Forgotten in the discussion about the President Obama’s falling domestic popularity is his even more precipitous decline in the esteem of the Arab world. The Christian Science Monitor reports Zogby found it had slipped from 45 percent to 20 percent in the past year, and that his “negatives” had soared from 23 to 62 percent. ” The Asia Times says Arabs asked to name a leader they admired named Obama well below the Shi’ite Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
When respondents were asked to name the world leader they admired most, Obama’s standing was less than 1%. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was cited most often (20%), followed by last year’s top pick, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (13%), and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad (12%).
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The hope that appeasement would be rewarded by respect has earned the President a kick in the nose. Perceived strength generates its own legitimacy in rough places; Arabs who have traditionally feared Persia now believe it has a right to build nuclear weapons. They have watched Iran push the President’s flaccid arm down to the table and drawn their own conclusions. The policy of apologizing for America has not won friends or influenced people; it has not even delegitimized Iranian expansionism. It has produced the contrary result.
Iran appears to have benefited, at least indirectly, from Arab disillusionment with Obama, the poll results suggested.
While a majority of respondents (55%) said they believed Tehran’s nuclear program was aimed at developing weapons – a charge denied by Iran – nearly four out of five respondents (77%) said the country had the right to pursue the program – a whopping increase of 24% since last year.
Appeasement has been bought at the price of respect without even gaining “moral” standing. Many of the Zogby respondents believed Obama was an Israeli tool, just as apparently President Obama’s left wing critics believe his a tool of Wall Street. Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe argues that President Obama is failing to please his liberal supporters because he’s been too soft. So they are witholding approval from the President out of “tough love”. That’s another and nicer word for blackmail.
Liberals have criticized Obama mainly because he is bungling this opportunity, not because he isn’t as leftwing as some might like. …
With his temporizing, Obama has left independent voters perplexed and the Democratic base dispirited. Democrats are now at risk of an epic legislative defeat this November, leaving Obama with even less running room to provide the recovery program that the country needs.
Obama’s failure to rise to the moment seems more characterological than ideological. He has the temperament of a conciliator, at a time when his opposition wants mainly to destroy him.
Temporizer .. conciliator … the word Kuttner should be looking for is loser. Nobody likes a loser. The nasties on the Left and extremists in the Arab world can never in any case feel something as uplifting as gratitude. There is no market for gratitude in a dog-eat-dog world. About all a certain type know how to do is kick people people who display weakness in the face.
In the most cutting of ironies Politico reports that the President is running for the middle — to the people who cling to their guns and Bibles, now that even Wall Street, which supported the Democratic Party in the last elections, is turning against him. “Wall Street executives are donating nearly 70 per cent of their political contributions to Republican candidates ahead of November’s mid-term elections, representing a significant shift in allegiances across an industry that has in recent history heavily favoured Democrats.” Not even the prospect of One More Bailout for the Street — in the guise of support for Fannie and Freddie — can restore the President to his former high estate among financiers.
Perhaps by running to the middle — if he is — the President will seek decency where he should have looked for it in the first place. The President might have tried being the careful steward of the economy and security entrusted to him. But that would have been too simple. Maybe there was something about the crowds — the intoxication of making speeches in front of styrofoam columns and before the Temple of Hercules — that made him see himself as the New FDR; the post-everything President. Maybe there was something about the whispers in his ear that blinded his judgment. The editor of Newsweek, recently sold for a dollar, once described Obama as a “sort of God”. Did that ring deliciously in his ear? At all events it may have made him forget that in order to be a success you must actually do something sometime. It’s always hard when you forget that part. Now with his popularity in decline it may finally be evident that those who play to the audience of fools becomes one of them himself.
Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.
Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.
And yet it’s a safe bet that even now, with the IMF saying that the US has committed suicide by debt, even now when the Arab masses are almost literally laughing at the great uniter, even now when the polls show an impending bloodbath for the Democrats in November, that they’re still spending their money on Axelrod, pollsters, spin-doctors, PR men, media mouthpieces, talking points memos and the whole clanking apparatus of political witchcraft. What is the phrase? What is the magic lighting angle, what is the buzzword, what is the frequency Kenneth? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The advantage of the ancien regime over the current crop is that they would have understood the French.
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I’m a loser
And I’m not what I appear to be
What have I done to deserve such a fate
I realize I have left it too late
And so it’s true, pride comes before a fall
I’m telling you so that you won’t lose all.
The editor of Newsweak is dyslexic.
He meant doG.
#2 blert
Maybe the editor of Newsweek meant Bo the First Dog, who traveled to Maine on his own separate plane. Bo’s name is supposedly derived from Teh Won’s initials.
Hard to see how Bo could do worse than BHO.
Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington.
Must have sacrificed a number of goats, chickens, and virgins to get Obambus elected in the first place. But magic, in these later days, is unclean, it comes from the dark side and it destroys all who call on it. “It was never very lawful,” suggests Ransom, in “That Hideous Strength”.
In Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away”, it is only with the exhaustion of magic that the old evils are gone, and it falls to the protagonists to make that happen.
A common theme is that with the coming of Jesus, the old magics were defeated. If Obambus were a real Christian, he might know that.
Wretchard says: Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. . . . Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
A patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Sorcerer (1877):
Oh, my name is John Wellington Wells
I’m a dealer in magic and spells
In blessings and curses
And ever-filled purses
In prophecies, witches, and knells
If you want a proud foe to “make tracks”
If you’d melt a rich uncle in wax
You’ve but to look in on our resident Djinn
Number seventy, Simmery Axe [St. Mary Axe]
We’ve a first-class assortment of magic
And for raising a posthumous shade
With effects that are comic or tragic
There’s no cheaper house in the trade.
Love-philtre, we’ve quantities of it
And for knowledge if any one burns
We keep an extremely small prophet– a prophet
Who brings us unbounded returns.
For he can prophesy with a wink of his eye,
Peep with security into futurity
Sum up your history, clear up a mystery
Humor proclivity for a nativity.
