Richard Fernandez and the puzzle of Barack Obama
Richard Fernandez notes that some of his most ominous predictions appear to be coming true lately. But rather than gloating, he’s not very happy at all:
The validation of so many sad insights is of little consolation unless one is like those movie paleontologists so happy to be vindicated in their prediction that dinosaurs still exist that they do not care that they are about to be eaten by one. One can only hope the readers of this site are not similarly consoled. A history of good guesses does nothing to answer the problem which desperately needs solving: alright we’re in a crisis, but what do we do now? How do we dig ourselves out of the hole?
I’m neither the prognosticator nor the writer that Richard Fernandez is, but I’m enough of both to feel the very same sentiment when my dire predictions appear to have been on target.
In another post, Fernandez riffs off a Bret Stephens article that discusses Obama’s foreign policy failures as essentially of the “fool” (“Obama is unteachable”) variety in our old “fool vs. knave” debate.
But I’m with commenter Subotai Bahadur, who writes:
Obama is not ideologically deceived. He is not doubling down on failure. He is doing what he is doing deliberately, and he is winning.
If it was incompetence, if there was an element of chance, if any statistical probability was operating; at least once in his two terms Obama would have done something that was not harmful to the country in either the foreign or domestic fields.
This is calculation. This is careful calculation and concerted action.
Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
…And the Gods of the Copybook Headings are preparing a page to be written in Crimson.
Actually, I think one of the fascinating things about Obama (and I don’t mean “fascinating” in a positive way) is that he is subject to so many interpretations. I’ve been studying him since 2007, have read probably millions of words about him and have written possibly hundreds of thousands on the topic, if not more. And yet, and yet, something about him continues to elude—not just me, but many extremely intelligent people such as Fernandez, whose intelligence I respect just about as deeply as I respect anyone’s.
I think it may stem from the unusual fact that Obama is a consummate actor, a man so practiced and so ideological that everything he says and does is purposeful and is a piece of propaganda. There are no spontaneous moves, no impulsive actions, although sometimes he tries to make us believe that he’s doing something impulsively. Nothing is apolitical, either, except perhaps his golf game.
This is what my gut tells me, anyway. And he is remarkably consistent, one of the most consistent people I’ve ever observed, although if his underlying purpose isn’t discerned he can seem meandering and even foolish and inconsistent.
I believe that Obama’s purpose—the overarching impetus for all he has done as president (and indeed, for much of his life before that) is something I wrote about back in 2009:
Obama considers himself a man of destiny. He seems to have believed that his election itself would have a transformative effect on America, separate from any particular programs or policies he would put into place once inaugurated. He promised change, yes; but the very first change would be the fact that he–Barack Obama, an African-American man–had been elected president. If slavery was (and in some sense still is) America’s original sin, and if the Civil War wasn’t enough to undo that fundamental flaw, then Obama’s election would be a sign that America had finally taken a decisive step to purge itself of that sin.
A step, yes; but only the first in a lengthy process. The second step would be confession. And there were many other sins as well for which America must begin to atone. That is why Obama proceeded to go on a worldwide tour early in his presidency, apologizing to nation after nation for America’s manifold sins of hubris and exceptionalism, militarism and imperialism, greed and excess. These were the many ways in which Obama and his fellow leftists have reframed American exceptionalism as American tyranny.
If Obama has anything to say about it, there will be further steps in America’s journey of penance and redemption through the mechanism of his presidency. The redistribution of income is only fair and moral, since taxing the rich will punish them for their greed; and cap and trade will be the penalty for having used more than our fair share of resources. Foreign policy is a major mechanism by which this country will be made level with other countries–just one nation among the rest, stripped of much of its power and its weaponry.
Obama is here to punish America for its sins, and he’s been very successful at that. That the left and many liberals continue to love him, continue to support him, is a puzzlement to many people. But why wouldn’t those who have been successfully taught that America is a great evil in the world—birthed in evil, steeped in evil, and empowered by evil; especially racial evil but also countless other evils big and small—applaud his efforts?
In my recent post exploring the life and work of the remarkable Brit F. L. Lucas, I came across a quotation that’s particularly apt:
“One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat,” he wrote in his last published letter (1966), “that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it.”
Obama could never have been elected, or in particular re-elected, if generations of intellectuals and not-so-intellectuals had not spent so much time and effort boring holes in the bottom of Western Civilization. Obama is merely reaping the fruits of their lengthy and patient labor.
