Do the candidates believe their own bs?
I saw this in the comments last night from “Sergey” (quoting J. Frank Bullitt):
Every candidate lined up in Wednesday’s debate is living in a fantasy world where they are convinced their decrees can yield a utopia just because they say so.
And commenter “AesopFan” replied:
Well, Obama did it first, and it worked for him!
It did work for him. But did he really believe his own (to put it crudely) bullshit? I’m using that word for a reason; it’s a direct quote from Obama.
Remember this?:
But perhaps the most telling quote in terms of what Obama believes or doesn’t believe is true comes from Obama himself. It occurred during a conversation with journalist Richard Wolffe, and appears in Renegade, a book published in 2009 and based on Wolffe’s coverage of Obama’s 2008 campaign:
“Every now and then in Renegade, a moment arrives when it seems Obama might reveal something, some tiny thing, about himself. ‘You know, I actually believe my own bullshit,’ Obama told Wolffe with a smile. But what for a nanosecond seemed like candor – would the candidate actually examine his own B.S.? – was just another talking point, as he explained to Wolffe that he truly wanted to bring change to America for better health care, for better schools, and especially for ‘the kid on the streets.'”
There’s much about this quote that’s revealing. First, there’s the serious message Obama is trying to deliver within the joke about bs: “I truly believe that I can make people’s lives better.” But if he really does believe that, then why insert a subtle disclaimer (it’s all “bullshit”) inherent in the casually deprecating tone that seems to negate its seriousness and casts an ironic and juvenile eye on the entire enterprise?
And then, of course, there’s the more subtle message beneath. Obama seems to be admitting that, at least at the moment when he utters whatever bullshit he happens to be spewing, he does believe it. That trick of believing and yet not believing is one of the exercises at which narcissists and con men are skilled. In order to sell a product convincingly, it’s necessary to believe your own bullshit, if only temporarily.
But there’s also another level operating here, one that was described very well by Hilton Kramer. In the following quote he is speaking of Stalinists, but what he says is applicable to the majority of leftists such as Obama as well:
“It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others, but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth.”
So Obama’s ability to lie, and his relationship to his own lies, is multiply-determined: by his narcissism, by the fact of his being a president who is protected from the harsh truth, and by his leftism. He believes and does not believe at the same time, and shifts between the two depending on the strategic value of one or the other attitude at any given moment.
Is that true of the current crop of candidates? I can’t speak for all of them, but my guess is that it’s true for many or even most, but not all. Some really really do believe their own bullshit. Some are well aware that it’s bullshit, but they think it’s tasty bullshit that will sell. One of the reasons we’re seeing more of this, post-Obama, is that he showed how very very successful it could be in the right hands.
I think this is especially the case with the career politicians among the current crop of Democratic candidates. Even if career politicians start out believing, it probably doesn’t take long for a lot of it to become a game.
I think the phenomenon transcends party affiliation, but I also have observed it to be especially marked with the left, because they tend to promise the moon and they must know it’s fiscally impossible. They’re playing to a combination of the gullible, the wishful, the idealistic, the ignorant, and the greedy.
I think that what most career politicans (and some new ones as well) really really really want is power, whether that was their original motive or not. And the way they believe they can get it is to be elected. And they say what they think they need to say to reach that goal.
“The penalty of deception is to *become* a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.” —Howard Thurman
From a tweet this morning.
Serious question.
What will they actually do if they win the general election?
My spidey sense tells me that Sanders, Yang, Gabbard, and Delaney might just be roughly on the level (to the degree that, say, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter were on the level). Hickenlooper certainly has skills the others do not. De Blasio is so godawful I don’t care whether or not his lying is self-conscious. The rest of them remind you that in the Democratic Party, it’s sociopathy at the top and stupidity at the bottom.
Note that ~40% of the public is completely at home with the essential grossness.
What will they actually do if they win the general election?
Obama was enough of a cipher that his administration was the resultant of the vectors at work in the Democratic Party. What BO added was little touches of spite and mendacity.
Art Deco,
What I meant by what will they do is that most of these crazy ass proposals cost trillions of dollars and added up are bigger than the entire economy. Just fiscally they cannot be done. Plus they are way more unpopular then say ObamaCare (not that it was very popular either) but even a good slice of Democrats oppose Medicare For All and open borders and debt forgiveness.
I trust Neo that the description of politicians in your last paragraph was not a recent revelation. I think only of relatively recent Presidents, Carter and Reagan do not fit that mold.
Marianne Williamson believes what she is saying!
People all over the world (everybody)
Join hands (join)
Start a love train, love train
The O’Jays – Love Train
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vTKmVvyNRc
I can’t feel bad when I hear that one.
Now we have an Operation Chaos on behalf of Marianne!
Author Marianne Williamson’s quirky, love-conquers-all approach on the Democratic debate stage Thursday drew applause, ridicule and confusion.
On Friday, she was attracting donations. From Republicans.
GOP strategist Jeff Roe, who ran Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’ 2016 presidential campaign, tweeted out to his 16,000 followers asking fellow Republicans “to donate $1 to keep this vibrant democrat on the debate stage. One debate performance is not enough.”
At least several people appear to have taken up the challenge based on responses to Roe, accompanied by copies of receipts of their campaign donations.
Republicans start donating to Marianne Williamson to keep her in future Democratic debates
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/06/28/democratic-debate-2019-republicans-urge-giving-marianne-williamson/1598726001/
Heck, I’d donate just for the entertainment value.
