The “Obama, fool or knave?” debate…
I say “both, but knave predominates.”
I also say that, if you’re going to be a knave, better that you also be a fool. Competent knaves are the most dangerous. And I think Obama’s been plenty competent enough, unfortunately.
Isn’t the debate, like GW, settled?
Fool or knave, pshaw… I’m going with supremely narcissistic avenger of the evil oppression and hegemony of America, plus destroyer of the Constitution and would be dictator for life.
He’s a knave. As I have said from Day 1 he is the first and only President who hates the country he is president of, and is out to destroy it – or “fundamentally transform” if you are a lying piece of blank named Obama. He is, without doubt, the “God Damn America” President, faithful disciple of Jeremiah Wright (who at least is not a hypocrite).
But he is a knave because he is a fool. Truly a sad and pathetic fool. Anyone, especially him, who does not love America is truly a fool.
But this is a chicken-egg question. I think I would have to say that ultimately he is a fool, and therefore is a wicked vicious sociopath based on that. Why he became a fool? I put it down to fallen human nature, original sin. His foolishness comes from the same place that College Killer’s foolishness came from; the same place everyone’s sin comes from – the devil himself and their own black hearts.
Period.
If you like your knave, you can keep your knave!
unless you read and know the history that becomes him, you will forever waffle this proposition. and everyone knows that people don’t read anymore, and will wing it.
“Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?”
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore
lets just flip a coin. without requisites, how can one judge either? neither?
A fool about what?
And a knave about what?
BO has zero capacity to be a president of a country, if capacity is defined as ability to do those things in the best interests of the country.
But the bests interests of the country are irrelevant to him. He is the invisible person who gets to see the movie for free.
I realize it is shameful in our culture to bring up the abject political provenance of a person when it is communist, Leftist, anti-American.
And worse still to point out that communist, Leftist, anti-American amounts to a sophisticated reality of kicking down the barn which any ass can do.
Part of the reason, a little part, of why we are gone, is the inability to see how we are being conned. The con is the Left.
Please. As you mentioned in an earlier post about the VA scandal, he’s known about it since was a candidate in 2007 AND he had to maintain the narrative that the VA was running smoothly on order to sell Obamacare. So he intentionally swept it under the rug.
Doesn’t mean he’s not an incompetent manager, too. But there was a real incentive to do nothing, so he choose to ignore it instead of quietly working with Shineski to get it fixed. Because he just doesn’t care about the vets….or Mexicans killed with Fast & Furious guns, or Sandy victims awaiting FEMA aid, or the Gulf Coast residents while it takes 90+ days of inaction as the BP oil leaks, or the safety of his ambassador and consulate staff in Libya on 9/11, or SEAL Team 6 after he’s revealed that they carried out the Bin Laden raid, or the Pakistani doctor he identified as assisting in the raid, or Israel’s security after he’s identified that they created Stuxnet and the existence of their secret base, or the safety of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, or the effectiveness of terrorist interrogations after he’s made the Bush interrogation memos public, or the safety of US citizens by having DHS release criminal illegal aliens during Sequestration, and on an on. Hard to miss the pattern here, eh? He’s not incompetent, he malevolent.
He has a determination to wreak 3rd world havoc on the citizens of the US because he & his enablers believe we
just have had it *too damn good*.
Molly NH Says:
May 27th, 2014 at 9:28 pm
Precisely. It is an article of faith on the Left that White Americans stole the wealth of “People of Color” in the Third World.
Therefore, we deserve to be punished and taken down a notch, and made to suffer real poverty. Obama regards himself as the Avenging Angel of the Third World.
I suppose “both” is accurate:
He pursued his agenda intentionally, using underhanded tactics. That makes him a knave.
His agenda can’t possibly work. That makes him a fool.
Obama has done more to set back the liberal agenda than anything our side has done in opposition.
If America gets competent conservative leadership as a counter-example, the Overton window will be shut on progressivism for a generation.
Only the establishment Republicans can save Obama now.
It is settled science that he is the worst president in US history.
And if you don’t agree then you are a denier and racist.
I just call the Leftist alliance evil. Much simpler ROE.
“It is an article of faith on the Left that White Americans stole the wealth of “People of Color” in the Third World.”
With 17 trillion rapidly becoming 18 in debt obligations and 100+ trillion in unfunded liabilities coming due in 15-20 years it can reasonably be argued that we did not steal enough wealth from the “people of color”.
It will be bloody chaos in the metro areas once the EBT cards purchase nothing and the DC elites flee to their carefully prepared off shore bunkers.
