The Omnipresent Leader
On Friday, I had the rare honor of appearing in the pages of the New York Times, apropos President Obama’s plans to beam himself into every schoolhouse in the land in the peculiar belief that Generation iPod will find this an enthralling technical novelty. As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”
Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler, the “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim: Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale
Close enough for Times work.
But, if the Times wants to play this game, bring it on. The Omnipresent Leader has traditionally been a characteristic feature of Third World basket-case dumps: The conflation of the man and the state is explicit, and ubiquitous. In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few weeks after the regime’s fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily taking down the huge portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall, I visited an elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly empty picture frames piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The education system’s standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids called Hassan and Amal — a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane — proudly holding up their portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of an Iraqi education:
“O come, Hassan,” says Amal. “Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, ‘Our beloved Saddam.’”
“I come, Amal,” says Hassan. “I come in a hurry to chant, ‘O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.’”
Pathetic, right?
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beentheredonethat Says:
Another ‘lazer guided bomb’ by Steyn and right on the bullseye. It’s going to be interesting to see after the ‘O’s address to Congress if his bullshit can still baffle the brains of the American public.
Posted on September 6th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Anna Keightley Says:
Talk about the hardest challenge to the American Constitution itself. It’s all intentional/planned..to solicit a public reaction.
Posted on September 6th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Mac Says:
Steyn doesn’t pull punches, does he? Good article!
Posted on September 7th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Cynapse Says:
Obama had made countless partisan hacks extremely rich through their rabble rousing. What are they going to do once they finally get their poor-stomping squared jawed cowboy back in office? The third-world comparison is some clever code language – Steyn at least has mastered that much.
Posted on September 7th, 2009 at 1:53 am