The truest comment of the Obama presidency:
“You Lie!”
The candidates threw around a lot of “statistics,” numbers, and “estimates” the other couple of nights and—looking around–and depending on the topic–you can often find a lot of statistics, and “estimates.”
Then, there is the methodology that has been used to gather those statistics, to compute those “estimates,” and the motives and the competence–or not–of the people or organizations gathering them, what particular statistics are chosen to be presented or emphasized and, moreover, in what manner they are presented.
Is it just one number, a list of numbers, a chart, or a graph?
And how about labeling?
Given how the chart or graph is structured and labeled, does that contribute to and enhance your ability to understand the information that is being presented, or does it distort. misrepresent, or confuse the issue?
Unfortunately, at each step along the way, there is ample room for incompetence, as well as for manipulation of those statistics, charts, graphs, and estimates; this presentation of supposedly “accurate” information.
Prime examples are some of the “science is settled” measurements, statistics, charts, graphs, and reports that were presented a few years ago by climate activists (including those at the UN and NASA) to attest to the reality of “Global Warming.”
Remember that “Hockey stick graph,” or some of the supposedly cutting edge, and accurate climate calculations that—it turned out—left out the effect of the oceans on climate as just too complicated—at our current state of technology and computer science—to model?
Investigate, as well, the supposedly “scientific” statistics presented by Dr. (of Entomology, no less) Kinsey in his extraordinarily influential, supposedly “scientific studies,” his “Kinsey Reports” on human sexuality—which set off, and formed the foundations for the Sexual Revolution.
Investigate the “scientifically” selected, large, supposedly “normal” sample population Kinsey’s statistics were supposedly gathered from, and then compare that with the small, decidedly not “normal” group of people they were reportedly actually gathered from.
Investigate, as well, Kinsey’s information gathering and record keeping; the level of systematization, uniformity, and rigor with which those supposed “statistics” were gathered and recorded; “statistics” which lay behind and justified his Earth-shaking reports and conclusions.*
It appears that a white lab coat and thick rimmed classes a “scientist” makes, as did the cover of “Time.”
For the extraordinarily and surprising, revelatory details on these issues—and many others—check James H. Jones’ massive, heavily researched biography, “Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life.”
Bottom line, I’m pretty sure that these candidates just had their staffs fish around to find some plausible looking/sounding statistics, or some estimate that validated whatever point they wanted to make and—regardless of the methodology—good or bad—used to arrive at them, regardless of their validity, and the other statistics out there that might refute them, they used them, just threw them out there.
Counting on a mostly innumerate and incurious audience to just accept them as true.
I often find Kevin Williamson annoying for whatever reasons, but the man is a writer. Here he is on Marianne’s debate:
Marianne, you beautiful lunatic. Every time you spoke, I didn’t know whether you were going to do a rain dance, cast a hex, or hold a seance. On those rare moments you got a chance to talk, I leaned forward because I had no idea what kind of absolute insanity was going to come out of your mouth.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democratic-debate-kamala-harris-criticizes-joe-biden-busing/
One debate is not enough!
Mark Twain said it best:
There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
An overwhelming majority know their promises are necessary to fool voters in order to gain what they want: power, fame, and fortune. Pandering pays.
I loved it when ol’ Bernie thundered that–not to worry, his extraordinarily expensive Medicare for All, tuition free public college education, and student debt cancellation programs were all, somehow, “fully paid for.”
Whew, I was getting worried there for awhile.
But, if Bernie says, its “fully paid for,” I guess that its “fully paid for.”
Bernie wouldn’t stretch the truth like a biiig rubber band or lie to me, would he?
Nah!
Bernie wouldn’t do that!
I wonder what kind of statistical gymnastics, what kind of pretzels his staff or some organization had to contort the numbers into, to concoct his great “Plan”
Take a look, as well, at this analysis of Bernie’s plan for new taxes, done by the Tax Foundation, which, I’d think, has some familiarity with and expertise in this area,, at https://taxfoundation.org/details-and-analysis-senator-bernie-sanders-s-tax-plan
Democrats have always had the tendency to pie-in-the-sky promises. But Trump is the first Republican President in my lifetime to stretch truths routinely like silly putty.
I’ve made my peace with Trump. However, as far as I’m concerned Trump supporters are fooling themselves if they believe Trump’s elastic approach to the truth hasn’t emboldened Democrats to do him one better.
A couple months ago, Obama had this to say in Brazil while speaking at a confab there.
Later, when pressed by a reporter, he claimed that the term “machine guns” was just a more familiar phrase than AR-15 or assault weapon. Bullshit indeed.
The most accomplished liars do in fact believe their lies.
It is an internal dissocation that allows them to hold contradictions and counterfacturals without experiencing the dissonance.
The best politicians believe their lies, for as long, and with as much sincerity, as their priorities require. They can do this even unto psychopathy.
The Dems/Progs have problems with reality. They think Bruce Jenner is female. Give it awards for courage. Can’t get much further from reality. They will believe anything, even their own BS.
One thing that strikes me about Obama is that he had no interest in *operations*…ie, the ‘executive’ part of the chief executive job. For example, after making assertions (ridiculous assertions, of course) that as much energy could be saved thru proper tire inflation as thru expanded drilling, he did absolutely nothing to create programs for encouraging/incentivizing/enabling people to actually do so. (an FDR or a JFK would have done something along these lines.) Speaking the words is all that matters to Obama.
