The Obama Effect: Close Encounters of the Agitprop Kind
One of the creepiest aspects of Barack Obama’s run in 2008 was its cult-like atmosphere. While campaigning, the rhetoric of this tyro Cook County machine hack was something akin to a New Age tent-show preacher calling for the eschaton to be immanentized and souls to be re-engineered, Soviet-style, with quotes such as this:
We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.
* * * * *
I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere.
It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.
* * * * *
And similarly, Michelle Obama told voters:
We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.
* * * * *
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
The media, having spent eight years convincing first themselves and then their readers that George W. Bush was the anti-Christ, were thrilled that a self-proclaimed savior had now arrived, and fell hard. Journalists who once prided themselves on being the successors to the tough, cynical men who founded their profession were putty in Obama’s hands. The younger tikes in the newsroom, the Juice Box Mafia that made up the JournoList, ate this stuff up, leading to leftists such as JournoList-founder Ezra Klein (now with the Washington Post) uttering now-hilarious bromides in response such as this:
Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
News photographers invariably photographed the rookie senator in messianic backlit mock halos. And everyday voters responded in ways that now appear sad and desperate in response:
Then there were the wealthier liberals, the people whom now-chastened Obama-supporter David Brooks would define as “bourgeois-bohemians” – high net worth, highly educated upper-middle class Americans who nonetheless long for the tumult and radical chic of the late 1960s. These leftists also fell for Obama’s sophistry, leading a couple of conservative blogs in 2009 to accurately compare them to the investors of Bernie Madoff, one of Obama’s fellow Democrats:
President Obama and Bernie Madoff have an immeasurable amount in common. Both believe in soaking the rich to accomplish their goals and achieve their power. Both are known to be extremely generous with other people’s money, the very same money they’ve snookered people out of, and both are famous for making promises that they can’t, in the long term, keep. Both tactically use money that doesn’t really exist, and like any true Ponzi-scheme, the last people holding the bag are rewarded with seeing the proverbial feces hits the fan.
The original beneficiaries of Bernie Madoff’s and Barack Obama’s tactics, like in all pyramids, come out quite well. They get exactly what was promised to them, thereby causing such excitement at the miraculous results that it creates extraordinary demand for them, peaking at near messiah-like worship. The stimulus-bailout torch burns brightly for those in the front of the line, but becomes dimmer and dimmer, as it’s passed back to the suckers in the back of the line.
Mr. Madoff, like Mr. Obama, only took money from rich people, fat cats, millionaires, evil private jet owners, those that can afford to get bilked. Both have account minimums, a status symbol used to create the illusion that only the select elite will be allowed to participate. In Obama’s case, it seems to be around $250,000 (for a couple, but only $125,000 for an individual filer) Madoff’s, reportedly, was a cool million.
Obama and Madoff both like to hob-knob with the rich, famous, and influential of society, maintaining social networks that would put Donald Trump to shame. Their legendary early results spread like a virus among the privileged few.
Madoff devastated charities that had trusted him for his legendary investment prowess. President Obama will devastate charities with his proposal to vanish charitable tax deductions for the well-healed.
The major difference? One is behind bars, and one is still actively employed, planning new types of schemes to solve such “perceived” problems as global warming and economic inequality. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
While the road to hell in November of 2008 had an avatar and roadmap, it lacked a movie to memorialize it, until now.
Brace yourself — nothing more I can say can prepare for the full impact of this year’s equivalent of Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, North By Northwest, 2001: A Space Odyssey and every other great film of the past rolled into one landmark cinematic achievement. Its trailer is at the top of the next page.
After watching that trailer and _knowing_ it’s not satire, words fail me…
…except that I’d watch a whole movie about that Republican bit part character guy. _That_ might actually be a funny show.
I first remember seeing Mr. Dutton in a weekly show on Fox called “Roc” – it lasted about three seasons. One thing that struck me about the show was the earnestness about it – the hard-working blue-collar African-American who earnestedly loved his wife and kids who, in turn, earnestly loved him back. Mr. Dutton appears to be playing the earnest man who goes all out to be a part of something “much bigger than himself”. But, as author, P.J. O’Rourke has remarked, “Earnestness is stupidity gone to college.” Messianic figures such as Juan and Eva Peron, Napoleon, and Mussolini, tend to lead their countrymen to sorrowful ends – crushing debt and hyperinflation, societal destruction, and (often) military defeat. I wonder, I really do wonder, how Peggy Joseph and her family are doing right now.
