Obama’s Skin
First, there is a characterological issue. I won’t say that narcissism is exclusively a left-wing character deformation. There’s plenty of that liability to go around. (It is worth noting, however, that narcissism is not the same thing as haughtiness or pridefulness or even smugness. Narcissism requires a certain supplement: a fatal injection of unassailable moral superiority.) Taranto is surely right that “It is healthy for America that the president be criticized and even mocked. Deference to a Dear Leader has no place in a democracy.” Cast your mind back over the satire, ridicule, and calumny that was heaped upon Bush (both of them), Clinton, and Ronald Reagan. Then consider the way the Left reacts to criticism or ridicule of Obama. They regard it — or pretend to regard it — as evidence of racism. Court jester Chris Matthews even claims to find deployment of the word “Chicago” racist. Which is why, as Taranto observes, criticizing the president and even poking fun at him is good for race relations, too: “It’s healthy for race relations, too, that he be judged on his record rather than held to a lower standard in the name of racial progress. When a black politician is treated just like any other politician, that’s genuine progress.” Taranto continues:
If Obama had been subject to the usual rigors of politics in 2008 and before, and if his backers in the media and elsewhere had not been so keen before and during his presidency to deflect criticism by invoking race, he probably would have a thicker skin, better arguments and a deeper understanding of America. Those qualities would make an incumbent a better bet for re-election. Then again, without the racial symbolism and all the accompanying baggage, he probably would still be the junior senator from Illinois (if that).
“If that,” indeed. But I haven’t yet touched on the second major reason that the Left finds it difficult to accommodate criticism. Narcissism is one reason. But behind that is this fundamental component of the liberal world view: the conviction that their view of the world is the sole virtuous view. This has been the case at least since Robespierre appropriated Rousseau’s hot-house notion of virtue: the virtuous man is not he who acts in a virtuous way, but he who is intoxicated by the spectacle of his own virtuous feelings. Take a look at the behavior of the Occupy crowd, of Code Pink, of the Greens, of the left flank of the Democratic Party. Dissent from their point of view is not regarded as a different opinion: it is rejected as heresy, as the benighted machinations of people who are not just misguided but downright evil. Paul Ryan delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention, and a writer for Salon assails it as a pack of “brazen lies.” The New York Times runs a “son-of-Satan” photograph of Ryan on its front cover that even one of my liberal friends was embarrassed by.
There’s a lot more that could be said about the Left’s response to the speeches at the RNC. For now, let me step back and note the close link between left-liberal intoxication and intolerance. Conservatives in contemporary America stand for limited government and individual liberty. They applaud James Madison, who (in Federalist 45) noted that the Constitution accorded powers to the federal government that were “few and defined”—having to do mostly with “external objects” like war, peace, and foreign commerce—while the powers delegated to the individual states were “numerous and indefinite,” extending to “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” What happened to that ideal, they wonder? The Left, meanwhile, is the party of government unlimited, individual liberty be damned. That’s why the Left is the party of speech codes, nanny-state intrusions into everyday life, and overbearing regulation of business. Thomas Jefferson once observed that “A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Just imagine how such a declaration would be assailed today by the Left!
President Obama is right: this election is about two fundamentally different views of America. One is the view promulgated by Madison, Jefferson, and their colleagues — a view that championed limited government and individual liberty — he other is the Republic of Virtue the Left from the time of Rousseau through Marx, Lenin, and all the other “Friends of Humanity” have been promising us. The very extravagance of their promises is part of what (for those susceptible to the rhetoric) makes them so seductive. Remember: back in 2008 Obama assured his adoring acolytes that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (wild applause). He said that his ascension would mark the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” (air-sickness bag alert). Conservatives offer more pedestrian promises. Mitt Romney, for example, noted in his acceptance speech Thursday night that while “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet,” his promise was merely “to help you and your family.”
Merely. The real choice is between boundless but unrealizable utopian promises and more modest but realizable promises that take account of human and economic realities. Behind that choice is another choice: the choice between the limited but real freedom offered by the rule of law and its often tedious processes and that virtue-saturated utopia the Left keeps promising us. Think about it the next time you encounter an Occupy Whatever demonstrator destroying private property, or an academic administrator or college professor stomping on the free speech of a student with whose politics he disagrees, or a government bureaucrat who prohibits you from buying a large can of soda or an incandescent light bulb or charges you more for driving a gasoline powered car. Maximilian Robespierre, who knew a thing or two about what it took to impose virtue on a recalcitrant people, put it with all possible clarity when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
Of course, that was a long time ago, and history since Robespierre has demonstrated that we humans have progressed far beyond employing such blunt scenarios of coercion.
(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com image.)
Hmmm – do I detect a certain post-RNC melancholy in Mr. Kimball’s words? To be sure, that mood is wholly justified:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/09/01/eliot-weinberger/a-hologram-for-president
“melancholy” ?
