The Bludgeoning of the American Character

Not long ago, as you may remember, former Republican U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, who was then the chief financial guru for the McCain Presidential Campaign, called us “a nation of whiners.” For that ill-timed and inaccurate remark, he was called upon to resign his post. Months later, but not to be outdone, Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General in the Obama Administration recently followed up by calling us “essentially a nation of cowards.”

How does it feel to have two hi-level Washington elites staring down their noses at the American populace?

When Senator Gramm was Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he dismantled Depression-era regulations which had kept commercial banks and Wall Street investment houses strictly separate. Gramm’s reversal of those legal requirements proved to be a principal causal factor of the current economic meltdown. Since retiring from the Senate, Gramm was rewarded with a top executive position at UBS, the European financial conglomerate.

In the most recent assault on the American character, Attorney General Eric Holder claims that we are “a nation of cowards” because, according to him, we are afraid to honestly and openly engage in a discussion on the issue of race relations in the public square.

Previous to his current appointment, Mr. Holder was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration under Janet Reno. Among other duties, he was responsible for vetting President Clinton's last-minute pardons.

Mr. Holder justified and blessed one of the most egregious of those pardons, that of Marc Rich, an international commodities trader. Rich had been indicted by then U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Rich never stepped into a U.S. court room. He remained ensconced in Switzerland, away from U.S. justice, and the FBI placed him on its list of Most Wanted people.

Marc Rich’s family donated generous sums to the Democratic Party and to the Clinton Library while Clinton was still in office, leading to allegations that Rich had purchased his pardon. Despite these data, Clinton’s Deputy U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder justified the pardon for Rich. Was Holder simply acting as Clinton’s toady? I wonder just who the cowards are.

Within the Washington Beltway, there exists a coterie of elected and appointed officials who act as princes and princesses of the realm, and who do the bidding of the king. Many of them are strongly biased towards the rest of us whom they consider vassals. Hence the insouciance of these courtiers, as they label ordinary American citizens “whiners” and “cowards.”