-rights conference held in China this May. [The comparison is absurd. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, ordered every Japanese resident, man woman and child, to be taken from their homes and placed in fenced-in internment camps for the duration of the war. Following the 911 attack on the World Trade Center, President Bush didn’t intern anyone and took great pains to defray citizens from retaliation against Muslims.]

It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere…but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally.

To read the full article paste the following URL into your address bar (sorry, the link is not working normally).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703302604575294231631318728.html