Hah, once again, with the left it’s about feeeeelings.
No, this was analysis of choices and the difference in which they are framed by Democrats and Republicans.
Republicans = ideas.
With Democrats, it always comes down to the Racial Bogeyman.
I think you are splitting chairs. If you take a chairful look you will see that your’s is empty. You should take far more chair before imagining something that isn’t there. Oh wait, you’ve already done that with your President. Chair up, there must be other things that you chair about that are not just a faded poster.
I thought Clint Eastwood was really funny. His improvisation of a grumpy old white guy arguing with an imaginary foe exemplifies the modern GOP quite well. His little skit launched a new internet meme: “Eastwooding.”
However, the reality is that Clint is 82. There hasn’t been any “Eastwooding” without a blue pill since “The Bridges of Madison County.”
Gotta have a sense of humor, huh?
Too funny!
Well played sir.
I stopped reading Taranto’s blog after it went into pay-to-read. But, Roger, before I stopped, I posted MANY emails and links to Taranto for “best of the web” concerning “the usual rigors” that Obama did not experience.
It is almost a mathematical theorem.
He was not subjected to the hurly burly of normal politics, due to being shielded. No honesty in disagreement and debate, no give and take, no kerfuffles. That makes it like a communication channel carrying zero information, like Claude Shannon figure out way back in 1948. It is like having someone on the phone, telling you “Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One, Obama is the One…” without variation. Zero entropy, zero information. You do not need to listen to know what they are saying on that line, so you can hang up the phone.
That being the case, Obama is not strong. How could he have become strong? So I always shake my head when I read someone describing him as smart.
But now, Clint Eastwood has a variation on it. Instead of hanging up the phone line, we have to let him go. I like it.
Taranto’s column is still free to read. (I read it most days.) One of the few free things left on the WSJ opinion page.
Still free? Hmmmmm. Maybe I will start reading it again.
Hey, you wrote “burly”! RACIST!
– he can’t help it, he was born with a silver pacifier in his mouth.
Why reference that liberal, lying, distorted UK website and blog. It was hard to read because so many of the comments were so twisted and and untrue I kept picturing this Brit with his pompous nose stuck up in the air (as obo does) while a stiff pole was sticking out his ass.
Yeah, Britain’s politics are working out so well as is their social policies. Islam anyone.
Eliot Weinberger’s a New Yorker, born and bred. You might have checked that, before giving in to the spasm.
Here in England, all politicians nowadays see to be devoid of a sense of humour, unlike Churchill who perpetrated many a bon mot, often against himself.
But a good joke is going the rounds about the PM,s Cameron’s, attempt to introduce “gay marriage”. The joke, at least 2000 years old, goes back to Suetonius who in his biography of the Emperor Nero described how Nero had “married” a man in the Roman army. Suetonius tells us that the whole of Rome was stating that it was a pity that Nero’s father did not restrict himself to such a “marriage”. This is now being applied to Cameron who has not been reported as seeing the humour of it.
Now, that was scathingly hilarious! I should think Cameron would catch fire before his face cracked a smile.
“this fundamental component of the liberal world view: the conviction that their view of the world is the sole virtuous view.”
Actually, it’s worse.
The Left doesn’t just believe that their view is the only moral one. They’re also positive that their view MUST inevitably triumph eventually.
They have this ideological “Manifest Destiny” about the ultimate triumph of democratic socialism. They have reinterpreted American history as a gradual but inexorable march to the left, always to the left, with just a few historical aberrations along the way like the Reagan Administration.
If the Left thought that socialism wasn’t inevitable, they would have to actually debate their views with those who disagree. But since they believe they must win inevitably, that gives them sanction to just sweep aside opponents with force (heckling, threatening, even rioting). Much as America’s own “Manifest Destiny” in the 19th century gave Americans sanction to sweep the American Indians aside. (U.S. troops used force, not debates, against the AmerIndians.)
articles like this persist in the illusion that the left is some sort of monolithic entitity personified by the Slimes and MSLSD. The truth is quite different. 99% of the Left are small time grifters scramblling to get in the other guy’s pocket and following whatever pied piper promises them the most goodies. obama started out as one of those until he realized that the color of his skin and being clean and articulate (sort of) made him the golden goose. The 99% is all over the map…pissed off homosexuals, pissed off feminazis, happy illegals (happy to get free stuff), happy corporate executives feeding at Uncle Sam’s trough, happy politicians making fortunes without risking life and limb as they would be doing if they had to revert to conventional crime, angry union guys (angry because they can’t can’t get a bigger gubamint teet), etc. etc. etc. The only common theme is greed, and for some, anger.
