August 22, 2011
By James V Capua
American Thinker
Is our current "Young Pretender" preparing to fly the coop even before his Culloden in 2012?
Until the advent of Barack Obama, Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), called The Young Pretender, was a prime contender for the title of greatest narcissistic waster of other people's time and trouble in history. The Stuarts' hopeless quest to reclaim the throne of England brought little beyond misery to the Scots, many of whom subsequently turned their backs on the Highlands to wrest a better life out of the American wilderness.
The restoration of the Stuarts was, by the
middle of the eighteenth century, a romantic dream, not unlike our own Hope and Change. Certainly, like Hope and Change, it served the needs of some powerful interests to foster the Stuart cause, but in the end the Jacobite dream dashed itself headlong into reality and fell to pieces, leaving the poorest of its adherents, who "trusted" in their Prince from Across the Water, to pay a terrible price. Charlie, who had grown up in Rome as a pampered aristocrat, with about as much connection to those he sent to ruin and misery as our own vacationer-in-chief, whined and complained his way through The Forty-Five, as the Jacobite Rebellion was called, but at least stuck it out until the final disaster at Culloden before fleeing. One begins to wonder whether Barack Obama will be so resolute.
In Chicago, where they know him best, there are doubts that he will:
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