Speaking the words is all that matters to Obama. –David Foster
Sometimes speaking the words is what matters. In the philosophy of language, there are utterances which go beyond communication and they are actions in themselves. They are called “speech acts.”
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
–JFK, 09/12/1962
Obviously JFK talked to his advisors before such a declaration and understood it wasn’t a bat-crap crazy idea, but it was still important for JFK to say the words. Going to the moon wouldn’t have happened without the words.
Unfortunately Democrats look to JFK and FDR like cargo cultists. The only part they get are saying the words. So they say the words and expect the goal to materialize.
From the tax foundation: “According to the Tax Foundation’s Taxes and Growth Model, the plan would significantly increase marginal tax rates and the cost of capital, which would lead to 9.5 percent lower GDP over the long term.”
The progs don’t care if GDP falls, or business slows, or jobs decrease as long as their plans for equal outcomes are in place. And that is the failing of the socialist model. Wealth creation slows, tax receipts fall, they must borrow and/or print money to compensate, and the whole economy slides into the dumper as inflation takes off. They don’t want to look at the consequences of high taxes and government regulation on economic activity.
I calculated my income tax bill under Bernie’s plan as outlined by the Tax Foundation. It would be an increase of 200% for me. That would impact my financial situation and not in a good way. 🙁
Bernie is an ideologue, as was Obama. And even more dangerous than Obama. There is one upside to Bernie. He is openly telling people what he would do. Obama was very sly in not disclosing what he intended to do
J.J.: True, but look on the bright side: the progs stay in power and keep their privileges until bunker time!
Ya gotta think these things thru.
Bernie is an ideologue, as was Obama. And even more dangerous than Obama.
No. Obama was a bundle of attitudes. He hadn”t one original idea.
Art Deco: I wasn’t aware one had to have original ideas to be an ideologue.
Snow on Pine on June 29, 2019 at 7:06 pm said:
I loved it when ol’ Bernie thundered that–not to worry, his extraordinarily expensive Medicare for All, tuition free public college education, and student debt cancellation programs were all, somehow, “fully paid for.”
Whew, I was getting worried there for awhile.
* * *
This is how it’s done.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/06/Screen-Shot-2019-06-26-at-6.50.55-PM.png?w=1194&ssl=1
huxley on June 29, 2019 at 11:26 pm said:
…
Obviously JFK talked to his advisors before such a declaration and understood it wasn’t a bat-crap crazy idea, but it was still important for JFK to say the words. Going to the moon wouldn’t have happened without the words.
Unfortunately Democrats look to JFK and FDR like cargo cultists. The only part they get are saying the words. So they say the words and expect the goal to materialize.
* * *
The words are the goal, because Democrats are never held accountable for not producing what they promised.
AesopFan: Once upon a time Democrats were accountable. If D-Day or the Moon landing hadn’t come off, there would have been consequences, especially in the first case. LBJ didn’t run for a second term because the Vietnam War went south (though there was also an understandable health issue).
Then came Obama’s healthcare roll-out — the website kept crashing in the first weeks while Obama made lame excuses. Absolutely pathetic. And the website was the easy part.
Like most here I opposed ObamaCare, but botching the website? That means Obama had incompetent managers who were either not being honest or whose reports were ignored somewhere in the chain of command under Obama.
The buck stops somewhere else.
Yang is something new in the Democrat world, and after reading his book and watching him several times I am sure he does believe what he says. The economy has changed and is continuing to change at an accelerating pace. His plan is an honest attempt to make the best of it. It is thorough and could work.
This all is the usual socialist/progressivist double-thinking, first described by Dostoevsky in “Crime and Punishment” and later by Orwell. This is a hard to learn, complex art of self-deception, and different candidates of the present Democrat crop mastered it to different degrees. Obama was a grand-master level doublethinker, due to his twisted biography and the necessity to impersonate different self-identifications (all of them phony) at different ages.
Living in a society overwhelmingly based on BS provides unique insights in psychological dynamics of the people it creates. There were heated debates in 20-s and 30-s in Soviet Union about true Party line: these times the opposing parties within the Party were called Left (true believers in Communist orthodoxy) and Right (more realistic and opportunist wing, ready to make some accommodation to the unmovable facts contradicting the dogma). When Lenin was asked which “leaning”, or “deviation”, is worse, he replied that “both are worse”. He preferred to be very dogmatic in strategic goals, but infinitely malleable in tactics. Stalin also took this path. The same parties among the ruling Party elites resurrected after Stalin death and partial expose of his crimes. By the time I came to age there again were the two opposing camps in the Party. As one of the dissidents aptly observed, they are better called not Left and Right (where, for some inversion, revisionists were called Left, and hard-boiled orthodox – Right), but as a dogmatic heresy and a cynical heresy. The right course should be to believe and at the same time not to believe in the dogma, that is, to be a true double-thinker.
As time gone, a dogmatic wing of the Party simply died out, and all the newcomers were very cynical. At this point the regime became so weak that it simply collapsed.
Art Deco: I wasn’t aware one had to have original ideas to be an ideologue.
I wasn’t making the classification contingent on that. That’s just an observation about him.
Most politicians have signatures. Obama didn’t. The disreputable Mr. Sailer offered that Obama would have been well-adapted to the Foreign Service, where you’re supposed to be transmitting the views of others and not adding much original content. Look at Obama’s matrices over the last 40 years and ask how his views differ from modal opinion in those matrices. The only peculiar element is Jeremiah Wright. To the extent there is a signature it is one of vintage. The green energy boondoggles and the suck-up to Iran are unsurprising to those of us who were (at an impressionable age) reading newspapers in 1979. Otherwise, Obama’s view of the world is about what you’d expect of a Democrat whose background and matrix are what they have been.