Matt_SE, 10:38 pm —
“If America gets competent conservative leadership . . .”
OXYMORON ALERT. OXYMORON ALERT. OXYMORON ALERT.
Lizzy, you beat me to it.
M J R,
I said “conservative,” not “Republican.”
OTOH, I hear Jeb Bush is up for a run if Mitt Romney (or McCain!) bows out. Heh.
“Obama: Fool or Knave?”
Neither and both.
President Historic First is a mindless puppet having his strings manipulated by others with sinister agendas while mouthing someone else’s words off a teleprompter, most likely a combination of thoughts from the self-loathing Jew Soros and the Iranian Jarrett, America haters both.
Every time President If You Like Your Plan opens his mouth without a script, he shows himself to be both a fool and a knave.
I think I agree with you Neo-Neo. In the follow ways.
Knave by design and intent, fool by capacity. Whoever said you couldn’t have it all?
I’ll take one from column A and one from column B with a side dish of treason/sedition.
Here is the response I left at PowerLine:
Fundamentally transform the United States of America. I’ll repeat – Fundamentally transform the United States of America.
How can anyone read the above quote by the president (twice) and NOT come away with the thought that the president is NOT a radical hell-bent on changing the U.S. into something it’s never been? This is a guy who believes in negative vs. positive rights, and that the constittution is flawed because of what it does NOT guarantee. Plus the fact that he was raised by avowed communists, surrounded himself with communists his whole life, and went to a church run by an avowed communist black nationalist.
The president can be a great politician, a lousy manager, AND an avowed leftist. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
In early 2009 I had a close friend ask me if I thought Obama might be the anti-Christ. I responded not at all. It is my understanding that when the anti-Christ arrives he will be supremely competent and irresistibly likable. And Obama fails dramatically in both counts.
KNAVE.
His mentors Rev. Wright, Comrades Saul, Billy A. & Bernardine are proud of you, Sir Knave.
A loathsome catastrophe. And a Knave.
Fool or knave, what difference does it make. He’s cool; so cool he could rape and murder a busload of nuns and orphans on prime time TV and it would not negatively effect his poll numbers or his chances of being voted in President for Life.
Or am I being too optimistic?
“Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!”
“The Communist Party is the party of the most determined class struggle….”
“… Politically, the transitional period [between capitalism and socialism] is one of the proletarian dictatorship….”
“… The question arises: who is to exercise this dictatorship: the Communist Party or the proletarian class? … Fundamentally, should we strive for a dictatorship’ of the Communist Party, or for a dictatorship of the proletarian class?…”
seeking ways of achieving…with the sole purpose of concealing its actual and main efforts to form a coalition with the Independents
“… Consequently, two Communist parties are now arrayed against each other:
“One is a party of leaders, which is out to organise the revolutionary struggle and to direct it from above, accepting compromises and parliamentarianism so as to create a situation enabling it to join a coalition government exercising a dictatorship.
“The other is a mass party, which expects an upsurge of the revolutionary struggle from below, which knows and applies a single method in this struggle–a method which clearly leads to the goal — and rejects all parliamentary and opportunist methods. That single method is the unconditional overthrow of the bourgeoisie, so as then to set up the proletarian class dictatorship for the accomplishment of socialism…
“… There–the dictatorship of leaders; here–the dictatorship of the masses! That is our slogan.”
you would think this came from Van Johnson or Obama, or others… but its from a pamplet written by the frankfurt school before 1920…
Any Bolshevik who has consciously participated in the development of Bolshevism since 1903 or has closely observed that development will at once say, after reading these arguments, “What old and familiar rubbish! What ’Left-wing’ childishness!”
I have been trying to explain this as a PROCESS that is repeatable, as it reproduces the key elements in material realtiy and in case you didnt know, all of science is based on the fact that the same elements acting in the same way lead to the same outcome…
and that it dont matter what you call these things, as long as thier functional point is the same
so it doesnt matter if you have internal police loading people into ovens against their will, or have abortion and redistribution influence them and nuge them to the same end for their family!!!!!!! but you guys seem to think it matter… because you look at it from the perspective of the watcher, not the victim… either way, the victim is dead and the family is ended for eternity…
in fighting, as in war, or battle, there is a situation you can create that gives you advantage over those of less experience. and that is ACCLIMATION. you get acclimated to things, and so sublimate the responses to unthinking, and knee jerk
so in a fight, you keep doing X, until the process is sublimated to be automatic and to be assumed, and the subject quickly becomes acclimated…
now, violate that.
the subjects still run on the automatic, they do not look to check validity, they dont say “its a trick”, they reflectivly gueard the area that is over stimulated over and over, while the opposition does something different and cuts their head off.