The other 1% are hard core marxist, in the mafioso sense. They aren’t marxists in the ideologial sense either. It’s just that they are in it for the big con rather than the pocket pick. And confiscating the wealth of people who work for a living and redistributing 2% of it to the grifters is easy work.
(PS, most republicans are just like the democrats. Don’t believe their lies either.)
I’ve been telling people something similar for a long while now. These leftists are more like a big crime family than anything else. Corporate shakedowns, scams, payola for protection,kickbacks for cronies, you name it. It’s all there. Whem Obama was telling the Wall Street companies early in his term that he was all that stood between them and the people with the pitchforks, what I see is Don Fanucci in GFII telling a young Vito Corlene that he’ll offer protection from the police if he can just wet his beak a little.
They’re all working a con, both large or small.
“Then again, without the racial symbolism and all the accompanying baggage, he(Obama) probably would still be the junior senator from Illinois (if that).”
And Hillary Clinton would be President, the Dems would be in control of both houses of Congress and criticism of the Prez would be sexist, not racist. Barry and his excesses just may have saved us from disaster.
I sure hope you’re right. I really feel like there is a shift underway and that this could be a big win for Romney, but there are two long months ahead of us, still.
With regard to your point about Hillary Clinton, though, I think that you are definitely right about how things might have gone had she been elected. She would have played it much more cautiously and been more centrist than Obama in her policies in the first few years. Then she would have coasted to re-election and could have gone full-on hard left in the second term. Obama, on the other hand, gave us hard-left right away. He doesn’t know how to be centrist, he only knows how to be a demagogue. So now he’s reduced to saying ridiculous things like he will be more “bipartisan” in his second term, which is a sure admission of his failures in that regard, though of course the media is doing its best to hide that from the voters.
I’ve shared this conviction since 2009, when it became clear that the Obama presidency would be a catastrophe: It was a profound and merciful gift Divine gift, this opportunity to wake up and turn around before our country went over the fiscal cliff. Nothing else would have dispelled our vast, trancelike complacency.
The 0bama cloud has a silver lining in that we were saved from an even greater 8 yr Hilliary disaster. Alas, history does not reveal the results of its alternatives. But you are probably correct.
It is the moments like these that has showed America who he really is, and why he will be one and done! He told everybody to judge him by the people he surrounds himself with. Well, we have and he will pay with job!
EPA official’s ‘crucify’ comment continues to draw fire Apr 27, 2012
http://video.foxnews.com/v/1603185814001/epa-officials-crucify-comment-continues-to-draw-fire
The Democrats are stuck firmly between a rock and a hard place. They can argue that America is dissatisfied with Obama’s performance because of his skin color, thus admitting that we’d expect much better from a white guy, and make the White House off-limits for every other potential Affirmative Action hire. Or, they can argue that America is dissatisfied with Obama’s performance because of his ideology and make the White House off-limits to future generations of leftists.
Since blacks are useful idiots for the leftists it’s no surprise that they’re throwing Obama’s skin color under the bus. If the rank and file minority voter goes along then it’s a big for the Democrats and their “hard bigotry of no expectations”.
Employing Alinsky Rule 6 (A good tactic is one your people enjoy) with #Eastwooding.
“No sane person believed that stuff about casting down the oceans and mending “the planet,””
AGW-nuts do believe it. They think the oceans are rising and the Earth is dying, being killed by humans and their greenhouse gasses. Electing Obama meant that AGW legislation would finally get passed, and the oceans would begin to recede and the planet would begin to heal. All hail Mother Gaia.
But they cannot really be called insane, although their notions beggar belief. No, they are just fools, not insane.
“Then consider the way the Left reacts to criticism or ridicule of Obama. They regard it — or pretend to regard it — as evidence of racism.”
No, it is evidence of blasphemy. All hail Mother Gaia and her chief Prophet, Obama.
I got to the bottom of your article, and whaddaya know? You mentioned heresy. Kinda on the same page.
The link below is for an article by Stanley Kurtz which was written more than 11 years ago, but which does a great job of explaining the thinking and behavior which leads them to label those who disagree as heretics.
http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kurtz053101.shtml
“Maximilian Robespierre, who knew a thing or two about what it took to impose virtue on a recalcitrant people, put it with all possible clarity when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
And THAT is what bothers me most about the upcoming election. By any objective examination of the Obama administration, every rational person can see that it was a dismal failure. Unemployment is still way too high, taxes are skyrocketing, healthcare costs (which were supposed to go down) are still climbing, and economic growth is almost non-existant. If you hired a contractor that performed this poorly you would fire him, right? Yet Obama still wants four more years. To do what is anybody’s guess.
So if the last four years have been so bad, why in God’s name would anybody want to give this guy a second chance? And if Obamacare is allowed to kick in, that will certainly spell the end of our economy and drive us right back into recession, given that Obamacare has roughly 21 new taxes that are going to be shoved down our throats. So if Obama can’t run on his record, what CAN he run on?
