Woody Allen loves President Obama and thinks Republicans should stop obstructing him.
In fact, according to the Los Angleles Times, Woody told a Spanish interviewer, “It would be good…if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”
Woody is expressing a frustration with the messy democratic process a lot of really smart people are feeling these days.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, recently went into more detail about how he thinks really smart people should be running things.
“Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
“Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.”
So how are we a “one-party democracy” with one of the parties opposing the other? Never mind.
Further down Friedman approvingly quotes blogger Joe Romm, “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want.”
Yeah, love that managed economy.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, he of the tingling leg, thinks the Chinese way of getting things done is pretty cool too. After the Gulf oil spill Matthews asked, “Why doesn’t the President go in there, nationalize an industry and get the job done for the people?”
He went on to explain how the Chinese would deal with this, “They execute people for this. Major industrial leaders that commit crimes like this…Everybody says ‘Capitalism is great. Unbridled free enterprise is great.’ Look at it! This is great, isn’t it?!”
Anita Dunn, White House communications director, quotes Mao approvingly, but doesn’t quite get away with it.
Examples multiply. And I must say, I find it refreshing.
If I may explain. Regular readers know I’m a multi-culti kind of guy. Meaning I’ve actually known and interacted with a fair number of people in non-Western cultures. Some years back during one of my sojourns at university, I met a lovely Iranian girl studying in the U.S. This was during one of our free-speech/assembly debates, having to do with members of the American Nazi Party wanting to hold a march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skoke, Ill.
She was shocked, “You Americans with your ‘freedom.’ You let them do these things?”
What really blew her away was that Jewish lawyers from the ACLU were defending these bozos right to do so.
(Yes fellow-libertarians, I know if the streets were private this wouldn’t be an issue.)
That’s the refreshing thing you find when talking to people from other cultures who don’t share, or feel any need to pay lip service, to the basic assumptions of Western culture. They don’t see freedom as a given, thus you can have a conversation more honest than any you’re likely to get with a home-grown enemy of liberty.
With our fellow-Americans who hold to political philosophies which would extinguish freedom, there has always been a need to claim something like, “Oh but we mean real freedom, real democracy, etc.”
Until now.
The elitists who believe America is a far worse place because they are not allowed unchecked power to run it are coming out of the closet, in a manner of speaking. They’re starting to openly admit their convictions that property rights, free speech, and all our liberties, are not the highest good and end of free government.
That’s great! Now honest debate can begin in earnest.
And one more thing. Do the people who’ve said this debate might come down to a trial of arms seem quite so crazy anymore?
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