Freedom Line Blog

Byron York has a characteristically subtle and devastating critique of the Obama administration’s recent attempt to ruin Thanksgiving.

The kerfuffle began when Obama’s still operating campaign arm, Organizing for Action, released talking points to convince relatives and friends to enroll in Obamacare over Thanksgiving dinner. Reluctantly, conservative blogger Ben Domenech responded with counterpoints.

Watching from afar, York was reminded of an exhibit in Berlin explaining how the communists who ran East Germany for the USSR tried to make every personal event into a celebration of socialism.

The memory prompted York to make this heretofore unnecessary declaration: “Now is the time to state definitively: The United States is not communist East Germany. It’s not in any way close to being communist East Germany. So why is the Obama administration seeking to politicize Thanksgiving? And Hanukkah, too? At the very least, why invite the ridicule and derision that inevitably follow?”

It’s crazy to think we’re in an era where the President of the United States is green-lighting not only massive increases in government-run health care, but also beseeching everyday Americans to make support for such interventions the topic of completely private, non-political family gatherings.

York can be excused for sensing some totalitarian tendencies in the present administration. The parallels seem obvious.

If the Wikileaks State Department cables are ever compiled into a book, one of the chapters should contain the rise and fall of Fidel Castro’s affinity for President Barack Obama.  It’s hard not to smirk when reading this article from The Guardian outlining the Cuban despot’s excitement that the candidate of “hope” and “change” would take America in a leftward direction.

Considered “obsessed” with Obama by U. S. diplomats stationed in Havana, Castro wrote several op-eds in a state-run newspaper praising the president for his speech in Cairo, Egypt.  The dictator also liked Obama’s stance on global warming.  That is, until The One broke the dear leader’s heart at the Copenhagen Conference.  (Apparently, wanting some concessions from China before handing over climate reparations went too far for Latin America’s oldest communist.)

Get in line, Fidel.  You and Che Guevara-sporting American Left will have to content yourselves “only” with the first critical step towards socialized medicine (Obamacare), and unprecedented nationalizations of the finance and auto industry.