Was Steve Jobs a closet Republican?
THE DAILY BLADE: When conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh eulogized Steve Jobs, he said that the Apple co-founder “epitomized American exceptionalism”:
His life epitomized it. His philosophies epitomized American exceptionalism. The fact that he was a liberal, to me, was one of the greatest contradictions. But that is of no matter and no concern now.
Libs hear the term “American exceptionalism,” and they think it’s code for “Republican,” or “conservative.” HBO's “Real Time” host Bill Maher got his shorts all in a knot:
[H]e’s one of the few people who liberals and conservatives both like, you know, in the partisan country that we live in. And I just know that the right-wingers are going to try to claim him because he was a giant success. Please don’t do it, right-wingers. He was not one of you. He was not a corporate type. He was an Obama voting, pot-smoking Buddhist. He wasn’t one of you. So don’t try to claim Steve Jobs.”
Let's Leave aside the fact that pot-smoking is a bi-partisan pastime, that Buddha is nonpartisan and that there are actually Republicans who did (or will) vote for Obama. Jobs famously had a mean streak – he wielded it in the pursuit of excellence, but still; he didn’t run his business according to the moralistic codes of the socially responsible school of capitalism; and he was apparently too “hard-hearted” to donate a significant portion of his income towards uplifting the downtrodden, healing/housing/feeding the poverty-stricken, or bettering the lives of the otherwise pitiable.
In other words, Jobs was just the kind of guy liberals like Maher define as quintessential Republicans.
One more thing: Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak bootstrapped their start-up themselves. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his programmable calculator to get the seed money they needed, and a couple of weeks later Jobs made his first sale. They got no R&D money from the government nor looked to taxpayers to get their fledgling company off the ground, unlike Solyndra and other so-called “green technology” companies (related article, third item on the page) that the Obama administration has been lavishing public monies on.
Apple was green – that is, the company made money. Apple made money for its founders, for employees, for investors and for people who developed and launched other companies and services Apple products inspired or made possible. The two Steves are amongst the so-called 1% that the Occupy Wall Streeters are bellyaching about, but and they created wealth for tens of thousands of people.
Besides, if the middle-aged John Lennon had become a closet Republican, who’s to say Jobs hadn’t become one, too.
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