A White House Debased: Politicizing Thanksgiving

The White House and the presidency itself have been fundamentally transformed.

 

 

Breitbart has all the disgraceful details.

WHITE HOUSE SLAM GOP'S FOOD STAMP REFORMS

IN THANKSGIVING MESSAGE

 

UPDATE / Related - and disturbing - commentary, by Byron York:

Why is President Obama trying to politicize the holidays?

During a recent stay in Berlin, I visited the old headquarters of the East German Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi. The building, in a suitably bleak part of what used to be East Berlin, is now a museum devoted to the communist surveillance state. 

... the first floor of the Stasi Museum  ... is devoted to the propaganda that East German bureaucrats used to foster socialist consciousness in an unwilling public. One display explains the GDR's efforts in the 1950s to politicize what in the past had been family and religious occasions. The state sought to transform weddings, confirmations, and other personal events into "socialist celebrations," to be "committed collectively and aimed at a confession to socialism," according to the awkward English translation of the exhibit.

The exhibition informs visitors that the project "did not gain popular acceptance." Amazingly enough, people didn't want to turn their family holidays into socialist celebrations.

Here at home, this Thanksgiving brings an effort by the Obama administration to turn a day of giving thanks into a day of discussion about the virtues of national health care. On Wednesday afternoon, just hours before Thanksgiving, President Obama's Twitter account -- which has more than 40 million followers -- sent out this message: "Make sure everyone who sits down with you for #Thanksgivukkah dinner is covered." ("Thanksgivukkah" refers to this year's rare overlap of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.)

The president's tweet linked to a photo of a young man sitting at a table with a turkey and a menorah...

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Interesting phrase, "fundamentally transform." The root of "fundamentally" is, of course, "fundament" -- a venerable English word we rarely use because those of us who aren't proctologists rarely discuss anuses, and "fundament" means "anus." Moreover, "fundamentally transform" is what my old English profs would have called a redundancy, since transformation is, by definition, always fundamental -- a change in the basic character of something -- so saying a transformation will be fundamental is saying the same thing twice. I throw out this bit of lexicological trivia for the benefit of all those readers who wish to ponder the question: Do people who use phrases like "fundamentally transform" thereby make asses of themselves?