Well, he’s the first black president, right? I guess that counts for something. It doesn’t count for much if you’re looking for a job or have to pay the rent, but to liberals it means everything. So are we to keep a failed president simply because of his skin color?
To all you liberals out there, think about this. If Obama DOES get another four years and we actually do fall into total economic chaos and bankruptcy, who do you think is going to get hurt first, the rich people? Not a chance. It will be the poor and the middle class. The very people that Obama claims to be the champion of will get whacked the worst, because the first thing a bankrupt government will be forced to do is cut way back on all sorts of benefits, from Medicare and Medicaid to student loans and Social Security. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at Greece and the other bankrupt social-welfare states in Europe. They are literally having riots in the streets because people can’t get enough to eat, let alone get their promised pensions and other benefits. Europe is teetering on the edge of total chaos, and yet this is the economic model our president wants to emulate?
If Obama is (God forbid) re-elected, we will be bankrupt by 2016. That’s just a plain fact. We just can’t keep spending this much and borrowing this much and still remain financially solvent. And then what happens when the benefits start drying up, people don’t get their food stamps or unemployment checks, and the medical care that was promised under Obamacare cannot be obtained and goes away? You really will have to deal with a new Terror and possibly even a new Robespierre. People do desperate things when they go hungry and it never ends well. At least in the 1930s we had the flexibility to run up huge bills to pay for Roosevelt’s social programs. Now we’re just about broke and what happens if nobody thinks we should be loaned any more money? It’s too horrible to think about. You will have California on steroids. Is this what we want for our country? Is this what we have to look forward to?
Being black just makes you black, it doesn’t automatically make you a great or even effective president. By any objective measure Obama has been a failure. Perhaps the vast majority of Americans will come to this conclusion in the privacy of the voting booth, rather than having the guts to say it in public. We can only hope.
Libertyship,
Well thought out, and well said and terrifying.
I think you should have your own column.
ZZ
“So if the last four years have been so bad, why in God’s name would anybody want to give this guy a second chance?”
Because they can “Yes, but…..” themselves to death, thereby talking themselves into giving him that other chance. But the Republicans are (fill in the blank…racists, want to restore DADT…), Obama hasn’t been given enough time, Obama’s stimulus was too small. It goes on from there. Common sense eludes so many people, it’s not funny. It’s difficult to see just why it’s that way but it just is.
Nonetheless, I am still cautiously optimistic that this thing is going to go our way because there are enough voters out there stinging from “buyer’s remorse.”
Hopefully the Dems will establish with their display at their convention this next week what losers they really are. I won’t be watching but will necessarily do what I must to keep up with the highlights.
On Facebook today, I noticed several leftist Facebook friends have linked to or quoted from the Jon Stewart response to the Eastwood appearance. I haven’t bothered to watch it because I find Stewart’s smug schtick very tiresome. Nevertheless, one of the quotes is interesting for what it says about Democrats’ self-delusions with regard to Obama. There is a picture of Eastwood talking to the empty chair, and the quote says: “I could never wrap my head around why the world and the President that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the President that I experience. Now I know why. There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.” So far I’ve resisted the temptation to respond: “Or, perhaps Stewart and the Democrats are just deluding themselves about the reality of the naked emperor.”
Read From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe. The “International Style”, “Bauhaus Movement”, “Post-Modernist” architects of the Twenties through the eighties (known as the White Gods to architectural critics), to a man, dreamed of the total destruction of existing architecture.
Their battle cry was “starting from zero”- beginning with a clean sheet of paper, an empty site, and expressing their own vision of Utopia- with somebody else (i.e., the client) footing the bill and living with the consequences, including their edicts on the use of the result. Think “Only furniture approved by the architect”, which is where the Barcelona Chair came from. Or “No curtains to mar the inhuman perfection of the facade’- the sun in the afternoon is your problem”.
Most of them were leftovers from Europe in World War One, and saw the place as “ruins”, the Golden Opportunity to Make The World New. (Actually, very little of Europe was physically damaged by the events of 1914-18; the primary damage was in human casualties, plus economic disaster.) In their minds, they were the Heralds of the Future, posing grandly in front of the ruins as they created the Brave New World. (Which was, of course, socialist to the core.)
Modern leftists are the intellectual heirs (or maybe bastard children) of this lot, plus all the other socialist bohos who have wandered in and out of our governments, academia, and other institutions since then. And like their forebears, they, too, dream of “starting from zero”, of creating a new, perfect world. With them defining perfection.
To them, the existing world is anathema. It must be erased, to make way for their Millennium. Anyone who isn’t “on board” must go, too, any way they can arrange it. (They prefer that “reactionaries” be used as labor; they’ll settle for burying them in the foundations.)
