Exceptional nation?

Pat Buchanan writes at Taki's Magazine,

...every day for weeks, beginning with Hollywood king Harvey Weinstein, whose accusers nearly number in three digits, actors, media personalities and politicians have been falling like nine pins over allegations and admissions of sexual predation.

What is our civil rights issue, and who are today’s successors to the Freedom Riders of the ‘60s? Millionaire NFL players “taking a knee” during the national anthem to dishonor the flag of their country to protest racist cops.

And what was the great cultural issue of summer and fall?

An ideological clamor to tear down memorials and monuments to the European discoverers of America, any Founding Father who owned slaves and any and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen.

Stained-glass windows of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson have been removed from the National Cathedral. Plaques to Lee and George Washington have been taken down from the walls of the Episcopal church in Alexandria where both men worshipped.

But the city that bears Washington’s name is erecting a new statue on Pennsylvania Avenue—to honor the four-term mayor who served time on a cocaine charge: Marion Shepilov Barry.

Whatever side one may take on these questions, can a country so preoccupied and polarized on such pursuits be taken seriously as a claimant to be the “exceptional nation,” a model to which the world should look and aspire?

Contrast the social, cultural and moral morass in which America is steeped with the disciplined proceedings and clarity of purpose, direction and goals of our 21st-century rival: Xi Jinping’s China.

...Since 1962, this nation has dethroned its God and begun debates about which of the flawed but great men who created the nation should be publicly dishonored. Are we really a better country today than we were then, when all the world looked to America as the land of the future?

Read more here, especially about "real deal" civil rights clashes of 1962.

"It’s high time we stop being embarrassed about our exceptional nature, and start being proud of it again."

Sundance has a well-written post about American exceptionalism here.

"You didn't build that"

Finally someone has taken on Obama for his "Michelle Malkin has a new book out entitled, Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs. She also has a column at USA Today in which she reports Obama's diatribe this week

at Georgetown University, President Obama's class-envy diatribe applies to everyone who has earned too much for his taste. "You pretty much have more than you'll ever be able to use and your family will ever be able to use," Obama scoffed — as if capitalists stash their capital like toilet paper in the utility closet.

Our president then casually derided America's top achievers as "society's lottery winners" who need to stop being selfish and start being their "brother's keepers."

For radical progressives, life is a Powerball drawing. Success is random. Economic achievement is something to be rectified and redistributed to assuage guilt. Only those who take money, not those who make it by offering goods and services people want and need, act in the public interest. Those who seek financial enrichment for the fruits of their labor are cast as rapacious hoarders in Obama World — and so are the private investors who support them.

Wealth-shaming is a recurrent leitmotif in the Obama administration's gospel of government dependency.

In 2010, the president proclaimed, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." In the summer of 2012, he openly denigrated American's makers and builders because someone else "invested in roads and bridges." Team Obama argued that his "you didn't build that" remarks were taken out of context. But let's remember what he said immediately preceding that infamous sound bite:

Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, 'Well, it must be because I was just so smart.' There are a lot of smart people out there. 'It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.' Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

The context then and now makes Obama's incurable contempt for private entrepreneurial accomplishments even clearer. Pushing to raise taxes even higher on wealthy Americans, Obama stoked you-think-you're-so-smart resentment of business owners. His intent was to humiliate those who reject collectivism. The president's message: Innovators are nothing special. Their brains and work ethics are no different from anyone else's. They owe their success to taxpayers, public school teachers, public infrastructure — and unfair dumb luck.

The progressives' government-built-that ethos is anathema to our Founding Fathers' first principles. They understood that the ability of brilliant, ambitious individuals to reap private rewards for inventions and improvements benefited the public good. This revolutionary idea is a hallmark of American exceptionalism and entrepreneurship. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the doctrine of enlightened "self-interest rightly understood" was a part of America's DNA from its founding. "You may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say. It is as often asserted by the poor man as by the rich," de Tocqueville wrote.

...Here is the marvel Obama and his command-and-control cronies fail to comprehend: From the Industrial Age to the Internet Age, the concentric circles of American innovation in the free marketplace are infinite. This miracle repeats itself millions of times a day through the voluntary interactions, exchanges and business partnerships of creative Americans and their clients, consumers and investors. No federal Department of Innovation or Ten-Point White House Action Plan for Progress can lay claim to the boundless synergies of these profit-earning capitalists.

Of course, they benefit from the "help" of others. But America's best and brightest wealth creators deserve the ultimate credit for the fruits of their individual minds and the untold byproducts of their labor. And no, President Obama, they didn't just get a better roll of the dice. They were smarter, faster, more daring and more hardworking than everyone else, including you and me.

We owe them, not the other way around.

Read more here.

Defending Rudy Guiliani's remarks

Michael D. Brown is a former Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Now he has a talk show on Denver radio station KHOW. Like Rudy Guiliani, Brown has received a torrent of criticism from the left for writing these words on his Facebook page:

The lens of history will show Barack Obama told us, through words and deeds, how he would fundamentally transform the United States. But until Rudy Giuliani spoke up Republicans were generally scared to say what they knew in their hearts was true. We are not a nation of socialists, fascists, communists, statists, appeasers, cowards, racists. We are a nation that believes in the supremacy of the individual, self-sufficiency, limited government, free markets.

Like Guiliani, Brown is at a liberating point in his career. Both can raise questions and say what they think without concern for political correctness, and without the "timidity of politicians who claim to believe in American exceptionalism empower Obama and his followers when they fear to speak the truth because of political correctness."

On the other hand, there are politicians such as John McCain, who says he is ashamed of his country, and Rand Paul, who says we can't question the motivations of our president. Brown says Jeb Bush is another one who fears the media making him to look like a politically incorrect boob. Scott Walker cleverly said, "I don't know, ask Obama!"

Brown warns us that the day we can't question the motives of an elected official is the day America has been "fundamentally transformed."

Ask a liberal if he/she thinks America is exceptional.

Jonah Goldberg writes about the glib anti-Americanism of the left here.

Putin and Obama agree on one thing: America is not exceptional

Peggy Noonan writes that Putin is different than previous Russian leaders in that he is not anti-God; he is pro-God,

pro the old church of the older, great Russia.

Putin gave a speech last week at the Kremlin that Noonan has read and analyzed. Putin said that the world is less stable because of American "rule of the gun," and that Americans think they are exceptional and can "decide the destinies of the nations of the world."

Putin, of course, favors "Eurasian integration," and alleges that the West has opposed that. Noonan believes that we are in a new stage of relations with Russia, one in which Putin is more comfortable in confrontation.

Read more here.