Nidra Poller, who is my partner in crime on the Great Reverse Shlep Tour, wrote this oped piece for Atlas readers.
I have always said the greatness of the country is the common man. "The individual will save this nation". If history has talk us anything, its that the individual can change the course of human history. Despite Obama's and his cultists contempt, the very idea of America, the birth of this nation was the rights of the individual, not the collective, not the state -- it was ..... Joe.
Nidra gets it too. Although she is an expat living in Paris (fo decades now), she is distinctly American and love her very American perspective from a European perch. Joe the Plumber, Sarah the Governor, and other common folk
Nidra Poller
October 19, 2008
The chance encounter between Barack Obama and a commoner—Joe the Plumber—not only exposed the Hope & Change candidate’s plan for redistribution of wealth, it also revealed his attitude toward the ordinary guys he has pledged to serve.
Leftists everywhere love the wretched of the earth…as long as the poor stay poor and the downtrodden downtrodden. As we see by Barack Obama’s reaction to the uppity Ohio plumber, the wretched are supposed to know their place. The Democratic candidate is splurging millions on ads to show how much he’ll do for the working man & woman but the sight of a real guy, who would like to make his way into a higher tax bracket without getting taxed back down to where he came from, threw him off balance. He blurted out his true intention of spreading the wealth around. More like spreading it thin, no?
Senator Obama lectured Joe on the spot, explaining (what do plumbers know?) that his success would be all the more acceptable if those coming up behind him could also succeed. Obama was too heady with ideology and ambition to understand that Joe is that guy coming up behind. Now Obama’s dissing him. “Who ever heard of a plumber that makes 250,000?” Obama’s minions are furious with Joe for tricking their idol into spilling his socialistical beans. They went and dug up the dirt on Joe. “His name is not really Joe,” they hissed. Voters beware: under an Obama administration first names will come first, middle names will stay in the middle, and last will not be least…
Joe got the same treatment meted out to another uppity commoner, VP candidate Sarah Palin. The aristocracy of liberated feminists is red in the face with rage at this woman who does not respect their etiquette, speaks like a hick, lets her fertility all hang out, and did not ask their permission to rise to a position of power. She can’t be intelligent because she doesn’t fit their bill. Barack Obama is allowed to play with a whole range of accents from street to Ivy League, but Palin is trashed for being authentically authentic.
Europeans have a long tradition of contempt for commoners. In a way, they consider all Americans upstarts who belong in the kitchen and the garage. In France, the far left revolutionary Olivier Besancenot, who will have no truck with capitalism, speaks more like a professor than the mailman he claims to be. President Sarkozy, another uppity outsider, is mocked for his infradig accent and occasional spontaneous outbursts. Countries, too, can lose their capital of sympathy. Way back in the 70s French Leftists dressed in drab Mao suits and shabby Chinese sandals and gave the little red book equal play with Les Fleurs du mal but they don’t like China anymore. Too rich, too pushy, too… well… bourgeois. Today their hearts go out to the poor Tibetans. But they will drop Tibet in the blink of an eye if ever it becomes free and prosperous.
As for the refundable tax credit Obama is promising to 95% of American workers, we have a gadget like that in France, introduced by the Socialists in 2001. It’s called the “prime pour l’emploi.” The taxpayer who earned a pittance at a full time job declares the extent of his underpaid misery and receives, in exchange, a small check from the government. President Sarkozy has promised to do away with this and other consolation prizes and start a real economy. Unfortunately the global financial crisis is thwarting his ambitious plans for stimulating economic growth but he is trying to stick to the principle. And the Socialist opposition sticks to its own: every time purchasing power falters, they cry for bigger and better “primes pour l’emploi.” Marxist economics dies hard in France. The underlying assumption is that money, which is inherently evil, can be purified if it passes into the hands of the government from which it will be… redistributed.
A thick coating of charitable intentions hides a perverse determination to disconnect rewards from effort. Doctors who have spent years to qualify for a difficult profession have to haggle with the social security administration to get a 1-euro raise per consultation, while the Socialists demand big salary increases for unskilled workers and generous benefits for the chronically unemployed and the legions of illegal aliens. A recent proposal to offer students government-guaranteed loans was met with indignation from the main student unions. They want subsidies, not loans!
It is hard to imagine that Americans would willingly choose a president who would stifle the very dynamism that President Sarkozy is striving to develop in a welfare state economy suffering from 30 years of neglect and debilitating double digit unemployment. Undue concentration on the economy at this stage of the campaign is obscuring life and death foreign policy issues and shielding Barack Obama from the scrutiny his past and present alliances impose, but the encounter with Joe the Plumber—Everyman—revealed, beyond the sneaky share-the- wealth program, a deep contempt for the self-made in the U.S.A. men and women.
Posted by Pamela Geller on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 05:11 PM in Leftist MEDIA JIHAD aligned with Terror Force, Nidra Poller Exclusive: Baked on the Premises, WHITE HOUSE: THE RACE TO NOVEMBER, Women for Sarah Palin | Permalink
Nidra Poller
nidrapol@gmail.com
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