‘Ideologue’ is generally meant as a pejorative. The thing is, politicians should be ideologues in the sense of having a menu of principles which influence action, principles which they’ve pondered. Obama did not have principles. He had attitudes and biases and there’s little indication he had much critical engagement with anything. Ronald Reagan was an actual ideologue. How Reagan and Obama differed was in their habits and background. Reagan took an interest in scoring accomplishments and was willing to accept a suboptimal result if it incorporated an incremental improvement. He’d also had 12 years under his belt as a negotiator (first as President of the Screen Actors Guild and then as Governor of California) which included 8 years as a public executive. Obama had no skills in either venue, and he was too vain to acquire any. Like most Democrats today, he had too much contempt for the opposition to arrange mutually-beneficial exchanges with them. The failure of Simpson-Bowles is an example. He spent astonishingly little time in the presence of members of Congress. Mr. Sailer notes he spent a great deal of time playing golf, but didn’t play with people who were professional peers or make use of recreation as a way to break the ice with other pols.
A great deal of what’s said about Obama is rubbish.
1. He isn’t a Chicago pol. He doesn’t have the diligence or the people skills to be a precinct captain (nor the interest in flesh-and-blood people), much less graduate to alderman.
2. His association with Ayers / Dohrn isn’t indicative of much of anything; the two of them had a place in the academic and legal worlds of Chicago; that they were acceptable company is merely an indication of the unseriousness of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie in our time; that Christopher Kennedy had the stones to persuade other people on the board of U of I Chicago to deliver to deliver Wm Ayers (and the faculty who hired him) a small rebuke is astonishing for its rarity.
3. His association with Michael Harrington’s outfit isn’t indicative of much of anything either. There’s little indication that Obama is passably read in social theory, much less Marxism in particular, and people like Harrington and Irving Howe were not at the time advocating much of anything that wasn’t an extension of the main currents of thought among the Democratic Party’s wonks.
4. His foreign parentage and his years in Indonesia have given people the idea that he’s exotic in some way. There used to be a youtube up of Obama trying to make some remarks in the Malay trader’s dialect that’s a lingua franca in Indonesia. It’s about 40 seconds long and his delivery is halting and spoken with his usual accent; Indonesia never made much of an impression on him; you’ll note that his sister lives in Honolulu, nowhere near her father’s other children.
5. Obama grew up in Honolulu’s haole society. The ethnic Japanese in Hawaii are native to the islands and have a distinct outlook and sensibility quite foreign to the culture of ambition you see among Oriental populations in California and the BosWash corridor. Hawaii is their home, a place like no other. By contrast, 80% of the haoles were born elsewhere; its a jumble of people who fancied the climate more than they did the social world of the places where they grew up. Honolulu is a 2d tier city with a built environment that’s suburban ticky-tacky (expensive suburban ticky-tacky). The nighttime air is exquisite, but if you’re not attached to that, the place doesn’t hold you. In 1970, the place had an informality that made it distinct from the Mainland and made it attractive to some; nowadays every place in America is so relentlessly informal that the distinction’s gone.
6. It’s hard to locate in Obama’s nonage anyone to emulate. He spent all of nine weeks of his life in the same city as his birth-father, who was an alcoholic, a sexual adventurer, and given to extraordinary displays of arrogance. His step-father seems to have been a good-natured sot treated shabbily by his mother; he had little contact with the man after 1971. His grand-father was an amiable buffoon. The smart money says his attachment to Frank Marshall Davis was faute de mieux.
7. At least one woman acquainted with him at the time has offered that Obama remanufactured himself in law school and she witnessed it in real time. He’s a phony in the clinical sense of the term.
If “fundamentally transforming” the country you’ve been electing to lead is NOT ideological, then I’m not sure what is….
(But then, one can always define things the way one wants to, I guess.)
File under: Definitions, definitions, definitions.
Speaking of definitions….:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-cold-truth-about-sweden/
If “fundamentally transforming” the country you’ve been electing to lead is NOT ideological, then I’m not sure what is….
About a generation ago, James Neuchterlein offered that rank-and-file liberals of the sort you might find on campus took John Kennedy’s hifalutin’ rhetoric almost literally, something Kennedy and his staff did not, following up measures described with verbiage like “unparalleled in scope” with brass tacks proposals which were modest little dribs and drabs. Neuchterlein thought the difference between rhetoric and reality had had a damaging effect on the political culture, as street-level liberals got more and more impatient.
I think it would be a similar mistake to take BO’s gassy blather all that seriously.
Art Deco—From what I’ve read about Obama and his background, his relationship with Communist (Ayers claims that it’s with a small “c”) and unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers (and his wife Bernadine Dohrn) was long standing and close.
According to some of the articles I’ve read, the Obama and Ayers families often socialized and ate dinner on the weekends together, and the Ayers and Obama families often traded baby sitting duties.
Obama began his political career at a fund raiser dinner at Ayers’ house.
When Bill Ayers was able to attract the Annenberg Challenge to Chicago to apply hundreds of thousands of donated dollars to try to improve the abysmal Chicago public school system, it was Obama who Ayers apparently proposed to be that organization’s head.
According to reports, Ayers and President of the Board Obama had offices on the same floor, and worked closely together for at least four years (1994-5 to 1999) on that failing exercise in philanthropy.