He has answers oracular, bogies spectacular
Tetrapods tragical, mirrors so magical
Facts astronomical, solemn or comical
And, if you want it, he
Makes a reduction on taking a quantity.
Oh, if anyone anything lacks
He’ll find it all ready in stacks
If he’ll only look in on the resident Djinn
Number seventy, Simmery Axe.
He can raise you hosts of ghosts
And that without reflectors
And creepy things with wings
And gaunt and grisly spectres.
He can fill you crowds of shrouds
And horrify you vastly
He can rack your brains with chains
And gibberings grim and ghastly.
Then, if you plan it, he changes organity
With an urbanity full of Satanity
Vexing humanity with an inanity
Fatal to vanity,
Driving your foes to the verge of insanity.
But in tautology on demonology
‘Lectro biology, mystic nosology
Spirit philology, high-class astrology
Such is his knowledge, he
Isn’t the man to require an authority.
Live performance here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NFJ2rLaeHw
Progressives in the West may be impressed by fancy pants words and the capacity to bob and weave when faced with a tough question. But in the Middle East the only thing that impresses is strength. And we forfeited it in November 2008. BTW, the weakening process has just begun. Wait till the Defense budget gets cut to “pay” for all this borrowing and spending.
The final lines of Psalm 29 say,”The Lord will give strength to His people; the Lord will bless His people with peace.” The message is clear. Strength first, then peace can follow. Ancient wisdom that is not in the least bit progressive.
we forfeited it in November 2008
We made historic fools of ourselves voting for a con man who calls himself Barack Hussein Obama. The trick in the con is to make the mark *want* it. The truth was clear enough to the residents of dar al-Islam, there was virtually no way Obama could have redeemed the promise to prove it anything but a fraud ab initio.
Bozo the clown and Obama = Bozama. Bozama is a good laugh. I gave up on the guy 6 months ago.
What is the fate of a god who no longer has worshipers? Once the promised miracles are shown to be frauds all but the most deluded of the devout will desert them. Do the discredited gods fade into the shadows never to reappear? Or do they attain the status of demons, like Baal and Hecate?
I think the Obammasiah will find out the personal answer to this question much sooner that he ever would have thought possible.
#9 Tcobb
You may find the story of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76) instructive. Zevi was a seventeenth-century rabbi from the Balkans who first claimed to be the Messiah and then converted to Islam.
“Sabbatai transformed the fasts of the Seventeenth of Tammuz and the Ninth of Av (his birthday) into feast days. He contemplated converting the Day of Atonement to one of celebration. . . . [In September 1666 he was brought before the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet IV]; he cast off his Jewish garb and put a Turkish turban on his head. Thus his conversion to Islam was accomplished. The sultan was much pleased, and rewarded Sabbatai by conferring the title (Mahmed) Effendi, and appointing him as his doorkeeper with a high salary. Sarah and a number of Sabbatai’s followers also went over to Islam. About 300 families converted and were known as dönmeh (converts). The sultan’s officials ordered Sabbatai to take an additional wife to demonstrate his conversion. . . .
Sabbatai’s conversion was devastating for his followers. Muslims and Christians criticized his followers after the event. In spite of Sabbatai’s apostasy, many of his adherents still tenaciously clung to him, claiming that his conversion was a part of the Messianic scheme.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi
Sabbatai Zevi was cited by Leon Festinger in When Prophecy Fails as a historical example of people committed to a messianic movement becoming even more zealous when the leader is discredited– in this case, Zevi’s followers claiming that his conversion to Islam was actually a part of his messianic mission to bring thousands of Muslims to Judaism.
So it may be that the “sort of God” in the White House will continue to provide his hard-core worshipers with all sorts of leg tingles, not to mention other “blessings and curses/And ever-filled purses.”
Remember thou art mortal
#10 PA cat
There is no hope for the insane. But for most folks when you claim the ability to turn water into wine you better be able to produce the miracle upon demand. Otherwise they tend to … doubt you.
As far as Obamah is concerned the water still looks and tastes like water and I don’t get even the slightest buzz off of it.
#12 Tcobb
As far as Obamah is concerned the water still looks and tastes like water
Polluted water, too, I’d say.
i’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.
Stock car flamin’ with a loser at the cruise control.
Maybe one of the PJTV shows can play that riff – you know the one, bow-bow-booowww-be-bow – as Obama’s intro theme.
Didn’t a famous Islamic leader once say ‘Everybody wants to ride the strong horse. Or was it the fast horse? Same thing I guess.
Meanwhile, remember the power POTUS has.
10 nights of bombing Iran and his poll numbers will be back up in the 70′s and all his Muslim buds will love him once more. 10 days because that is how long it will take for Western Cowards to realize that the Mad Dog Mullahs are running a bluff.
They have no effective response to a bombing campaign.
Turn loose Hez-bo-allah and Hamas and the Jews will just stack up the bodies. The terrorists know that and also know that with CNN showing Tehran being bombed, all their sacrifice won’t get any air time, which to them will make it a waste. Mine the Straits? The US Navy has invested in state of the art mine removal technology. They will clear the mines faster then they can be placed. Silkworms? HA Ha. The Navy has been shooting them down for 2 decades. No Silkworm has ever hit a target being protected by the US Navy.
No, in 10 days the weakness of the Iranian military will be exposed. That will do more damage to Iran then the bombs the Air Force drops.
Iraq picked up it’s first 11 Abrams this week. New build, so they will be getting 11 per month for the next 8 months. That will make Iraq MUCH stronger then Iran.
Once again, everybody wants to ride the strong horse.
What jumps out from the Arab opinion data is what it says about the truly bizarro-Andrew-Sullivan (but I repeat myself) thinking that the brown peoples of the world feel a magical kinship with brown Americans.
And even if that were true, nothing matches the loathing that arises when someone with whom you identified reinforces, through their failure, that you are a loser, too.
