Obama, the unchecked president
This article by Donald Sensing was recommended by several commenters yesterday. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, both here and elsewhere. But it says it very well and quite succinctly.
It’s a gloomy message. But it seems to be the truth, at least as I see it.
That doesn’t mean there might not be some black swans on the horizon that could make a big difference. But that possibility doesn’t change the persuasiveness of the picture painted by Sensing.
That’s the reason I dreaded the 2012 election even more than the 2008 one, and why I had a constantly upset stomach for the entire week before the election and the entire week after. I knew what Obama’s re-election would mean for this country and its people. And I knew Obama was very very likely to win.
But it’s not really Obama himself. It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: he could never have gotten away with this and been re-elected had the American public not been ready to vote for a smooth-talking orator of little substance and almost no accomplishment, who contradicted himself and blamed others for his every failure while simultaneously pretending to take the high road. Part of this is the self-righteous kick they got out of voting for the first black president. But part of it is the dumbing-down of American culture, the paucity of critical thinking, and the full and eager cooperation of the MSM.
[NOTE: And this from Sarah Hoyt makes some good points as well, although I have a few quibbles with it. The first is that, even in the early days of Communism, it seemed to appeal to quite a few intellectuals, even before the huge leftist propaganda machine really got going. The second is that Great Britain and Israel are two other countries that do a lot of breast-beating and mea-culpa-ing, and educate their elites (at least to a certain extent) to be very critical of what their countries have done.]
Once it became clear on election night that Obama had won, I said to my wife, “That’s the end of the Republic”. Being a good lib, she laughed it off not believing it. Sadly, it becomes more true every day with every usurpation by Obama and his claque.
Intellectuals (mostly those who think they are; some really are intelligent) are easy to persuade that the smart should rule the others.
Paul in Boston:
I’m curious—does your wife see it now? Or is everything still okay with her?
I was wondering last night, after reading Sensing’s doomsday post, whether John McCain would have won the 2008 election if Hillary had been his Democratic rival. I think he just may have, and largely because I remember how my liberal friends, even the ardent Hillary lovers, were quite relieved when Obama won the nomination. They weren’t sure she’d be able to pull it off, I think.
Long way of saying, I guess, that I think dismissing the importance of Obama being the first black candidate, and then president, is a mistake.
Robert Heinlein, one of ‘the greats’ in SciFi had particularly prescient observations, relevant to our situation;
“The America of my time line (1987) is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories.
A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens.
What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will generally vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure.
Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and, that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader and the barbarians enter Rome.”
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot…”
“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” [clearly, Heinlein didn’t consider credibly threatening a man’s family…]
Lest one think that Heinlein was solely a grim curmudgeon, there’s this:
“I believe in – I am proud to belong to – the United States. Despite shortcomings, from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.
And finally, I believe in the human race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown –in the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability … and goodness … .of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth, that we always make it just by the skin of our teeth –but that we will always make it … survive … endure.
I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure –will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage –and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.”
It is that sense of hope along with his mental toughness and realism that so endeared Robert Anson Heinlein to his fans.
Wow, Sensing kind of hits the nail squarely on the head with a heavy hammer blow. I have a good friend who just got back from Costa Rica, looking for a place to live when he retires soon. In 2012 when Ohio went for Obama he told his wife that they need to plan to move South.
I am more slightly optimistic than that but I am amazed day after day when our esteemed leader does things that would have caused any Republican to be run out of town on a rail and the media seems to be in a coma.
I guess we get what we deserve when we become real stupid at the ballot box and it makes me very sad. I also think a lot of professionals on the left side understand public opinion, propaganda and advertising vs. logic and fair play better than some of us. Over and over dictators and despots have known how to give the crowds entertainment and circuses in a slight-of-hand manner to consolidate power and maybe that goes with hubris and a sense of self-serving entitlement.
Last thing, I was walking up a set of stairs to a resturant in Nuremberg 45 years ago and looking at pictures of the destruction of the Nuremberg Frauenkirche Platz below us during WWII. It had been renamed the Hitler Platz for a few years and the comment made by my friend was, “Can’t you just imagine people in Germany standing here 35 years ago saying it could never happen here.”