As with the Bauhaus Boys & Co., to get the full effect their egos demand, our “enlightened elite” need those ruins to pose in front of, limned against the horizon with the rising sun behind them as they look down their noses at the serfs. (I.E., everybody else- who survives, that is.)
And if they have to wreck everything themselves to create the ruins they need to pose in front of, well, they are fond of saying that “sacrifices must be made in the name of the Cause”. As long as the “sacrifice” is somebody else, that is.
And for them, sacrificing that “somebody else” is very easy. After all, they don’t really like the rest of us. At all.
clear ether
eon
“and what happens if nobody thinks we should be loaned any more money?”
I think it far more likely that they won’t have any money to loan.
Court jester Chris Matthews even claims to find deployment of the word “Chicago” racist.
Matthews and his ilk are simply terrified to the point of derangement, to judge Obambus on his (de)merits.
But it almost doesn’t matter, cuz Matthews et al have never, ever considered voting for anything in the Republican party anyway. Again I point to Judy Woodruff’s amazed reaction on Thursday, when she appeared shocked to her core that Romney was a human being with a few likely virtues. Matthews is still fighting to resist that observation, belief, conclusion, whatever. Perhaps he’s lost the capability. The left, judging from the NYTimes and such, does not even believe in trying to judge facts on a neutral basis.
And they just get worse and worse.
Imagine worse than Obambus, I wonder if you can.
“Perhaps the vast majority of Americans will come to this conclusion in the privacy of the voting booth, rather than having the guts to say it in public. We can only hope.” Libertyship46:
My wife and I do not have a Romney campaign lawn sign in front of our home. We do not have a Romney bumper sticker on our car. When the pollsters call, we note the caller ID and do not pick up the phone. I believe that there are millions like us who will joyously vote for Romney. We want an adult in the White House rather than the current poseur. Richard Nixon spoke of the silent majority. We are part of that majority.
My bet is that it is going to be a Romney landslide. Count on it!
I do the same, avoid the pollsters, get calls from both parties, and make polite noises to the Obamaphiles about it being a close election and the power of incumbency. This week I was invited to a special reception to meet Joe Biden. Cleaning the litter box was a much more appealing option.
Obama’s concession speech is going to be must see tv. Just might send a little tingle up my leg.
Obama *will not* formally concede if he loses, even in a landslide. He will make some kind of statement vaguely acknowledging the result but mostly blaming stupid ra-a-a-a-a-cist white voters for his loss. And remember if he loses he will still be eligible to run again. If this seems ridiculous, especially if he loses big, you underestimate the denial of the media and the many people who blindly follow him.
Obama’s concession speech is going to be must see tv. LeighB.
I’m SO looking forward to it,I’ll probably record it so I can watch it over and over and over and over…….
The look of disgust and hatred for America on the soon-to-be former first lady’s face will be priceless.
The rioting in predominantly black neighborhoods, with smashed store windows and torched cars, will be fun to watch too.
The violence will start as soon as the major TV networks call the election for Romney.
The Self-Exalted One will never concede. He will, however, deploy every lawyer He can lay His hands on to sue His way back in. (I am convinced that the ObamaCare SCOTUS decision has encouraged Him on this front.)
Just because it didn’t work for AlGore From The Planet Eco will not dissuade Him. After all, Al wasn’t The Messiah.
clear ether
eon
Yep, I fully anticipate that the left’s current position of “there is no voter fraud” will magically become “the Republicans stole the election!”
A consistency of logic has never been their strong suit after all.
And as the old saying goes, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
While his concession will be wonderful, he can still do a lot of damage. Don’t rest easy until Jan 20, 2013 (the end of an error).
When George W. Bush left office and flew away, the crowd changed, “Hey hey hey, goodbye”
When Obama leaves, I think I’ll sing the words from that old spiritual, “Free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!”
I’m like you in all those respects except for one. The other day when a Democrat activist type came to my door asking about various political races, I told him I was voting for all the Republican candidates he named. So at least someone in the Democrat world knows how I’m likely to vote–though the calls from “Organizing for America” haven’t stopped (but I still don’t pick up the phone).
From Pew research:
“At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.”
http://www.people-press.org/2012/05/15/assessing-the-representativeness-of-public-opinion-surveys/
Precisely correct, Harvard. The polls today are about as accurate as those internet thingys. This became glaringly evident in the Wisconsin recall where the exit polls had Walker losing big time. We all know how that turned out.
Lives on the Left are rooted in belief fueled by emotion; critical thinking and reality’s consequences are unwelcome, threatening intruders when they’re inconsistent with cherished assumptions. Even being bitten hard by reality doesn’t convince; it just means we haven’t “cared” enough.
If we had a larger intellectually mature, critically thinking population and an honest media this presidential race wouldn’t be within hailing distance of close.
