Recieved the following by email:
If you don’t read anything else today please read the essay below by Robert Weissberg, Professor of Political Science – Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana. It offers by far the most accurate description of what most Americans are feeling but haven’t been able to put their finger on it. Part of the problem is the fact that it’s far easier to stir up a mob with a platform of lies if the audience is both under informed and filled with a sense of entitled. Combined with the participation of the media and you have a prescription for what we have witnessed over the last two years. We must not allow any of our fellow patriots to remain in the dark. I hope you will forward this to everyone you know. It is critical ammunition in the fight to retain our individual freedom.
A Stranger in Our Midst
As the Obama administration enters its second year, I — and undoubtedly millions of others — have struggled to develop a shorthand term that captures our emotional unease. Defining this discomfort is tricky. I reject nearly the entire Obama agenda, but the term "being opposed" lacks an emotional punch. Nor do terms like "worried" or "anxious" apply. I was more worried about America’s future during the Johnson or Carter years, so it’s not that dictionary, either. Nor, for that matter, is this about backroom odious deal-making and pork, which are endemic in American politics.
After auditioning countless political terms, I finally realized that the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators almost resemble a foreign occupying force, a coterie of politically and culturally non-indigenous leaders whose rule contravenes local values rooted in our national tradition. It is as if the United States has been occupied by a foreign power, and this transcends policy objections. It is not about Obama’s birthplace. It is not about race, either; millions of white Americans have had black mayors and black governors, and this unease about out-of-synch values never surfaced.
The term I settled on is "alien rule" — based on outsider values, regardless of policy benefits — that generates agitation…