I liked it better when we kicked the scoundrels out every few years and started over instead of allowing a concentration of power in one place.
“breast-beating”? BOOM!
A lot of the reason there is no push back is that Obama presents himself as black. And apparently Americans are absolutely terrified of being called racists. Pollsters have found that if a focus group has any blacks in it, as soon as the blacks express an opinion the whites in the group shut up, fearing that disagreement with any black will make them appear as racists.
I would hope that Sensing is very wrong as I’d like to live out my life outside of the gulag.
I wonder if there is not some kind of tipping point, regarding ridiculing Obama, though. The Tuffy The Rodeo Clown imbroglio seems to be gaining some legs… and of course, none of this storied company at Neo’s place would own to being familiar with Mad Magazine … but guess who is going to be on the cover this months. Just to spare cutting and pasting, the link to what I posted on Chicagoboyz.net is here.
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/38132.html
Curiously, I am a member of the collective there by invitation, although I am not a boyz and have never been to Chicago. There is a link in my post to a Facebook page to support Tuffy the Rodeo Clown. Like one of the recent commenters on my linked post – I wonder if the Friends of Obama are just beginning to sense an under-swell of scorn and derision aimed at their Precious One.
“Pollsters have found that if a focus group has any blacks in it, as soon as the blacks express an opinion the whites in the group shut up, fearing that disagreement with any black will make them appear as racists.”
Treating anyone based on race, gender, etc. as anything less than a distinct individual is stereotyping based upon race, gender, etc. I know it occurs millions of times daily, but it is counter productive. As long as we are judging the ideas of an individual from a logical set of principals based on real world experiences it is ultimately disrespectful to handle them with kid gloves.
Yes, I know there are plenty of people who can’t take the heat but that’s just too bad. They have no right to live in a world where everyone agrees with them. A society where identity politics covers a host of sins is not going to be a healthy society. Let the chips fall where they may.
BHO is not a terrible president and a dangerous would be dictator because his father was Kenyan. The left can keep shuffling a deck of race cards but it does not change his usurpation of the law of the land into pink lemonade.
Neo @5:03
Everything is beautiful, Trayvon was a sweet innocent boy, Obamacare will bring medical utopia to us all, Morsi was elected democratically and unjustly overthrown, the earth is warming catastrophically, and Obama is a wonderful speaker. All information outside the sanitized world of NPR is rejected.
I don’t discuss any politics with my wife or her friends, male or female, because the threat level goes to DefCon 5 immediately. I went to her office party once and before I barely said hello her boss asked if I’d like to go outside and have a fist fight. Huh? I haven’t been in one since I was twelve, a loooong time ago. I just walked away. He’s a big backer of JStreet and wants the Israelis to make peace unilaterally.
Paul in Boston:
My goodness.
Are you a political changer? Were you and your wife more aligned politically when you first got married? Or was it always this way? If the latter, I guess you and she are used to it.
And not one Republican in Congress or a governor has even uttered the word “impeachment”. Are they all so afraid and why?
Democracy in the US is dying, the surveillance and welfare state makes that inevitable. Obama just speeded up the process a bit. But some republican congressmen should have, could have, spoken out out to secure their reputations in history.
If the electorate cared at all, or the palace guard press, he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. But they don’t, so he does.
Neo,
We’re used to it and usually avoid politics.
Bill and Hillary pushed me over the edge. Were these two grifters the best that the Democratic Party could do? Sadly, the answer is yes. It hasn’t gotten better since.
I turned on the MSM after the second intifada. The NYT would have a long article that made the Israelis look bad, but if you read to the end, there’d be facts buried in paragraph twenty five that flipped the entire meaning of the story on its head. Ditto NPR. It was at about this time that the Internet broke the hold of the information gate keepers so that it became possible to see how they distorted and omitted the facts to push their agenda.
