Tag: leaders
Are we getting the leaders we deserve?
SUBMITTED by THINKER.
I know this isn’t an original post, but the subject is something that might appeal to TBPers on a slow news day. The video of Gary Hart’s withdrawal is here: http://www.c-span.org/video/?3681-1/hart-first-withdrawal
He points out bread and circuses — and the media’s complicit role in all that — like no one else has.
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Are we getting the leaders we deserve?
by Matt Bai
If you’re tired of hearing Donald Trump go on about his ratings and polls, if you’re mystified by the Twitter War of the Candidates’ Wives, if you can’t understand why Wolf Blitzer interviews a former contestant on “The Apprentice” as if she were a political authority, then I’ve got a video you really need to watch.
The video I’m showing you here, courtesy of C-Span’s archive, is of a presidential candidate speaking in 1987, at a moment of tectonic upheaval in our politics and media. Chances are pretty good you’ve never seen it, or even heard about it, and there’s a reason for that.
Before I tell the remarkable story of that eight-minute speech, though, let’s put it in the context of our moment.
Recently, a bunch of commentators — among them the president of the United States — seem to have latched on to the idea that the media is culpable in enabling Trump’s antic march to the Republican nomination. In the New York Times, my former colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Jim Rutenberg have both written columns in the past week asking whether we, as an industry, need to be more accountable.
FuhrerPrinzip
Guest Post by Eric Peters
Free people don’t look for “leadership.” But that’s what every candidate for the presidency – regardless of partei – is offering to give them.
Such people deserve what they will get.
They have, after all asked for it.
Most Americans do not know what the German word, fuhrer means.
It does not mean “Hitler.”
It means, leader.
Hitler was Der Fuhrer; the leader.
The Germans of the Hitler era loved having a leader. Being led.
And leading, too.
They even had an expression for it: fuhrerprinzip, the leadership principle. You obeyed your superiors and your subordinates obeyed you in turn – with the leader (Der Fuhrer) at the apex of the pyramid.
Americans today are like the Germans were.
Ready for a leader.
And to be led.
The one requires the other.
This sickness in man was – is – not unique to Germans. It is a canker humanity picked up somewhere from ape to now that itches and comes to the surface regularly, pustulating and red. Germans (Prussians, to be precise about it) were particularly afflicted but the disease is easily spread.