Stray thought: One advantage we will gain after we have finally suffered through the Obama administration is that the idea of groveling before islamists will have been shown to be futile and foolish.
Now this should have been obvious to everyone. But it plainly wasn’t. So when after the next devastating terror attack plaintive voices start bleating yet again that we’re the problem people can truthfully point out that we have in fact tried appeasement- and it failed.
There’s a silver lining in every mushroom cloud doncha know…
Oh, and BTW, after I read wretchard’s previous post about “cargo cults,” I dreamed I saw Obongo directing air traffic — while wearing cocoanut headphones.
The situation is tragic and everyone, including much of the world is in the same boat whose whose captaincy the LA Times criticized based on a new Gallup poll.
As the panic spreads there will be pressure among the Dems to write the President off. A cynic might say that the sudden “tough love” from the left is less the result of remorse than a desire to get away from the undertow. Whatever one may think of Charlie Rangel he was probably correct to suggest that the outrage of his colleagues was less due to moral indignation at dishonesty than the desire to have someone hold the bag. They needed a scapegoat and since he was turning 80, why not him?
C’mon Charlie, do the right thing and take the pill. Except Charlie won’t.
In the case of Barack Obama the calculus is similar. As Charlie Rangel said “I understand you gotta do what you gotta do”. And he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. How much of the sudden allergy of Democratic candidates to the President is due to belated enlightenment and how much to need to throw someone to the wolves? When the fictional blackguard Harry Flashman found his sled being overhauled by enemy cavalry his first thought was to throw his girlfriend over the side to make the sled go faster. “For an instant even I was appalled – but only for an instant. There was eight stone of her if there was an ounce – her loss would lighten us splendidly!” And over she went. Just how much better than the fictional Flashman are the honorable members?
The abandonment of Rangel and Obama to the “greater good” is a classic example of a corner case in the liberal race-card system. The flip side of being characterized as special or “magic” is that it also makes you unusually disposable in a crisis. Live the magic, die the scapegoat. Both Rangel and Obama are painfully aware of the hypocrisy of the game. That may cause unexpected problems. What if President Obama, like Rangel, balks at taking the fall?
In that case the elite system will rip itself apart with even greater force than one would expect. Instead of a “run to the center” a la Clinton, you may get a “make me go if you dare” response a la Rangel. That would in effect hold the system hostage rather than play by old style perp rules. This would be the ultimate revenge of Karma.
It will be interesting to see if any “wise men” will crawl out of the Democratic Party woodwork to work out a soft landing. Otherwise the system which put Barack Obama in the White House will be hoist on its own petard. Tolkien pointed out that things often developed in unforseen ways. It was Gollum, not Frodo, that destroyed the Ring. The rise and fall of Barack Obama may have consequences the Left never anticipated.
All glory is fleeting.
L3
Affirmative action baby–everything seemed to come so easy (it must be me!).
L3, IIRC a slave was to whisper those words into the ear of a victorious general as he paraded his troops (and booty) through the streets of Rome. Alas, there is no one in The One’s inner circle capable of whispering such words…and even the victory parade itself has been revealed as little more than a fantasy. Sic Transit Gloria, indeed.
I’ll see your “sic transit gloria” and raise you a “sic semper tyrannis.”
(through the ballot box)
November can’t come soon enough!
The left is nothing but fun to watch – though dangerous to live around.
They think that Obama is the reason why all of his leftist policies are so hated – when the reverse is true. They think Obama should be able to pass even more leftist policy proposals – think cap’Ntrade and Card Check, but since he can’t he must be incompetent.
Ultimately, the left built a narrative to explain history to the rest of us, and then they themselves decided to believe it. That includes:
1) FDR made the depression go away. He was made popular for it. Obama should do the same stuff, our depression will go away and he will be just as popular.
2) JFK was the greatest president ever. And Obama can be just as great. Of course, having the same reputation as JFK requires being assassinated just before everything goes bad – probably not going to happen.
Really smart guys came up with those two theories to entertain the rest of us. Trouble is, they aren’t true, so if the left believes them, the stories turn into boat anchors around their necks.
That’s why, if you read between Wretchard’s lines, he almost feels sorry for them.
L3 and Clioman -
You just reminded me of a line Liz Taylor had in “Butterfield 8.” Her character’s name is Gloria. She quotes the Latin phrase, “Sic transit gloria” but, not knowing what it means, says she figures it has something to do with the car she drives.
*************
Back during the 08 presidential campaign (boy does that seem centuries ago) a friend remarked how she thought Obama’s peripatetic “international” childhood was big plus because, in her line of thinking (parroted directly from the O’s marketing of himself), a less American, more We-R-The-World president would make America more accepted and loved by the world.
Several problems with this line of thinking.
1. The kind of people whom you are trying to win over by being “less American” will never see you as anything BUT American. And they will still hate you for it.
2. If you try to accomplish “being less American” via being a dhimmi, the folks in #1 will hate you twice as much. American dhimmi would be like, what, a tax-collecting leper in Jesus’ times?
3. If a private citizen wants to make him/herself “less American” when traveling abroad, that’s his or her business. But it is most emphatically NOT how the POTUS should approach the job. The international aspect of the job of POTUS is to represent America to the world, not to represent a “less American America” to the world, or to represent the world to America. Obama has no root American identity. Fools like my friend *knew* this and thought it was a great thing. Turns out, not so much. In fact it tends to bomb like anvils in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Square peg, round hole.
This is why the Constitution stipulates that the POTUS be a natural-born [American] citizen: the Framers understood that the job requires the person to be instinctively, viscerally American. If your heart doesn’t skip a beat when you see the American flag unfurl on a flagstaff, then don’t run for POTUS. If you don’t get the point that in the presence of American troops you are both CinC and are surrounded by your betters, don’t run for POTUS. If you don’t know the Constitution, or if the one you do think you know doesn’t fill you with awe and humility, don’t run for POTUS. If you don’t trust the (admittedly sometimes squirrelly, but freely made) judgment of Americans, then don’t run for their president. If you don’t understand why those guys returning from WWII, Korea and VN kissed the ground when they reached American shores, then g*******t don’t run for POTUS. And if you think any of the above are corny sentiments to be sneered at, or simplistic notions that need to be parsed and picked apart by super-intellects, then do the rest of us a favor and don’t run for POTUS.