But rather than gloating, he’s not very happy at all:
i concur…
i am seldom happy when the negative things i say come out to be true or happen… then again, i dont really care to score points and be validated for the negatives i see… i would much rather be wrong.
now hillary is copying fiorina in suggesting creating no fly zones that russia will follow
sorry, russia wont follow
russia will try to shoot down americans
if americnas shoot them down, russia will escalate
they are in a WWIV situation
and other than back down and not act
they will potentially start a world war conflict
you cant treat russia like a third world country
they have so many operatives in the US and with computers and all that, the suffering would be emmense.
not to mention yamentau mountain, and all the preparation for nuclear conflict they made
obama was played by his own kind.
that is, communists screwing communists is the rule not the exception… there is no honor among theives and our administration was a bunch of idiots to think that they belong to the club when the club sees them as useful traitors never to be trusted and always to be taken advantage of.
obama and hillary are acting against their people and the soviets see that as traitors. useful, but still the kind of people who can never ever be trusted.
now what?
russia is bombing our people and has killed and added some new stars to the CIA wall.
get ready for a huge conflict just before the election, farther away from the election, removing obama from office was a potential fix. now this close you have lock up… and confusion.
knowing that they were going to escalate a conflict in the last year before he and biden are out of office is what i said long long ago. as that is the best time to have such a conflict and have the outcome the most in your favor.
a prediction i wished i was wrong about
Yes communism has won, with the Presidency of Barak Obama and the tens of millions of Americans who love him. The country has changed. I could understand his winning the first election, I thought he had fooled people and they were tired of Bush and thought they’d give him a chance. But when he won the second election I realized the country had changed. And his second term has been horrifyingly against America, and yet his millions of worshippers still think he is fantastic. I used to be a liberal but I voted Republican for the first time when Obama was running in 2008. I’m still in liberal circles and hear them speak. They just adore him. And they hate America. it seems almost as if this were a plot in a thriller. That the communists fifty years ago infiltrated America and set up a situation, identified a bi-racial child, and systemically groomed him to be the first black President, to tug on the heartstrings of a guilty white America, and to bring down America to enhance communist power worldwide. It seems like a Tom Clancy movie. No wonder he thinks he’s a man of destiny. Perhaps he is.
It is bad for the country, but this is the sort of thing that led to 40 years of mostly republican presidents after FDR.
Lord of Flies is punishing the whole world for the sin that his trash mother and trash father didn’t love him at all.
The followers will be forever changed if they even survive coming storm.
I’ve been studying him since 2007, have read probably millions of words about him and have written possibly hundreds of thousands on the topic, if not more. And yet, and yet, something about him continues to elude–not just me, but many extremely intelligent people such as Fernandez, whose intelligence I respect just about as deeply as I respect anyone’s.
thats cause everyone wants a different outcome to their assesment and refuses to call what they see as they see it… if they actually know what they see.
pundits know that if they were openly bare bones and told the complete view, so they wash the thing..
their fear of losing jobs, being attacked without supporters to defend them and such,, has them watering it all down.
but if you know communists well
then you knew from day one the 100% outcome
but most dont know them well, most like them, and most have no idea of their history and dont want to believe that they have a nature.
[edited for length by n-n]
formwiz,
Participatory politics is more than electoral politics. There’s a lot more to culture and politics than the Office of the President, which in many respects is follower, not leader.
Obama is merely avatar and agent of a movement. He’s an activist first. Misunderstanding of Obama is grounded in a misunderstanding of activism, which is a fatal flaw because the activist game is the only social cultural/political game there is.
* are more
Obama is here to punish America for its sins, and he’s been very successful at that. That the left and many liberals continue to love him, continue to support him, is a puzzlement to many people. But why wouldn’t those who have been successfully taught that America is a great evil in the world–birthed in evil, steeped in evil, and empowered by evil; especially racial evil but also countless other evils big and small–applaud his efforts?
see?
failure to accept that the end result of what communists want is communism as they want power… thats it. nothing more complicated than that… everything else is trying to avoid that one proposition.
ie. communists want power and will do anything that achieves it.
everything else is circumstance, opportunity, window dressing, disenformatzia, etc.
and also there is no honor among theieves, they pretend to be a group workign together, but they screw each other constantly… just ask staln what beria did to him, or that hitler did to stalin after their agreement or stalin did to the baltics after the peace treatires, or north korea to the south once they got permisson, and so on.
