There’s nothing Freudian about these Obama slips
Keith Koffler’s opinion piece at Politico discusses the fact that Obama has made a number of unguarded, unscripted, and therefore very revealing comments that seem to indicate he is both an extreme leftist tilt and a man who demonizes the opposition.
However, it’s puzzling that Koffler refers to these remarks of Obama’s as “Freudian slips,” and compares them to Reagan’s jokes that were intended to be off-mike but were broadcast by error, or Bush unintentionally reading his note cards aloud. Those are slips, although not Freudian; they are errors in which the meant-to-be-private inadvertently becomes public.
Obama’s remarks were very different. They were purposeful and extemporaneous, but he certainly meant to say them and to have them be heard. They were not errors, except perhaps errors of judgment that he later regretted because of the furor they caused.
A Freudian slip, on the other hand, is an actual slip of the tongue that can be revealing. For example, when a husband calls his wife by the name of an ex-girlfriend, that’s a Freudian slip. Or this one from Wiki:
She: ‘What would you like — bread and butter, or cake?’ He: ‘Bed and butter… Whoops!’
Obama’s “bitter clingers” and “enemies” are nothing like that. He said what he meant and he meant what he said.
No other president in my memory has been caught in this particular type of slip-up, as far as I can recall. The reason it keeps happening to Obama is that he’s the first president who appears to be hiding who he actually is, politically speaking, and what he intends and thinks in general.
Therefore when he is unscripted, when he lets down his guard and speaks his mind, he often speaks the truth, and it is often at variance with the persona he is trying to present to the public. It’s happened enough times now that the mask is at least half off, if not fully removed.
I thought a Freudian Slip was when you said one thing but meant your mother.
Oops…
No, Daniel, that’s an Oedipal slip. 🙂
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Admittedly, many Americans actually share that view. What sets leftists apart is the conceit that they via governmental policy are smarter about distributing it than the very people that earned and, in the cases of many business owners, created that wealth. There’s nothing wrong with saying “You know, I’ve made a fortune. I’m going to do something good with this money” and go on to fund scholarships, charities, etc. There is a ton wrong with saying “You know, that guy over there’s made more than he “needs”. I’m going to use my governmental position to take as much of it away from him as I can and put it towards things I think are good.” Ok, fine, I’ll admit that it’s possible you’ll get a type of “benevolent dictator” that still manages to use that money to everyone’s beneft… but it’s actually more likely that you won’t. History has shown us this empirically. But beyond that, since when is deciding that for someone else by fiat right anyway?
My two cents.
My understanding is that Reagan’s “We have outlawed the USSR; the bombs will fall shortly” (or whatever he said) was an intentional leak. It was a meassage to the USSR. He couldn’t openly say that, but he could make a “mistake” and say that (oops).
Reagan psycops on the Soviets.
Also remember when George W Bush referred to a NY Times reporter as a “major league asshole” without knowing his words were being picked up. Of course much of the electorate would agree that the set of NY Times reporters is a subset of the set of major league assholes.
At first, I thought making the Freudian slip distinction was shrewd. On second thought, Freudian Slip doesn’t quite go far enough.
When a Freudian slip is pointed out, the utterer instantly knows it was a slip. A Freudbamian Slip has an added element: before and immediately after making the mistake, the utterer doesn’t understand why it is a mistake.
Obama doesn’t understand why the center and right of America think as we do, and therefore is surprised when he offends the center and the right.
“spread the wealth”
“fundamentally transform this nation”
“I won”
“the police acted stupidly”
[bow]
[bow again]
“Punish your enemies”
From Obama’s perspective: these were not instances of misspeaking, as Obama believes he communicated what all smart thinkers believe. Rather, from Obama’s perspective, his mistake was that he revealed himself at all (as opposed to keeping his mouth shut).
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Therefore, Obama must feel trapped in a Catch 22: he believes he needs to justify his policy beliefs even as he hides the philosophical beliefs which justify the policies.
A man trapped in this Catch 22 might become bitter. Obama is temperamentally incapable of envisioning his predicament from a different perspective. Shifting a paradigm is shifting two coins in his pocket.