Square peg, round hole.
It’s very simple, really. In order to “fit” to the office and the people, the POTUS needs to love this country. Bone-deep. Like a man loves his mother.
People with baggage and, er, “complicated relationships” need not apply. We do not need any (more) personal psychodramas [repressed anger, resentment, sense of betrayal or abandonment, etc.] being played out by someone who is going to have his finger on the button.
Re: “… [Obama's] more precipitous decline in the esteem of the Arab world.”
Good God – “esteem in the Arab world” is reserved for the human sewage like mass-murdering “martyrs” and satanic beasts like Osama bin Laden of Sunni Islam, Inc., and Nazrallah or Ahmadinijad of Shiite Islam, Inc. Who the frick wants to earn the “esteem of the Arab world”!?
Setting off into the bitter wilderness of Arabdom to “win their hearts and minds” was and always be a fool’s errand. Winning Arab hearts and minds turns the winner into a monster.
82 days. After the local election here, I am feeling hopeful. Republicans won 9 out of 9. This is in a very heavy black/Democrat area. State district 9 is 90% black and 70+% Democrat. The Winner there was a White male. Half Jewish, he was the incumbent and the only incumbent returned to office. He won in a landslide over a major black politician. When interviewed, most of the black voters said they were tired of getting screwed( not the exact word used) by black crooks trying to take advantage of being black.
In that respect the Obomination has been good for racial politics in America. Black voters are learning that a black politician is just as crooked as a white politician and will put it to them just as fast.
Progress is progress. You take what you can get.
The Big Zero has always been a “Fad” President. Unfortunately, fads fade, reality sets in; the allure of the fad is gone and people dump the fad.
The Big Zero is like the “Pet Rock” fad where rocks where humanized and sold as pets. The fad quickly died – but did make some people rich.
The Big Zero is the same. He is an empty suit who speaks out of both sides of his mouth. That kind of BS quickly wears thin and people quit believing his nonsense. No matter how you “package” him when you strip away the packaging you still have a worthless rock.
[Pet Rock Fad]
‘The first Pet Rocks were ordinary gray stones bought at a builder’s supply store. They were marketed like live pets, in custom cardboard boxes, complete with straw and breathing holes for the “animal”. The fad lasted about six months, ending after a short increase in sales during the Christmas season of December 1975. During its short run, the Pet Rock made Dahl a millionaire…’
See Pet Rock Fad
http://tinyurl.com/2zqc6b
The only real skill the Big Zero has is race baiting. The only major core constituency that is left is his black voters. It’s entirely possible the Big Zero will try to scorch the earth and cause a race riot. The result could be Wretchard’s “Proximity Alert” where the flaming crash of a B-52 is shown.
http://tinyurl.com/27gw9u2
Sadly, the Big Zero may just fly us into the ground. I would hope that someone or some group would legally relieve the Big Zero from the controls before this catastrophe happens.
Is this thing on? A little lag before comments are seen?
PA Cat@10 is on to the crux of the matter. At the height of Stalin’s “show trials” great internal party purge those Stalin had sentenced to death, even with his signature affixed to the death warrant in their hand starring them in the face, continued to voice aloud their belief in, fealty/commitment to, Communism and their “Great Leader” as they were being led to their deaths. Believing until the last that it was all simply a ghastly mistake–that Stalin had been misinformed, lied to by their party rivals, and that if they could only personally plead their case to Stalin the facts could be set straight.
Eric Hoffer had the archetype pegged. “True Believers” NEVER lose faith in either the cause or the man. The mounds of dead bodies of those who drank the kool-aid at Jonestown–but the latest in a sad, long historical line of such piles–serve as mute testimony to the evils of the cult of personality, utopian ideologies, narcissism, and the powers of analysis of Hoffer.
JFK was the greatest president ever.
Speaking of psychodramas, there is a whole bundle of unresolved projection & fantasy & trauma wrapped up in the lefty boomer’s regard for JFK.
If you were a kid or youth growing up at that time, he must have been an “easy” guy to be enthusiastic about. About the age of your pop, good-looking, frequently funny, sophisticated, married to a glamorous wife, father of cute toddlers, adored by all the cool people.
As a symbolic act (and that’s about the only level on which a kid would understand it, being too young and inexperienced to absorb all the frustrating complexities of politics), his assassination must have been especially devastating for young people.
And he was followed by … his exact style opposite. LBJ was the Scar to JFK’s King Mufasa.
I think it was Oliver Stone who once said in an interview that it was JFK’s assassination, not VietNam, that soured him (and he was speaking for everyone in his generation who went left) on not just the American government but on America iteself. As in, something’s rotten in the heart of the USA.
The “unfulfilled promise” of Jack Kennedy, Jackie’s “Camelot” glitter-wrapping, became for Stone et al a psychological terrain into/onto which they could push all the lost what-ifs and dreamy dreams. “The blank screen onto which people of vastly different political strips project their own views,” if you will. Since JFK was not around to actually *do* X or Y, anyone could then try to claim that he *would* have done X or Y. (Ditto Bobby.)
LBJ, correspondingly, became the psychological landfill. All the ugliness & rage gets dumped there.
The Kennedy hagiography depends so heavily on this sense of shock and traumatic loss, that it can be viewed as quite repulsively manipulative and shameless for the extent to which it has been milked. Not least of all by the Kennedy family itself. (Looking at YOU, Teddy.)
In the grotesquely ironic sense it was only JFK’s and Bobby’s “martyrdom” which allowed their “magic” to continue. Forever young. The dead Hollywood starlet frozen in time, forever beautfiul.
That’s the thing about magic; it thrives only in its own little hothouse of tightly circumscribed conditions.
