Posted on 07/18/2008 11:18:04 AM PDT by Trueblackman
The phrase, “Let them eat cake,” is often attributed to Marie Antoinette, but some believe that Jean-Jacques Rousseau also used the phrase when writing about a French Aristocrat insensitive towards peasants who could not afford bread at the time.
Whoever quoted the line is for history to figure out, but it would seem that this is the same bit of advice that Americans are getting from Congressional Democrats daily.
While Americans struggle daily with the high price of gasoline and demand that Congressional Leaders and the President do something long lasting to address the problem in poll after poll. Congressional Democrats would rather lecture the public on conservation tactics and the need for the usage of public transportation, while tooling around town in taxpayer funded Lincoln Town Cars or SUV with the air conditioner on full blast, than do something that would endanger their chance to expand their slim majorities in Congress. Simply put, the American People must suffer, so Democrats can gain absolute power in 2008!
For the middle and poor classes, the New Direction Congress of 2006 has led American kick and screaming down a bumpy and dusty dirty road towards the ditch of “personal economic ruin.” Some Americans are even turned to crime or pawning personal treasures to simply buy a tank of gas. When Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Democrats came to power in January 2007, gas price stood at $2.20 per gallon in the 2 years since gas prices have nearly doubled to nearly $4.40 in some areas. Yet the most that this “Do Nothing Congress” could over the American People were 50+ fruitless investigations, a windfall price gimmick, that oil companies would pass on to the customer and political smears.
Congressional Members lease luxury cars and SUV’s for 1000’s dollars monthly on our dime, gassing up for free at the Capitol Hill Police Gas Pump located at the Capitol Hill Power Plant and remember that in 2007 newly crowded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanded the Air Force to provide her with a Boeing 757, so that she could fly non-stop cross country with her family, staff and supporters in pure luxury, yet we are lectured daily on how we need to deal with the high prices of oil and gas.
I never professed to be the smartest person in the world, but I do know that “If you produce more of a product that the price of that product will drop to market value.
OPEC, the Iranians and Hugo Chavez currently have Americans over a barrel and love the fact that they can demand any price they want thru production cuts, speculation in demand and saber rattling, while receiving daily assurances that the current leadership in Congress are bought and paid for toadies of the Socialist Environmentalists who use disinformation and scare tactics(such as man-made global warming) in their madding quest to turn America in to a over regulated government mandated Socialist Utopia.
Despite the nightly disinformation campaign by Environmentalists and their puppets, America has enough oil reserves to make us truly energy independent, while funding alternate energy technologies for the next 200 years.
The fact of the matter is that Environmentalists and Politicians have convinced the American People that oil is the big enemy and that the same technologies that allowed Americans to go to the Moon in the 1960’s and 70’s does not exist that could allow us to extract our own nature resources with little impact to the environment. Simply put, “America can send a probe to Mars to look for water, but at the same time we can’t get a drop of oil out of the ground without spilling it!” Come on who would believe that mindset? If Americans believe that we are too stupid and do not have the technology to extract oil safely, then we do deserve to eat cake and for those of you who don’t know the cake I speak of is not the sugary snack you make think of it. Cake was the name of the burned dough that collected around the edges of cake pans as the yeast rose during baking in old France.
Americans should not have to settle for cake crumbs from a “ Power Hunger Do Nothing Congress” that only serves Socialist Special Interests, Hollywood Elites and props up 3rd world tin pot dictators with oil reserve, who then take a money and fund terrorism worldwide, the last part alone should give Congress reason enough to lift the ban on drilling.
Excellent! You are right on!
The Congressional DemonRATS just plain aren’t getting the message. A million mad average Americans march, with tar, feathers, pitchforks and torches might be what is needed to get their attention. Nothing else seems to get across to them, not even the lowest rating of a Congress in poll taking history. They don’t even know we exist....except when election time comes. I hope the real American people revolt via the ballot box and throw out them all out on their ear in November.
would be nice if everyone that claims they are ticked off would do that. but alas as the results come in they old faces have remained.
I am continuously amazed that her constituents are so blind to this woman's total hypocrisy. She obviously sees herself as ruling over them, and they must like it that way. Fools.
Be careful what you ask for. That level of arrogance and stupidity is very dangerous.
I'll not be surprised if, eventually, they quietly allow drilling to expand, while continuing to say "No, no, no, can't, can't, can't", if they think they can get away with it. It will drop the price of gas, and they can still take credit for it.