I thought NoBama’s specialty was puns, as in “Heck of a job, Larry – pun intended.” (??)
Obama’s “bitter clingers” and “enemies” are nothing like that. He said what he meant and he meant what he said.
Exactly so. In both cases, he let his guard down because he viewed himself as being among friends. His “bitter clingers” remark came from a fund-raising dinner in San Francisco. It would be difficult to imagine a more congenial audience for Obama. Obama was not aware that he was being recorded, and apparently assumed that what was said among friends remained among friends, as if he were at a dinner party with Michelle, Billy Boy and Bernadine.[snark, snark]
IIRC, when Obama was later made aware of the negative reaction to his “bitter clinger” statement, he replied that his assessment was correct.
Obama’s “enemies” remark came on a Spanish language station. This was friendly territory for Obama, and he apparently made the assumption that what is said to the Hispanics remains among the Hispanics.
I am reminded of Helen Thomas’s reaction to her “Go back to Poland and Germany” remark with Obama’s reactions to negative feedback. Both Obama and Helen Thomas saw the problem as not being what they had said, but on the reaction that others had to their remarks. “I’m sorry if I offended you.” As if it is unusual that political opponents of Obama were offended by his labeling them “enemies” when Obama has been very reluctant to label Iran and DinnerJacket as enemies.
Another example of a “Freudian slip” was in a TV interview when he said “my Muslim faith.” Before Obama could even correct himself, the interviewer said something like “You meant Christian faith.”
Too bad the announcer had caught it. It would be interesting to see him try to wiggle out of that.
My favorite Freudian Slip isn’t even verbal; it’s the guy who writes his wife and mistress and gets the envelopes wrong.
Had a behavioral psych prof pound the podium and insist, “There is no such thing as a Freudian shit, er, slip.”
Probably used it every semester.
he’s the first president who appears to be hiding who he actually is
care to rethink that?
he utterer doesn’t understand why it is a mistake.
i said this is very true of sociopaths, who have no limits to morals, or rather no morals…
a long time ago, i explained that when they got closer to what they want, they chomp at the bit, they throw the traces, they let slip the mask (i can write about 2 dozen phrases that let you in on it).
if you pay attention to the morals of the left, goals, etc.. its what the sociopathic would do to the common to get them to notice them less, and not think them different, and not prosecute them…
they act… they are not in their bodies, but above it all, using their bodies as a marionette under control to get others to act…
its cargo cult… image only…
when he talks impromtu, or off the cuff, he has spent so much time on stalinist marxist communism, like his uncle odinga, that he never learned what we know as very basic…
57 states… dont know, dont care, makes no difference to him since state offices are not their own power in communism.
economics.. dont know, dont care, no reason to study a system that wont exist when he is done, right?
etc
Interesting that most of Obama’s slips appear to be hostile as opposed to Biden’s that just appears careless, or dare I say stupid.
Joe Scarborough: Top Senate Dems have told me privately that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing
So would all talking in your sleep qualify as a Freudian slip?
All the slips I’ve ever encountered were Gordian.
JR Nyquist makes a similar point regarding whether or not the challenge to our way of life is a conspiracy or a strategy. People who argue conspiracy miss the greater truth: It is happening right out in the open. Freudian slips? Who needs them when the truth is as apparent as a huge cold sore on a person’s face? Conspiracy? Why hide it when few care to see?
Nyquist mentions KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn’s 1984 book, New Lies for Old; The Venona Secrets, by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel; John Early Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage; and David Aaronovitch’s book Voodoo Histories.
http://financialsense.com/contributors/jr-nyquist/a-communist-conspiracy
No, Mike Mc., the spell isn’t broken. It never will be and each age will fight its own unique battle. Consider the following: “According to Chambers, “Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind.” Then he added, “You will not find out what it is by calling Communism names. Chambers explained that Communism is “not simply a vicious plot hatched by wicked men in a sub-cellar. It is not just the writings of Marx and Lenin….” Then what is it? “It is man’s second oldest faith,” he said. “Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind.” As such, it cannot disappear. It cannot collapse or go away.”
