NY Sun on Paul Ryan’s worthiness to be an Ayn Rand disciple .
” Let us savor the irony of the New York Times complaining that Paul Ryan is an unworthy disciple of Ayn Rand. The irony was on display yesterday on the paper’s op-ed page, which ran out a column headlined “Atlas Spurned.” It’s by a history professor, Jennifer Burns, who reckons that Mr. Ryan has betrayed the ideas of the author of “Atlas Shrugged” by believing in God and a strong defense in the war against terror. “As a woman in a man’s world, a Jewish atheist in a country dominated by Christianity and a refugee from a totalitarian state, Rand knew it was not enough to promote individual freedom in the economic realm alone,” writes Professor Burns. “If Mr. Ryan becomes the next vice president, it wouldn’t be her dream come true, but her nightmare.”
This is almost touching. It’s probably the first time the Gray Lady has put the creator of John Galt up as a model to be emulated. When “Atlas Shrugged” was published in 1957, the Times ran out a review by Granville Hicks that complained the novel “howls in the reader’s ear” and asserted: “Loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear that the book is written out of hate. … Perhaps most of us have moments when we feel that it might be a good idea if the whole human race, except for us and the few nice people we know, were wiped out; but one wonders about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work.”*”
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