Obamaphiles: well, nobody’s perfect
I have a friend who isn’t ordinarily very political. But from the start she’s been taken with Obama, and supported him enough to do some canvassing for him during the primaries—the first time in her long life that she’s actually worked for any candidate. She’s a highly intelligent, not-too-far-to-the-left Democrat, and even a practical and rather cynical sort. And so it stunned me to see that certain light in her eyes—the light of a quasi-religious belief—when she spoke of her admiration for the man.
She and I have learned over time not to talk about politics too much. But after the Wright revelations, I decided to ask her a brief question or two, because I was so intensely curious to hear her reaction. I first asked her if she’d heard about Wright and his sermons, and I was going to follow that question up with another: has the news changed your mind at all about Obama?
But I never got that far, because as soon as she heard the beginning of my first question she leapt in and answered before I’d even finished it: “Yes, I’ve heard all about Wright, and it’s only made me like Obama more.” It was said in a fervent tone that brooked no discussion and no challenge. And so, in the name of our continuing friendship, I offered none.
I think my friend’s attitude is not at all unusual. The more statements I read from Obama’s supporters, the more they remind me of Joe E. Brown at the end of the movie “Some Like It Hot;” nothing, but nothing, can dissuade them from their undying love.
To refresh your memory (and because I love the scene so much), here it is:
That puts the fear into me like nothing else. Very similar to someone brainwashed by a cult figure. Oh wait – that’s exactly what it is. The fact that she wasn’t very political, up until she found Obama, and is now one of his glassy-eyed robots, speaks volumes about how truly ignorant the typical Obama sycophant is. These people (some of which are also my “friends”) will have been responsible for getting elected one of the most dangerous politicians since Hitler. Thanks guys.
Mind-numbed robots.
I’ve decided that they hear what they want to hear and believe because they want to. If they read his speeches (instead of listening to them), they would see that he really doesn’t SAY anything. He has no plan to fix any of the major problems coming up and he has no experience. I read someone who said that Obama would give us universal health coverage. How? There’s just not enough money to pay for that, especially with the country in a possible recession. I have a friend who is also an Obama supporter, who told me the other day how she sympathized with the Palestinians. I said I didn’t any more. They’ve done nothing to warrant my sympathy. And I left it at that, trying to say that we know that there are good people in the world living under bad governments. But I still believe she is blinded to the fact that they have used mentally ill women as suicide bombers, laced bombs with rat poison and have had opportunities to end the violence. She sees what she wants to see.
Given the intelligence of readers of this site, I don’t think it necessary to annotate the “personality cults” down through history. Not too many good outcomes.
Scary times!
Early in the campaign, Obama had an aura of having been dragged in the Democratic race while Hillary was viewed as ambitious; or as I put it in another place Cincinnatus vs Crassus.
In addition to this, Obama has a wonderful way of speaking that sounds reasonable, balanced and nuanced. His discussion of the 2nd amendment and the DC gun control case on NPR a few weeks back is a prime example. When discussing this with a very smart Obama supporter I know, he though his answer was brilliant. I agreed it was politically brilliant, but where did he, Obama, actually stand on the issue? Was his balancing point near the DC law is a valid regulation of a right, or on the other end where the law is a gross infringement? His answer let us believe what ever we want to believe. He truly is the Mirror of Erised, and it is going to be very difficult for some to give up their dream and see him for what he really is.
It should be said that that remains one of the sweetest things ever captured on film.
The Obama, not so much.
Teri – that’s exactly what I’ve been saying from day 1. Are people that easily snowed? Bottom line is, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the rest of us who are going to suffer for their mindlessness.
People want to have hope. Even the fans of a sports franchise want some young player to give them hope for the future. We seek hope. We cling to hope.
I think, especially, of Obama supporters who are atheist: if they lose Obama, what hope is left for them?
Look at Obama’s campaign posters:
“Hope”
“Change You Can Believe In”
Obama is being packaged for people who want to have hope. He is a product. He activates their dopamine.
A friend, whose wife has been a lifelong Republican, recently and very publicly expressed her strong support for Obama. She was also, until quite recently, a public administrator in the Corzine administration, having been a hold-over from years ago (end of the Whitman administration).
I hadn’t seen my friend for a few months, and kidded him about it a bit, when I ran into him right after the revelations about Rev. Wright surfaced. His eyes dropped and he muttered something like, “She’s in love.”
Then, about a week later, his wife suddenly ended up in a very public tussle with a senior Corzine official, and is now out of a job.
Corzine, of course, has been a strong Clinton supporter.
this is a test since my posts are not appearing. sorry for the test..
She may seem bright to you, but she isnt that bright. Because she has lived her life not caring much about the key things that she should care about way before they become a problem.
Obama has finally given her a candidate she can understand, because he talks to her emotions, and so she believes he stands for whatever she feels he does and feels she wants.
Ultimately, I will say that many people know the things at their end stories. But we are not at the point of Germany after the SA was gone, after crystal nacht, camps and all the other stuff.
We are at the start story, the part that has been clouded by leftist opinion so that we can blindly and blithely walk into it.
The Nazis also made their appeal to GERMAN YOUTH. Hitler and his aides were, in general, much younger than other
leading politicians. In 1931, for instance, 40 percent of all Nazis were under thirty years of age, 70 percent were under 40.
Bet most didn’t know this did you.
