Borrowed from a friend...

In her poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus wrote: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.” Americans embraced that image of a nation that welcomed those who wanted to work hard and grow and build their lives.

But Barack Obama has replaced this call for self-reliance with an offer of security and serenity protected, subsidized, and sheltered by the government.

Obama heralds his arrival on the battlefield of our politics not with a cacophony of confrontation, but with a lulling siren song designed to sedate and anesthetize us while he transplants our essence and replaces it with something else entirely.

His sirens—the modern equivalent of those voices that tried to lure Ulysses onto the rocks and to his death in Homer’s Odyssey—sing the same soothing lullaby that has long since lulled Europe and Japan into a trance.