How the Hell can a neo-con call anyone else "elitist"?
It's bad enough that the media are ignoring the fact that President Bush has just admitted authorising torture, and also ignoring reports that Senator McCain once used the C word to describe his wife, whilst that same media are engaging in an orgy of "elitist" charges against Barack Obama by deliberately misconstruing what he said, but do we really need to put up with hypocrisy on this scale?
Bill Kristol, yes Bill bloody Kristol, has penned an article denouncing Obama's "elitism" entitled "The Mask Slips" in which he compares Obama to Karl Marx and states:
What does this mean for Obama’s presidential prospects? He’s disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped. And it’s not so easy to get elected by a citizenry you patronize.
And what are the grounds for his supercilious disdain? If he were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service — then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur. But what has Barack Obama accomplished that entitles him to look down on his fellow Americans?
It's really a bit much to have to take this from a useless daddy's boy like Kristol, a man who has been wrong on almost everything he has ever said about the Iraq war and who once said this:
"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."Indeed, he's wrong so often that comedian Jon Stewart once quipped "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?"
But to have Kristol call someone else "elitist" is simply taking the piss. The entire neo-con movement are followers of Leo Strauss, a man whose elitism was simply breathtaking.
Critics of Strauss accuse him of mendaciousNor did Strauss think that society was even able to handle the truth which, according to Strauss, was something which should be reserved for those "who lead" rather than those who had "to be led."populism (while actually being elitist), radical illiberalism and anti-democratic sentiment. Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), argues that Strauss taught different things to different students and inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders that is linked to imperialist militarism and Christian fundamentalism. Drury accuses Strauss of teaching that "perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
Strauss noted that thinkers of the first rank, going back to Plato, had raised the problem of whether good and effective politicians could be completely truthful and still achieve the necessary ends of their society. By implication, Strauss asks his readers to consider whether it is true that "noble lies" have no role at all to play in uniting and guiding the polis. Are "myths" needed to give people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society? Or can men dedicated to relentlessly examining, in Nietzsche's language, those "deadly truths," flourish freely? Thus, is there a limit to the political, and what can be known absolutely? In The City and Man, Strauss discusses the myths outlined in Plato's Republic that are required for all governments. These include a belief that the state's land belongs to it even though it was likely acquired illegitimately and that citizenship is rooted in something more than the accidents of birth. Seymour Hersh observes that Strauss endorsed "noble lies": myths used by political leaders seeking to maintain a cohesive society.So now we have followers of Strauss, the greatest elitist I can think of, telling us that Barack Obama is "looking down on his fellow Americans"; the same Americans of whom Strauss followers, like Kristol, believe are so stupid that they need to be led and lied to by their intellectual superiors, which Kristol actually believes includes himself.
And someone who holds those views has the gall to call Obama "elitist"?
Pass me the sick bag, please....
Click title for Kristol's diatribe.
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