Where self awareness goes to die:
Alas, among the Obamas, self-awareness is not a strong suit, and this particular deficit isn’t limited to the first lady. This week, at Georgetown University, the president bemoaned the scourge of private schools, driven by “an anti-government ideology that disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”
One wonders: Did he feel that way as a teenager while in the bosom of the exclusive Punahou prep school in Honolulu? The Obama children, of course, attend Sidwell Friends, a private institution that costs $37,750 a year. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Sasha and Malia studied at the University of Chicago’s elite Laboratory School, where middle school tuition runs at $29,328.
Intellectual consistency is for the little people.
[Update a few minutes later]
“How can Obama object to private schools when his children attend one, he went to one?”
Your children are to be molded; his are to be groomed.
Go read what Obama actually said. He did not describe private schools as a “scourge”, or object to them.
Ooooooh! Obama never actually used the word “scourge,” therefore the fact he talked about them as if they were a scourge means nussink! Nussink at all!
No, he didn’t talk about private schools as if they are a scourge. The thing he objected to in that passage was withdrawing investment from public goods. Obama has consistently argued that people like him should pay higher taxes to fund investment in public goods.
Are you still clinging to the myth that Obama grew up poor and struggled through a hard knock childhood?
How could you listen to Obama speak his own words and come with a conclusion other than he thinks that people sending their kids to private school is an attack against society, directed toward the people who send their kids to public schools, motivated by malice?
He wasn’t saying people should pay higher taxes for better schools. He was attacking people who send their kids to private schools as being bigots, racists, and/or classist who don’t want to associate with public school kids.
This is a common attack from leftists. It is part of progressive dogma. It goes into their whole defense of what happened in Detroit and how the city’s decline had nothing to do with Democrat management of the city but rather white flight motivated by racism.
Are we just supposed to ignore Obama parroting progressive dogma? Are we supposed to suspend our disbelief and think that Obama’s comments are free of a specific ideological underpinning that is common and accepted among those on the left? Are we to be conned into ignoring the words that came out of Obama’s own mouth and the context in which they were spoken?
It’s like Joe the Plumber all over again…
Its fine for Obama to choose not to associate with the poor and common folk despite claiming he came from them, understands them, and speaks for them. It’s always the other who is the problem with Obama.
“Are we just supposed to ignore Obama parroting progressive dogma? Are we supposed to suspend our disbelief and think that Obama’s comments are free of a specific ideological underpinning that is common and accepted among those on the left? Are we to be conned into ignoring the words that came out of Obama’s own mouth and the context in which they were spoken? ”
Jim has. So he thinks you should too
Are you still clinging to the myth that Obama grew up poor and struggled through a hard knock childhood?
No. He didn’t grow up rich, or poor.
How could you listen to Obama speak his own words and come with a conclusion other than he thinks that people sending their kids to private school is an attack against society
Easy, I just read what he said. He said that disinvesting in public schools, public parks, etc. hurts society. Sending your kids to private schools, signing up for private gyms, etc. are ways you might insulate yourself personally from the cost of a decision to disinvest in public goods, but they aren’t necessarily the cause of that decision, as his own example illustrates.
At least you have given up the talking point that Obama grew up in poverty. The guy was raised in Hawaii by the VP of a bank and went to the best private schools all his life. He knows nothing about what it is like to be poor or middle class. He doesn’t know what the poor and middle class need any more than he knows about shovel ready jobs, the health insurance industry, or violence in big cities.
He certainly can’t speak to the motives of people joining gyms or sending their kids to private schools. Do you really think that people were exercising in the park one day, busting out sets on the weight bench, using the elliptical, or maybe just relaxing in the sauna when a bunch of poor and non-white people showed up and all of a sudden the park wasn’t good enough? WTF park has exercise machines and other amenities you find in gyms?
What about people who exercise at home? Are they divesting from society because they hate the poor and non-whites? Does Obama realize that poor people and non-whites use gyms too?
“are ways you might insulate yourself personally ”
You are using this racist and classist attack too. People are not going to gyms and sending their kids to private schools because they want to divest from society, because they hate the poor, or because they hate non-whites.
You know what keeps people out of parks? Having to pay the government to access public lands. Democrat protesters never have to deal with this because they don’t live by the laws the rest of us do. Where I live, if you want to access state land, land controlled by Democrats, you have to pay the state. Who uses public lands as a form of recreation? The poor.
Democrats don’t want the riff raff in public parks so they raise the price of accessing those lands. Rural people are targets and all of their activities will be taxed and fee’d. Want to fish? Get a license. Oh wait, what species? You need another license for that one. Want to have a boat? Get a license for you and one for your boat. Want to hunt? Get a hunting license and then another endorsement for each species you hunt. Want to do all of these traditional rural activities? Then you can spend hundreds in licenses every year or risk jail and thousand dollar fines.
It isn’t just the fines, fees, and licenses either. These activities are highly regulated. The poor people who engage in them are viewed as revenue generators for the state. They are regulated to the point of stupidity where if a kid reels a fish to the boat but can’t lift it over and the father grabs the line to help, he can get fined, imprisoned, and lose his license.