Obama has also told some “jokes” that reveal chilling glimpses of the ruler behind the mask. When Arizona State University decided not to award him an honorary degree, he said — haha–
“President [Michael] Crow and the board of regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
And then there was the time when, mid-speech, the Presidential seal fell off the Presidential podium, and our President joked, “”That’s all right, all of you know who I am. But I’m sure there’s somebody back there that’s really nervous right now, don’t you think? They’re sweating bullets!” I have no doubt that he was right.
I cannot, by the way, type the phrase “Presidential Podium” without hearing Paul Simon singing in my head:
‘And if I was President
The minute the Congress call my name
I’d say “who do,
Who do you think you’re fooling?
I’ve got the Presidential Seal
I’m up on the Presidential Podium
My mama loves me
She loves me
She get down on her knees and hug me . . . ”
So, who DOES he think he’s fooling? Maybe only himself.
If the President would stop wearing skirts he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing his slip.
Curtis,
Your quotes from Chambers are thought provoking.
From what I’ve seen, it seems he is spot on. It is a faith. Probably the only way to combat it would be to plunk one of the believers down in a Communist country. Only by experiencing the loss of hope, the grim monotony, and the grinding poverty up close and personal could the belief system be changed.
Since there are so few Communist paradises around for people to experience, it will always be around.
Don Says: November 16th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
The world is not a Byzantine plot, and things don’t work work that way. Only in books and movies do leaders “send messages” that way.
Neo – You are right, the Obama comments cited by Koffler in the Politico piece are “unguarded, unscripted, and therefore very revealing.” Unlike the times when Reagan, GWB, or whomever got caught saying something they didn’t know was on-mike, Obama’s words were not meant as jokes. He really does see the world that way.
Gringo: that “my Muslim faith” remark has been hugely misinterpreted. Obama was not speaking about his own faith, he was referring to what people who believe he’s a Muslim think.
You know what I think of Obama in general. But that particular charge—that the “my Muslim faith” remark was a slip that revealed he thinks of himself as a Muslim—is unsupported by the evidence. I don’t always agree with Snopes, but they are correct here.
ElMondoHummus (@:43 above).
I think you are exactly correct here. It’s one thing for someone to say “s/he’s made too much money,” It’s another thing to say “I think I’VE made enought money” and begin to use the coaelesced wealth for benefits that couldn’t otherwise occur.
On a tangent, this is exactly what studies in the humanities are supposed to do: To expand our sensitivity to the world around us and allow us to realize that the almighty buck and the toys it buys are not the be-all and end-all of life on this earth.
If study of the humanities’ purpose is to give us the ability to recognize this, then it is clearly in this forum that they should be damned by all of us who are humanities majors, because they have failed miserably both in the overwhelmingly indoctrinated faculty which teaches them and in the spawn that this faculty has produced. Yet, there is always the rare exception to that condemnation (faculty and student) that continues to give me hope.
Yeah it was misinterpreted as there were other ways to express it… however one missed slip does not negate anything else
Just as “Dreams from my Father” is misinterpreted so no one asks, what was the fathers dream that was given to Obama.
and why the Secret Service gave him the code name Renagade – Etymology: 1580s, “apostate,” probably (with change of suffix) from Sp. renegado, originally “Christian turned Muslim,”
they are LEGENDARY for word games if you have learned history, if not you then just miss it.
out of the 75,000 words in Shakespeare plays, and a decidedly even larger dictionary for modern man in English, and they pick that word?
plenty of “duping delight” there…
Just as we now know that Peoples in Zinns Peoples History WAS saying communist history of America we just weren’t willing to conclude that this was what it meant since we would prefer that our manipulative end justifies the means people would be less ambiguous with us (Which they ARE in other places, speeches, etc. but we conveniently don’t pay attention to that, and deny any relevance if someone brings it up).
