The Great Barack & War Swindle

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his best-selling look at Hollywood in the 1970s, contains a memorable opening scene: Martin Scorsese as neophyte filmmaker, recently arrived to Los Angeles from New York, getting ready to shoot his first Hollywood movie, and dreaming of bigger and better projects. The big 1971 earthquake hits. Scorsese panics, wants to flee the city. A friend asks him, “Where are you going to go?”

In the 1970s, if you wanted to make movies, you worked in Hollywood, and took your chances with the earthquakes, and the city’s myriad other woes. Where else are you going to go?

Having just punked the anti-war far left, Obama is similarly asking them — where are you going to go? He’s got them in his pocket. Going to vote Nader? I don’t think so. Hillary? She’s in too deep with the administration. Screaming about impeachment, or being duped? You’re just allowing him to rhetorically triangulate towards the center, and play the far left off the rest of America.

Or as the Rhetorican explains, “How Obama Crushed The Dreams of A Generation (of Lefties):”

After the Left successfully demagogued every single move the Bush administration made for 8 years, here he was: a candidate upon whom every single aspiration of the Left could be projected and then some.  Independents flocked to him.  Crowds gathered in far off countries just to hear him speak.  He was The One.

But he was also a product.  A product that was marketed and sold, like a Hollywood movie.  And like a bad Hollywood movie, he didn’t live up to the hype.  And then, irony of ironies, fate turned the tables on Obama and his administration.

Where as in 2000 the Left got behind Al Gore’s ill-advised recount to clamor “stolen election!”, Obama and his DOJ let voter intimidation occur with impunity.

Back in the Bush years, enacting and enforcing the Patriot Act allowed the Left to lament the rise of an Orwellian tyranny under Bush.  But then Obama carried on with the same approach to surveillance…and later he let the TSA get away with invading people’s privacy in a far more tangible way.

Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney were demonized for erecting the Guantanamo prisoner facility.  And yet Obama has kept Guantanamo open.

Transparency, corruption, the economy (the economy was supposed to be bad during the Bush years.  Does anyone still believe that?).  You name it.  Whatever the Bush White House was accused of doing wrong, Obama has done just the same or worse.

Now Obama has his very own war in his hands.  A war that is vulnerable to the same criticisms with which the Left barraged the Iraq War Bush pursued.

All of the above and much more present the Left with a monumental problem.  Now they look like hypocrites…or fools (Rubes!).  Or both.  It’s almost as if they forgot about Alinsky’s rules.  But they had it coming.  They backed the wrong candidate. Many of them probably knew it (how could they have not known it?), but they backed him anyway.  They wanted the power.  Now they’ve paid for it with their credibility.

But where are they going to go?