Showing posts with label Obamacare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obamacare. Show all posts

Friday, November 21, 2014

America's Journey into the "Heart of Darkness": MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, Elite Universities and Obamacare

 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's tale of one man's journey up a mysterious river into the heart of Africa, is one of those books that has embedded itself in America's postmodern psyche. How many high school students have written theme papers on Conrad's book? How many professors have crammed  Heart of Darkness down the yawning throats of indifferent sophomores imprisoned in mandatory English courses?  How many scholars have quoted the book's most famous line--"The Horror! The Horror!"--and opined on the book's rich commentary on colonialism, racism, and existential doubt?

At its core, however, Heart of Darkness is about greed. The people who ravished Africa in the late 19th  century and who people Conrad's book had nothing more in mind than making money.  Conrad described a group of European adventurers encamped on the bank of an African river as "sordid buccaneers" whose talk was "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage . . ." When the character Marlow asks an accountant why he took a job that landed him in an African jungle, he scornfully replies, "To make money, of course. What do you think?"

I  thought about Heart of Darkness recently as I read the news about Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who was one of Obamacare's chief designers.  Videos came to light in which Gruber basically admitted that Obama's healthcare law was based on deception and the contemptuous belief that Americans are too stupid to understand what the law would cost them.

Prior to passage of the healthcare law, Obama's people bragged about how smart Gruber is.  He was going to craft the most perfect and lovely healthcare system that had ever been designed, we were assured. And now we find out that Gruber was just a cynical academic who made millions of dollars packaging a swindle.

Indeed, Gruber is very much like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the mysterious man in the heart of a dark continent who accumulated vasts stores of ivory and who acquired a firm hold on the imagination of the novel's central character, a riverboat captain named Marlow.

Marlow's description of Kurtz sounds very much like the Obamacrats' obsequious praise for Professor Gruber:
Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together. That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk . . . .
And of course Professor Gruber is just one of the many elitists who surround Barack Obama--all graduates of America's most prestigious colleges and universities. Almost all of them have an air of arrogance and condescension, and an unseemly sense of their own intelligence. Like the characters who grub for wealth in Heart of Darkness, most seem propelled solely by greed or the desire for power and recognition.

For some reason, Americans  have been willing to put the nation's destiny into the hands of these hollow and soulless people, most of whom have done nothing with their lives except attend elitist universities where they learned to do little more than talk. We even want our children to get degrees from the fancy colleges where Obama's bureaucrats have been spawned. We are willing to borrow vast sums of money to pay tuition costs so our children can take classes from professors like Jonathan Gruber.

And so we journey upriver into America's own Heart of Darkness: the elite colleges and universities that suck up our money and produce nothing but emptiness.  "The horror! The horror!" we will say to ourselves when we get our first student-loan bill and find we don't have the money to pay it.

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber
"The horror! The horror!

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Ivy League graduates are smarter, more ethical, and more competent than the average American: That's why we let them run the government!

President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School and Michelle graduated from Princeton.  All nine Supreme Court Justices graduated from Harvard's law school or Yale's.  More of Obama's top aides have graduate degrees from Oxford than from any American public university. Secretary of State John Kerry and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton--both Ivy Leaguers.

Don't call me, Barack. I'll call you.
These are the people who run our government or greatly influence it. And that's as it should be because people who graduated from America's elite colleges are smarter, more high minded, and more competent than the average American--some guy who graduated from Kansas State University, for example.  That's why we put Ivy Leaguers in charge.

How's that working out for us?

Under Barack Obama's leadership,  American prestige has never ebbed lower.  The U.S. has managed to offend all of Europe's top leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande.  Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, looks like he doesn't want to be in the same room with President Obama when the two presidents are photographed together. Three South American countries offered asylum to Edward Snowden,whom the United States government describes as a traitor and a defector--something that would never have happened under previous American presidents.

Let's let Toni's company build
the Obamacare website: How
hard could it be?
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, one of America's staunchest allies, turned down a seat on the UN Security Council out of anger toward the U.S.  Libya, where President Obama dabbled by ordering air strikes on Muammar  Gaddhafi, has been flooded by jihadists; and terrorists killed our ambassador in Benghazi.

And now we learn that Toni Townes-Whitley, Michelle Obama's college  roommate at Princeton, is Vice President of CGI Federal, the company hired by the Obama administration to construct the Obamacare website.  CGI got a no-bid contract to perform the work, and so far the website it constructed has been a disaster. Oh yeah, and CGI is a big Obama campaign contributor.  Are the Obamas really all that high minded?

When will Americans get the message?  Our Ivy League colleges do not teach their students to be problem solvers, to be competent, or even to be patriotic.  Instead, they produce graduates who are arrogant, narrow-minded, and contemptuous of traditional American values.

Personally, I'd rather give Joe Six-Pack a chance to run the country than continue with the bozos whom Barack Obama has accumulated around him.  Honestly, I think we would be better off if we limited all presidential candidates to people who reside in Pocatello, Idaho rather than continue to allow these Ivy League losers to drive our once great nation into the ditch.

References

Fox News. Michelle Obama's Princeton Classmate Was ObamaCare's Web Site Builder. Fox Nation web site. Accessible at: http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/27/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-was-obamacare-website-builder

Brian Resnick & Brian McGill. More Top Obama Officials Have Graduate Degrees from Oxford Than Any Public University in the United States. National Journal, July 19, 2013. Accessible at:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/decision-makers/more-top-obama-officials-have-graduate-degrees-from-oxford-than-any-public-university-in-the-united-states-20130719