Gloria Borger's Projection of GOP Class Warfare Betrays a Bias

Gloria Borger's Projection of GOP Class Warfare Betrays a Bias

CNN’s Gloria Borger’s thinking is so caught up in the liberal paradigm of “class,” as in class warfare, she sees everything in that light, while projecting it onto the right to provide cover for Obama’s use of class warfare. Evidently, Borger is ignorant of the fact that the entire notion of class conflict is a Communist device, having nothing to do with conservatism.

Washington (CNN) — For months now, the GOP has been complaining about Barack Obama’s class warfare: He’s pitting the wealthy against the middle class. He’s unfairly asking the rich to pay more taxes. He’s dividing the country along economic lines for his own political agenda.But wait. Has anybody looked at what’s going on in the GOP lately? Can it be that class warfare is alive and thriving among Republicans?

Borger sees these examples below as an example of class warfare by Rick Santorum.

Sure looks that way. How else to explain Rick Santorum calling the president a “snob” for emphasizing the importance of a college education? And when Santorum says that John F. Kennedy’s speech about the absolute separation between church and state made him want to “throw up,” he’s not exactly aiming for the academic theologians.

Here is what Santorum said.

“President Obama said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob! There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

Does she realize Bill Gates, Lawrence Ellsion, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are all billionaires and college dropouts? It would seem not. John D. Rockefeller and Howard Hughes also appear on the extended list, among many others. And that says nothing of all the hard working individuals in trades and occupations who start businesses, ending up with incomes that rival those of many who went to college.

As for Santorum’s comments regarding the Kennedy speech, Borger seems to suggest that if one is educated they can’t believe in God, or the Judeo-Christian tradition. WIthout such an assumption her comment makes little sense.


Perhaps Borger can’t grasp that Santorum was speaking somewhat abstractly. Don’t they teach you how to do that in college? Along with stating his clear opinion that government should not force a set of religious views on the population through legislation, Santorum has also made clear his view that the American system and our Founding documents are greatly informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. No serious scholar should argue against that.

In fact, on occasion, even Obama has given a nod to how much of America is defined around the concept of religion. Aside from Santorum’s Constitutional view stipulated above, if we are a government of, by and for the people and many of the people hold religious beliefs, then certainly our government is informed by same. Borger is creating a red herring to make a flawed attack on Santorum and the GOP, as a whole.

Obama, June 28, 2006 (prepared remarks): Given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

At the heart of the conservative mindset is the individual. An individual can go to college, or not go to college, be a member of an organized religion, or not. Government’s role is to refrain from unnecessarily restricting individuals in their pursuit of happiness, wealth, or however they might define success. The statist believes we are best combined – and ultimately kept – in classes with assigned roles, expectations and some imagined equality of result.

As a conservative, any Santorum acknowledgement of differences among Americans is not assigning them, or restricting them to some class. That is Borger’s view and her projecting it onto another, or a political party, for a weak political argument does not make it accurate, or acceptable.

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