Problem is if you live in a “Multi-Ethnic city and you are white (or brown) and Obama is defeated you may not survive.
You should worry, why? No one gets out of this prison alive, you know…
You look like a smart kid. So, why do you live in sucha place? Mishug it is…
The cemeteries are full of the Korean-Americans who stood up to the Rodney King rioters twenty years ago. Or maybe not.
If you’re white or brown you have a pretty good chance — not a certainty, but what is certain in this floating world? — of surviving the cut-rate Helter Skelter that the Left has been trying to gin up. If, on the other hand, you’re an Eloi, I recommend that you book your refuge at Gstaad now, before you’re forced to settle for a suite with only six rooms.
Obama is beta male as Golden Child — i.e. a man who does not possession leadership qualities and under normal circumstances would simply fade into the woodwork. But given his liberal ideology, that’s the type of personality people like David Axelrod needed in order to use collective racial guilt to get Obama elected. A more aggressive man than Barack Obama who holds the same political opinions as Barack Obama would have flamed out in the primary back in 2008, because he would have reminded Democratic voters too much of Al Sharpton.
Down deep, Obama knows this. It’s why it at least initially was embarassed at receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, because it’s was the ultimate conclusion of the left’s strategy to give Obama credit for accomplishments he never made, while at the same time prior to his election, allowing him to vote ‘present’ on key issues, maintaining his viability to run as president. He knows it’s a sham, yet at the same time he’s grown up his whole adult political life thinking this is the way it’s supposed to be — other Chicago pols, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, et al. are supposed to do all the heavy work in getting things done, and then they give Barack Obama the credit, because in their racial politics world, Obama’s skin is the Golden Ticket into the Chocolate Factory.
He can’t deal with opposing voices, because he’s been shielded from them all his life, and he can’t deal with criticism for the same reasons, and because down deep, he knows his media persona is a fraud and doesn’t want the swing voters ever picking up on it.
Only sightly off topic.
hillbuzz suggests that conservative women protest the DNC dressed a giant brains.
LOL. The Left’s drama queen antics are becoming absurd. Just like their endless shrieking about race.
Is it true or not true that had Obama been entirely white, he would not have risen as quickly as he did? Please, would someone on the Left simply reply to the question?
Good catch and this is a huge problem for the left.They can’t answer the simplest questions about this election or their Dear Leader without resorting to diversion, lies, emotionally getting mad at the questioner,or worse yet changing the topic.IF they ever get locked into straight answers to straight questions they lose every time.
I’m not on the left but they won’t answer it so I will. Of course someone’s with Obama’s skimpy (to put it charitably) resume would not have gotten a long look in 2008 if he were white. Would not have made it out of the third tier of candidates. “Nice try, come back when you’re ready”.
This question is based upon a false assumption. Those of us outside of the party power brokers circle assume that the function of the party is to filter out the Obamas of the world. It is not so.
Had Obama claimed to be white on his paperwork, it would not have affected his climb to power in the least as long as the power brokers saw a way to victory.
It all comes down to “who sent you?”
Then you would say it’s not true that Obama’s rapid rise to success is due the color of his skin?
Taranto is right: “The left has not moved beyond seeing Obama as a racial symbol.” Why? He adduces two reasons: “First, his record as president doesn’t have much else to recommend it, so that crying racism is about the best they can do as an argument for re-election. Second, it is of great psychological importance to American left-liberals to believe that their opponents are racist and they themselves are not. Their self-image as a moral elite revolves around the imputation of invidious racial attitudes to others.”
The big question remains will the American voters see beyond this phony racism and white guilt do the right thing and vote this poser out.
I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not me,
Not I,
Not me!
So there!
Never gonna be a adult,
I won’t!
Like to see somebody try
And make me.
Anyone who wants to try
And make me turn into an adult,
Catch me if you can.
I won’t grow up.
Not even a hundred billion will I pinch.
I will never learn diplomacy nor will I ever grow an economy,
Or ever give that energy an inch.
‘Cause growing up is awfuller
Than all the awful things that ever were.
I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up,
No sir,
Not I,
Not me,
So there!
Eastwood was brilliant, and he got about as many answers to questions as the media has been getting, unless they are asking about which super power he would like.
As to the empty chair, if only we had that chair in the white house, we would undoubtably have been better off.
Instead we got an empty suit, that votes presents, leads from behind and tells us that questions are above his paygrade when the going gets tough.
And like the emperor with no clothers, it seems we are finding that not only is the suit empty, the material is transparent, sort of like one of his failed promises.
and we can thank Artur Davis for telling us that blacks made a mistake and want to rectify that when he spoke at the conventions and said:
ARTUR DAVIS SPEAKS AT REPUBLICAN CONVENTION
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/artur-davis-speech-_n_1831712.html
Now, America is a land of second chances, and I gather you have room for the estimated 6 million of us who know we got it wrong in 2008 and who want to fix it.