“Brief time period” appears to be condition #1. People are fickle and black swans have this tendency to appear and dispel the pixie dust. Therefore, the only time window is a very short one.
“Extreme exhuberance and self-satisfaction” appears to be condition #2. It’s not about the white rabbit coming out of the hat. It’s about how the audience FEELS about seeing the white rabbit coming out of the hat. Emotion. The more intense, the more childlike, the better.
“Tightly controlled narrative” appears to be condition #3. Magic wouldn’t be magic if you saw how it works. Controlling the narrative, allowing the audience to see only what the magician wants people to see, is what gives it that aura of specialness. It’s always a presentation; carefully selected and edited. The minute the backstage machinery fails or, heaven forbid, some rival magician leaks Mr. Mojo’s secrets, things start to fall apart.
Not being a boomer, and having Nixon & not JFK as my first president, has tended to cast me as some kind of skeptical outsider with regard to the JFK “thing.” I don’t understand the gut-pull of it because obviously I wasn’t there. I’ve never had a sense of magic about any president, ever. (Though RR looks better & better as time goes on; to some extent nostalgia, yes, but 20/20 hindsight also.) And I’ve thought for a long time that boomers, as a generation, were a generation badly in need of some competent psychoanalysis. Or just a plain old “grow up already” kick in the pants maybe. How much of lefty boomers’ dissociation from reality is due to the JFK “thing” I don’t know; but I don’t think they are entirely unrelated.
Wretchard:
“Forgotten in the discussion about the President Obama’s falling domestic popularity is his even more precipitous decline in the esteem of the Arab world. ”
Why should that be surprising?
Arabs may occasionally be crazier than shaved rats in coffee cans, but they ain’t necessarily stoopid.
They can appreciate how much the Alleged Hawaiian sucks too.
Here’s a little secret: The Arabs WANT a strong America to keep their local kleptocrat tyrants and the violent Islamist kooks that they seem to breed in line.
Recall that Al Qaeda has murdered FAR more Muslim Arabs than they have Americans.
What we suffered on September 11th, the Iraqis call “March”,(well, no they don’t, actually, they have their own names for months, but you get the idea).
For all their ululatory babble, the LAST thing any reasonably sane Arab Muslim would want would be no Warden in the prison.
Ergo, they perceive Obama as an out of touch neo-Marxist tool, too.
“Temporizer .. conciliator … the word Kuttner should be looking for is loser”
Well, “loser” is one way to put it, but to be completely blunt about it, the words he is striving mightily NOT to write are:
“Lazy”
and :
“Shiftless”
crazier than shaved rats in coffee cans,
bilgeman -
First time I’ve heard this expression. Whatta gem. I plan on stealing & using it some time.
But I have to ask … who shaves the rat and, more important, WHY?
The New FDR?
“Don’t waste a crisis”
The Original FDR.
“We have nothing to fear except fear itself”.
Bogie #34:
I’m not kiddin’ about this:
It is not longer necessary to shave the rats. The USAF developed hairless rats in the 1980′s.
But perhaps the A-Rabs are mainly “Birthers” and they figure Obama ain’t really an American and so they ain’t skeered of him.
2) JFK was the greatest president ever. And Obama can be just as great. Of course, having the same reputation as JFK requires being assassinated just before everything goes bad – probably not going to happen.
The perversity of the legend-giving power of assassination is interesting, and disturbing. For instance: The Malcolm X that is worshipped by the black community is not the man he was becoming, but the persona that Malcolm X was leaving behind. The new persona was why he was murdered, so his old self could be flash-frozen in time and in the consciousness of black America. So now blacks celebrate a man that a living Malcolm X would repudiate, and they also tolerate (and sometimes celebrate) one of the architects of his murder: Louis Farrakhan.
Wretchard says: Maybe there was something about the crowds — the intoxication of making speeches in front of styrofoam columns and before the Temple of Hercules — that made him see himself as the New FDR; the post-everything President. Maybe there was something about the whispers in his ear that blinded his judgment.
Victor Davis Hanson on “Obama: Fighting the Yuppie Factor”:
“From the price of arugula to vacations in Marbella, the Obamas are the perfect yuppie couple.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/439064/obama-fighting-the-yuppie-factor/victor-davis-hanson?page=1
One of the things that not well understood is that 9/11/01 kept bush from completely opening the borders–and locking the US into a road for the NAU. Prior to 9/11 path to the NAU was written about approvingly in the Wall St Journal as way to proceed with North American integration.
Human Events
North American Union Isn’t Going Away
by Jerome R. Corsi
01/09/2007
As early as July 2, 2001, Robert L. Bartley, then-editor of the Wall Street Journal, directly supported the idea of creating a North American Union in no uncertain terms, writing an editorial titled, “Open Nafta Borders? Why Not.” Bartley wrote:
Reformist Mexican President Vincente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion [in his book "Revolution of Hope published in 2007] that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grand that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper [the Wall St. Journal].
……
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
[In his book, Revolution of Hope,] While sometimes needling Bush, Fox also doles out heaps of praise, applauding his onetime U.S. counterpart for “cultural sensitivity.” Fox writes that several days before the attacks of Sept. 11, he and Bush pumped hands and hugged at Andrews Air Force Base after returning on Air Force One from an Ohio immigration reform rally.
“We’re going to get this done,” Fox recalls Bush telling him. By then, Fox writes, Bush had improved his Spanish and had “mastered the traditional male hug of Mexican culture, the abrazo.” Fox felt like “the toast of Washington,” and Bush’s enthusiasm, along with promising talks with congressional leaders, had the new Mexican president believing that “passage of the immigration reform package was in the bag.”
Three days later, planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and “our revolution of hope came face to face with the walls of fear,” Fox writes.
……….