Scary thing is she was closer to the truth than most knew:
Cash for Clunkers
Suing to stop forclosures
Free citizenship for 800,000
Welfare for ALL as of yesterday
48 million on food stamps
Socialized medicine
If you voted for Obama ? Thx asshole
“But fortunately, we’re leaving behind plenty of warnings to the future not to repeat those same mistakes.”
Like the warnings left behind that would have helped us avoid the Great Depression that we took all of 5 years to forget? Every generation seems to have to start all over again. Sigh.
Yes, I had intended that ending to be a bit dual-edged.
Campaigning for the ‘first black president’ is like Wyle E. coyote chasing the roadrunner. They never think about what happens if they win.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFDmcDW9uwc
Gosh, it appears the amount of hype needed to support the narrative extolling an otherwise empty suit is inversely proportional to the amount of his actual talent and/or accomplishments. This is probably a mathematical law but no one in the political class apparently knows how to do math anymore, having all graduated with degrees in obtaining creditials or something.
Hollywood can’t figure out how to best plant a smooch on Obama’s read in 2012, after their “ApocOlips Now” version in 2008.
Extremism is mother’s milk to radical leftists, so in a town where Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love are par for the course, Dutton ain’t nuttin’ in this bizarro world trailer.
The Choom and Doom squad doesn’t seem to like Scientology, but they sign up in droves to be audited by the Barryntologists. More than a little creepy.
Every time Typhoid Barry has a policy collapse, he says he didn’t do enough talking about it. Because, heaven knows…if only he had something other than a lapdog media and a pet monkey Hollywood as built in cheat-vantage…he could actually sell his small c communist crap to a country that can’t stand it.
“…we have to measure our greatness by the least of these.”
When did I become a member of a commune? That’s right: in a political sense, I am in fact NOT my brother’s keeper. There’s plenty of scope in private life for that without acting like only the gov’t can do this.
Can anyone here hack into King Obama’s Mr. Teleprompter at just the right time … … like real soon??!! Before he even realizes what he is saying, we may be free, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last!!
Good afternoon subjects. I mean, um, ah, my fellow Muslims. I mean, um, ah, my fellow Americans. I am hereby resigning from the office of your God, I mean, um, ah your Supreme Ruler. I mean the, um, ah, Presidency. [Be sure to scratch your nose with your middle finger]. I will spend some of my remaining time on Earth trying to forgive myself for making Kenya, I mean, um, ah, Venezuela, I mean, um, ah, America worse off when I could have made, um, ah, America better off with the same effort and I will spend the rest of my life living in a hut with my half-brother whats-his-name in Kenya studying the Holy Qur’an. I mean, um, ah, studying golf, I mean, um, ah, studying horticulture. Allah willing. I mean, um, ah, God bless you. [Be sure to scratch your nose with your middle finger again]
What really shocks me about the whole Obama phenomena is that so many, who should have known better, fell for his stupid sh*t, and so many still are. It is inescapable conclusion that 45% of the electorate are complete idiots.
Either that, or government employees who don’t give a crap about their unemployed neighbors. I think most of that percentage fall in that category.
Everyone here is taking the assurances that the movie *isn’t* satire at face value, when it sure looked to me as if the whole thing was satirical, at least in some fashion. Charles Dutton is an interesting guy, an ex-con with a checkered past who’s turned himself into a serious actor. I’d be pretty surprised, in spite of the fact he’s black, if this was just an obsequious homage to Obama and nothing else. And the clips themselves, the wife throwing herself in front of the wall to keep him from putting up that last Obama poster, the suit he wears with Obama’s portrait on it, the scene where he tells his wife he’s quit his job and she yells at him, all of this has to have at least some satirical aspects to it.
Even if it’s positive about his campaign, overall, it’s still mocking the more outrageous of his supporters in 2008, and that can’t be bad, can it?
From the preview alone you can see that the only character who is not satired is Obama himself. Satire doesn’t make sense unless it is referenced to something in reality. In this satire there is only one character in it who cannot be referenced back to reality: Obama. The effect on watching this type of satire would establish the non-satired character as a sort of absolute, because the audience would realize he is not being characitured, they would glaze over his part in the movie as being concurrent with reality, and therefore, as a truth. It is meant to bypass the logic of the conscious, which asks questions and reasons, and implant an absolute in the subconscious – That Obama is a history making man who won the presidency, and voting for him is to be on the “right side of history” is the information that goes to the subconscious. The subconscious doesn’t reason, but simply does. It knows what it knows without reasoning, because it has a gateway, the conscious mind, which is supposed to filter out illogic. To purposely use the method of bypassing the conscious mind in order to get people to change their behavior is called covert hypnosis.
