If Seth Rogen's latest tweet wasn't enough to convince you that Gen-Y granola crunchers (who only pick up their grains at the like of Whole Foods or the organic market in a smog-ridden metropolis on either coast) think they have a handle on key domestic and foreign policy issues of our time (Gee, Mr. Million-Dollar-Pothead-Actor Seth, perhaps you don't care that your tax dollars that bailed out GM were used to create jobs ...in China) check out the fluff over at CNN.com begging Young Voters, Don't Give Up on Obama.
Written by Jack Schlossberg, JFK's grandson (cha-ching!), a sophomore at Yale University (cha-ching!), the thinly-veiled plea for Obama 2012 begins with a Catcher in the Rye reference. (I guess this kid is too young to remember the disastrous results last time Holden Caulfield was held up as a cultural icon - and, no, I'm not talking about that South Park episode where the Colorado foursome couldn't get over the fact that they "read a book for nothing".) If the evocation of Salinger isn't daftly immature enough, try these gems on for size:
I was too young to vote in that election, but after volunteering for the Obama campaign, I felt what many first-time voters and volunteers felt after the last election: proud, accomplished and significant.
So, this is your first election and you're already telling us how to vote because you felt good after manning a phone bank? Thanks for that mega-experienced viewpoint. Tell me, did getting hung up on feel as good as feeding the homeless on Christmas Eve?
Four years later, what was once to us the novel and exciting adult world of politics now seems bitter and partisan.
Did you miss all those "Bush = Hitler" signs hanging around the campaign offices and rallies the last time around? You're only now catching on to the cynicism?
Just because our politics and government can disappoint us sometimes doesn't mean we should forget how far we've come.
In all that time, you've graduated high school and started college! Like most college students today, you're still living off of your parents' money. Unlike most college students, you're doing it at an Ivy League university (instead of some random state school whose name will be meaningless on a resume) and thanks to those family connections, you're already getting published by major news organizations, which means you might be one of those ten college graduates in your class who might get a job when they graduate. Geez, I'd say you've accomplished more than Obama in the past four years - unless, of course, you count his improved golf score.
According to Schlossberg, Obama's top accomplishments are listed in the following order:
Adult children can now stay on their parents' health insurance until their 26.
That is, unless Mommy and Daddy lose their jobs because, in this sinking economy, not many businesses want to incur the increased cost of health benefits that are rolling down the pike with the enactment of Obamacare.
Obama has increased funding for Pell Grants and promised to keep student loan interest rates low.
Because college degrees are proving so viable in today's economy that, by the time this kid graduates, he'll need a PhD just to get a job mopping floors.
Obama repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, so now "anyone can join the military regardless of their sexual orientation."
Kind of funny coming from a kid who attends a university that just relented after 40 years, finally allowing the ROTC back on campus because, well, they had to; the President ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which was their only viable excuse in a post-9/11 world to not support the training and education of future military at their university. (PS, Gays could join the military before the repeal of DADT; depending on their feelings about going public regarding their sexuality, they may have chosen not to. There is a difference.)
"When Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act, Obama changed policy administratively, enabling immigrants who came to the country as children to avoid deportation."
"Changed policy administratively"...is that one of those fancy, Ivy League terms for "abusing power to push legislation"? In this case, it meant pushing legislation so the children of illegal immigrants who did not pay taxes to support their child's public education or medical costs could remain in the country. (What is it with socialists continually justifying the lack of willingness of certain groups to pay their "fair share"?) You do the math.
Not to be outdone, Schlossberg reiterates the same leftist talking points about the "Republican war on women's health" (without any citation to actually define this so-called "war") and the "broken economy" inherited from George W. Bush (again, without any factual citation - because the theory has been grossly repudiated), adding the punctuation point that Obama has "preserved the possibility of home ownership and jobs for us." Again...no factual citations here, either. No remark on the fact that in four years the unemployment rate has yet to go below 8% (despite Obama's promises), that home ownership is stagnate at best, and that an entire generation of potential homebuyers are too busy being unemployed to go house hunting.
But if the pride in being a dependent on parent and government money, followed by the complete lack of factual evidence supporting any criticism of Republicans hasn't already convinced you, here's Schlossberg's thesis: His generation should support the President because, "Obama has acted aggressively on the issue most important to my generation: climate change."
Just to insert a bit of logic into the conversation, here are a few fun facts about our environment-loving President, thanks to the fine research of Randall Hoven over at American Thinker:
So, let's get this straight: The grandson of a former President who is in the midst of obtaining an Ivy League education (aka Jack Schlossberg) believes that you should support the man who has single-handedly done more to destroy the economy of the United States through "environmentally based" legislation because "our generation cares about healing the earth."
If the ideological love-fest hasn't smacked you in the face quite yet, Schlossberg ends his plea for Obama with remarks about ending racism. Yes, we have gone from giving amnesty to illegals and hugging the whales to a full-on United Colors of Benetton commercial. Comparing the election of Obama as the first black president in '08 to his own grandfather's election as the first Catholic president in 1960 is his defense of the need to "fight for change" that doesn't happen overnight. Change takes time. That's why you should give Obama another four years.
Here's where the nuts in the granola truly begin to kick in. This yuppie has no problem with Obama's March that has burned a path of economic destruction across the country, because for this rich white kid (wait - I thought that was a Republican stereotype?) the "fight for change" is an ideological one that involves ending racism and fostering unity across the country and the world, a battle gloriously led by Benevolent Barack. Politics for this kid is not about real-world pragmatism that focuses on keeping jobs in the market so workers can put food on their tables, simply because this kid never had to worry about starving a day in his life. He's far too busy with other, more important concerns, like fluffy rabbits and melting ice caps. Schlossberg is too busy praising the creation of electric cars to realize that, the way the economy is going, most Americans won't ever be able to afford one.
When Seth Rogen tweeted that Romney's "Keeping America American" was a popular slogan among the KKK in the 1920s, he was aiming for political punch in 140 characters or less. The fact that the KKK notoriously supported eugenecist and Mother of Modern Birth Control Margaret Sanger in the 1920s is as easily lost on the liberal Rogen as is the fact that the precious "fight for change" that was the Civil War in Schlossberg's eyes was a bloody war fostered by his own slave-owning political party of choice. (And while we're talking forgetting history, let's also talk about the irony in a Jewish American actor and a Kennedy being on the same political side - especially given the fact that good ol' Grandpa Joe Kennedy was once farmed out by the Democrat FDR administration to warn Hollywood Jews to stop picking on Hitler, lest they be blamed for getting America into the war.) What mattered was the style of the comment, not the substance - the quick and dirty irony in the ownership of the slogan - to crunch at the ideological battle that rages in the liberal yuppie mindset.
What folks like Rogen and Schlossberg don't get is that "Keeping America American" to a Romney jobs-first campaign can be just as easily interpreted as, "We want to keep American corporate jobs in America. We want those American-created jobs to go to Americans, who worked hard to escape terrible circumstances in their former countries and want to do it right, right here." They don't get it because they can't fathom that someone would dare possess a different perspective than their own. And they certainly won't hear of it; the granola crunching is just too loud.
Besides, people like Rogen and Schlossberg have bigger First World battles to fight (like crowning political messiahs) than to actually read a little, or give a damn. After all, they've got the dimes to spare. Those of us who actually know our history will recall that it was the insanely rich upper class who felt smart and snippy enough to tell the unemployed masses, "Let them eat cake."
Funny; Marie Antoinette could've easily tweeted that one on the way to the guillotine.
