Two snippets from Victor Davis Hanson’s column

President Obama also reportedly gave a pep talk to Democratic legislators on the eve of last Saturday night’s successful passage of the House version of his government medical plan. According to Rep. Robert Andrews, D-NJ, Obama at this juncture referenced the Fort Hood massacres. His “remarks put in perspective that the hardships soldiers endure for the country are ‘what sacrifice really is,’ as opposed to ‘casting a vote that might lose an election for you.’” (This from a politician who voted “present” for political reasons as a matter of habit, and compiled the most partisan voting record in the U.S. Senate.)

And according to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, President Obama also quipped, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit.” … “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Surely the President has learned that “tea-bag” has become a derogatory sexual slur, used by those on the Left to deride any who attend the so-called Tea-parties—the vast majority of whom are neither “extremists” nor  intrinsically “anti-government people.”

Instead of all this, what if the President of the United States had not called for a Saturday night vote on health care, in which he used the outrage over the Fort Hood horror to win back wavering votes, while slurring his enemies. What if instead he had said something like, “Let’s have the debate and vote take place in prime afternoon time, to encourage the American people to follow the proceedings. And let us conduct the entire process without calling each other names.”

Ignored and forgotten?

At about the time of the Fort Hood terrorist attack, the President was hosting a “Tribal Nations Conference.” At one point in his remarks, he confessed, “I know what it means to feel ignored and forgotten, and what it means to struggle. So you will not be forgotten as long as I’m in this White House.”

What does “ignored” and “forgotten” actually mean in this particular context (I do not think it is a reference to his father’s absence or his grandparents careful custodianship)? President Obama went to prep school, the elite and pricey private Occidental College, the Ivy League Columbia University, and Harvard Law School—no doubt thanks either to grants and scholarships or government-subsidized loans. Forgotten and ignored at prep school or Harvard Law Review? If so, what does that make the working classes at Cal State Bakersfield, or those who went into the Marines at 18, or those who began driving a semi at 19? In comparison to the wretched lonely ordeal at Harvard and Columbia, not forgotten and not ignored by American society?