“This quote was translated into English from an article appearing in the Czech Republic as published in the Prager Zeitung of 28 April 2010
“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.”
“The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.
The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who
made him their president.””
Very true. And it is very possible the US will vote for him again.
Maybe it is time to go back to the land of my ancestors in the Czech republic.
Conservative author Willmoore Kendall once said (I'm paraphrasing), "Americans have their country in their hips." He meant that we have an inbred sense of how to judge and manage our national affairs. The ordinary citizen was never too theoretical about it. This visceral instinct for how things should go was operative well into the 1990's. It was enough to label Hillarycare "socialized medicine," and Americans' instincts kicked in and settled the debate. Hillarycare was sunk.
The Left, however, never gives up. Through the unrelenting efforts of the media and the national school system, the Left has eroded Americans' visceral, seemingly innate sense of how things should be run. They no longer have the country "in their hips." The moral and intellectual patrimony of whole generations seems to have been evaporated over the last 15 years, and now we face an upcoming generation that outwardly looks and sounds American, but inwardly may as well be Apache Indians--or Martians for that matter.
But it's not just the media and the Marxist professors; the religious beliefs that formed the moral consensus of the country are vanishing at an alarming rate. In Peggy Noonan's What I Saw at the Revolution, she tells a story about the Sunday morning talk shows. She was very exercised over some slander directed at Reagan, and asks a fellow speechwriter, "What will the electorate think when it hears these lies every Sunday morning?!" Her boss says, "Peggy, most of America won't hear any of these lies. On Sunday mornings, most of America is at church." Although most of America used to be sitting in church on Sundays, I wonder if that's true any more.
I suspect that one of the things driving the Santorum boomlet is a desire to retrieve something from that former time. And although I am deeply sympathetic to that urge, I think it's a futile gesture to elect Santorum in hopes that he will revive our vanishing moral consensus. You can't reinstate a widespread moral consensus simple by electing one individual who symbolizes it. Santorum is a decent man who practices what he preaches, but I don't think that's enough any more, if it ever was (BTW, I'm Catholic and believe in everything Santorum does, from the Triune nature of God right down to forbidding the pill). No, electing Santorum won't be enough. You need great men in the pulpits--no, holy, saintly men in the pulpits, and crazy, saintly listeners in the pews who act on what they hear.
Anyway, I've gone on too long. I simply pray that the people of this country can be jolted to their senses. We're not facing your garden variety crisis, but a civilizational one. That's probably why I follow the polls now with more foreboding than I ever did before. This post is probably too elaborate for a simple poll thread, but I don't have as much chance to read and respond to others these days. I hope this answer can be food for thought for you and others.