It's the end of summer vacation rush, and the Obamas have left the District! Destination: Martha's Vineyard, of course. In a report from the state-run Associated Press, the Obama family is seeking a respite there from the heated politics of health care reform and budget deficits found in Washington, D.C. Martha's Vineyard has developed the dubious image as America's version of Russia's Black Sea resorts. Like Aspen, Colorado has become for well-heeled snow skiers, the small Massachusetts community is a summertime mecca for political and entertainment industry glitteratti. Where else can you find Bill Clinton, Ted Danson, or Carly Simon at any given time? Add to that list the Obama family, where they will be staying at the private Blue Heron Farm 28-acre estate that rents for $35,000 per week. In all fairness, the Obamas are paying for their accommodations themselves, while tax monies are used for Secret Service detail and White House staffers. This division of costs is customary for presidential retreats. What ever the cost the Obamas choose to pay for a family vacation is their business; and, it is not the point of this discussion. What is in question is an underlying attitude of privilege that drives the occupants of the White House in everything they do.
Byron York of the National Review followed Michelle Obama's campaign stump appearances throughout the state of Ohio in February of 2008. It was in the small town of Zanesville, typical of many struggling towns throughout the region, where Obama infamously whined about the costs of piano and dance lessons for her offspring. As a point of perspective for Obama's comments, consider that the median household income for Zanesville in 2004 was $37,192.[1] Furthermore, York reported that Obama exhorted the assembled to eschew ambitious, high-paying careers in corporate law and hedge-fund management, in favor of careers in "helping people," such a nursing and teaching. "Those are the careers that we need, and we're encouraging our young people to do that."[2]
Fine advice from yet another elitist who purports to connect with the little people, but in turn despises their culture and the American way of life that gave her so much. And, what makes Michelle an expert in the types of jobs and careers needed by the nation? If she truly wanted to be inspirational, she would have exhorted the assembled women to seek whatever career their God-given talents and abilities allowed them to achieve. Obama could have added a pledge that the federal government would lower taxes, reduce regulations on business owners, and maximize freedom of opportunity by getting out of their way. Instead, we witness the ever-present guilt and resentment secretly possessed by the elitists over their comparative personal wealth.
(continued)
Telling, too, is Michelle's repeated reference to 'White' cultural and social structures. Rather than express a certain gratitude for a country that has painfully excised social barriers to persons like herself, and have made enormous opportunities for success available, Mrs. Obama chooses instead to continue to identify with the pathetic, tired racial victimhood that most of America has rejected. Oh yes, it is all very cathartic to wring one's hands from supposed betrayal of imagined group identity. It is an entirely different thing to take that golden apple of opportunity and run with it. Certainly, Michelle is not alone in what she believes to be her Faustian bargain. Hollywood and the nation's capital are infested with those who gladly revel in the abundance of our culture, but despise the time-honored institutions that made their revelry possible. The manifestation of that internal angst is liberal guilt, through policy and cultural pronouncements uttered to assuage the guilt of personal abundance. We see and hear entertainment personalities routinely, who like Michelle, expect the great unwashed multitudes in 'fly-over' country to do as they say, not as they do. They imagine that the raw wealth they've accumulated gives them special dispensation to bloviate on matters dear to their uninformed world view. Non-incandescent light bulbs! Kyoto Protocol! Electric cars! Universal health care!
What they and Michelle fail to realize is that Americans see through the blatant hypocrisy of their mandates. It is the Al Gores of this world who ride chartered jets around the earth proselytizing the masses on the religion of global warming. It is the Baracks and Michelles, the Barney Franks and the Nancy Pelosis who seek to impose socialized health care upon the American people, all the while knowing that they and their families (well, not Barney's) will have special, high-quality medical care sequestered just for them. Byron York continued his observations of Michelle's condescending charge that citizens should pursue careers in the "helping industry."
So, while Michelle and her family enjoy a scheduled 10-day respite at their summer dacha on Martha's Vineyard, we proletarians will reflect upon multi-trillion dollar deficits, unwanted assimilation of private businesses into the federal machine, and the prospect of a Washington-dictated universal health plan that a majority of citizens utterly reject. She and Barack, on the other hand, can reflect on how horrible American society is, with its "predominantly White cultural and social structure," and how they can re-engineer it to more closely resemble the Marxist ideals that shaped their politically formative years not so long ago.
