For we, the American people, have failed to please The One. “Like a long-suffering parent, Obama bravely tries to be patient with his wayward, ungrateful children,” Jon Gabriel sardonically quips at Ricochet:
Yet every once in a while the mask slips and he complains about “bitter clingers” filled with “fear and frustration” who have gotten a “little bit lazy.”
The Hill begins a story with a line that should have been used much more over the past five years: “President Obama said Tuesday that Americans were wrong…” It encapsulates one of the greatest frustrations of his loyal opposition. Not that he disagrees with our policies, but that he considers them unworthy of even cursory investigation.
President Obama said Tuesday that Americans were wrong to doubt his signature healthcare reform law, saying concerns over rising costs or worsening health outcomes were not supported by the evidence.
In an interview with Telemundo on Tuesday, the president was asked if “everybody [was] wrong” after polling data indicated that a majority of Americans oppose the law and believe it will raise their healthcare costs.
“Yes,” the president said with a chuckle. “They are.”
As the late Kenneth Minogue wrote in 2010, in a piece titled “Morals & the servile mind,” in the New Criterion:
My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
On an episode of Mad Men, Roger Sterling once joked that advertising would be such a great profession, if only they didn’t have to deal with clients. Given that his inner child is a baroque leftwing college professor, Barack Obama very much believes that politics would be a fantastic profession as well, if only he didn’t have to deal with people.
“Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort, Bertolt Brecht once said. “If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
But then, that’s long been a belief of Mr. Obama as well.
Update: Glenn Reynolds insta-summarizes this Investor’s Business Daily column: “Obama To Unions Unhappy With ObamaCare: You’re All A Bunch Of GOP Dupes!”
Heh, indeed.™ Why, it’s as if they’re all suffering from a collective false consciousness or something.
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