The satire aspect of it all is meant to jog the Conscience. While your mind is trying to measure the characitures in the movie for their distance, or distortion from real people and things, the movie is feeding your subsconscious with an absolute that you aren’t even aware of: Obama is a historical man who won the presidency, and voting for him is to be on the right side of history.
That’s got to be one of the more obtuse, obscure, and downright confused answers to a comment I’ve had on this site. In fact, I think it *is* the most confused. I’m not sure exactly what you’re saying, but I’ll try and respond.
If you’re saying that the movie is trying to establish that Obama’s election was historical, well, we’ve had 44 presidents now, and the election (or accession to office) of each of them was historical. Whatever else he is, he’s the first black one, and that’s certainly historic. So I don’t get your point there. Is he subject to criticism in the movie? Probably not, given what you can see in the trailer (it’s important to understand that trailers don’t always reveal everything in a movie: they keep surprises concealed til you actually pay your money), but of course we’re not bound by that, and it certainly looks as if Dutton’s character is engaged in hero-worship, and the movie’s director is letting you in on the joke.
As far as I’m concerned, we won’t know until somebody actually bites the bullet and goes and sees the thing. Frankly, it looks to un-funny to be a comedy, and too one-dimensional and heavy-handed to be taken seriously. If that’s the case, it’ll crater like everything else Hollywood lefties have tried to push on us the last few years.
No, you don’t undertand I guess. I’m saying that the movie is using a form of covert hypnosis, intentional or not, based on what I can see from the preview. I believe it is a satire, but satire is not without a point. It is not a lampoon either. It was most definitely made by Obama supporters, and the fact that Obama is not satired in the movie is important. Like I said, it establishes him as an absolute in your subconscious. While you are watching this satire your conscious reasoning mind will be observing the distortions it is making of reality, which is what I said was called jogging the conscious. This puts your conscious reasoning ability on useless errands of figuring out something irrelevant, when all along the subconscious is on automatic, establishing absolutes and truths (that’s its purpose). So, the function of the subconscious is to establish truths and absolutes, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily only contains valid truths and absolutes. If the conscious mind is bypassed it is possible to insert things into the subconscious at will. The sub-mind doesn’t reason, so without introspection it wouldn’t be called into question by the conscious. It’s call covert hypnosis. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it does work.
When I say that the movie is imbedding the invalid argument that Obama is a historic man who won president, and voting for him is to be on the right side of history, I am saying that that is an example of part of an invalid argument that your subconscious is supposed to accept as a truth. Because those two things are irrefutabley true (despite that you would deny this), because we are talking about logic here. Not opinion. Is Obama historic? Yes. Did he win president? Yes. Is he on the “right side of history”? Yes. You have to understand about that last one, it is rhetoric. We are ALL on the right side of history. It is a meaningless tautology. It is always true about anyone living. The subsconscious is not going to judge about how good a person is. It does not reason. There are probably other irrefutable truths throughout the movie, such as “everyone needs hope”, and “America is in trouble”, and so forth.
Oh, I did forget something. Sorry, maybe this does seem disjointed the way I’m explaining it. The reason your conscious allows your subconsious to be accessed without filtering correctly if something is true or not is because you are being paced with the irrefutable truths, which puts your subconscious at ease. Then it is jogged.
I would bet that the movie starts out with lots of irrefutables: the country needs help, hope, black people are down, America is a good country that lost its way, etc. You are being paced. The conscious relaxes and is trusting what it sees as being true. Then the satire begins to develop. It stretches and stretches and your mind is now being jogged (because a satire needs a reference to reality your mind will try to figure this out – it goes on an errand, while the movie plays). All along Obama is NOT satired, so your mind accepts, if the covert hypnosis is successful, that Obama as an absolute: is who he is: a man about hope and change, wants to help, cares, etc. Then later when you think of Obama your subconscious will have already stored the invalid argument: “Obama is a historic man”, “he is on the right side of history”, therefore, “he is who he is”.
