Sacrifice is for the little people

In response to Shared Sacrifice: Michelle Obama Should Cancel Her White House Birthday Bash:

“It’s really odd that the Marxist drivel preached by President Obama time and time again is often eschewed by the First Lady, who never actually adheres to her husband’s call for fairness.”

I know what you mean in the strictly logical sense, Jerome – it’s odd that the people who run a beyond-broke government, and speak endlessly of “shared sacrifice,” live like French kings on the public dime.  But it’s not odd in the historical sense.  The socialist elite always enjoy lives of fabulous luxury, to the applause of the class-war intelligentsia.  

Check out that line of sobbing leftists parading past the glass-encased corpse of billionaire kleptocrat Hugo Chavez, who looted his oil-rich nation into penury, but is still lauded as a great progressive thinker and Man of the People.  The same leftist shills have been giving Fidel Castro the same treatment for decades – he’s a great socialist revolutionary who robs his national treasury blind to build mansions, while his people subsist on a handful of rice and the occasional glob of mystery meat.  The Politburos ruling over those great Marxist experiments always have their luxury vacation villas and summer palaces, even in North Korea, where the starving populace goes one step further than the oppressed Cubans and resorts to eating each other on occasion.

Of course nobody trapped in these dungeon states speaks up about the rank hypocrisy – they’ve got the secret police (and, perhaps more effectively, lingering fear of their party-line neighbors) to think about.  But more grimly enlightening is the applause of the international Left.  Here in the United States, we’ve got Michael Moore raking in millions by selling anti-capitalist agitprop to suckers, and showing the back of his hand to unions while he’s at it.  Hollywood socialists routinely emerge from limos to lecture the rest of us on our planet-ravaging conspicuous consumption, while their studios choke down millions in special-interest tax credits.  

And the rank-and-file liberals are very cool with it all, because inherent to liberalism is a strong desire to be ruled.  The liberal sees himself as morally and intellectually superior, so his leaders are giants, and their leaders are titans.  They deserve to live in obscene luxury.  Their superior compassion, surpassing intelligence, and bold leadership “earned” those glittering rewards, in a way that no entrepreneur or private-sector CEO possibly could.  That’s how we ended up with David Letterman giving Mitt Romney a hard time for being filthy rich, when Letterman makes considerably more money that Romney does. 

It pays for us to point out the hypocrisy, but we shouldn’t expect too much of a reaction from the liberal rank-and-file, or leftists in the media… because as far as they’re concerned, those $540 sneakers belong on Michelle Obama’s feet, and the royal family deserves parties that cost three times as much as a year of the White House tours they canceled to punish greedy Americans for refusing to hand over more of their income in the name of “deficit reduction.”