Charles Krauthammer's hyperbolic hammering of President Obama's "villainy-of-the-rich theme" is classic polemic -- that is, it is stridency caressed by not even a sinew of reasonable context, either political or historical. And it caused me to think of these words, written by another U.S. president, regarding
the wrong and evils of the money-piling tendency of our country, which is changing laws, government and morals and giving all powers to the rich and bringing in pauperism and its attendant crimes and wretchedness like a flood. Lincoln was for a government of the people. The new tendency is "a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich."
FDR, right? Maybe Wilson or the rabble-rousing TR? No, those thoughts were committed to paper (his deeply thoughtful diary) by Rutherford B. Hayes -- yes, that Rutherford B. Hayes, Grand Old Party-member extraordinaire, of the Krauthammer-adoring Gilded Age -- in the mid-1880s.
Hayes, as political historian and former Nixonian Kevin Phillips has noted, was also so aghast at America's amplifying wealth disparity that he "favored blocking 'a permanent aristocracy of wealth' by legislation that would limit inheritance to five hundred thousand dollars, the rest to go to the state."
Again, that was a former Republican president surveying the socioeconomic wreckage of what contemporaneous GOPism had wrought. Yet Obama proposes an almost trivial uptick in the upper-income bracket and in Krauthammer's eyes he becomes a confiscatory, Marxist leveler, "turning general discontent into rage against a malign few" -- the poor things.
Strident, and rather pathetic.
Krauthammer is protecting himself and others like him, even if he has to lie to do it. He has no shame.
Posted by: majii | October 14, 2011 at 09:20 PM