all you need to know is in the long telegram no one wanted to read or study!!!!! its laid out there and if you use that and the chatechism of the revolutionary and a few others you can NEVER fail to predict what they will do!!!!!
they are open books that rely on the fact that good people dont want to htink in ways that would allow them to understand what bad self serving psychopathic people will do together to achieve power.
i forgot to mention that punishing america is not in the game its just an excuee for the sake of preventing people from rationalizing a take over by rationalizing some form of jail term or retribution.
this then implies that when we are punished enough the game will end… no, it wont, and even if america was the all good never bad place, they would still do this stuff.
if you read about sociopaths and psychopaths you will find that they love this kind of thing. i have read their descriptions of their victims thinking that they are being punished and so could figure a way out. but no, that is the rationalization of a victim.. not the acceptance that no rationalization is necessary!!!
if you really want to understand this mentality, read about the serial killers who kept prisoners. they are the ones that describe the fun of watching their victims grasp at ideas and stuff and be confused and never hav it right.
learn from that…
artfldgr:
No, it doesn’t imply that if America is punished enough the game will end.
“One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it.”
As brilliant a line and castigation of intellectuals and theorist as I can remember.
But Obama is not alone in commanding our disbelief and befuddlement. He can be explained — to some good extant. He is our Frankenstein monster. Cursed with an obsidian heart, a Muslim soul, an Alinsky brain; he sees through Cultural Marxist eyes, and his persona, a highly disordered character, emits a Gnostic hatred. But how does one explain the simultaneous emergence of O and the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, Stefan Lé¶fven (Sweden), and all the other sellouts of their countries and national heritages? It’s a muddly world and I still say if you dismiss God you’re left only with demons.
This isn’t the first time that Neo’s said that Fernandez is the better writer, so I want to take a moment to disagree.
I’ve been reading “Belmont Club” for a long time, and I’m very grateful that Richard Fernandez continues to offer up his point of view. In fact, I think there’s now an extraordinary amount of good political writing freely available to us, and I have some small hope that it will eventually be to good effect. Still, I’m not so taken with Fernandez’s style. I think he works too hard to find a personal narrative voice. Consequently, there’s too much air in his sentences. He gets a little too writerly for me. Neo’s writing is more compressed — rarely prolix — more concise, more precise. Her thoughts and observations are more firmly expressed. I prefer that.
My two cents. Probably not worth even that.
So a Manchurian candidate?! Whether self-made or fashioned by the likes of Frank Marshall Davis and Rashid Khalidi, the difference is academic.
Barack Hussein is evil.
I leave it at that.
Sen. Tom Cotton on the floor of the US Senate, yesterday.
“Obama could never have been elected, or in particular re-elected, if generations of intellectuals and not-so-intellectuals had not spent so much time and effort boring holes in the bottom of Western Civilization. Obama is merely reaping the fruits of their lengthy and patient labor.”
True, I call it the legacy of the sixties where the boil burst.
We were insulated and nothing could touch us so why not throw everything constricting overboard. Like say every “taboo” (one of those raped words I have come to hate). Long live nihilism.
Questions though;
– What will it take for people to realize that abortion, like in “Roe vs Wade” was one of the, if not THE major stepping stone on the road to the disaster of today.
– Monogamous marriage being one of the most important fundaments of society (and incidentally of “women’s rights” since it put a woman on the same level as a man unlike polygamous societies) so why was this new, and fundamental assault on Western Civilization so accepted and even sought-after by many new on the right, especially the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal)
– …
“boring holes in the bottom of Western Civilization”
Charles W. Eliot, President, Harvard University [1869 – 1909]
sdferr:
I think the problem was not introducing some choice, it was doing away with certain basic foundational requirements (Western Civ, for example), and then making many of the choices of low quality. If the foundation was there, and the choices were all substantive, quality choices, it would be okay.
Choice! Ha! Put the decision and judgment of curricula in the hands of the ignorant (by definition!). Brilliant.
But then, Bloom cites the loss of confidence by scholars in their own discipline. They had learned how to no longer trust their own judgment, or alternatively could not support the necessary premises of their judgment, for they had never learned them.
