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Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up Post Date
Jul 05, 2008 6:07 a.m. Article Structure
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Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-upDisplaying mentions in this article, for full text please visit source. Independence Day weekend, and the pundits are uneasy. Clarence Page: A century ago the satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a conservative as "a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." Of course, he was being sarcastic, describing each side in terms used by its opponents. Patriotic conservatives prefer to think of themselves as preserving what’s good about America, while patriotic liberals aspire to make America better. Ambrose Bierce (1911): PATRIOT, n.
One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors. PATRIOTISM, n.
Combustible rubbish read to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. Bob Herbert: Symbols of patriotism have replaced the hard work and sacrifice required to keep a great nation great... We can build spectacular new stadiums for football and baseball teams (the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants and the Jets are all getting ready to move into staggeringly expensive new homes) but we can’t rebuild New Orleans or reconstruct the World Trade Center site destroyed almost seven years ago. Daniel Henninger: That World Trade Center thing? It’s all because no one is in charge. Dear reader, it’s all your fault for insisting on democracy. If Disney owned it, we’d have a finished building (okay, shaped like Mickey Mouse, but it’d be done, damn it, and with enough parking.) Where the hell are the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons when we really need them? Mike Bloomberg, I’m looking at you! Colbert King: Speaking of the good old days, Fredrick Douglass, 150 years ago, on race: "What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?" "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers," Douglass said, "is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me." This July Fourth, Douglass declared, "is yours not mine." Barack Obama in 2008: Racial strife, poverty and the political corruption revealed by Watergate, Obama said, were outweighed by the "joys of American life and culture, its vitality and its freedom." Patriotism, he said, is "more than loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people"; it is loyalty to American ideals and their proven capacity to inspire a better world. We’ve come a ways in 150 years. Gail Collins: The good old days? FTS. Independence Day in New York City was much like Baghdad after a big soccer game, with men racing outside to fire their guns into the air — or into another person if the casualty lists in the newspaper were any indication. Victor Davis Hanson: On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises. So as for that once in a generation foreign policy blunder in Iraq? And the hurting economy? This is the greatest country on earth, and you ought to get down on your knees and kiss the ground for the right to pay 6 dollar a gallon gas while the bank forecloses on your house. Washington at Valley Forge had no such opportunity, so make the most of it. Suck it up, and for God’s sake don’t blame the Republicans and elect a Democrat, or we’ll all be overrun by the Communists while we sleep, just like Seoul in mid-summer 1950.
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