Not only that but they even match the ideological points (including the lighter anti Semitism that was early on, except this time its also hatred of Europeans and Christianity too, which dilutes it and makes it stand out less).
“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.” — Karl Marx
Obama gets her because he is talking the speech of safety. Pacifism to those who don’t fight (women) seems like a good idea. It seems more so when war is defined as some immature thing that men do.
Look at all the easing into the safety net of the nanny state… the totalitarian regime will make it ok for you, just give us power to change the system.
“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” – Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10
“A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, Random House, 1952), p.806
“The Women’s Caucus [endorses] Marxist-Leninist thought.” — Robin Morgan, Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 597
40 years of this stuff being pumped into womens minds through magazines, talk shows, television, news, and everything else has them believing that
if they can vote right, then the left can create for them what its been promising. it was done before!!!
[sorry for several posts, its allowing me to isolate why my post wont appear in total]
So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
“It was the women’s vote that brought Hitler to triumph” — herman rauschning 1939
“Emancipated women of Weimar Germany voted quite happily in 1932-3 for their own enslavement.” – From German Women and the Triumph of Hitler by Richard J. Evans
While few sign on to the total deal, most sign on to the partial deal with personal versions. so you get Marxist feminists, and lipstick feminists, and so forth.
Women who tend to be steeped in this live their life naturally as ideology replaces gossip, and mass culture replaces the social circle.
she enjoys the social value of being on the right side and the image of that more than she values being on the truthful side.
If she accepts something that says he is a liar, she ahs to accept that she will not get what she is being promised politically.
It’s the old Japanese concept that if one is not willing to accept the answer, then one shouldn’t beg for it by asking the question.
The man creeps me out. I look at him and I think of Jim Jones. Yeah, utopia here we come.
this is why the eradication of family… then she has no unit she belongs to…
and the lack of morals means she cant trust others…
this and more leaves her open to the effect of finding a home, a place, a thing she can belong to..
and she is safe… because even if he becomes a despot, she cant be blamed for her finding meaning and supporting it. she absolves him, and the mass culture absolves her.
by the way… this is why they wanted the womens vote (which they got before black men). because as marx points out, there was no way to get communist socialism since the wife would look to her husband and family for the things that she now looks to the state for since they have been soured by manipulating the laws and outcomes.
to see how much this relates to your freind, here is a passage from a paper on the voting before and leading up to puting such a man for change in office.
Until 1930 women remained unlikely to vote for the Nazi Party. Moreover, in the presidential election of 1932 a clear majority of women preferred Hindenburg to Hitler. However, the early 1930s did see a narrowing of the gap between male and female voting patterns, especially in Protestant areas. Indeed, in some of these by July 1932 the NSDAP was winning a higher percentage of the female to male vote. In that month some 6.5 million women voted Nazi, many of them probably with few or no previous political ties.
he mobilized the women to vote who didnt vote before and were never interested in politics (so these were the most gullible having never had to read and deal with such issues before).
NSDAP membership was younger than that of other parties; the average age of those joining between 1925 and 1932 was slightly under twenty-nine. It rose slightly, to an average of thirty-two in 1932. That the Nazis did well with new voters may reflect their youthfulness.
Thirdly, the NSDAP was arguably most successful of all in picking up the votes of pensioners and the elderly. This group, especially the women, constituted the largest reservoir of previous non-voters in the early 1930s, and the party made a specific bid for the support of pensioners, the elderly and war veterans who had seen the value of their pensions and savings eroded. Here again the Nazis enjoyed success with those lacking previously strong political or ideological ties. As the rate of electoral participation increased (from 74.6 per cent in 1928 to 83.4 per cent in July 1932), so the NSDAP picked up the new votes not only of the young and newly enfranchised, but also of this geriatric electorate
sound familiar… a huge amount of people who were not into politics came forth and put the nazis into power.
the major key was women who had not voted much before!
so it wasnt a majority of germany… it was a majority of the most politically naive groups who were being promised things and beleived them more than those with more experience.
they felt that they were a part of something, that they could make a meaningful change and get the things that were vaguely being promised them.
when they started to get things (like here people get bribed by affirmative action) it created momentum to believe that the more they backed the more things they would get. the rest as franklin states above is just rationalization..
the key to change was crisis that then was used to establish restrictions and suspension of things…
The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation…. The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed…. On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country. Shirer
Utopia, TX:
http://www.themadhousewife.com/?p=1595
Her mind’s made up. Don’t confuse her with the facts.
Same thing happened when I tried to talk to my conservative friend about torture and Abu Ghraib.
Neo, I too have struggled with the dissonance created by my quite intelligent friends’ support for Obama. I have come to the tentative formulation (gads, I hope I got that tag right! A “preview” button would be a shiny thing) that much of what motivates them to support the worst of candidates arises from that which is best about America.
The free, prosperous, strangely introspective/self-absorbed mindset which has arisen from decades of (apparent) peace we’ve enjoyed has enabled us to forget the hard realities upon which that freedom and peace eternally rest. As our vigilance against internal and external threats is glossed over by this illusory immunity from the perils of the world, many of us yearn to have that dream validated by a leader who speaks the utopian language.
I understand the dream. Up until a few years ago, I shared it. But as a psychologist I understand the seductive power of uninterpreted dreams and their incremental creep toward delusion.
This is not an aberration, it is now standard operating procedure for people on the liberal/left end of the spectrum – rather than admit their pet theories have failed, they have taken the stunningly tragic choice to spin away from reality to preserve ideology.