Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Why Emulate Them?

Have you noticed how Barack Obama acts like a European and seems to wish he was one? Of course he was treated like a rock star over there, seeing as how he’s more European than American on every meaningful measure you can think of. And it’s no wonder the MSM worships him, since it’s filled with likeminded elitists who think of Europe as sophisticated and idealistic while thinking of America as backward and oppressive.

Unfortunately for their worldview, however, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who had it right when he described that continent as “rich in the culture and arts, barren of all ideas.” Italian cuisine is delicious, French prose is mellifluous, and the onion-domed architecture of Russian cathedrals is strangely beautiful, but the reality of European life is not something we would ever want to duplicate. The vast majority of the continent is plagued by high unemployment, chronically stalled economies, and fertility rates so low it has become questionable whether many European societies will be able to sustain themselves.

Here in America, the standard of living is higher and the cost of living lower. And an overwhelming majority of Americans move up through the income percentiles during their lifetimes, whereas in Europe a much higher percentage spend their whole lives in the same economic class to which they were born. Consider that most people in the top fifth of U.S. earners started in the bottom fifth, and few who start in the bottom fifth remain there.

Plus, perhaps most striking, free speech is an alien concept on most European soil. After French actress Bridgette Bardot criticized this ritualistic slaughter of sheep by Muslim immigrants, she was prosecuted for “inciting racial hatred.” After British blogger Lionheart criticized Al Quadea’s growing influence in his country, he was arrested for “stirring up racial hatred.”

The United States is great precisely because it is not like Europe. Combine all the nations of Europe together and they still have not done nearly as much for human progress and individual freedom as the U.S. Yet virtually the entire MSM, and their wunderkind candidate Obama, and most disturbingly, millions of well-intentioned but ill-educated people who call themselves “liberal” because they’ve bought the lie that it’s a synonym for “good,” think we should abandon our path and follow Europe’s. I say: Why?

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