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It Didn’t All Start With Barack Obama
Freedom Outpost
Richard Willard Armour , an American writer of humor and satire, wrote a parody history of the United States entitled It All Would Have Started With Columbus . He subtitled it A Merry Mangling of American History from Columbus to Nixon . In it, he recounted American history in the manner of the old “Fractured Fairy Tales” cartoons that used to appear on TV . He filled the book with many cockeyed interpretations of the events of history, giving them the twist of a kid whose understanding was skewed by a pervasive, even an invasive, sense of humor, as though the events themselves were far less important than their funny interpretation. Sometimes I think that what is happening today, if it weren’t so dire and horrible, would actually fit Mr. Armour’s style of narrative.
It won’t of course, because we are in a seriously bad way today. However, a lot of people don’t go deep enough in assigning blame for our desperate situation. Our tendency in the Right is to blame Obama for all our ills, but these ills have much deeper roots. I don’t know whether I got all of them here, but I am going to try to give a rough outline of them as I see them.
Our present state of ruin didn’t begin six years ago, although that is the period during which we have seen the most radical, rapid change. It really began in the early decades of the 20th Century, when the republican principles on which this country was founded were slowly stolen through corruptions in language that led to corruptions in concept and eventually in policy.
Teddy Roosevelt probably started it when he founded a third party to run against both Republicans and Democrats. He called it the Progressive Party and imbued it with principles of populism, which was nothing more than a kind of watered down Democratic Socialism. There was nothing progressive about it, because it did not lead our country forward, but loosed the moorings of our foundation through populist collectivism.
Reposted with permission