Maybe we should have known that night in Denver that things that begin with plywood Greek columns and artificial smoke typically don’t end well.
Maybe the Hollywood stars and the glamour blinded us a little: you thought it was the glare, some of us thought it was a halo.
But in all seriousness, do you know why so many of us believed? We led with our hearts and our dreams that we could be more inclusive than America had ever been, and no candidate had ever spoken so beautifully.
But dreams meet daybreak: the jobless know what I mean, so do the families who wonder how this Administration could wreck a recovery for three years and counting.
As you correctly point out, the left regards conservatives as moral bankrupts and deluded simpletons who parrot the viewpoint of greedy hustlers, racists and shock jocks.
This inability to conceive of another point of view as anything but fubdamentally misguided at best and evil at worst is why newspapers like the New York Times will be unable to survive. For some time now, conservative voices have been saying to the legacy media that they must abandon groupthink, and publish a range of opinions. This sort of talk is incomprehensible to the MSM. Conservative opinion is intrinsically ignorant, usually racist and malevolently inspired. Bankruptcy is a preferable alternative.
A little case study from my part of the world, Australia. we too have some tottering, near bankrupt print media empires that still publish oversimplified, self-righteous PC pap that fewer and fewer people want to read. Exhibit A is the Fairfax Media empire, once the publisher of profitable, well-regarded broadsheets in our two biggest cities, but which is now teetering on the edge of the economic abyss. Look at this astounding, myopic, narcissistic claptrap about the RNC that appeared on the front page of the Melbourne “Age” (the most politically correct newspaper in the english speaking world):
Eastwood’s empty chair routine mocked on Twitter
LOS ANGELES: Clint Eastwood has earned plenty of bad reviews for his latest performance: a bizarre, rambling endorsement of Mitt Romney.
”Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic,” tweeted film critic Roger Ebert as Eastwood ad libbed to an audience of millions – and one empty chair – on stage at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. ”He didn’t need to do this to himself. It’s unworthy of him.”
Eastwood carried on a kooky, long-winded conversation with an imaginary President Barack Obama, telling him he had failed to deliver on his promises and it was time for Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, to take over. ”Mr President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them? I mean, what do you say to people?” he said at one point to the empty chair.
In the running for the “weirdest” convention moment ever seen … Clint Eastwood. Photo: AFP
Twitter was instantly ablaze, mocking the Oscar-winning director of Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.
”Clint has now eclipsed the total word count of his last three films,” tweeted film critic Richard Roeper during the speech, which was intended to last five minutes but went on for nearly 12. Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, said ”Clint’s empty chair act” was the ”weirdest convention moment I have ever seen”.
That’s what it’s all about to the liberals, you see: other liberals laughed at Clint. That’s the story.
Ever been with a group of friends when a particularly clever joke is told? There’s always one or more “slow” ones who just don’t get it and have to have the punch line explained to them. I watched the Eastwood speech and was blown away by such a masterful performance by an admittedly senior citizen, accomplished actor and director though he is. Then there is this flood of “poor Clint, how sad he’s fallen so far.” All it proves is they are either stupid or in such a state of denial that such a performance simply cannot register in their tiny minds.
“Thomas Jefferson once observed that ‘A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.’ Just imagine how such a declaration would be assailed today by the Left!” The left already has a pat response: “Jefferson was a slave owner.”
This is precisely what they pointed out the very next morning after the Eastwood speech. The title of their piece says it well, “The President Saves Clint Eastwood’s Gig”.
The proposition is that by responding – specially in such inappropriate manner and conduct – the President exposes his thin skin. Read it at http://www.AmericasChronicle.com
I’d like to move the discussion from the thickness of ObamaSkin to the width and breadth of his desire to destroy America.
If the Obamunists consistently voiced what they truly believe, most of America, including the soft core leftists, would ride them out of town on a rail.
But, of course, Obama can’t be truthful.
He’d be chided, derided, even shunned because it would become obvious to all that, with a passion usually reserved for child molesters, Obama hates every star in our flag. So he plans to tear it apart by tearing us apart. By pitting us against one another. By taking apart the virtue of America that holds everything together.
So he lies. About healthcare. About tax money he’s squandered. About his real objectives. The closest to the truth he’s come was when he said he was going to fundamentally transform America. Any more specific than that, though, and he’d have been in trouble.
Hopefully, after four years of Obama trying to destroy what’s good and right and exceptionally true about America, most Americans are realizing what Obama’s truly up to. And they’re not down with it.