@Julia NYC – your thinking of the plot of boys from brazil
neo-neocon Says: artfldgr: No, it doesn’t imply that if America is punished enough the game will end.
of course it does… the purpose of punishment is to teach and change the behavior of others… not to visit greek eternal punishments like promtheus, sissyphus, atlas and others.
synonyms: penalty, penance, sanction, sentence, one’s just deserts
all of them have finite times…
eternal punishments is the luxury of gods, not men
Very insightful by neo.
The Mideast is ready to blow up and the Obama Administration is spinning it as a good thing. Or something.
I am at a complete loss as to what it would take to wake people up. Prediction: Russia bombs the ISIS oil fields and pipelines next week.
Miserable jobs report today and Barack does nothing. The Federal Reserve is out of tools. A real leader would offer a bill to cut corporate taxes or allow repatriation of corporate profits. One thousand people laid off at Omaha’s ConAgra yesterday. UPRR suffering due to the war on coal.
Glad Carly will be up to the task of cleaning up after Barack.
sdferr:
If all the courses from which a student gets to select are substantive and of high quality, and there are also required courses to give the student a strong foundation, then choice (for a certain percentage of courses) is an asset. By the time the student has that foundation, he or she is capable of plotting some part of his/her academic direction.
The lengthy memorandum began with the assertion that the Soviet Union could not foresee “permanent peaceful coexistence” with the West.
the Soviets were deeply suspicious of all other nations and believed that their security could only be found in “patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power.”
Kennan was convinced that the Soviets would try to expand their sphere of influence, and he pointed to Iran and Turkey as the most likely immediate trouble areas. In addition, Kennan believed the Soviets would do all they could to “weaken power and influence of Western Powers on colonial backward, or dependent peoples.” Fortunately, although the Soviet Union was “impervious to logic of reason,” it was “highly sensitive to logic of force.” Therefore, it would back down “when strong resistance is encountered at any point.” The United States and its allies, he concluded, would have to offer that resistance.
neo cut out the part about the answers being in the long telegram… too bad we wont read it, and will edit out references now…
to what end i dont know as it describes whats going on now, including the area of interest in war.
for those curious as to what it says and can apply it to our leader whose family helped overthrow kenya for commuinism, met in russian language class, and on and on
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm
The point of reality (not humans or social authority) verifying your predictions is because it affirms the belief that one’s own personal judgment and authority is what matters, not anyone else’s.
The idea that one is not fit to judge, so one might as well abdicate free will to some elite cliche of totalitarian baby snatchers, is not generally a wise thing for civilization, especially human civilization, to contemplate doing, let alone actually mass produce as they have.
I take a great deal of comfort from the words of Adam Smith – “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.
Deep down I am not sure the liberals “love” Obama and gave him the 2012 election because of that love.
My take on it was that in 2008 they had elected a messiah who the liberals saw as the ultimate statement of their progressivism (with heavy weighting on his race than on his accomplishments or policies).
Then they waited for the wonders to appear. Even the Nobel Peace Prize awarders admitted they gave the Prize to Obama for something they hoped he would do (which as they noted lately to their total disappointment never happened).
So during the 2008 – 2011 cycle there were many disasters and even drone strikes but nothing other than still his race that Obama accomplished.
I had many liberal friends express disappointment in Obama but were still doubling down on how he was digging out from the Bush years and had not had a chance to implement his wonders. So they did everything in their power (including Candy the kank Crowley lying during a debate) to give him his chance to show all of us his greatness and glory.
Well everyone except the liberals saw all of O’s flaws and that it was not going to get better after 2012 but that it would intensify as Obama did as much damage as he could to the US before the end of his term.
Only the craziest of Obama’s supporters or those $$ benefiting from his reign are still supporting him actively. My liberal friends have shut up about Obama and now are flailing around without an anchor.
The only thing I see them doing which the rest of us have to watch out for is planning for 2020. They have pretty much given up on 2016 and are trying to get set up for 2020 (with the illegal immigrants, blocking voter laws, and trying to get criminals able to vote). Also they want a Republican in office in 2016 (preferably one unable to do anything but make a stink the MSM can fan and scream about) to clear the political palate so to speak.
They can’t win if Obama and his disasters are on the plate. So 2016 is putting up with some Republican, fighting like mad to undermine voting for 2020, and making sure said Republican has the full brunt of the liberal MSM and blocked policies for 4 years.
Obama was a long term goal for the Liberals and basically it blew up in their faces (instead of ushering in the golden age of proggies). The 2012 second chance blew up even worse. So they are now on another long term scheme for 2020 and beyond.
