Boy, those CPAC speeches were dumb

Not to be outdone, Romney’s potential competitor for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Tim Pawlenty, mocked Obama for speaking from a teleprompter and then contrasted him—I kid you not—with the famously teleprompter-averse Ronald Reagan. Pawlenty also declared that America’s first “basic constitutional principle” is “God’s in charge.” And there I was, all this time, thinking that in a democracy the “basic constitutional principle” is that the demos—the people—are in charge. I had naively assumed that “God’s in charge” is the “basic constitutional principle” of well, theocracy. For Pawlenty, evidently, Thomas Jefferson and the Ayatollah Khomeini saw government pretty much the same way.

But the most disturbing lines came from Florida senatorial hopeful and CPAC heartthrob Marco Rubio. During his speech, Rubio called America “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from…the only economy in the world where poor people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can compete and succeed…the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home…the only country in the world where today’s employee is tomorrow’s employer” and the “one place in the world where the individual was more important than the state.”

And you wonder why Republicans have trouble getting along with America’s allies. Once upon a time, leaders of both parties took pride in America’s membership in a community of democracies whose members shared the same basic commitment to due process and individual liberty. That was the whole point of the phrase “free world.” For Rubio, however, there’s only one free nation in the world; the rest of the planet has succumbed to the kind of totalitarianism that Barack Obama hopes to bring to our shores.