Same goes for the “Audacity of Hope”.
boogie wheel @32/
As someone who WAS around during “Camelot” (I’m now 66, college Class of ’66)) I can tell you that much of the enthusiasm at the time (early sixties)was because both the left AND the right were optimistic at that time–liberals because they thought everything was going to change their way; conservatives because they thought everything was going to stay pretty much the same. Strangely, to many today, the assassination of Kennedy DID NOT do much to change that at first. Southern conservatives who had rankled at the admission of James Meridith to Ole Miss in 1962 and the ensuing campus riots detested Kennedy and thought his death meant integration would be slowed. Liberals were still optimistic–until Vietnam escalated under LBJ–believing LBJ to be the only one powerful enough (he knew where all the bodies were buried domestic politics-wise) who could actually deliver a Civil Rights bill (which he did.) After that, after about spring, 1965, and the landing of the Marines at DaNang introducing a substantial ground presence in Vietnam and making it LBJ’s War, the twin “cause celebres” of civil rights and the Vietnam war insured that it was down-hill all the way national unity-wise. Of course trends developed unevenly geographically-speaking nation-wide, but a turning-point was reached–IMHO–during the 1967 “summer of love”– a climatical merging of wide-spread drug use (until then limited to certain circumscribed segments of society) with dissatisfaction over both the direction of civil rights by conservatives and the Vietnam War by liberals–after which any similarity henceforth between national politics going forward and years previous were few and far between.
Court approved gerrymandering (down to certain apartment buildings), an army of public union employees, a nearly unlimited mountain of cash from we don’t where, and the dictatorial power of the AG to keep felons, dead people, and illegals on the State voting rolls by “enforcing” the Voting Rights Act keep a very big Democrat thumb on the electoral scale – whatever people think of Obama, and no matter how they vote.
31. virgil xenophon
PA Cat@10 is on to the crux of the matter. At the height of Stalin’s “show trials” great internal party purge…
…….
There was something like a diabolical genius in American communists during the early 1950′s in that they imputed to McCarthy what Stalin was about to do in the Doctor’s Plot of 1953. Stalin was about to exterminate Russia’s jews byo the Doctor’s plot. About 100 or so Jews had already been killed. The labor camps had already been set up in siberia. The Soviet press had ratcheted up its vendetta against Russian Jews to a level that everyone recognized as a prelude like to the purges of the 1930′s.
And then Stalin died.
The purge died too.
However, American communists saw the McCarthy trials as show trials just like the Stalin put on in Russia prior to his great purges. Because the Rosenburgs were jewish–american communists dropped a blood libel on McCarthy that he was anti Semitic–and tarred the American right with the same brush. The lefts visceral reaction to the Nixon presidency had its roots in his part in the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). The left simply felt that Nixon was irredeemably anti Semitic. The blood libel worked its magic through the decades.
Stalins actions before his death were not forgotten in the Soviet Union. In the 1970′s when it became clear that communism was not working — it was Russia’s Jews– and especially the communist party Jews who were made scapegoats.
The soviet Union’s way of handling the the problem of communism– was a primitive reaction to failure.
A two party system enables a new group to form when the Ancien regime goes into rigor mortis–as is happening now. We hope that the change is happening fast enough. Faster please.
Darn that Doris Kearns Goodwin! Imagine the fun they’d have had at Ace of Spades with “The New Foundation”! Well, maybe we can salvage this – how about a similar idea, only more Latinate, to appeal to the sophisticates: “The New Fundament”.
So Obama could not get elected dogcatcher in Cairo — even though Arabs are culturally predisposed to dislike dogs?
What are the external players making of all of this? The Russians & Chinese who are providing material support to Iran? Iran? Hamas? Al-Queda? To say nothing of Chavez?
Do they recognize that the US is shaking itself to death (with the Anglosphere, Japan, and the EU as paralyzed & useless as ever), and step back to let Obama get on with it? Maybe even get the Chinese to send Obama more millions in illegal campaign contributions, to keep the pot boiling?
Or does one of those players decide to strike while the iron is hot?
The most important decisions on the future of the US may not be taken in the US.
From the White House
“These rituals remind us of the principles that we hold in common, and Islam’s role in advancing justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings. Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. And here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”
Geez. Are we on the same planet as this guy?
“The New Fundament”.
Phooie. Dr. Mabuse beat me to it.
#45. Peter Boston
Geez. Are we on the same planet as this guy?
Yes we are. We are just not taking the same drugs as he is.
Perhaps like the Black American’s the arabs have discovered that Obama (PBUH) is half white man.
It’s likely that most BC readers already fully appreciate that the charade of the current oval office is fully intentional. A person was selected and groomed, and surely gave what in medical/legal terminology is styled “informed consent” to play a particular role for the beasts who paid good money to put him where he is. Simply, it was never his aim to do any of the things we have thought to be good for this country.
In exchange for his piloting – “controlled flight into terrain” — his wife and children get to scamper all over Harrod’s, Paris, and other jewels of the West. God knows whether those will still be here in another few years. In all likelihood promises of personal safety for the family have been made, and some pretense of follow-through might be actually made.
In any case, Oxamba is fulfilling his part of the bargain, sabotaging the country that enabled his parents’ brief liaison, his access to educational opportunities and career options not available to more than a tiny fraction of a percent of the world’s population. That he has pissed away that wealth by betraying the country that made his pathetic life possible, is among the great ironies of history.
One need not be a wearer of tinfoil beanies to look at a man of undetectable skills, ethics, and judgment, and conclude that his elevation to leadership could only have been a result of powerful monsters operating in the shadows, who needed a malleable puppet.
To Skip@16,
Please, keep your voice down. If Ofumble hears about these really good things of which you speak, the next sound you hear will be the sound of Abrams tanks being turned around to drive back to be turned into the “Cash for Clunkers” incovenient tanks program.
Charles @ 42…
Stalin unleashed Hitler with his August 23 Pact. In its codicils were the new Soviet Nazi Boundary running through Poland – pretty much the same boundary as the Polish-Russian border today.
