Mark Levin brings up an important point, too little discussed since it raises fundamental and unsettling issues. Is the meteoric and unusual rise of Barack Obama a harbinger of something quite ominous?
I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. [...]There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. [...]
Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.
This hit me hard this morning due in part to a conversation just yesterday with my barber, a naturalized U.S. citizen who grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany. He remembered asking his parents why they supported Hitler, and that they could not or would not explain. He left Germany for the freedom of the USA as soon as he could, and expected that freedom to continue unabated. As both a citizen and a small business owner, now he's unsure what's about to happen. So are we all.
Obama isn't Hitler - instead, he's a leftist technocrat who thinks he knows best for all of us. The question is, why do the voters want so fervently to be sheep for an all-controlling shepherd?
Corroboration: Michelle Malkin says Levin's commentary is a must-read. Indeed.