They also both sat on several other boards together.
Given all these close and year’s long associations, that the MSM allowed Obama to get away with and say, when questioned about his relationship to Ayers, that he hardly knew Ayers, and that—
“This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”
was a total betrayal of these “journalists” much vaunted, so called “code of journalistic ethics,” and malfeasance of the highest order.
As for Obama’s formative years from age 7 to 10 in Muslim Indonesia, those who looked into it found that Obama, living in the Muslim household of his step father Lolo Soetero, was registered at school as a Muslim and—at that time in hard line Muslim Indonesia—took the mandatory training in the Qur’an and Islam that all Muslim students in school were then required to take. Obama even mentioned, in an article, about how he would cut up in “Qur’an class.”
Then, there were his fellow students who, when queried, remembered that Obama was also taking the extra, apparently costly, after school class in reciting the Qur’an that only the pious students took, and they also remembered sometimes seeing Obama and his step-father Lolo going to the Mosque to pray.
You might also remember that Obama told New York Times reporter Nikolas Kristof, in an interview, about how the Muslim Call to Prayer was “the prettiest sound on earth in the evening,” and how Obama then proceeded to chant this Muslim Confession of Faith in what Kristoff—who had been stationed the Middle East for years—said was a first class accent.
I’d say, from all of this, that Obama was very likely profoundly influenced by Islam and its teachings.
Neo says, “I think the phenomenon transcends party affiliation”.
I should like to see some examples.
I am on record here in saying Democrats are evil. Well, perhaps they are merely sociopaths, but that’s pretty close to being evil.
All irrelevant, Snow on Pine. Ayers was a professor in the teacher training faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago and his wife having resurfaced landed an associates’ position at Sidley, Austin. I don’t know where she ended up working; however, it was remarked at the time (1985) by Michael Kinsley that under ordinary circumstances a resume from someone who hadn’t cracked a law book in 18 years would go into the trash; Dohrn was not only accepted, she was granted privileges. What you’re not getting is that people who had real benefits to dole out were at home associating with this pair. That indicates something about the faculty and law firm culture in Chicago that’s damning. Obama being Obama adds nothing to that. The problem we face as a society is that there was 1,000 others just like him at that time and place.
As for Obama’s formative years from age 7 to 10 in Muslim Indonesia, those who looked into it found that Obama, living in the Muslim household of his step father Lolo Soetero, was registered at school as a Muslim and—at that time in hard line Muslim Indonesia—took the mandatory training in the Qur’an and Islam that all Muslim students in school were then required to take. Obama even mentioned, in an article, about how he would cut up in “Qur’an class.”
This is nucking futz.
1. Although there are redoubts of orthodox Islam in Indonesia, then as now the mode in Indonesia is lax practice and syncretism. There’s a local term used to describe most of the population that translates as ‘statistical Muslim’.
2. Although there could be other explanations for this, Lolo Soetero died of liver failure at the age of 52; it’s a reasonable inference he was a boozer, a rare vice among strict Muslims.
3. Per published reports, Nicholas Kristof studied Arabic for a year a quarter century before he met Obama, dialect not specified but one might wager Egyptian; it’s not likely he’s in a position to call someone’s accent flawless.
4. I cannot help but recall profiles of Dianne Feinstein back in the day noted she’d attended Catholic schools and was fond of the Latin mass. Doesn’t make her a sedevacantist.
5. He was living in a notionally Muslim country, his mother was an exhibitionistic atheist, and his grandfather attended a Unitarian congregation because ‘you get five religions for the price of one’. How would you expect his mother to have filled out that form? By the way, among my nearest and dearest is a lady who sat for Bible classes in the county junior high in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1967.
“…gassy blather…”
OK.
In that case, I guess I’ll just have to ignore
– Obamacare
– “Operation” Fast and Furious
– JCPOA (for “peace on our dime”)
– The lovely Lois Lerner (and her audacious colleagues)
– Packing the courts with cohorts
– Delay tactics, stone-walling and flat out lying to Texas judges
– Eric Holder’s deft “exit stage left”
– Sweet Lorretta Lynch’s “mum’s the word” 5th-taking (as well as her tarmac escapades)
– All that racial healing…
– Screwing the State of Israel and engineering further demonization of that country
– Weaponizing the DOJ and FBI against American citizens supporting the next President of the USA as well as the President himself
Oh, and ignore the current crackpot state of the Democratic Party of the USA, which he bequeathed to the country he led.
(And no doubt other things I’ve missed….)
Art Deco-
-There are many causes of liver failure, of which booze is just one. See liver flukes, fairly common in Asia.
-Feinstein, nee Goldman, is, was and will be Jewish. Going to a Catholic school is not relevant.
-Once a Muslim, always a Muslim. Apostasy is punishable by death. Barry Soetero aka Barack Hussein Obama, was surely positively inclined to favor Muslims and Islam as POTUS. Actions speak louder than words. As far as I’m concerned, he is Muslim and practices taqiyya rather ably.
-Once a Muslim, always a Muslim. Apostasy is punishable by death.
He’s nearly 60. They’ve been taking their time with it.
Barack Hussein Obama, was surely positively inclined to favor Muslims and Islam as POTUS. Actions speak louder than words.
Again, leafrogging loyalties. Bog standard among bourgeois liberals.
