The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
‘You Don’t Want to End Up Like Me, Pulling a Cart’
“Horses Motivate Kids to Learn to Read”–headline, Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), Jan. 22
Help Wanted
“Hamas Asserts Control in Gaza, Seeks ‘Collaborators’ “–headline, Reuters, Jan. 21
The Obama Cult
Writing in the Province, a Vancouver, British Columbia, newspaper, columnist Ethan Baron describes some creepy Canadians as they watch President Obama’s inauguration:
Rapt eyes shone as Obama spoke with stunning eloquence of re-building America. When the president delivered perhaps his most impressive rhetorical offering, telling the world’s tyrants, “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” many in the audience gasped audibly at the sheer power of his language.
I haven’t seen a group of people wearing their fervour so completely, and so uniformly, since a guy I used to work with brought me to visit ….
We liked that line too. But this degree of adulation for a politician is rather unsettling. And it’s not only Canadians. Check out the “I Pledge” video, produced by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, which Michael Graham describes in the Boston Herald:
When rocker Anthony Kiedis says “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama,” it seems humorously over the top.
But then Moore stares intently into the camera and announces “I pledge to be a servant to our president,” a pledge echoed by all the celebs who promise to become “the change that we seek.”
A pledge of allegiance to Obama? I don’t care if you’re a Republican, Democrat or a Vegan Evangelical Anarchist–that’s just plain creepy.
It’s also odd coming from a group of people who’ve previously shown little enthusiasm for pledging allegiance to our flag, much less a previous president.
“This isn’t patriotism,” Graham observes–and he’s right. Patriotism is the love of one’s country, not a devotion to any particular officeholder. We would venture to say that patriotism demands a degree of respect for the presidency, and for the man who holds the office at any given time, whether or not one admires the president or finds his policies congenial.
Obama is our president too, and we wish him well. But this cult phenomenon is the flip side of the hatred that the left too often displayed during the Bush years. As long as it remains the province of a political fringe, and as long as Obama is wise enough not to let it go to its head, it is likely to be harmless. But history offers numerous cautionary tales about the dangers of treating politicians as objects of worship.
‘The World’ Against Obama
Bill Neely of ITV News reports from Tehran in London’s Daily Telegraph that street mobs in the Islamic Republic did not exactly sound like Demi Moore:
Out on the streets, thousands chanted his name. But only to yell “Death to Obama.” They didn’t wait for the inauguration to deliver their verdict on Obama, dragging his portrait through the streets of Tehran and then, three hours before he took the oath of office, setting fire to it alongside a picture of George Bush.
Hardly a good start and all because of Obama’s long silence on the Gaza war.
“All because”? Really? Neely continues:
It was the Supreme Leader’s Special Representative though, who put it most graphically and with evident disgust. “Obama’s is the hand of Satan in a new sleeve,” explained Hossein Shariatmadari. “The Great Satan now has a black face.” His words have weight because he speaks for Ayatollah Khamenei, the man who makes the big decisions in Iran; on foreign policy and all matters nuclear. His fingernails have regrown since they were pulled out by the Shah’s torturers thirty years ago and Shariatmadari now edits Iran’s most hardline newspaper. “Obama won’t make any big change in American policy towards Iran,” he told me. “Because he has little room for change in anything. And we won’t change our goal; we are determined to have nuclear power but not nuclear weapons.”
Is Iran seeking nuclear weapons “all because” of Obama’s silence on Gaza? …
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