Medal of Freed… I don’t think that word means what you think it means

Obama awarded the Medal of Freedom to seventeen people; among them were wannabe gun banner Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg who famously retroactively removed guns from his ET film. Both Jews who don’t get it. Spielberg, as the director/producer of Schindler’s List, has no excuse of ignorance.

On the bright side, Jewish-Israeli conductor Itzhak Perlman seems to have stuck to what he’s good at: music. But other than that liberty provides a situation where he can safely do so, I don’t see what that has to do with ‘Freedom’.

Officially, that medal recognizes ‘an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.’ I’ll allow that Streisand and Spielberg could get in on the basis of cultural offerings (that’s pushing it a bit for has-been crooner Barbra), along with Perlman, but their insistence on disarmed, defenseless victims directly counters security and peace. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, another reliable gun-banner was also recognized.

Hmm. The late Shirley Chisholm, another gun control nut, got one. There’s former congresscritter Lee Hamilton, whose Center On Congress appears to favor some restrictions. William D. Ruckelshaus: I don’t know his position of defensive arms, but his DDT-banning EPA has certainly killed a few people. James Taylor flat-out says we need to sacrifice freedom. Yep, Gloria Estefan, too. I rather suspect that Sondheim hates this gun.

Time to rename that award the Presidential Medal of Political Convenience.


Ed. note: This commentary appeared first on TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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2 thoughts on “Medal of Freed… I don’t think that word means what you think it means”

  1. I think you are right, Carl. They don’t have a clue what “freedom” actually means.

    Do what you are told and pay up, then nobody gets hurt (much)… seems to be the essence of it.

  2. “The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they… have always held… The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most effective way to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.

    Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed….

    If one has not one’s self experienced this process, it is difficult to appreciate the magnitude of this change of the meaning of words, the confusion it causes, and the barriers to any rational discussion which it creates… And the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people. Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.”
    — Friedrich Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom”

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