Why is Rush Limbaugh so highly compensated that he could afford to put up all of his guests at his recent wedding for two nights at the Breakers in Palm Beach? He's just good. Two items from his email newsletter today that deserve wider circulation: President Obama's NASA administrator said in a recent interview that President Obama told him that his "foremost" mission should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering." And in President Obama's remarks on July 4, he said "we celebrate the principles that are timeless —- tenets first declared by men of property and wealth, but which gave rise to what Lincoln called a 'new birth of freedom' in America: civil rights and voting rights, workers' rights and women's rights, and the rights of every American." Rush's response was, "Even on the day of our independence, the leader of the regime has to bash this country."
Of course, it's no insult to most people to describe them as wealthy or property owners. In the case of the American founders, though, it isn't entirely accurate. As I write in my biography of Samuel Adams, that founding father was so poor that when he went off to the first Continental Congress the people of Boston had to take up a collection to buy him a new suit. "I glory in being what the World calls, a poor man," Adams wrote home to his wife, who responded that she was short of cash. Many of the richest people in Boston, other than John Hancock, who was an ally of Samuel Adams, were merchants who sided with the crown against Samuel Adams and the "mechanics" of Boston. This isn't to claim that the American revolution was some kind of class war, but the idea that the founders were all a bunch of rich guys is just ridiculous, and President Obama should know better than to propagate it on July 4 or on any other day. Even the richest of the founders was a lot poorer than George III.