Bump your draft. We need an artist/cartoonist to get Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi dressed as Louis and Marie—
Excellent article! Interestingly enough, I just made a similar point in a Letter to the Editor of my local paper, printed last Sunday. Unfortunately, I had to keep it under 300 words, so that really limited me. What I wrote is below. If there are any ideas in it you might be able to use for your Op-Ed, I’d be honored for you to use them.
Fletcher J
*****
When told that the people of France had no bread to eat and were starving, Queen Marie Antoinette was falsely accused of saying “Then let them eat cake”. The rumor eventually cost the Queen her head. Now Americans are getting the same treatment from congress over the price of fuel, but this time it’s no lie.
Solutions to this foreseeable energy crisis have been blocked by Democrats for decades. No new gasoline refineries. No drilling for oil in ANWR or off-shore. No new nuclear power plants. Nothing that would reduce fuel costs for working Americans. Even wind farms aren’t excluded; Ted Kennedy blocked one off the coast of Massachusetts, saying indignantly “That’s where I sail!”. Ted says to American workers: Let Them Eat Cake.
Elitist Democrats want high gasoline prices. High prices reduce gas usage by we commoners, and the elitists think that will save mother earth. Al Gore called for higher fuel taxes in his book “Earth in the Balance”. Meanwhile, his own home burns through twenty times the electricity of an average American home. Al Gore says to working Americans: Let Them Eat Cake.
Barack Obama was asked about the high price of gas recently, and he said: “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Read that quote carefully. Mr. Obama doesn’t care that gas is $4 per gallon; he just wishes we had gotten to $4 a little slower. Given this position, will he do anything about the price of gas if he’s elected President? Obama is just another elitist Democrat that wants you to save the planet by riding a bicycle to work like some third-world peasant, while he rides in the presidential limo. Obama’s message to working Americans? Let Them Eat Cake.
Sadly—this is true. Most Americans don’t look at much more than the 30 second commercials and the sound bites. They just vote for what is simplest—like keep the old people in. Its a habit we need to break if this country is to survive. Maybe Obama can teach us something.
Where are your Op-Eds published?
Didn’t someone’s head get cut off for saying the same thing a while back???
IIRC...
We’re not entirely sure who said “Let them eat cake,” but we can tell you that it wasn’t Marie Antoinette. This flippant phrase about consuming pastry is commonly attributed to the frivolous queen in the days leading up to the French Revolution. Supposedly, she spoke these words upon hearing how the peasantry had no bread to eat. But biographers and historians have found no evidence that Marie uttered these words or anything like them.
Our old pal Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope explains the quotation was first written by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Confessions. Actually, Rousseau wrote “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” which essentially means “let them eat a type of egg-based bread” (not quite cake, but still a bit extravagant). Rousseau claimed that “a great princess” told the peasants to eat cake/brioche when she heard they had no bread.
But Rousseau wrote this in early 1766, when Marie Antoinette was only 10 years old, still living in her native Austria and not yet married to King Louis XVI. So it’s highly unlikely that Marie uttered the pompous phrase. Perhaps Rousseau invented them to illustrate the divide between royalty and the poor — which is certainly how the phrase has been used ever since.
However, “Let them eat brioche” isn’t quite as cold a sentiment as you might imagine. At the time, French law required bakers to sell fancy breads at the same low price as the plain breads if they ran out of the latter. The goal was to prevent bakers from making very little cheap bread and then profiting off the fancy, expensive bread. Whoever really said “Let them eat brioche” may have meant that the bakery laws should be enforced so the poor could eat the fancy bread if there wasn’t enough plain bread to go around.
A recent biographer claims that “Let them eat cake” was actually spoken by Marie-Therese, wife of France’s Louis XIV, 100 years before Marie Antoinette, but we couldn’t find anything online to corroborate this. Ultimately, we will probably never know who uttered this infamous phrase.
This is perfect, Trueblackman. I have bookmarked this.
Can I use your train of thought to relay in my weekly e-mails to Pelosi, Reid and Feinstein? Boxer is such a lost cause that my e-mails to her is: Drill Here, Drill Now...Damn It!
Good Job.
Good job, True.
Pity no one will ever read it...
I always had heard the “cake” was the burnt on residue left in the ovens after something was baked...thus what ever had bubbled over was caked on the oven floor
Yep, Drill or get off the Hill!!
i’m afraid there is much that we do not know of obama and i am not sure i want to find out more about him. what really irks me is the people that only vote along party lines no matter who the person is or what they stand for. i for one will look at the candidates and what they stand for and if the better person is in the other party i will vote for him. people just have to smarten up if like you said this country is to survive.
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