The Mendicant and the Medal of Freedom by EDWARD CLINE
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/the-mendicant-and-the-medal-of-freedom
There is a glaring and ironic contradiction in President Barack Obama’s mendacious bestowing of the Medal of Freedom on anyone. During his two terms in the White House, he has done perhaps more than any other president to reduce the range of freedom of individuals to achieve anything.
In the unlikely event I was ever nominated for the Medal of Freedom, I would refuse to accept it, regardless of who was in the White House. But I especially would refuse to accept it from a demonstrable liar, thief, and fraud.
I even question the purpose of the Medal of Freedom, its name, and its propriety. It is awarded to individuals “for especially [a] meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” It has as much, or even less, genuine meaning as does an Oscar, or the Nobel Prize for Peace or Literature. It is an empty symbol that serves to justify a ritual burlesque. It is pure government theater. The character of the presidents who have awarded it since its inception – technically, in 1945 by Harry S. Truman, a power-hungry mediocrity elevated to the office on the death of FDR, and revised in 1963 by John F. Kennedy, the charming fascist – makes the Medal’s association with freedom a sham.
And the baffling association of freedom with many who have been awarded the Medal is also covinous. I doubt I could stand in the same room with any of them without getting into an unceremonious brouhaha. It would be clock-cleaning time in the name of freedom. Bill Clinton would get at least a black eye. Hillary would have her lying face slapped silly and as red as Mao’s Little Red Book. Her friend, former State Department aide, and intimate, Huma Abedin, closely associated with the President’s favorite club, the Muslim Brotherhood, and present at the ceremony, might fly to Hillary’s rescue and try to scratch my eyes out. But I’m sure the Secret Service would rescue me before that happened and escort me unceremoniously from the White House.
In Obama’s instance, it gave him a chance to field a few joshing, cracker-barrel yuk-yuks, giving the ceremony all the dignity of a Friars’ Club Celebrity Roast, and also the opportunity to gloss over his own cruel ObamaCare joke that Americans could keep their health insurance plans “if they liked them.”
The implied, unnamed focus of the award is “public service.” In service to what? To whom? Society? The American Medal of Freedom is the closest thing to being thwacked on the shoulders with a sword by the Queen of England and dubbed a knight of this, that, or the other of a long-deceased empire. Freedom is dying in the U.S., and Obama doing his bit to see that it hurries to its expiration.
I bear no grudge against the innocent victims of the charade; they have been as much as elevated to sainthood by a government that ought not to be anointing anyone. It is the proper role of government to recognize freedom by protecting and upholding it, not emphasizing it while at the same time engineering its incremental demise, and at the hands of individuals who are freedom’s nemeses but who have also been awarded the Medal.
Many of this year’s awardees of the Medal of Freedom are not so innocent. Bill Clinton, noted for his corrupt “good ole boy” career in politics, advanced statism and made a shambles of our foreign policy. Richard Luger is a mainstream Republican nonentity who, among other offenses, endorsed Obama’s two radical left Supreme Court nominees, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Mario Molina helped to promote the fraudulent science of how chlorofluorocarbons from aerosols destroy the ozone layer; he was an ancillaory pioneer of the global warming scam. Gloria Steinem helped to erect legislative and cultural divides between men and women with her “radical feminism.” (No mention of her stint as an undercover Playboy Bunny was made by Obama in his introductory remarks.) Patricia McGowan Wald was a Bill Clinton appointee to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, another leftist now on the Supreme Court. She served for a while as U.S. representative to the International Criminal Tribune for the Former Yugoslavia, which oversaw the convictions and imprisonments of Serbs and other non-Muslims, but no Muslims, for alleged war crimes (and Bill Clinton did his bit to ensure that the Muslims triumphed in Bosnia). She also chairs the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
Then there’s Oprah Winfrey, alleged “journalist,” alleged “actress,” media muggle, and all-round busybody and do-gooder, another recipient of the Medal as a kind of kiss-and-make-up consolation prize, except when she’s claiming that only old white people are racists and that the problem of racism will disappear when they’re all dead. One supposes that it was all those white people who stopped her from becoming a billionaire, especially all those white people in the East Room of the White House, where the King of the Mountebanks presided over the presentation of the Unicorn Awards.
Of course, there is Barack Obama himself, who in 2009 won a Nobel Peace Prize for having done absolutely nothing, largely because everyone expected him to work for “peace.”
That’s quite a police line-up. Detective to witness: “Can you identify the perpetrator who mugged you and robbed you of your freedom, your wealth, your rights, your future and that of your children?” Witness: “All of them.”
Since JFK recast the purpose of the Medal of Freedom in 1963, it has been awarded to individuals in architecture, art, dance, film, literature, music, photography, business and economics, computing, education, history, for humanitarian work and social activism, to members of the media, to those active in medicine, philanthropy, philosophy, to former presidents, for diplomacy, environmentalism, to Supreme Court justices, First Ladies and astronauts, and to sports figures. I’m surprised the categories don’t include landscaping, cooking, and graffiti art. Surely, those activities contribute to our national security interests and world peace, and are worthy cultural endeavors, as well.
The JFK-defined Medal of Freedom comports with his overall fascist political agenda, and is awarded to those perceived by government functionaries to have harkened to his famous inaugural maxim, “Ask not what your country can do for you – but what you can do for your country,” whether or not doing something for the country was their purpose. Ought the federal government be in the business of defining what our culture is, what actions in it are worthy of recognition, and deciding whether or not individuals have performed anything that is deemed “meritorious”?
No. The recognition implied by the Medal of Freedom is wholly subjective and arbitrary, and helps to establish and perpetuate a suffocating pall of government-mandated approval of what Americans do, say, or think – or not.
And that is fascist, with a dash of socialist mendacity mixed in for flavor.
Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/the-mendicant-and-the-medal-of-freedom#ixzz2legn0rc8
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Comments are closed.