– Obamacare
– “Operation” Fast and Furious
– JCPOA (for “peace on our dime”)
– The lovely Lois Lerner (and her audacious colleagues)
– Packing the courts with cohorts
– Delay tactics, stone-walling and flat out lying to Texas judges
– Eric Holder’s deft “exit stage left”
– Sweet Lorretta Lynch’s “mum’s the word” 5th-taking (as well as her tarmac escapades)
All examples of abuse of power to which partisan Democrats fancy they’re entitled. Not examples of ‘transformation’, but of secular decay in the political culture.
– All that racial healing…
Mundane race relations haven’t changed at all. What Obama did was what just about any higher ed administrator does as a matter of course: petty acts of malicious stupidity which in turn had an effect on behavior patterns within inner city law enforcement. He had plenty of help in this from bad local politicians.
– Screwing the State of Israel and engineering further demonization of that country
His general attitude toward Israel is asinine; again, in this regard his disposition is bog standard among bourgeois liberals (Jewish liberals a qualified exception). However, Israel remains substantively uninjured, and the security assistance program continues.
– Weaponizing the DOJ and FBI against American citizens supporting the next President of the USA as well as the President himself
Absolutely. And they were happy to go along, as was the IRS. No transformation there, just rancid institutional cultures of which Obama took advantage.
Oh, and ignore the current crackpot state of the Democratic Party of the USA, which he bequeathed to the country he led. (And no doubt other things I’ve missed….)
Obama didn’t cast a spell and generate pussyhats and Occasional-Cortex. Street-level Democrats gave you that.
OK.
But still, wouldn’t it be funny if Obama actually believed that what he was doing was fundamentally transforming America?
Actually believed his own “gassy blather”?
Actually intended his “gassy blather” to see the light of day? To come to fruition? (And managed to ram through laws, accordingly? Or employ Executive Privilege to do so—But just once, right?…. )
IOW, I suppose we could all claim that ACA never REALLY materialized because it never quite worked the way we were told it was supposed to? (Poor Jonathan Gruber’s lies all for nought, alas?… For that matter, poor, poor Harry Reid!)
And wouldn’t it be funny if Obama et al. were rather upset at the results of the 2016 presidential election because, well, um, they just don’t like losing elections, especially when they’re supposed to be winning them? That the reason for their rancor, their anger, their distraught panic, their anxious perturbation, had absolutely NOTHING to do with the widely-held belief that the “arc of history” required the Democratic Party to be in the vanguard? That the Democratic Party project was not yet completed?
IOW, that ideology has nothing to do with it—NOT one bit?
IOW, “OK, so a few neanderthal-troglodyte-racist-deplorable Republicans somehow won the elections. Well, we could, in theory, live with that…; it’s just that we HATE to lose (insert obligatory Vince Lombardi quote.)”? “In fact we HATE to lose so much that we’re willing to destroy the country just to let everyone know how much we hate to lose”?
IOW, nothing to do with ideology. Nothing at all….?
Well, maybe….
IOW, I suppose we could all claim that ACA never REALLY materialized because it never quite worked the way we were told it was supposed to? (Poor Jonathan Gruber’s lies all for nought, alas?…)
ACA was a badly conceived program for financing medical care larded over the extant mess of health care finance. That doesn’t ‘fundamentally transform’ anything. It just made the existing mess marginally worse (on balance).
But still, wouldn’t it be funny if Obama actually believed that what he was doing was fundamentally transforming America?
Oh, he might. He’s vain and not adverse to plumbing the shallows of a subject.
The entire culture of the Democratic Party is rotten. If there’s an Obama signature, it’s the secretiveness and petty spite (e.g. refusing to release his long-form birth certificate until Gov. Abercrombie suggested withholding it was de trop and siccing spies on Sheryl Atkisson). Being secretive and spiteful is not an ideology. It’s a character and personality defect.
Snow on Pine on June 30, 2019 at 10:58 am said:
Art Deco—From what I’ve read about Obama and his background, his relationship with Communist (Ayers claims that it’s with a small “c”) and unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers (and his wife Bernadine Dohrn) was long standing and close.
* * *
I wasn’t very happy with John McCain as the candidate opposing Obama (the GOP really blew that nomination), but when he went around blathering that, “Nobody cares about some washed up old terrorist,” I really lost all respect for him as a campaigner.
There were LOTS of us who thought the Ayers-Chicago-Obama connection was important, and that it was one of the most critical signifiers of how miserably Obama would govern — which his record (detailed above) amply proved.
Humans create an ego and identity. This provides them salvation from threats. However sometimes the ego is tr8ggered. Defense for the ego is to attack and attack. A favorite tactic is to confuse the truth with the ego, and the ego with the truth.
A parable. A man walks to a field and sees a hole. He looks around for trespassers and then covers up the hole. Tommorow another man walks into the field and sees his irrigation hole filled. He digs another hole. Tommorow a man walks into a field and sees the guy who is a threat on his field. The hole digger attacks because he has become vulnerable due to someone filling up his hole and somebody messed up his hole.
The field surveyor attacks because somebody is digging holes. The surveyor now had a hole in his heart and the hole digger has another hole in him.
Meanwhile the Divine Most High sends a messenger, a Son of God, to tell both of them that they are living rent free on the earth and to wake up, there are no fields or property, let alone trespassers or holes on the Sabbath to save people from.
The Ego replies, i am what will save you from enemies, holes, and trespassers.
I reply, the ego is created by man, the natural human. It is not the will of god, thus it is satan or an opposing illusion.
Art Deco—From what I’ve read about Obama and his background, his relationship with Communist (Ayers claims that it’s with a small “c”) and unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayers (and his wife Bernadine Dohrn) was long standing and close.
