Conservative writer Michael Ledeen doesn't think much of President Obama, apparently. He was, at least, generous enough to say he doesn't believe the president is naïve, but that's about where his courtesy to Obama ends, at least in a post he wrote for The Corner, one of the National Review's blogs, on Thursday.
The post is headlined, "Is Obama Naïve?" Ledeen answers the question by saying, "I don't think so," but then going on to write:
I think that he rather likes tyrants and dislikes America. I think he'd like to be more powerful, I think he is trying to get control over as much of our lives as he can, so that he can put an end to the annoying tumult of our public life. As when he said (about health care) to the Congress, "Okay, you've talked enough, now it's time to do the right thing (my thing)." And he's trying to end American power in the outside world. He's saying "I'm going to stop us, before we kill again."
There is nothing unusual about elitist hatred of freedom .... [I]n modern times, we can all name famous intellectuals who fawned all over Mussolini, Stalin, Fidel, and even Hitler.
Leaders are constantly frustrated, and some of them come to yearn for an end to our freedom. They think they know best, they just want to tell us what to do and have us shut up and do it. I think Obama is one of them. He's not naïve. It's different. He doesn't like the way things work here, he thinks he can do much better, and he's possessed of the belief that America has done a lot of terrible things in the world, and should be prevented from doing such things ever again.
One of Ledeen's colleagues, Andy McCarthy, weighed in on his side, but National Review editor Rich Lowry did chime in to disagree.
You can read a 2007 interview I did with Ledeen here.
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