In a world where being clear is dangerous, euphemisms take the place of clear speech. just the fact that they used them is evidence of some form of game playing.
wake up to the fact that humans THINK, and humans have sentience, so they have a theory of mind, and so they play MIND GAMES as a way to win things if their opponents are dumb enough to normalize mind games, and such manipulations… ie, popular fronts (feminism, racialists, gender warriors, anarchists, Fabians, socialists, Marxists, etc… each one is broken up into further slices to maximize filtration of the populace and insure that they get caught in one group or another whose power is summed and voted by a few who care very little about what the chattel want)
in fact its related to this thread… in that euphemisms and neologisms are normalized so as to free up speech and prevent slips from being seen as slips.
neurolinguistics, dissimulation, half truths, lies, ommissive lies, misdirection of subject context through assumptive, etc
here is a old example in how you define peace.
the majority of good humans who work hard and mind their own business define peace as the absence or war which they define in terms of destruction to force compliance.
however, thats NOT how socialists of the extreme left define it!!!!!!!!
to them, peace is defined as the absence of any opposition to socialism. ie, they are in a state of war against all other human beings and will remain so until all people are enslaved under a socialist banner world wide… and so war is ANYTHING that can help or move to that in ANY WAY OR MEANS.
heck. some of the communist socialist fights are so normalized that we cant stop them, nor are we happy if we dont comply! feminism being one of them. which is why they dont behave in line with what YOU would think they should be if they were true to their fronted position. but since all their public positions are fronts, the behaviors dont match. and people like to try to make sense of that politely rather than call them to the mattresss on it and then put them out of power.
right now, everyone is just waking up to the game that is being played and they are discovering different facets. but since those things are things that they were familiar with, doing so causes a big scary feeling that everything you based your life on was a lie. for some it has been…
this is what it means to be used… not to actually be a part of what your working on, but being used on a need to know basis with the common man being the last to know since they are the last to learn HOW, and the first to forget HOW
(which is what judeo christian religion taught, which is why it has to go, and others are more acceptable. they dont teach that the natural state of man is free like everything else)
when they talk about oppression, they are NOT talking women, or gays, or blacks, or animals. they are talking about themselves (sociopathic, megalomaniac, power, cheaters, liars, cargo cult, brutal class, etc)…
THOSE are the most oppressed by human kind!!! we wont allow them to have a victim class of slaves, we wont let them have full freedom since responsibility negates their desires. morals ends their practices. freedom says, you cant cross the line and do things to others…
feminism, marxism, racialists, gender warriors, gays, and so on… are the ROAD to the others.
they could not make the leap from good society with morals, absolutes, etc… without shortening the distance between what we accept and what they want.
those fronts are just dominoes to knock over to get to a point which once reached, is not easily reversible, or reversible at all for a long time…
every person who sided with those things rather than standing as an individual with no club, group, collective, committee, or anything between them and the state changing their vote as it gets passed on…
e pluribus unem means just that…
by standing apart we stand as one..
by becoming feminists, racialists, or club of the month, we convert without realizing it.
We become “many groups united by one group”
in case you guys haven’t noticed, there is more areas to this chess board than internal politics, and the internal politics are readying for us for external politics we are not paying attention to.
A “Freudian slip” is the inadvertent saying that reveals what the person really thnks. So in that regard, Koffler might be right.
Some of Obama’s comments might be “purposeful and extemporaneous,” e.g. the clingers, but other appear to be Freudian. However, all are consistent, and show that he is indeed a sociopath and a malignant narcissist.
I’m reminded of the now infamous Univision interview, where he reminds Latinos to punish their enemies. He alluded to difficulties in making things happen by the fact that he was President, not King.
Despite attaining the nation’s highest office he’s still apparently stymied with the limitations that position comes with. I’m sure there’s much comiseration on those late night conference calls with Mugabe, Chavez, et al
In political terms, these are what Kinsley called gaffes —
In U.S. politics, a Kinsley gaffe (or “gaffe in Washington”) is an occurrence of someone telling the truth by accident. Typically, it refers to a politician inadvertently saying something publicly that they privately believe is true, but would ordinarily not say publicly because they believe it is politically harmful. The term comes from journalist Michael Kinsley, who said, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” [wikipedia}
stan: that is an excellent description. They are indeed gaffes, in that sense.
“The reason it keeps happening to Obama is that he’s the first president who appears to be hiding who he actually is, politically speaking, and what he intends and thinks in general.”
Agreed. So why don’t we coin a new phrase and call them Manchurian slips?