It is amazing to me that with all the apparent windfall of no Democratic bench for president for 2016, that Republicans are not asking themselves why the Dems appear to be reluctantly handing over the presidency in 2016 instead of vetting more viable options. Does anyone really think Hillary, Biden, OMalley, and Bernie are the best the can do?
Why oh why hasn’t Eliot’s program worked out that way, we must wonder? Was it not a sure-fire cure for the ailments of the academy? Certainly his program wasn’t a tiny early step on the way to the destruction of the academy, for he could not have intended that!
I am at a complete loss as to what it would take to wake people up. Prediction: Russia bombs the ISIS oil fields and pipelines next week.
Around 2010, I figured it as 100 WACOs.
artfldgr:
You show ignorance of the psychological underpinnings of the desire for revenge and/or retribution on the part of mortals. It can be insatiable. It does not necessarily follow the rules of logic.
@neo-neocon and @sdferr
Maybe if the teachers union was not run by the head of the communist party at that time those changes went thorugh and beyond, it wouldnt ahve served world communism so much.
Dodd was an organizer for the CPUSA from 1932—1948, and from 1944 to ’48 sat on the CPUSA’s National Council. She also served as head of the New York State Teachers Union. She was expelled from the CPUSA in 1949
In 1953, she testified before the US Senate about widespread Party infiltration of labor unions and other institutions. On March 11, 1953, The New York Times ran a front page article entitled “Bella Dodd Asserts Reds Got Presidential Advisory Posts.” The article reported that Dodd “swore before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee today that Communists had got into many legislative offices of Congress and into a number of groups advising the President of the United States
The New York Times reported on March 8, 1954 that Bella Dodd “…warned yesterday that the ‘materialistic philosophy,’ [i.e., dialectical materialism ] which she said was now guiding public education, would eventually demoralize the nation.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd
can anyone be more plain?
how hard is it to connect bad education, communist love from academia, a changer that switched sides that confessed what she did to congress, and yet, ignore it like 60 plus years of school taught everyone to do?
AMAZING…
Well; part of the answer is the media. A lot of moderate people never hear a criticism of these things. The MSM keeps it out of the news.
Even leftists don’t put a lot of questioning thought into things he does and typically write off criticism as nonsense (and change the proverbial channel). re: the Iran deal is just a good deal… not a shoot the US in the foot plan.
sdferr:
The enterprise was undermined in two ways (and not just these two). The basic foundations were thrown away and in some cases replaced by their opposites (for example, teaching that that the West is evil). In addition, a lot of worthless courses were introduced.
Alan Bloom has described it well. It started prior to the 60s, but it really picked up steam in the 60s.
That the communists fifty years ago infiltrated America and set up a situation, identified a bi-racial child, and systemically groomed him to be the first black President, to tug on the heartstrings of a guilty white America, and to bring down America to enhance communist power worldwide. It seems like a Tom Clancy
The thing about Tom Clancy thrillers is that they present events in such a way that the normal person can digest the complexity of inter facing actors. So conspiracies are easily explained and generated, to move the plot and present interesting challenges for the fictional characters.
In reality, conspiracies are not that simple. If it was, they wouldn’t be that deep or that in need of a propaganda onion defense.
In reality, what people consider thriller events in fiction, played out on the stage of this planet, would look like an onion. The outside is not the layers inside, and the center is not either of the previous.
Like the waters of a lake or sea, it is deep. You cannot see to the bottom from the top.
The complexity of 100 X 100 x 100 different human actors and factors, does not make for a simplistic explanation.
neo-neocon Says: artfldgr: You show ignorance of the psychological underpinnings of the desire for revenge and/or retribution on the part of mortals. It can be insatiable. It does not necessarily follow the rules of logic.
no i dont, i show knowing what words mean. revenge is not punishment unless your a leftist. revenge is vengeance and vengeance is not punishment, though they may misuse the words for it.
punishment has an end
revenge is not punishment except in the minds of the vengeful who believe (wrongly) that they are judge jury and executioner.
if you said revenge i would not have commented back… but you said punishment.
RAbbi Mendal Shabbas house:
A. Revenge is a subjective, personal, wild form of justice, untempered by objectivity and truth. Often the focus of revenge is a sense of satisfaction or enjoyment, while punishment is about consequence, and a deterrent and hopefully also an attempt to rehabilitate. Revenge is more about our emotional response than about what needs to be done to correct the situation.
