“CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is a sanctimonious elitist and a plagiarist besides,” Joel B. Pollak writes at Big Journalism:
Predictably, Zakaria arrived at his point — copied, unsurprisingly, from the rest of the mainstream media: conservatives are racists, bitter clingers who cannot deal with a diverse modern society, “misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic…passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial…democracy,” etc.
Zakaria ended with an admonition to conservatives: “[Y]ou cannot love America in theory, and hate it in fact.” What an amazing accusation, even from Zakaria.
Projection? Fareed Zakaria is soaking in it. Time-Warner-CNN-HBO does a thorough job of hating America in both fact and theory, every day, from Time magazine and Piers Morgan’s hatred of the Constitution, especially the pesky Second Amendment, to Anderson Cooper’s Tea Bagging slurs, to Zakaria instructing Americans — but not their government — to spend and consume less and accept higher taxes:
Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.
“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”
Forget America’s founding fathers for a moment — how did Time-Warner-CNN-HBO go so far astray from its own founding fathers?
On February 17, 1941, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine published his landmark “American Century” essay in that magazine’s spin-off, Life. As Alan Brinkley wrote in The Publisher, his 2010 biography of Luce:
“What can we say and foresee about an American Century?” [Luce] asked. His answer was bold, ambitious, idealistic—and filled with the missionary zeal that had shaped his life. “It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.” America was already the “intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world,” he claimed, and Americans were “the least provincial people in the world.” But more important than that the United States now had “that indefinable unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige. And unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole of the American people.” The creation of an American century would require great vision. It would mean a commitment to “an economic order compatible with freedom and progress.” It would mean a willingness to “send out through the world [America’s] technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.” It would mean becoming “the Good Samaritan of the entire world,” with a duty “to feed all the people of the world who … are hungry and destitute.”
Most of all, the American Century as Luce envisioned it would require:
a passionate devotion to great American ideals … a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation….[W]e are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization—above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity…. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.
From these elements, he concluded, “surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm…. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.”
Two years later, Warner Brothers would release Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart as a disillusioned American expatriate who rediscovers his ideals in the crucible of war.
In sharp contrast, Zakaria envisions a “Post-American world” with a weakened US as just another nation; a goal that evidently Mr. Obama endorses as well. On the cover of their July 4th, 2011 issue, Time magazine shredded the Constitution and asked, “Does It Still Matter.” The previous month, Zakaria asked his viewer, “Is it time to update the U.S. Constitution?”
But why? As Calvin Coolidge once said, only a few years after Luce had founded Time magazine:
One of Coolidge’s greatest speeches was on the occasion of the Declaration’s 150th anniversary (his 54th birthday). Silent about himself, Coolidge praised the Declaration’s words on human equality, natural rights, and consent of the governed. America was the first nation founded on those principles. July 4, 1776, the day when they were formally expressed, “has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history” and “an incomparable event in the history of government.”
For Coolidge, these principles spelled security. They were final. “No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions,” he said. To deny the self-evident truths of the Declaration would take America “backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
Why go backwards, as this Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee envisions?
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