so this whole knave thing is a ridiculous thing, as it requires people to accept acclimated facts and gets them to ignore the key points or even learning what they are
its a practice in public knowlege and suface cargo cultism
Does the criminal act like a criminal or does he cover it up well? and if he covers it up, how do you know he is a criminal?
as Pauli would tell you guys:
knave or fool is not even wrong
The phrase not even wrong describes any argument that purports to be scientific but fails at some fundamental level, usually in that it contains a terminal logical fallacy or it cannot be falsified by experiment (i.e. tested with the possibility of being rejected), or cannot be used to make predictions about the natural world.
its getting you to waste your time on a question that cant be resolved and that distracts you from anything useful as time is the only thing we get the same amount of each day – 24 hours.
this is pseudo science or pseudo debate at its best.
it only has the trappings and cargo cultism of a debate.
“What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not.” – Pauli
right… but neither can the people discussing things as they do not follow the rules of debate, and so, this is one big masturbatory waste of time… (as is most of this kind of erudition)
That Baraq is evil is really not the problem.
The problem is the large number of previously ensconced powerful who have been occult evils themselves for decades, the Harry Reids, the Pelosis, the Barney Franks (and the list goes on and on and on), doing their business until the doors of their cages were opened and they were let loose like the Hounds of Hell.
rats… wanted it a bit shorter.
anyway. the point is that you guys get acclimated to the way things are, and that obama then suddenly uses something in a way that is not customary (ie, not culturally limited), and takes advantage of the default sets of mind that people have (like assuming a doctor is a male, or any number of them that 100 years of studying humans with the idea of controlling them wihtout their knowlege (which is easier))
the above stuff i pasted was from 1920
it was lenin commenting on the games of the frankfurt school..
the sad part is cargo cultists cant be convinced easily that that is what they are doing…
what gives a conversation substance?
depends what you want out of it, no?
if you want entertainment, then what are your limits?
if you want serious discussion over something, what is your limit?
entertainment has no limits. you can tell the truth, or a lie, or embellish as a combination of both. you can leave stuff out and so on.
but no one would say a made up conversation between people is a debate, discussion etc. EXCEPT CARGO CULTISTS Who woud say it looks the same, feels the same and i FEEL so smart doing it, it must be science and how science or debate FEELS
its not one iota science, debate, or anything
the cocanut headset will look the same, be worn the same, and the cargo cultist will accept it as the same as it appears to be the same.
but it doesnt work. its missing the parts/’facts’ that would make it real.. so at best its entertainment masquerading as somethng real.
however, its harmful and dangerous, because the person sitting there with cocanuts on their head is also not doing something else. the distraction takes one away from an effective outcome and moves them to a bad end and without any knowlege why.
“Debate is contention in argument; dispute, controversy; discussion”
science papers have a concordance with the past. as do history and others (if held to the proper standards).
so, if your going to be einstein and say that newtons work is incomplete, you better have your paper work from newton to yourself, not just stand up and declare newton wrong, which he was (unless you think you can be incomplete and still be right)
same with debate or other such interactions.
the DEFAULT ruls of such are that the people discussing will not pass off unfacts, lies, untruths, etc as valid arguments. no?
but when you move from the legal to the illegal suddenly as a practice, this breaks down and suddenly anything is let in to the conversation.
this is why converstations like this today are unproductive. ie. this process moves all debate into the land of fantasy augmented reality
in this game, reality is just a framework to give the thing substance, and the goal is to titilate, sound great, etc…
the idea is to have the whole blog post and such seem like a debate… not actually be one…
so facts are not important [they limit the conversation and reality is such a drag compared to what we can imagine and pull over each other]
common knowlege or zeitgeist is more important [because it makes us more equal, and that is socialist double plus good! harmony is favored over truth]
short is favored, as short avoids losing a point to exactitude and concreteness. [because long is boring to people who have their attention spans limited. they would be ashamed if they knew the difference]
short is also favored as its more entertaining. like going to a tapas bar and tasting everything rather than to dinner and ahving one thing. (variety is enjoyable itself) [9th inning stretches and that almost ruined baseball, but thats entertainment… brain surgury could go nine hours, but would you want them to cut it to 3 to be more fun? then why would the facts that are important to your live and the outcomes in it, get shortened to be more pleasing than valid?]
if you go to the wiki on debate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate
go ahead… look and see… you wont find a single line on validity!!! ie. we consider this to be so common knowlege we forget to add it. the reason the bill of rights was written was to combat this effect!!!