Most punishment is administered by society or those entrusted by society or law (i.e. parents, teachers, police etc..) while revenge is more personal. By the way, the Torah condemns revenge but consequence, reward and punishment are very much part of our books. (Although Chassidus teaching, vs. Mussar, puts much more emphasis on positive encouragment and inspiration than negative punishment).
A lot of moderate people never hear a criticism of these things. The MSM keeps it out of the news.
A person kills someone and takes their cash, then says the law against killing and robbery wasn’t on the MSM and so he didn’t know about it.
What other excuse will they have next for their guilt?
Prior to Bloom’s arrival at U. Chicago, that university’s President Robert M. Hutchins saw the problem with the conditions Pres. Eliot had inadvertently created and sought to implement a band-aid patch in concert with Mortimer Adler and others. Their patch has since failed, now largely abandoned. Funny thing. Or, not so funny.
artfldr:
You continue to indicate you think no one here acknowledges the influence and planning of the left. But just about everyone acknowledges it and often explicitly refers to the left.
And of course that prominently includes the influence and planning of Communists.
And yet you continue to write as though everyone is ignorant of that fact or in denial.
The Profintern, or “Red International of Labor Unions,” forced the CP to change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL in order to make it a revolutionary body — what an earlier generation of SP members referred to as “boring from within.” In order to accomplish this, the Profintern recognized the Trade Union Educational League, an organization founded by William Z. Foster, as its U.S. affiliate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communists_in_the_United_States_Labor_Movement_%281919%E2%80%9337%29
right now the AFL-CIO and the SEIU are the largest of the communist unions.. after the communists were ejected, we washed our hands looked the other way and they went back into it.
Entryism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
Entryism (also referred to as entrism, occasionally as enterism) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organisation in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. In situations where the organization being “entered” is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge to hide the fact that they are an organisation in their own right.
EVERYTHING you need to know is in the history they didnt teach and people were incurious to read.
[edited for length by n-n]
Julia NYC wrote: “That the communists fifty years ago infiltrated America and set up a situation, identified a bi-racial child, and systemically groomed him to be the first black President, to tug on the heartstrings of a guilty white America, and to bring down America to enhance communist power worldwide.”
Sometime in the early 1990s, I was in my kitchen listening to NPR — which I still did regularly then, before my political “change.” Some religious mystic was being interviewed, possibly a Native American. I can’t remember exactly what the context was, but the mystic said that he had learned in his visions that the Antichrist had been born in the 1960s, was growing up and gathering strength as he spoke, and would rise to power in the United States early in the 21st century and achieve his goals — which, as I recall, were to bring about Armageddon.
Now, this is not the kind of thing I ordinarily pay any attention to. I am not a believer in Antichrists, mysticism and all that, most especially not when mixed with politics. Nevertheless, something about the mystic’s tone stopped me short. I did the math to figure out how old this “Antichrist” would have been as I listened, and afterward I never completely forgot about it. I still don’t really believe the prediction was anything more than babble, and I have been trying hard to keep my feelings of fear and fury about what Obama has done to this country in some kind of perspective, trying to avoid consuming my life in negativity. Nevertheless, the memory of that interview has come to mind increasingly often since 2008, and it gets more disturbing every time I think of it.
artfldgr:
Revenge is a big part of punishment for most human beings, whose emotions do not follow the limits you describe.Human beings are not legal systems, and neither are the emotions that drive their actions , which don’t follow those rules.
oh, and one last thing.
they certainly dont acknowlege that the left is and has been for nearly 100 years under the control of russia and russian edicts. they certainly DONT include that in their conversations… they dont reference defectors, they don reference opened archives, biographies etc. they mostly comment as if the american left has no hard connections, is not funded, and does not benefit from things like FSB support and advice.
watch for those references if you know them
if yhou dont, then read about them and watch for them..
its nigh impossible not to include references to history you know when the facts come up, one would have to purposefully ignore it then lie about the current comment to do so. which is why i cant ignore it.
if you know the sky is blue, and people are saying its plaid, its very hard for you to go on with the falsehood of its plaid and not say its blue or try to tell them…
its like believing 1+1 = 2, hearing that 1+1 = 5 and being able to keep going and never say anything about its validity.