Well, the University of Illinois at Chicago hired and tenured one of these creatures. Sidley, Austin employed the other for four years, after which Northwestern’s law school hired her. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this, but hanging out with this pair is not a BO signature. That’s the sort of thing lawyers and academics in Shi!cago do; the culture of our fancy people is suck-o.
Sorry ArtDeco
just because you say so
does not make
it so
On the Crime and Religion thread, John Guilfoyle on June 30, 2019 at 8:10 pm linked this:
https://theothermccain.com/2019/06/30/godless-commies/
“Godless Commies” is a riff on “an essay by Harry Stein about the continuing relevance of Eugene Lyons’s 1941 book The Red Decade because of its eerie parallels to the Stalinist tendencies of the 21st-century Left.”
The original essay is worth reading in its entirety, and I have excerpted some relevant portions here and on the “Crime and religion” and “SJW” threads from Saturday.
(“Intermezzo” didn’t seem to have much to do with the burden of Stein’s arguments, except insofar as Communists had penetrated the world of entertainment in general.)
https://www.city-journal.org/eugene-lyons-the-red-decade
RTWT
The historian Wm. O’Neill estimated that fellow-travelers exceeded actual party members by a factor of about 4. These in turn were part of a larger ‘progressive’ matrix. Henry Wallace won about 2.4% of the vote in the 1948 Presidential election, with about 60% of his support collected in New York and California. After that, this bloc began to implode rapidly, with Wallace himself undertaking a volte face consequent to the Korean War. The dozen or so trade unions controlled by the red haze were ejected from the CIO in 1949 and largely evaporated after that, with only the United Electrical Workers retaining any significance. Over the period running from 1947 to 1972, the population of the United States increased by 1/3, but the Communist Party membership rolls declined by 85%. Red haze types in the world of screenwriting and book publishing had been quite influential in 1945 and (per RWB Lewis) had distorted and disfigured the body of output in the latter sector. Not much has been written about the publishing sector. In regard to cinema, there was a concerted and successful effort to eject such people from positions of influence. Ellen Schrecker remains steamed about it.
I think if we’re fussing about Stalinism we’re not fighting the last war, but the one before that.
just because you say so does not make it so
Thanks for denying something neither asserted nor implied. Been an education.
Somewhere above, Art Deco said “Obama’s view of the world is about what you’d expect of a Democrat whose background and matrix are what they have been.”
I said from fairly early on that Obama was best understood as a white liberal. Accordingly, I was delighted a while back when the parents of one of his white girlfriends said something along those lines. His race gave him enormous cachet in Democratic circles, and I don’t think he would have stood out apart from it. Seems likely that deep in Hillary Clinton’s heart there is some hatred for him.
Cicero:
With Feinstein it’s actually more complicated than that:
And here’s Feinstein speaking about her religion:
“Religious,” but apparently not Jewish.
Of course, she is ethnically Jewish, if that’s the point you’re trying to make. But it does not sound as though she was raised Jewish, nor was her mother, and her maternal grandparents were converts to Christianity, and she says that for her the “big questions” were answered by Catholic doctrine.
Aesop Fan,
Have you ever even BEEN to Hawaii? Not tourist Hawaii or even Military stationed a few years Hawaii. Hawaii Nei Hawaii.
Aloha Po.
Beg your pardon, Aseop Fan. My comment was addressed to Art Deco.
“It just made the existing mess marginally worse (on balance).”
Hmmm. Well, actually, the ACA succeed in hamstringing small and mid-size businesses.
In hog-tying any mid-size business that intended to expand but which couldn’t afford to do so because it had factor in being financially responsible for its employees’ health care—above a certain number of employees.
(Of course, true to Obama’s MO, such a policy was only for the benefit–the health!—of the American people….)
Now why might any administration of “the home of the brave and the land of the free” even want to hamstring entrepreneurship initiative or hog-tie the American middle class?
(Maybe because of Obama’s most unusual, very special, quite unique sense of humor? Seeing as it couldn’t possibly be because of any particular ideology….)
Next up: Let’s ask Henry Kissinger about what happened to his painstakingly constructed “pax Americana” (well, give or take—let’s call it “pax-ish Americana”) and how quickly it—somehow(!)—“deconstructed”…. On the other hand, who cares what Kissinger thinks… It was certainly time to shake things up—spread the wealth, as it were—and give others, e.g., Iran, a (well deserved?) chance to cosy up to the roulette table—just ask Valerie Jarett. So no “ideology” here: it’s just a case of being “fair”…. (vis-à-vis Cuba, too, I suppose… And no one can deny that the US was for half a century most unfair to Castro’s dictatorship and the Cuban people; though no doubt the real reason for US policy was to somehow ensure that all those fabulous vintage automobiles were maintained and kept in circulation…).
And as long as we’re talking about being fair—the “American way”, certainly—when Obama let slip to Medvedev that following the 2012 election, Obama would be able to be “more flexible”—to show “more flexibility”—can there be any doubt that ideology had nothing to do it? Surely, Obama was not scheming with Medvedev/Putin but merely intimating that, finally, he would have more free time for his pilates and his yoga—as per Michelle’s idea to promote physical and mental health nationally (taking up the fight against that vicious enemy—obesity). And anyone who believes there is more to it than that is surely mistaken.
Nope. No ideology, none of the time.
and she says that for her the “big questions” were answered by Catholic doctrine.
