One of the most influential essays on American life is Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance."  It was published in 1842, and it became the bedrock of American philosophy.  Emerson celebrated  the unique genius and the inconsistencies of the individual.  He celebrated personal life rather than communal rigidity.  He called "a foolish consistency ... the hobgoblin of small minds." "Self-Reliance" was a precursor to undercutting Marxism and governmental weight.  We should go back and read it more often. Meanwhile, not long ago in Roanoke, Virginia, a naïve President Obama sophomorically and socialistically attacked Emersonian individualism in a now-famous speech. So, America has become the greatest country in the world to be trodden down by Obama's outdated and failed governmental ideas.  Obama hands out welfare like carnations to the ugliest girls at the prom.  He loves failed individuals because he knows that he himself has borrowed other...(Read Full Post)