The sub-conscious accepts it as true because the conscious has seemingly okayed it. Covert hypnosis was pointed out in some of Obama’s first campaign speeches. He uses pacing and jogging of the conscious mind in order to insert an invalid argument about himself into your sub-conscious. I remember hearing him before he won and couldn’t understand why he was so well liked. It seemed to me he wasn’t really saying anything. It was weird. Then I saw something on youtube about him using covert hypnosis, and it clicked. And I felt it explained a lot about his supporters, and why people would dismiss his record for what he was selling. Now, whether it is intentional or not, is arguable. I’m not suggesting conspiracies or anything, but it is what it is. If you saw a 4 year old doing algebra you wouldn’t dismiss them as false because it’s a four year old. It may be endemic of simply the way liberals run shop. They cheat, manipulate, and use rhetoric. And this is not to suggest that they are savants or anything, but that the use of rhetoric can be powerful on the mind, and the mind is quickly able to access what works and what doesn’t. Ironically, it may be adapted from the way politics simply are. Ironic because we tend to think of adaption as being a good thing, but all it means is a survivable trait.
It’s pretty clearly satirizing the Obama-zombie cult members of 08.
Satire is not entirely characiture, AND in this case the locus is based on a real life character (if they characitured Obama himself it would have a different meaning). The main character in the movie is the cartoon, but the point is that Obama’s emminence, his position, and maintaining his power is important. It’s very sly.
The movie is made about the past. It is not someone obsessed with the next election. Keep that in mind, because Obama won the election, so they are using the victory of the first election, which we all know that Obama won (which has a subconscious effect, since the movie is interpreted as it were current.), to project onto the present something reminescent of that dumbstruck “I will vote for Obama” epiphany crappola, that temptation to “believe” AGAIN. (To win, and that’s it – it says nothing else). (Again, if Obama were characitured in the movie it would have another meaning. It’s focus would be on the charade of it all, but the movie only characitures the Obama nut, which ironically (characteristic of satire) puts all of its affection, the realistic attention, on the non-cartoon in it: Obama. That he is some kind of something.
Everyone in this movie is a characiture except for Obama. The easily won hispanic (with no real life hang-ups about Obama like Catholicism…), and the people around the Obama nut, who eventually come around or realize that the cartoon with a dream, the main character, is on to something, because he, of course, has his victory. Correlation is causation fallacy gets a lot of people.
And that’s the point of the movie? Everyone who voted for Obama had a little bit of this cartoon in them when they believed in his hope and change. This movie is to make them NOT feel like fools. To cling to that cartoon version of reality and they will be “on the right side of history”. Just more playing to their dumb side, and bypassing their conscious logical faculties in order to implant an idea into the subsconcious. And it’s funny, because for a little while I’m sure a lot of Germans in 1940 believed they were on the “right side of history”. I would just like to say, ” ‘F’ the right side of history. Its propaganda. That is all it takes to get the illogical Obama voters bumping. Feel good propagand that says absolutely nothing about the real world they live in. They DO NOT listen. They hear.
This also explains rap music.
I can remember back when John and Yoko were yodeling about “all you need is love” and poking daisies in gun barrels, thinking to myself that I was pretty sure people like Idi Amin weren’t going to go along with the program, and also wondering why that was so terribly obvious to me, but that John and Yoko and all those happy hippies with flowers in their seemed to truly believe that, somehow, the Idi Amin’s of the world were going to either (a) magically lose their evil-osity, or (b) voluntarily give up their lust for power to become loving human beings like the rest of us.
Yeah. Right.
I had that exact same vibe when I was watching the video’s of all those idjuts fainting and flopping about in the face of Obama’s wonderfulness … being pretty sure (again) that this dude, even if he *is* the first sorta kinda African American president, wasn’t going to give up his evil-osity nor give up his lust of power for love. And peace.
At least John and Yoko were acting out their own personal lunacy and there wasn’t the aroma of having been purchased by some overseas war lord, thereafter dancing a puppet dance controlled by god only knows who.
If The One is reelected look for the Democrat-media complex to go after the 22nd Amendment. Their position will be…”eight years of this guy is not enough”.
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Whoever said it – he was right.
Let’s go back a bit and see what the who believed in God also believed:
Witches
Spells
Flat Earth
Devils
Geo-centric universe
6000 year old Earth
Supernaturalism
Mysticism
Original sin
Collectivism
Tribalism
Feudalism
The superiority of “faith” over “Reason” (A good example of the crack-headed notion Chesterton was coming from)
The right to kill those who didn’t believe in their “God”
etc.
etc.