The rules applied to rural activities are more convoluted and complicated than the NFL, starting a business, or buying a house. And when we give the state more money, they don’t cut down trees in front of benches, they hire more park cops to write tickets. They don’t manage aquatic weeds or dredge silted up lake beds. They hire more fish cops to write tickets.
Want to ride a bike down the middle of a busy street? Don’t need a license. Want bike lanes? Don’t ask bicyclers to chip in any money.
“Easy, I just read what he said.”
You ought to try watching him speak rather than reading a partial transcript. He was making an emotional appeal using emotional attacks and you can’t see the emotion on his face or hear it in his voice by reading.
” but they aren’t necessarily the cause of that decision, as his own example illustrates.”
Obama said they were the cause. His own example is just one of ignorance, bigotry, hatred, and hypocrisy.
At least you have given up the talking point that Obama grew up in poverty.
I never argued that he did.
The guy was raised in Hawaii by the VP of a bank and went to the best private schools all his life.
He went to Punahou on scholarship. Being one of many VPs of a local bank doesn’t make you rich, it’s a middle-class job.
He knows nothing about what it is like to be poor or middle class.
Huh? He was middle-class for the first 30+ years of his life.
people like him should pay higher taxes to fund investment in public goods.
BS. People like him are John Kerry. What the President should do is make sure his employees pay the taxes they owe.
There’s nothing stopping him from charity. There’s nothing stopping you. It’s so much easier to force others to give up their money.
Jim, the money never gets to the teachers, that’s the problem. No matter how much money the school district gets, it will never help the teachers.
Just look at Chicago, land of Obama and Rahm and you have your proof of poor management. Look at spending per student and you’ll see that Washington DC should be pumping out little Einsteins.
“Jim, the money never gets to the teachers,”
It might get to the teachers in the form of raises, increased benefits, or in hiring new ones but it never gets to the students. The students never benefit. Increased funding rarely goes toward actually helping the students.
There’s nothing stopping him from charity.
No, and my understanding is that he gives a fair amount of money to charity. But we don’t have public schools, public universities, roads, parks, etc. because of charity. There isn’t a country in the world that successfully depends on charity to fund vital public goods.
Actually Jim, we do have many many parks thanks to charity. Same for colleges. Roads are often maintained due to charity too, ever adopted a highway?
Why move the goal posts here? No one is talking about getting rid of raids, parks, and schools. We are talking about Obama’s claims that people send their kids to private schools because they are racists who don’t want to associate with poor people.
When Obama speaks of divestment, he is speaking in terms of culture and emotion. He is claiming that sending kids to private schools is withdrawing from our culture and is motivated by malice. That parents who send their kids to private schools have no emotional connection to the wellbeing of public school kids and don’t care about them.
Just typical progressive stuff you hear from every Democrat these days. Obama can’t speak about any issue without saying people are motivated by hate and racism and no one asks him about the inconsistences between his actions and his words.
That Obama sends his own kids, and that he went through the private school system himself, should preclude him from making attacks like this but he knows no one in his party will call him on his BS but will defend the multimillionaire who went to elite private schools, who engages in the abuse of civil liberties, who profits off corruption, and who uses racist rhetoric when his words on these issues are in direct contravention to his actions.
You are free to fall for it but don’t expect the rest of us to and don’t pull an Obama and claim not being gullible is really being racist.
Is it just me, or is every moral appeal to sacrifice for some common good basically trolling for suckers? Most of them read to me anymore as: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had Y? Hey, you! Even though this basically amounts to forgoing good options/sacrificing your life/freedom/mind of your firstborn child – go make that sacrifice so that somehow Y might happen … someday.”
“Oh, and while you do that, we’ll be over here making sensible decisions for ourselves, laughing at you losers who fall for these appeals.”
Just like with the IRS, there is one set of rules that Democrats apply to others and no set of rules they apply to themselves. Seems a lot like what Democrats used to do back in the mid 1900’s.
That makes it sound like a long time ago though in reality, Jim was probably alive when the Democrats were doing this to black people. It is great they learned that you can’t attack black people like that but they still need to learn the other lesson that the policies are what make the behavior bad not just who the victims are.
Its only been a generation, they still need more time.
Tragedy of the Commons: white parents send their children to private schools to keep their children from being ripped to shreds by the NAM kids. Only a radical change of the system could change the status quo, but the teaching establishment would never allow that.
So, naturally, Obama blames parents.
I see this as typical Obama being a typical leftist. As always he attacks some outlandish straw-man argument in order to make himself appear morally superior. Secondly, he displays the leftist fallacy that if one group of people become wealthy they are obviously doing it at the expense of another group of people who become poorer. They believe there is a pie of wealth that can only be divide up so many ways before it will all run out. But new wealth is created all the time but not primarily by, “the lucky few”, as the president would have you believe but rather by hard working, eager, and intelligent people that bring new products and services to fruition.
” . . . an anti-government ideology that disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.” Wow, Il Dufe is spouting the party-line so robotically you’d think he was Baghdad Jim. (Wait a minute–has anyone seen the two of them together at the same time?)