An additional stipulation was the start date certain for the European war: September 1st BOTH parties were to attack. (Stalin broke the deal immediately – he didn’t cross into Poland until she was defeated. (A two-week siege of Warsaw doesn’t count.)
Stalin was stunned right along with everyone else when France collapsed so quickly and German losses were a joke.
He did have some jokers floating around Hitler: spies and double agents. I recommend Unholy Trinity, Aarons & Loftus ISBN 0-312-18199-X St. Martin’s Press.
If you parse the history of the Shoah it is plain that Nazi schemes and motivations changed between 1939 and 1941 drastically. Full-blown genocide coincided entirely with Barbarossa.
Khrushchev wrote that Stalin was an anti-Semite of the first water. He had long hated Soviet Jewry far more than Hitler!
There is reason to believe that Stalin used Hitler’s out-of-the-book anti-Semitism to suit his own desires.
The most effective double agent in history has to be Stalin’s plant in Zapororzhye/ Zaporizhia. This was the furthest point east that European gauge rails reached behind the German front. So, they located their operational HQ for Army Group South just east of the Dnieper River.
This agent, true name never established, fed the Germans a banquet of tactical intelligence. His cover explanation: he represented a crew of White Russian officers operating in Stavka’s staff who wished to see Stalin defeated, but who could not get direct access. They did have access to the battle maps, so getting Hitler to beat Stalin was the best that they could do.
After throwing enough sugar to Hitler, this double agent conned his way into Zapororzhye HQ, toting a high-tech radio permitting him to receive and transmit directly to his ‘contracts’ at Stavka. Being a double agent, his gambit was to trade pawns for rooks.
The success of Saturn damn near killed him. Gehlen was able to save him, though. The cover excuse was that the NKVD was working a mole hunt and the boys had to cool it, lest they be rounded up entire.
This agent demanded in the name of his crew that the harshest measures be pressed against the Ukraine – and the Jews above all. His crowd insisted that their co-operation would only continue if the cultural threat of these undesirables was eliminated.
For Hitler, who already thought along these lines, such stimulus and the tactical intelligence rationale made him rash, cruel and foolish beyond even his prior habit.
This bargain seems to have been made even before Barbarossa got launched and must be factored into Hitler’s belief that he need only kick the door down. The first weeks of Barbarossa and the battle maps indicate that someone was giving Hitler absolutely top quality information right from the start.
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/maps/LageOst23Jun41a_lg.jpg
Note how German forces are strong exactly where Soviet forces are thin. If you poke around the other maps you’ll see the incredible advance of German forces into the East.
Of course, the double agent was getting his news directly from the NKVD under the watchful eye of Stavka. While he was helping the Germans, he was giving Stalin ten times as much.
This agent is almost certainly the source for Hitler’s concern about Ploesti being attacked. By thusly sacrificing the southern armies, Stalin saved Moscow. He fully realized that there were no factories to lose in Ukraine: he never permitted any asset build-up there! However, Ukraine would make for the perfect battlefield. Hitler would inevitably be destroying the very people that Stalin just got through destroying over the last ten-years. (It’s the Georgian in him.)
As you look at Hitler’s follies on the road to ruin, always keep in your mind the manipulation Stalin is pulling on him with the ultimate double agent!
Stalin hated and murdered Jews all his life. The fact that American Jews were so typically in his service and traitors to their country simply reinforced his opinion that all Jews are security risks. And we are talking about the most paranoid man to walk the earth.
The Obami still think they are God’s gift. It’s the country that is stupid. And they are not going to go quietly or honorably. If they aren’t cooking up an October surprise this time, they sure will next time. He likes being President even he doesn’t care to do the job. He’s been a slacker all his life. It’s so cool to shoot hoops with the NBA homeys and stuff. He doesn’t think he’s a loser. He will be the last to know.
#43 Dr, Mabuse
Darn that Doris Kearns Goodwin!
It’s ironic that she’s one of Teh Won’s advisors, given that she was caught in a plagiarism scandal in 2002 (she eventually resigned from Harvard’s Board of Overseers as well as giving up her position at PBS). I guess it takes one Harvard plagiarist/fake to recognize another.
http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/27/0227goodwin.html
On the other hand, Kearns Goodwin was the first female journalist to be allowed to enter the Red Sox locker room (no wonder Fenway Nation’s curse lasted so long . . . . )
44. Kinuachdrach
The most important decisions on the future of the US may not be taken in the US.
……
The first problem with this analysis is that the Anglosphere has lots of food. And lives on distant shores. The food riots start elsewhere–and the attacks would have to be necessarily blind. After all who do you attack when the grain barges don’t arrive. We’re not talking about Russia here. They’re keeping their remaining grain at home. And for good reason. They’re building gas pipelines across the north sea to Germany. This work turned up first rate wine recently from the seafloor from the 18th century. The Europeans and Japanese can afford to pay for food and fuel. We’re not talking about the Chinese either. They’re stocking up on US grain surpluses. Both countries are players.
We’re only in the first two years of the [failure]. You need a decade or more of this to have a revolution of falling expectations.
The US moves much faster.
But I understand your point. You’re saying “Hope springs eternal.”
The problem with Vincente Fox’s book “Revolution of Hope” was that it went over the heads of the Mexican people even more than it did the American people. The book was published only in English and ghost written by an American.
Even Obama’s book “Audacity of Hope” was written by a guy who is very far removed from the American black community. His roots are in the upper reaches of the democratic party.
Bogie Wheel @ 32: Brilliant insights into how magic works. Also the magical aspect of heroes being sacrificed (assassination or voluntary act to “bring back the fire” or atone for collective sin). I am hardly equipped to get Jungian or whatever but this does seem like a primordial motif in human moral-religious narrative. Note also that the residual guilt and gratitude of the people toward the dead hero is an emotional annuity that can –as you say– be cashed almost indefinitely by the insiders. The Kennedys, as somehow holding a corner on this commodity. The guy who claimed he had cradled the dying MLK. Etc.
