Our First Postmodern President
Victor Davis Hanson records Mr. Obama’s travails in Never-Never Land:
The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as truth to serve the higher moral narrative: a young biracial idealist searching for his identity in a mostly racist and oppressive America. To the degree that Dreams from My Father enhanced that narrative, then all of what was in it was “true” — even the literary agent’s bio attesting that the exotic author was born in faraway Kenya.
For the fabulist Obama, the past is a vague mess with shifting narratives that can serve noble contemporary causes. Take World War II — the old war that supposedly proves that victory is now an obsolete term, since, as Obama explained, Japanese Emperor Hirohito capitulated to General MacArthur, apparently on the deck of the Missouri, in a rare act never to happen again. Obama’s own grandfather was in the forefront of stopping Nazism, and the more dramatic the circumstances the better — so who cares whether the Russians, and not an American unit, liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka?
And in his latest ad (click over to Hot Air for the video), Obama makes postmodernism synonymous with sleaze:
The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action lobbed a heavy-duty attack at Mitt Romney this morning, airing an ad that links the closure of a GST Steel plant in Kansas City to the loss of a family’s health insurance — and the death of a woman some time later…
In the case of this particularly jarring super PAC ad, it may also be relevant that Soptic’s wife died in 2006, years after the GST factory closed down…
I asked Priorities USA strategist Bill Burton to explain the connection between Romney, Bain and a cancer fatality that happened near the end of Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts. The lapse in time between the plant closing and Soptic’s death doesn’t mean the ad is invalid, but it raises questions about the cause and effect relationship here.
Nevermind that it was an Obama bundler running Bain when Soptic’s wife died. As Allahpundit writes:
I have to say, though, it’s a comfort to me to know that Hopenchange will be well and truly shattered come November, no matter what happens on election day. Even if he pulls it out, after a campaign like this the idea that he and his team represent some sort of new, more exalted form of politics will be fully exposed for the joke that it is. His second term won’t be better, but at least people won’t be kidding themselves anymore, if any still are. There’s some small consolation in that.
Though as Michael Walsh writes, “as much as Obama hates Romney and loves the golfing and partying aspect of being president, the truth is that many Democrats won’t be sorry to see him go.” But he’ll leave quite a legacy, nonetheless:
But even should Romney win, the Democrats can still afford to smile, knowing that Obama’s “advances” — such as Obamacare — are going to be very hard or impossible to roll back. They know from history that American counter-revolutions never really restore the status quo ante, and that “progressive” ideas are nearly impossible to root out, especially with the media blocking for them. And they know their unfireable, beetling minions in the judiciary and the regulatory agencies aren’t going anywhere soon, no matter who wins.
Which is why the real fight lies elsewhere. For conservatives are engaged in a two-front war, one against the Democrats and the other against the sad, wan, spineless things known as mainstream Republicans. Alas, some of these creatures hold actual positions of authority in both the party and the government, in effect acting as facilitators for the other side.
The left are betting that the GOP don’t have the spine to repair the damage they’ve done since 2009. And they may very well be correct, as the SS Cloward-Piven sails even further into the pack of icebergs.







I’m not discouraged on the spine thing. We have a tea party for that!
I wouldn’t be too confident about the “legacy” of the Sleazebag president having a shelf life much longer than his campaign promises. I’ve read a couple of articles recently predicting the end of fiat money and with it, the end of the political class’s ability to manipulate the economy. The law of unintended consequences being what it is, when CTL+ALT+DEL is hit and the world reboots, the new OS may not be the same as the old OS. Regardless, Obamacare and maybe much of the Great Society and New Deal are doomed, math will see to that.
Kansas City, Kansas City…hey, isn’t that in Missouri? Wasn’t a big health-care plan Democrat — Bob Holden (D)– the governor of Missouri in 2001 when that plant closed down?
why is Romney to blame and Holden not .. beholden? Sauce, goose.
Walsh notes the same thing I’ve mentioned (often) in the past, in how much this race resembles Dinkins-Giuliani in NYC in 1993, which gives me hope, since I’m assuming the U.S. circa November 2012 still isn’t going to be as liberal as New York 19 years earlier, and the voters there still tossed Dave out in favor of Rudy.
The question is if Romney wins, does he have the stomach to go right at the worst of Obama’s legacy, as Giuliani did with Dinkins and Reagan did with Carter. Or will he stage a perfunctory assault, and then if he gets any push-back, even from some in his own party, be satisfied to just do minor things, in the same way Clinton came at it from the opposite direction during his second term, with ‘little’ big government stuff like police uniforms and midnight basketball. Any changes aren’t going to happen overnight, and the results could mirror Reagan’s first term, where the improvements arrived too late to save a lot of GOP members in Congress. If Mitt and the congressional GOP can’t deal with that, all we’re going to see is a lot of talk, but very little rollback legislation.