With a hat tip to our reader Henry, here’s a good piece from Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama’s recent speech from the Oval Office.
Excerpt (my emphasis):
The first responsibility of any government is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an entitlement mentality, no one in a foreign country is entitled to be in America if the American people don’t want them here.
Obama’s talk about how we should not make religious distinctions might make sense if we were talking about handing out entitlements. But we are talking about distinguishing between different populations posing different levels of danger to the American people.
When it comes to matters of life and death, that is no time for the kind of glib, politically correct rhetoric that Barack Obama specializes in.
Obama may think of himself as a citizen of the world, but he was elected President of the United States, not head of a world government, and that does not authorize him to gamble the lives of Americans for the benefit of people in other countries.
The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamentally different culture, without jeopardizing your own culture — and everything that depends on it — should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terrorists.
Such good, plain sense. Thomas Sowell is 85 years old. I wish he weren’t.
P.S. I’ll take this opportunity to recommend a book of Dr. Sowell’s that I’m reading at the moment. It’s called The Vision of the Anointed, and is a detailed examination of the Left’s casual relationship with facts. Highly recommended.
3 Comments
Thomas is an excellent example of how the left portray themselves as defenders of blacks, but really are exploiters of blacks. We know this because Thomas Sowell is never quoted by the left. Yet I hear Tom is often quoted by the right, and not because he is black, rather because what he says makes sense. The right are more honest (but we know this already).
You are quite right, joe. Sowell is a pariah to the Left because he has clarity of vision, not that it really requires x-ray vision to see right through the empty suits of the Left. This is why the Left preys on the low information idolizers of those who are frequently wrong but never in doubt.
Sowell’s hometown is also my wife’s hometown. He is a very effective writer and a clear thinker much in the vein of Victor Davis Hanson. The Left avoids Sowell because he is black and right. The herd mentality of the Left has no room for thinking members. …”should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe”. I’m not sure if European history let alone current events is taught anymore.