Looting our treasury to the tune of a 16 trillion dollar deficit, I’d say, is a pocketbook issue most aren’t comfortable with. Neutering our military with billions in budget cuts puts us all at risk. Spilling his guts secretly about the Seals 6 Osama killing operation so Hollywood varmints can make a tribute flick dedicated to Obama is something most voters can’t cotton to. It’s repugnant on so many levels of decency. Some would call it reprehensible.
Whispering to a Russian muckamuck on TV that post election Obama can be much more “flexible” not only was a telltale hot mike moment of honesty in intent, but also an act that less defines the expected behavior of an American President and more defines an American traitor.
Like the bad cowboy in the old westerns, Obamunists should be having mental images of Obama leaping on his horse and running away from the truth. In the end, of course, Hoppy, or Roy or Gene or John Wayne overtakes the bad guy and, with a dramatic leap, knocks him off his horse whereupon they have the final fist fight that John Wayne wins with one final right cross.
In real life, Obama has crossed us all, double crossing America and has expected to get away scot free much like he let the voter intimidating Black Panthers get away scot free.
But America is catching onto this miscreant, this traitor to American values, this golfer who wants another mulligan ball and a chance to further decimate America with his pack of lies and bag of tricks.
Obama, in the end, deserves a hot poker up his rear for he’s nothing more than a leftist eating and breathing totalitarian cancer on the Presidency who dreams of open borders that allow hand-out-seeking potential Democratic voters to pour in unopposed. So leftists can one day rule this nation unopposed.
The time is getting nearer and nearer for voters to take Obama and all his czars and avowed communist followers and lobbyists galore to the old American wood shed.
Where they’ll receive the beating of their lives.
“The RNC Convention Made Us Think–How About You?”
(Dedicated to “The Empty Chair”)
Did you think it enough to be “likeable”?
Did you believe it sufficed to be “cool”?
You once promised command of the land and the seas,
For four years you have played us for fools!
Bernanke’s abusing his printing press.
Geithner (tax cheat) never had one good plan.
And we found you’d betrayed us and lied to us.
When you claimed we’d “unite” at your hands!
You still haven’t a clue of ONE GOOD THING to do,
To make jobs, spend much less, calm our days.
So you get up and turn on your Media whores,
And go golfing in a Choom** induced haze.
You made food stamps a “virtue”, you degraded our fisc*,
You bowed lower and lower each day.
To the tyrants and despots whose great goal in life,
Was to kill the American Way.
You said, “I’ll do it in three or I’m outta here”;
Now you say “I just need another four”.
Since you spit on our seniors and crippled our land,
We’d be crazy to let you “help” more!
* Fisc = the treasury of a nation – see “national debt” rating downgrades.
** Choom = both a noun (marijuana) and a verb (“to smoke marijuana”)
Barry Soetoro aka Barry Obama aka Barrack Hussein Obama aka … CREATED NEW WAYS TO GET HIGH. See, http://www.buzzfeed.com/gavon/…
obama. These included BOTH marijuana and cocaine aka coke aka blow aka “Barry Fuel”…
SHARE THE FUN: COPY; IMPROVE; AUGMENT; MOCK; DERIDE; LAUGH AT THE WON
Around the world Obama is seen as a pathological liar.The country,it is sad to say look like more en more like a third world country.A judge that rewrites the statute,massive electoral fraud etc etc.
well said sir…
So if racism is to judge someone FIRST by the color of their skin, then the left is the ‘racist’ party and that cannot be denied with a straight face. Everything is judged through the prism of race FIRST (or in the case of women, gender FIRST). As a conservative woman, I find it vile and insulting that I am always judged by the left FIRST by the fact that I am a woman. I can’t imagine that minorities are not insulted, on some level, that the liberals just can’t get past the color of their skin.
The fact that the left will viciously attack any black conservative is PROOF of their racism. The fact that the left calls for an attack on (and in some extreme cases – death of) conservative women who are not pro-abortion is PROOF of their sexism. You must be monolithic in their eyes. If you are black, you must be a Democrat – you have no choice.
Finally, the fact that the left has such low expectations for Obama and his presidency is also proof of how so many white liberals view minorities. They see them as needing help to achieve, and they hold them to lower standards because, after all, they’re black, and they’ve had it rough, and they cannot make it without the help of the good, white, liberal.
Sadly, as any decent parent will tell you, your children live up to your expectations. In the case of liberals and minorities, they have set extremely low expectations in the areas the control, such as the inner cities. And sadly, those communities have lived up to those expectations. High drug use, high crime rate, low employment, low expectations.
Now look at Condi Rice. Lived in a time of horrible segregation – terrible Jim Crow laws and blatant, hateful racism (mostly by Democrats in the south, I might add). But her parents always had high expectations…regardless of their circumstances. She rose to the challenge and exceeded.
What is missing in the black community is high expectations. The right has been so demonized that they are ignored. The left will not place any expectations on the black community, starting with Obama.
Because they are racist.