It’s a damn lame straw-man that the right uses to push it’s superstition notions, then dumps on their equally irrational and unreasoning world.
And yet somehow how, those same men who believed in God managed to invent:
Fire
Clothing
Language
Hygiene
Trade
Roads
Transportation
Indoor plumbing
In the 18th century founded America.
in the 19th century ended slavery.
In the 20th century won WWII and eventually the Cold War.
you forgot
medicine
math
pyhsics
physics
sorry for the spelling
This is just one more bit of cheap trash that’s blown in from the streets of Hollywood, and I don’t think it is worth a lot of analysis. It is sad to think that people, overgrown teenagers and frat boys, spent good money making this tripe, and they probably think it is pretty good stuff. Just like they think Obama is cool. The movies from this crowd fill nine out of every ten screens in the cinema complexes, 24/7. The people who produce them have had a grip on public consciousness for over a generation, and the biggest trashy blockbusters draw the biggest crowds especially in the college towns. This movie will succeed at the box office because it is so bad. THAT is what is serious about this movie.
Calling him a tub-thumping cult leader does him too much justice.
Closest thing I’ve seen is the barker at the carnival who picks your pocket by throwing some fluffy balls in a pail…then he gives you the rock-hard ones for the $5 fee. If you get lucky you win a stuffed bear that falls apart the first week your kid plays with it.
But obama doesn’t even rise to that level. At least the barker is trying to make a living.
Give the dems credit for something. The flick only goes to show how desperate they have become about the likely outcome of the November election. They’re desperate to impress the impressionable with the only thing they have left: their own feelings of hero worship for O.
The more sensible part of their collective hive mind has reached the conclusion that Obama has changed the debate from the question of ‘which candidate will do a better job’ to the statement ‘we better get this guy out of the WH.’ The desperation implicit in their little film also suggests they understand that Obama’s awfulness has attached the additional tag of ‘before it’s too late.’
Unintended self-satarization…of epic proportions.
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
May this be the one true thing said about him! May we come together and work to get this id10t out of office and never be uninvolved and uninformed enough to let it happen again!
I feel ill! This would be a persuasive means of bring back the poll tax.
!
Excellent article — and great comments. Thanks.
Yes, this movie is silly, trashy, even stupid, not very good satire. But, I think KGB got it right. It IS PROPAGANDA, directed at those still undecided but leaning a bit the Obama (or Libtard) way, and at those who might have become a little bit disillusioned and are therefore in danger of drifting off the plantation. The real character, Obama, is NOT being made fun of, but letting others’ prejudices about him be slap-sticked one way or another. — That’s the point!
The message is: “I’m still here. I’m great. I will be here tomorrow, only greater. Vote for me again. I’m the only thing that’s real out there, that you always wanted. Together we’ll make it. Forget Bernie Madoff; buy some more of MY security. It’s for real! I’m for real.” That IS the insidiously intended message.
KGB is right when he says that the critical conscious mind is sent on meaningless errands to amuse itself (in a crude way), while the subconscious mind, responsible for integrating and automatizing the allegedly fact-checked results of these errands, is fed the serious main message against which it is then defenseless.
What KGB called “covert hypnosis” is nothing other than the elaboration of a con man’s trick when running up against a slightly more sceptical subject. First, he tries to sell himself as straight and honest joe, then the glitter of his worthless product, too good to be true, then he makes a little fun of himself to distract from that and the scepticism, then more glitter, but toned down, then the kicker: “Normally this sells for a grand, but hey, I need more people to like this, so word gets around, so I’ll be an idiot today and let you have one for only 300. You do have friends, don’t you? Put in a good word for me, please, will you?” — Most sceptics forget their doubts by this point, and after a little haggling think they got the deal of their lives by closing for 250 plus a bunch of (actually useless, but appealing) trinkets. All together the whole bunch is worth less than 100, and you could have gotten something like it used for less than 30. But, HE’s got a sale!
Things haven’t changed much, in 4 years: BO’s still a con artist, and Hollywood Libtards are still hucksters. — This Pic’s trying to make (some) people forget that. (They use psychologists, too, to help them with this stuff.) Worse, there’s no antidote to this vicious guff. Depending on who and how many see this, it may well capture some votes.
To quote the choom-smoker’s most recent: “They didn’t do it on their own!” – Remember November!