Lee A. Heilig
RAPTOR REPUBLIC
yesterday's ideals... tomorrow's promise
do as you're told, you prols! (posted 8/23/09)
[1] York, Byron: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmEyN2RkNzcwYzgyZDY2MDBiY2U5MjJlZGMwNDM2ODg=
[2] York, Byron: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmEyN2RkNzcwYzgyZDY2MDBiY2U5MjJlZGMwNDM2ODg=
[3] http://discardedlies.com/entry/?38365_
[4] York, Byron: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmEyN2RkNzcwYzgyZDY2MDBiY2U5MjJlZGMwNDM2ODg=
[5] from a story from The AP: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090821/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_vacation
“Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Right. Give us a big fat break.
“I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Why are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”
Princeton and Harvard educated Michelle Obama before a women's group in Zanesville, Ohio (2/2008)
"Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women in the audience, their first question for me is, 'How on earth are you managing it, how are you keeping it all together?'"
Michelle Obama
Gee, Michelle. It must be terrible. America is a mean country for making it so hard for you. -- editor
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Michelle Obama's 'friendly chat with the girls' in Ohio puts a face on liberal elitism. There is an internal struggle going on in the psyche of Michelle and so many like her that boils over the surface from time to time -- and they are unaware of it, even when it occurs. Michelle did her best(?) to identify with the 'ordinary' women of Zanesville, but her hypocrisy only looks more ludicrous the harder she tried. Her indulgence in her children with piano, dance, and other activities finds little resonance with women whose annual household income could never provide the niceties that Michelle lamented were so expensive. But, let's be clear here. I do not begrudge the Obamas for providing the nicer things in life for their children; and, I do not believe most Americans would. What is at work here is a duality of thought and action, of attitude and works. Michelle Obama's undergraduate writings at Princeton are very telling in the hatred she possesses for the very freedoms, the mechanisms, that exist in this country for the success she and her husband have enjoyed. A brilliant analysis of her seething rage is offered by a commenter to a website called discardedlies.com. In the commentary, "papijoe" offers:
It is obvious, though, with whom Michelle has cast her lot. If we are to take her Princeton anguish at face value, then her continued rise to American prominence must be excruciating. Does she share a similar malady of confidence that we've seen in say, General Colin Powell? A nagging malady that suggests that their individual scholastic or professional access and achievements were the result of benevolent forces beyond their control, affording them unfair advantages not enjoyed by more deserving souls?
Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. But his wife's anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.
Mrs Obama averred that she could not recall the contents of the thesis she composed in 1985, but that cannot be quite true, for it is a poignant cry from the heart. It explains her controversial outburst during the campaign to the effect that she felt proud of her country for the first time in her adult life in 2008, after "feeling so alone" in her "frustration" and "disappointment" at America.
Princeton both humiliated her and corrupted her, Michelle Vaughn Robinson complains in an undergraduate prose that is all the more touching for its clumsiness. By condescending to the young black woman from a Chicago working-class family, the liberal university made Michelle feel like an outsider. Worse, by giving her a ticket to financial success, Princeton caused her to feel that she was selling out to the institutions she most despised.
Michelle's ambivalence towards Princeton, and by extension towards America, has the makings of a tragedy of the sort found in the novels of Theodore Dreiser or F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fatal compromise in pursuit of status. Young Michelle felt she was betraying "lower class Blacks" by assimilating:
Nonetheless, she was drawn moth-like to the flame of success:
... the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.
At the same time, however, it is conceivable that my four years of exposure to a predominantly White, Ivy League University has instilled within me certain conservative values. For example, as I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates - acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals after Princeton are not as clear as before. [3]
Harvard and Princeton. Many people would take issue with Michelle's assertion that these universities are capable of inculcating "conservative values," as she states. These two institutions particularly are notorious for coddling radically leftist professors and intolerance toward divergent political discussion.
What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. [4] (That 'community organizing' is more lucrative than they lead you to believe, isn't it? -- ed.)
But will he play golf with Tiger Woods, as rumored?
Will he visit ailing Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.? (No plans yet, aides say.)
Will he attend the rumored wedding of former first daughter Chelsea Clinton on the Vineyard? (No comment from the White House; denials of a wedding from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.)
Will Michelle Obama again wear shorts that caught the eye of the fashion world? (No comment on her wardrobe from the first lady's East Wing.) [5]
These are the hard-hitting, penetrating questions from our vanguard journalism media - those courageous watchdogs for civil liberties and our personal freedoms. Rather than providing a lamp of truth to illuminate the real intentions and schemes of these people, the lapdog press are fixated on whether Michelle will wear those oh so stylish shorts that turned the fashion world on its ear. Does anyone need an airsickness bag yet?
