Silflay Hraka

Currently reading George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. One of the repeated themes in the section I’m currently in is that to Nicholas and Wilhelm the idea of a British free press was inconceivable, as the press was so closely controlled in their countries. Essentially, since their governments controlled their national press, they assumed that the British government controlled the British press. This led to any number of misunderstandings between–not only the cousins, but the govenments themselves during the years leading up to WWI.

I was reminded of this while reading this Jennifer Rubin essay at Contentions She says “(Between Nancy Pelosi, who’s looking for the funding behind the Ground Zero mosque opponents, and Obama, who can’t imagine grassroots opposition to his presidency, we have a peek at just how little the liberal elites think of us.)”

Given the ubiquity of bussed-in protestors and identical, premade signs at many of the Left’s rallies, which imply a certain top-down rather than bottom-up nature to those events–could it be that Obama cannot imagine a grassroots opposition movement because he’s never experienced one?