I’ve had some really weird experiences. The strangest was having a wife sitting me down and explaining that I couldn’t talk politics to her husband because it upset him too much. And it was a threat to our friendship. OK…
Paul in Boston,
Get far, far away from Boston. The “threat to our friendship” will one day become informing on your heretical mindset.
A childhood friend of 40 years has been a leftist since we were teenagers. We generally avoid talking politics, but in a recent conversation she said, “After the election I was relieved and ecstatic, but now I’m just scared.” Too late, too late.
“none of this storied company at Neo’s place would own to being familiar with Mad Magazine”
I read it all the time when I was a kid
Never really into mad magazine but i was really into comic books when I was eight.
Paul of Boston @ 10:12 pm . . .
I first saw your name as a commenter on Iraq the Model. That was a great website, and I think we both tried to spread the idea that the “Rule of Law” was what made America successful. The Year 2003 was still full of hope.
We both seem to have encountered the Liberal Mind Herd at about the same time. I was amazed at how totally stupid the people I knew reacted to Bush at the time of the Iraq War. The best writer of that era was Steven Den Beste, who summed up the geographical and military situation so beautifully.
Thirteen years later, after years of trying to engage with friends and family, I just give these sheep an eyeroll when they say anything political. They are hopeless. There are a lot of us isolated non-liberal out there. Thank goodness for the internet.
Sgt Mom @ 7:11 . . .
I always enjoy your posts at various websites. I’m personally “flattered” or “insulted” that you think we’re so intellectual that we would never read Mad Magazine. I’m named after a comic book character.
Promethea was a delightful comic book series by Allen Moore until the end…..*spoiler alert*….. where he totally messed up the entire plot with a giant hug-in/be-in. Nobody should bother reading the last volume in this series. Moore also moved into pornography, which I hate. BTW, Cracked is a good online website, with a lot of laughs and some occasional anti-Obama stuff.
Yesterday, my gun-loving grannies group met for lunch, and we had so much fun laughing over the Obama Rodeo Clown incident. We are often grim and serious about the Death of the Republic, but lucky for us, we’re Americans who like to laugh at the absurdities of modern life.
Reform of the schools with LGBT textbooks, switching genders at will (California schools), and kindergarden games? Yeah, that’ll work.
I loved Mad Magazine when I was a teenager back in the late 60s and early 70s. I don’t know what it’s like today, but back then it was fearless about poking Authority in the eye. The concept of Political Correctness didn’t yet exist.
Harold Says:
August 16th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
Well, Eric Holder did call us cowards for not wanting to have a “conversation” about race.
Surely that’s what he meant, right? Right?
If the Obama rodeo clown would consider doing kids birthday parites, I’d hire him. We have to start teaching them young.
N-Neocon: …amen…Amen…AMEN…A*M*E*N..!!
Paul in Boston: Welcome to the Cabal, oh evil neocon rascal. Or, as our ‘Godfather’, Irving Kristol, defined us decades ago: A Neoconservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.
Mine came in the first year of the Reagan administration. PRIDE in my country restored! The news results on the morning of Nov. 7, 2012, has yet to see my full recovery from FLATTENING.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.
The American people no longer want to be free; they want free stuff.
I was amazed at how totally stupid the people I knew reacted to Bush at the time of the Iraq War. The best writer of that era was Steven Den Beste, who summed up the geographical and military situation so beautifully.
I obtained much of my starting position with the same experiences.
I would have more hope for the future if it weren’t for the state of things in education today. High school students don’t learn to appreciate the true wisdom of the Framers, and they reflexively disparage the free enterprise system. Students in college are exposed to Rousseau & Marx, but not Locke & Hayek.
I’ve met precious few sociologists who even know who F.A. Hayek was, let alone what he had to say about the good society. That, in itself, is a tragedy.
So, our well-indoctrinated youth are all too receptive to the ways of today’s progressives, not seeing how we are on the road (nay, the superhighway) to serfdom.
I am powerfully reminded of this thought by the great Thomas Sowell, who must have been in the same pessimistic mood as Sensing when he said:
“When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”