size is more important [this is a clear sign that entertainment drives the thing not knowlege, facts, investigation, etc… if those governed things, then they would govern size.. not size govern them]
ultimately we get caught up debating without facts and watching the world go by like titans at mount olympus looking down through the pool of water into the acts of such odd little people beneath us.
but our converstations are meaningless,
because without facts, the content has no meaning
or maybe it has meaning, but not on this planet, at this time, with these people… but on another planet, in another time, with other people who actually did the things that are talked about!!!!
given the ignoring of GIGO
what is the benefit?
what is the harm?
do we imagine no harm so we can imagine a benefit?
neo asked me to ask more questions. 🙂
If we think of the President as a con man — gifted in persuading you that he knows what he’s doing and what he’s talking about, but utterly incompetent in actually doing anything real — then he can be both a knave and a fool simultaneously. In fact, whether the knave or the fool predominates at any given time depends on how successful his con-man tactics are.
If I thought there was some way to get an honest answer, I’d love to ask him what he truly believes. My gut tells me that he truly believes in Barack H. Obama II. Oh, and he really likes golf.
Michelle O: “Let our girls eat cake. Let the Nigerians eat mud. Let the Americans trapped in Sudan eat my hashtags.”
Somebody once proposed in open sight, that the solution the Brits should use to fix their dysfunctional society is to eliminate and purge 80% of their bureaucracy.
Democrat loyalists got really scared of that.
Knave, of course. Our first affirmative action president turns out to be a knave, and worse. We decided to get that race thing out of the way and we elected a knave and a fool. His foolishness is that particularly embarrassing kind — the foolishness of one who has been told how smart he is for so long that he believes it. Floating on a sea of sycophancy, he even fancies that he is a “quick study.” It is to laugh. And cry. Brilliant orator? Go back and try to read your way through his speeches. What a morass of liberal socialist boilerplate. And what is worse, for our beloved country, is that this knave actually believes that crap.
Consider a world in which the Leftist alliance and their bully pals the Islamic Jihad has been wiped from the face of this planet.
Just consider it.
What are the fundamental differences between BHO and Goodluck Jonathan, the Prez of Nigeria? Or any other subSaharan Prez?
None.
Knave. Straight up.
I think what we have is a “Joker”. Looking at his history before he got the boost of his life running for the US Senate it does not appear that he was very smart in taking care of his family or himself. In 2000 he was a Harvard Law grad who did not have enough on his credit card to rent a car at the Democratic National Convention.
Combine that with his muddled background and resume, I don’t think he could have past a background check to become a bank teller, so I really think he is more of a performer playing a part than he is an accomplished person who has ever done any sort of an adequate job.
I would almost say he is a fool but he is a bit more crafty than the fool and his not stupid but he is not an in charge smart Knave either. The mystery is how this man got catapulted to the highest executive, government position in the nation when it appears that he reached the pinnacle of his “Peter Principal” abilities as a community organizers.
Now all of the nutty buzzards, cronies, buddies and crackpots are sitting in appointed positions to implement regulations to fulfill their crackpot fantasies of a progressive, utopian, environmentalist society and the “Joker” appears to be bored and detached and ready to go smoke a little funny stuff and play golf with his buddies.
He is even confused now about what he should appear to be concerned about when he looks as if he had sucked on a lemon and says, “I am deeply troubled and surprised about this latest development, etc.”
Most of the card games I like we usually discard the Joker before we shuffle, cut and deal the cards and somehow this time the “Joker” was left in the deck.
The evil version of Chauncey Gardner. Watch Being There, it’s a good movie.
Great movie, Ymar! Except sweet Chauncey Gardner wasn’t intentionally vague so as to appear to be all things to all people.
IIRC, Obama has bragged about this con artist skill of his in one of his autobiographies. And an adoring press has taken it one step further by constantly proclaiming that each of his mistakes or poor decisions is actually secretly brilliant (he’s playing 3D chess – we’re just too dim to understand it!!)
I will admit there’s a high degree of knavery with Obama; however I strongly believe it’s supplemented by his ineptitude, which tends to add up to the same ruinous effect.
No man who puts in so few hours doing his job can be credited with having devised so many deliberate failures. Some are simply an artifact of his arrogance and his inexperience working together to bring about a bad result.
Not doing much of anything about US foreign interests could be considered a plan to minimize US influence, but it’s also a little hard to determine what interests he feels are worth pursuing. There’s a certain degree of indeciveness at work that I believe is interpreted by many to be deliberate and well thought out. I doubt it. Unlike a lot of conservatives, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing a 2 year senator without much experience in anything at all, would find himself in a lot of situations, especially as President, that he doesn’t know what to do. And Obama is an especially a lazy and detached man, with no real interest in how things run, or in much of anything.
