The Only Thing Wrong with America

What is wrong with America, in the eyes of the intelligentsia? The same things that are right with America in the eyes of others. – Thomas Sowell

Many years ago I worked in an office with a young German woman whose father had been an officer in Hitler’s air force. During the war, she said, her father’s plane was shot down by Americans but he survived and was incarcerated in a prison camp in Oklahoma. Oddly enough, after the war her father became a US citizen and was employed by a Jew.

She described the life of luxury Hitler had provided for them due to her father’s military position, prior to his being shot down of course. Hitler had even provided the family with servants, she said: maids, nursemaids, even a cook and a butler (none of the help were German but she thought they hailed from either Poland or Holland). I got a chill. Obviously, she’d been a child and didn’t know these people were foreigners who’d been brought to Germany against their will and enslaved. But what she added next stunned me. “The only thing wrong with Hitler was his idea about the Master Race.”

I was nonplussed. It was like hearing someone say the only thing wrong with Satan was that he was evil. That phrase, “the only thing wrong with” would follow me through the years, rising suddenly to confront me, even when I’d chastise myself for a blunder I’d made. “The only thing wrong with you, Amanda, is you’re a stupid idiot.”

The only thing wrong with a serial murderer is that he kills people.

As Thomas Sowell, who happens to be a black author, says in an article in Capitalism Magazine on May 6, 2008.  “Sometimes unrelated events nevertheless tell a coherent story.”

Following is an excerpt from that article:

Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances — Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record.

Later, when the ultimate political prize–the White House–loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

There are those who don’t feel right about Obama. He just makes them uncomfortable. Some even question themselves because the media is accusing them of being prejudiced in an effort to shame them. But the media itself is prejudiced against working class whites (they throw all blacks into a separate category regardless of education or income) considering them uneducated if they don’t have college degrees and also racially prejudiced, as if that naturally follows.

In another article written by Sowell in December 2007 he says:

Of all the presidential candidates in both parties, Barack Obama is the best performer on stage. He has the most presence, the most command of his words, the most quietly dramatic style. What he actually says, however, is mostly warmed-over 1960s ideas that have been failing ever since the 1960s.

But the media fawns over these same speeches.

While Sowell points out that “–the Tooth Fairy’s approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist’s analysis.”

So there you have it. The only thing wrong with America is the media, who can’t tell crap from fairy dust.