{"id":294642,"date":"2010-02-08T19:37:36","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T00:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/html\/northwestvoices\/2011018801_krauthammerdegradingthepeasants.html?syndication=rss"},"modified":"2010-02-08T19:37:36","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T00:37:36","slug":"krauthammer-degrading-the-peasants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/294642","title":{"rendered":"Krauthammer: degrading the peasants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>\u2018Joe and Jane citizen\u2019 aren\u2019t practicing common sense<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Charles Krauthammer\u2019s \u201cThe peasants are revolting\u201d makes some sense [Opinion, Feb. 5]. However, Americans since 1945 appear to apply decreasing common sense, instead choosing what is decidedly less healthy for individuals and the U.S. as a supposedly \u201cmodel democracy.\u201d Today\u2019s escalating trend: degrade government and politicians and \u201cennoble\u201d Joe and Jane citizen.<\/p>\n<p>Joe and Jane citizen are frequently hyper-consumers, unwilling to pay taxes to fund the too few, ill-equipped troops. Our \u201cpeasants\u201d have shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality, lower job skills and more incivility than other industrialized democracies.<\/p>\n<p>We have congealed into a fractious, self-indulgent nation whose view of \u201cfreedom\u201d seems to mean more consumption, no savings and an \u201cit\u2019s their fault\u201d response to problems. While we claim to detest our elected representatives, we re-elect nearly all of them.<\/p>\n<p>Krauthammer degrades liberals for degrading \u201cpeasants.\u201d Well, just look at peasants who behave self-destructively and ignorantly state: \u201cGovernment should get out of my Social Security.\u201d Consider today\u2019s growing tea party; What do they represent that really benefits America? [They] overstate that \u201cTaxes are wrong, government is inept and health-care reform is socialistic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Each of these epithets contains some validity. But the issue is how do we rapidly convert epithets into accurate problem statements that \u2014 when agreed to \u2014 lead to utilitarian solutions? Krauthammer\u2019s ongoing exposure of liberal versus conservative agendas fails to map out clear, concise and compelling answers to these problems.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u2014 Peter Loeb, Sequim<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2018Joe and Jane citizen\u2019 aren\u2019t practicing common sense Charles Krauthammer\u2019s \u201cThe peasants are revolting\u201d makes some sense [Opinion, Feb. 5]. However, Americans since 1945 appear to apply decreasing common sense, instead choosing what is decidedly less healthy for individuals and the U.S. as a supposedly \u201cmodel democracy.\u201d Today\u2019s escalating trend: degrade government and politicians and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}