Amber waves of greed

Irony is dead.  We know that, don't we, Dear Reader?  So it will be no surprise that Romney is using "America the Beautiful" as his latest campaign prop.

Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent and the author of a book about the song, wrote that Bates “wanted to purify America’s great wealth, to channel what she had originally called ‘selfish gain’ into more noble causes.” Bates later rewrote the stanza into its current version, unrecited by Mr. Romney today:

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

Bates’ revulsion at the inequality and corruption she saw around her was shared by many others who became the core of the Progressive Movement. President Obama has lately begun to channel that movement, invoking the spirit of its greatest champion, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his positions, he has a better claim to the spirit of the song than does Mr. Romney, who appears to have no problem with inequality.