Cheap and nasty theatrics but too lucrative not to be exploited by cheap and nasty people.
…never mind.
Arabs who have traditionally feared Persia now believe it has a right to build nuclear weapons
Well, duh. Muslims are obligated to put other Muslims, even heretical Shia ones, ahead of any infidel.
2@blert: Way off topic.
Did you hear the one about the dyslexic agnostic who had insomnia?
He lay awake at nights pondering the existence of Dog.
Ba-dum!
21@Leo Linbeck III:
Memento Mori. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
The desert moon now shining bright
The camels tucked in for the night
The fire banked to just a glow
An Arab spat and said, you know
That hopey changey guy’s a fraud
He promised us that we’d be awed
By all the wondrous things he’d do
I haven’ seen a thing, have you?
The other Arab sighed and spat
He dissed the Jews, but what is that
He said that Palestine was ours
That he and all the other powers
Would force the Jews off of our land
But here we are, still pounding sand
No better off the first guy said
It’s late and time to go to bed
A little love before the snores
My camel now, tomorrow yours
Walt:
Bravo!
The Arabs had hope for Obama because they though once he came to office he would immediately cut off all ties with Israel. Instead Obama still maintains our alliance, albeit at arms length. This is a “betrayal” in the eyes of the Arabs that he was trying to reach.
I’m quite sure that from his own point of view Obama was trying to reach a morally-equivalent compromise between parties by propping up relations with Muslim nations while pushing down the Israelis. Unfortunately what the Arabs want is not peace with Israel, it’s Victory. If Obama can’t deliver on that then to them he’s a traitor too.
Speaking of psychodramas, there is a whole bundle of unresolved projection & fantasy & trauma wrapped up in the lefty boomer’s regard for JFK.
Excellent observations, bogie wheel. But it’s not just lefty boomers. I am a late boomer (not old enough to remember JFK, old enough to remember Bobby)and recently I said something mildly critical of JFK when I was in the company of people roughly 10 years older than me. None of them are liberal, they detested Teddy, but they were very quick to defend JFK by saying his positions on taxation and defense would be considered conservative today. I didn’t argue the point because what mainly interested me was their rather touchy defense. All three of them were once Dems and the Greatness of JFK appears to be one item of Boomer faith they are unwilling to contemplate objectively or relinquish (P.J. O’Rourke does not get misty-eyed over the Kennedys, but then he came from a Republican family and returned to his roots after a fling with leftism.) Peggy Noonan said once that the country as a whole will never be able to come to a true valuation of the Kennedy presidency until the Boomers are dead. (I’d say the same is true of the Beatles – are they really that damn good, or do I think so only because my immediate elders have hammered the Brilliance of the Fab Four into my head since I was in kindergarten?)
Ironically, Kennedy was at a low point in the polls when he was killed. One reason to pray fervently every day for the continued good health and safety of Obama. Blame would of course be instantly laid at the feet of the tea partiers and the bitter clingers, Palin, Limbaugh, etc. One of the neatest tricks of leftists like Stone has been to make the Right, not the Marxist Oswald, culpable for the murder of JFK.
Kennedy was the perfect politician.
His dad bought him the election by way of the Chicago Mob — and didn’t tell him. And to think, all of these years, everyone thought the Daley machine was involved. Naturally, Nixon gracefully let him take office without sending in the FBI.
Once in office, Kennedy blew the Cuban Insurgents off the beach with fecklessness. He was still able to face them.
He blew his summit with Khrushchev. Subsequently permitted the Berlin Wall to go up. The diaries are open, now: the Reds would have given up if he’d pushed the first wet mortared brick over.
So to prove himself he ramped up the Vietnam commitment — particularly the secret commitments to the RSVN — to such a degree LBJ couldn’t figure out a way to unwind them. Vietnam bends the nation, ruins LBJ ( in over his head internationally ) and generally worked to shift the blame onto the guy who’s trying to not have Berlin Wall II on his watch.
He did manage to get credit for all time for the Moon program: which was LBJ’s baby even before Kennedy ran for President. ( What a burn for LBJ: Kennedy gets the credit for LBJ’s dream — Nixon ruins it with the Space Shuttle and takes the phone call from Armstrong!)
We now know that most of the Cuban Missile Crisis was triggered by his fiasco at the Wall. The Reds, being in a staggeringly inferior strategic position, had the guts to place 97 percent of their effective throw-weight in Cuba! The Nation was not told that Russia had essentially NO ICBMs at all. What she did have took a FULL DAY up, open, and on the pad to prepare for launch — from Estonia! She never had more than one such base, and it held at the ready only three effective missiles!
Her naval arm was so iffy that surviving retirees admit that any attempt to fuel up at sea could reasonably lead to the self-destruction of their boats.
The rest of their arsenal could not reach us at all. It was sized to destroy Europe. Any bombers they might send our way would be dead meat seeing how SAC would have nuked their airfields before the could take off and Russia did not maintain a standing alert until very late in the game. To repeat, the USSR had all of its sights on Europe. The impracticality of hitting America had not yet been solved: her nukes weighed too much!
As a result of Kennedy running his offers through the back channel the deal was struck via the same man who ran the penetration of Manhattan in his youth and was the handler of traitor W. Averell Harriman during WWII. What a nice trustful guy! ( He goes off into history has an all round good fellow who saved the planet! Nothing could be so far from the truth.)
Of course, Kennedy instituted price controls on the steel industry. It NEVER recovered.
But his most enduring act was to permit collective bargaining by professional Democrats on behalf of Federal employees. This particular executive order is the foundation for the destructive runaway pensions that erode the solvency of this great state.
We salute you, President Kennedy.
BTW, the trysts with Monroe — paved the way for Clinton. We’re becoming more French with every passing Democrat.
Never again should we nominate or elect a person who needs whores and painkillers to make it through the day.
Great post Wretchard. It makes me think of the foo fighters song “the pretender”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBjQ9tuuTJQ
“[W]hen people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”, some Arab guy, 2001