Idealist Versus Ideologue

Obama declared yesterday that he was closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and insisting all interrogation comport with the army field manual "to live up to the ideals of our founding fathers". The revolutionaries who fought off the British Empire were pragmatists and not idealists. They were not afraid to dish out rough treatment to Tories. They were the most successful tax protesters in human history. Those patriots who crafted the Constitution did it in such a way as to protect freedoms and restrain government, but they did not write a suicide pact to give due process rights to odious foreign villains. They were thinkers and warriors who could never have conceived of an American leader who placed the rights of terrorists over the lives of his countrymen. Ronald Wilson Reagan was an idealist. He saw America as "the city on the hill". He would not tolerate triangulation to divide by race, sex, or income. He really saw his compatriots as Americans, not African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans, or anything else. The current occupant of the White House sees every interest group and separates people that way. He plays the class envy card at every turn and he rose through the political ranks in the pews and with the assistance of Jeremiah Wright who was overtly belligerent to his own nation and white people in his sermons. Our President, I am sure would resent being characterized an ideologue, but it is becoming increasingly obvious early in his administration that he resents quite a bit about the country that put him in office.