It reminds me of the utterances of the magazine reporters, acting as stenographers for the candidate’s PR staff, who said Michael and Kitty Dukakis had ‘raised their children in both traditions’. It was either complete nonsense or it meant something like, Mrs. Dukakis decorates her house with Greek and Jewish tchochkes in December. If her big questions actually were answered by Catholic doctrine, she’d be at Mass and in the confessional.
Have you ever even BEEN to Hawaii?
Molly, nobody knows you’re a pig on the internet. I come here to discuss issues, not to discuss me, or my workplace, or my family. My remarks would be asinine if I hadn’t some personal knowledge of the place, but you can take that report with as large a hunk of rock salt as you care to.
Does ArtDeco believe his own spin?
Does ArtDeco believe his own spin?
What spin?
See 08:48.
Hmmm. Well, actually, the ACA succeed in hamstringing small and mid-size businesses.
In hog-tying any mid-size business that intended to expand but which couldn’t afford to do so because it had factor in being financially responsible for its employees’ health care—above a certain number of employees.
Again, an incremental change in the antecedent situation, when businesses had to take into account employee expectations in considering compensation schemes.
Next up: Let’s ask Henry Kissinger about what happened to his painstakingly constructed “pax Americana” (well, give or take—let’s call it “pax-ish Americana”) and how quickly it—somehow(!)—“deconstructed”…. On the other hand, who cares what Kissinger thinks… It was certainly time to shake things up—spread the wealth, as it were—and give others, e.g., Iran, a (well deserved?) chance to cosy up to the roulette table—just ask Valerie Jarett. So no “ideology” here: it’s just a case of being “fair”…. (vis-à-vis Cuba, too, I suppose… And no one can deny that the US was for half a century most unfair to Castro’s dictatorship and the Cuban people; though no doubt the real reason for US policy was to somehow ensure that all those fabulous vintage automobiles were maintained and kept in circulation…).
Henry Kissinger never constructed a Pax Americana, carefully or no. He had been out of office for 30-odd years on the day Obama was inaugurated. The intervening period of years had been rather eventful. Have you perhaps confused Obama with Jimmy Carter?
And as long as we’re talking about being fair—the “American way”, certainly—when Obama let slip to Medvedev that following the 2012 election, Obama would be able to be “more flexible”—to show “more flexibility”—can there be any doubt that ideology had nothing to do it?
Your post is sufficiently incoherent that my wager would be you were blotto while writing it.
See 08:48.
I have never invoked my personal biography to demonstrate a point, because it’s unverifiable to the other participants. If she’d like to dispute me, she can. Your complaint here is no more coherent than your previous complaint.
This circular firing squad with art d is an example.
Fighting between egos results from the creation of right and wrong. For someone to be right, others must be wrong. Light vs darkness. Good vs evil. Duality creates conflict. There is no war or conflict in the rest of god and the divine kingdom. War is a human and earth based system.
The ego says, everyone except itself is wrong. For if the ego is wrong. Then it dies.
“Thanks for denying something neither asserted nor implied. Been an education.”
A bit of instant karma for when you denied norway vs sweden when what was asserted was scandinavia. Triggers reduce iq since the ego is more fear based than iq based
ArtDeco:
Never and always don’t mean what you think. Recently you tried to make a point regarding homelessness/mental health issues/addiction by citing a sad family story. It’s been an education.
When I watched the debates, I got the feeling that I was part of a market research experiment hosted by the DNC to find the answer to “what personalities & intersectional types do independent voters especially like?”
No two people on the stages is the same as any other, except they all believe in socialism & pandering. This seems to be a gigantic focus group.
I’m awaiting the DNC’s roll out of their tested & perfect candidate who presses all the hot buttons of swing voters. And they may be holding who they think is the right candidate in the wings, until they get it all sorted out.
“…market research experiment…”
And here are the results (though not the ones they’ll show you):
https://humanevents.com/2019/06/29/antifa-brutally-assault-journalist-during-portland-protest/
Recently you tried to make a point regarding homelessness/mental health issues/addiction by citing a sad family story. I
Citing an example is not demonstrating a point, nor was it intended to do that. When I cite an example, I’m telling you why I am skeptical or something or believe something. I’m not in the business of proving it to you.
A bit of instant karma for when you denied norway vs sweden w
Except I did not do that. You made reference to oil revenues as a source of finance, which are salient for Norway but not the rest of Scandinavia.
I see I’ve got rent-free space in two people’s heads. No clue why.
Art Deco:
I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a clue. I’m going to assume you’re being sarcastic there.
Spin
Aesop, thanks for the link to the article on Eugene Lyons. Will have to read Red Decade and Assignment in Utopia. Then the others, “God willin’ and the crik* don’t rise.”
(“Crik” = “creek,” for those unfamiliar with the saying.)
Apropos of my comments above, about manipulating “statistics,” there is this article out today at
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/07/the-magic-wand-of-fudging-produces-global-warming.php
Ymar on July 1, 2019 at 10:53 am said:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Usa did not land on the moon given the evidence. Would not have mattered what jfk said. Nasa and v2 rocket guy knew the real bottleneck.
Space as vacuum vs space as water.
See, every moon landing comment is moderated and put in the hidden flash pan.
Is somebody threatened by the moon?
I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a clue. I’m going to assume you’re being sarcastic there.
I see I’ve got rent-free space in your head too.
All humans are living rent free on this Earth that they did not build nor are they doing much to maintain.
The squatters, of course, think they are better than the other squatters lol.
Sorry for testing…Test ? Did wink work? NOPE!?