I would also dispute that he’s capable of actually carrying out a lot of things if he were opposed by a competent leader. He doesn’t have the staff or the smarts to go head to head with a tough minded leader.
Could he sucessfully oppose a guy like Putin if it there was something he really wanted to do? I say no, he’s not charismatic enough to garner the support of the Europeans or other allies, and he’s not tough minded enough to forego the political ramifications of going it alone.
If compentence is judged by what he can do to destroy US interests because nobody’s going to oppose him, I guess you can argue that, but I judge competence by what’s difficult to do, which requires a great deal of planning, hard work and flawless execution, not by what’s easy and is automatically accomplished by doing nothing. Most of Obama’s transforming our country into a dependency oriented, lead from behind nation haven’t required a lot of work or imagination on his part. The media did most of the work for him.
OldTexan wonders: “The mystery is how this man got catapulted to the highest executive, government position in the nation”
In answer (before OldTexan asked), Neo is right: “Competent knaves are the most dangerous. And I think Obama’s been plenty competent enough, unfortunately.”
But kaba is also right: “… supremely competent and irresistibly likable. And Obama fails dramatically in both counts.”
How can Neo and kaba both be right?
Because Neo’s post implies a faulty premise: that Obama is the source and driver – leader – of the trend, as we conventionally assign the status to the US President or any apex executive authority.
Instead, Obama is better characterized as an (note I did not say ‘the’) avatar and agent of the Left’s full-spectrum, first, always, and non-stop, Marxist-method activist social movement, rather than a traditional leader.
Thus, Neo is right because Obama is a “competent knave” insofar he is of the Left’s competent activist social movement.
When Obama is judged in isolation as a leader, then kaba is right. Obama is not personally competent by the conventional measures of presidential, executive leadership.
Is v Ought. The problem is, separating Obama from the Left is an academic exercise only. Real-world, the activist game is the only social-political game there is, and Obama is competent enough in his function of avatar and agent in the White House for the Left’s activist social movement.
A frame that over-values elected office and individual personalities, whether it’s Obama now, or looking ahead to H.Clinton versus a fantasy messianic savior from the Right, traps you in an inadequate social-political frame of mind to approach the social-political game.
If it was just about individual merit, then Romney would be president. Instead, the social political competition is now waged between social cultural movements more than individual politicians or even the two mainline political parties.
So far, the contest has been lop-sided because only the Left and the Democrats are playing the activist game correctly. The trend can be reversed and the Right and GOP can catch up and overtake their opponents. To reverse the trend, the Right and the GOP must adapt a competitive full-spectrum, first, always, and non-stop, Marxist-method activist social movement.
So far in the comments, Tonawanda, Ymarsakar, Rickz, Artfldgr (I think), and Don Carlos show they get it. The rest of the comments, unfortunately, show the old social political schematic that’s been overtaken by the activist game.
Fool or Knave? YES! I actually take it as a positive sign that at least one lefty is beginning to recognize Barry is a fool. They’ll never accept that he’s a knave, so fool will have to do. We will have to focus on that when Hilary or whatever other Dem runs.
Except sweet Chauncey Gardner wasn’t intentionally vague so as to appear to be all things to all people.
Not intentionally, that’s why Hussein is the evil one.
No man who puts in so few hours doing his job can be credited with having devised so many deliberate failures.
How many hours did it take him to say…
Obama: “Orders for the Benghazi QRF? Tell them to stand down, let them die. I’m going to the fund raising meeting, talk to Valerie in the situation room.”
Here are other examples of the Left doing their thing, as usual.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2640632/Stoned-death-marrying-man-loved-Woman-attacked-sticks-bricks-20-members-OWN-family-broad-daylight-Pakistan.html
http://thediplomad.blogspot.com/2014/05/shaking-hand-memory-of-pakistan.html
Whether directly or delegated to their Islamic Jihadist allies, they will get it done.
“To reverse the trend, the Right and the GOP must adapt a competitive full-spectrum, first, always, and non-stop, Marxist-method activist social movement.”
In other words, embrace the power of the one ring and slip it on a finger to become the new dark lord. If we have not learned to separate ourselves from the left by words and actions we are no better than the leftists.
The Left often had difficulties selling their concepts, so they rebranded them using different names to attach different concepts to old words. Liberal. Progressive. Black. African.
In some cases marketing strategies are correct, when a brand needs a rebranding.