Obama is a typical leftist. Leftists believe life is unfair and this unfairness is manmade. It is rooted in the unfair laws and institutions of nations which favor certain groups. If you are a successful person or nation you have obviously gained that success by exploiting the unsuccessful using these crooked rules and corrupt practices. The unsuccessful must be made right by the successful being forced to give up their ill gotten gains and the laws must changed to prevent this unfairness from happening again. Obama is just doing God’s work in punishing the evil exploiters.
why bother having different words?
Ymarsakar Says:
“A person kills someone and takes their cash, then says the law against killing and robbery wasn’t on the MSM and so he didn’t know about it.”
The people next door makes an attempt to watch the news and be informed.. but it keeps anything critical of dems off the air…
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “revenge” (noun) as
(1) “an act or instance of retaliating in order to get even” and
(3) “an opportunity for getting satisfaction.” Clearly, the “satisfaction” lies in seeing the “enemy” suffer. It is primarily the individual person who seeks and sometimes gets revenge.
Opposition to revenge is very old.
The inventors of the retributive approach to punishment in the ancient world — the idea that punishment, administered by the state, should be proportional to or fit the crime (See the Code of Hammurabi ca. 1750 B.C.) — intended to move society beyond the revenge culture that typified the period prior to the rise of the state. They recognized that revenge-taking typically seems excessive to the party against which revenge is taken, and this perception leads to counter-revenge, often to an ongoing cycle of violence and mutual destruction. The state, in taking the task of retribution on itself, seeks to rise above this cycle and put an end to this cycle. From this point in history on, moral thinkers in their great majority condemn revenge, even if many still defend the retributive approach to punishment.
its very hard to include 4000 years in your arguments and keep them short…
Since Socrates, moral philosophers (with some exceptions) have condemned the desire for revenge (while distinguishing it from the desire for justice). They do not wish harm to anyone, even offenders, but defend punishment because it is called for by justice itself, or because it is likely to deter wrongdoing, or because it might produce reform in the offenders, or for still other reasons–but not because of the pleasure it might bring to people who seek revenge. The “satisfactions” of revenge, they would say, are submoral if not immoral pleasures it is advisable to outgrow.
I agree that Obama’s “failures” are deliberate. But most of the conservative media and many Republican politicians (e.g. the clueless iJeb! Bush) are stuck, like a broken record, on arguing that Obama has “failed” because he has “no executive experience,” has “never run anything,” and has “a thin resume.” These people have no idea of what their opponents have become. They do not understand that the Left is not interested in solving or ameliorating problems but in putting the country under their permanent control. This one reason we conservatives keep losing, even when we occasionally win elections. Our “leaders,” and most of the conservative rank and file, do not comprehend the stakes and the nature of the opposition.
LAST point on this
Punishment is legal
Revenge is not legal
If they are the same then they both should be either illegal or both legal.
No one punishes wrongdoers putting his mind on what they did and for the sake of this — that they did wrong not unless he is taking mindless vengeance, like a savage brute.
One who undertakes to punish rationally does not do so for the sake of the wrongdoing, which is now in the past — but for the sake of the future, that the wrongdoing shall not be repeated, either by him or by others who see him or by others who see him punished.
Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras
for some reason the past 2000 years or so have defined these well.. the law says punishment is legal, and says revenge, vengeance etc. is illegal. people may misuse this, or not. but this idea goes back to hamurabi, plato, aristotle, etc.
its from THEM i am taking my points from…
[and a few thousand years of jurisprudence]
I doubt that this comment, which I posted on Belmont Club in response to the linked essay, will resonate with many. However, being of a certain age and remembering what the 60s and 70s were like, I see the present situation as being quite similar to 1979.
Here’s what I said:
“Interestingly enough, we were in a similar state in 1979. The U.S. was in total disarray. We had a peace-at-any-price President. Our military had been decimated by Carter and a Democratic Congress. The USSR was on the rise and on the march in Afghanistan. We had a hostage crisis in Iran. Our allies did not trust us and our enemies did not respect us. Our economy was mired in stagflation. We were at the mercy of OPEC. Remember how bleak things were? I do.
One man, a B film actor from Hollywood, turned it around. A turn of events so unlikely that a writer of fiction would have thought the plot too fantastic.
Cheer up lads. This great nation has many things going for it. With the right leader we can be great again.
We’re in the process of selecting a new leader now. We need to be involved. History may not repeat exactly, but 2016 could be a near repeat of 1980 – God willing.”
Mrs. Whatsit, Thank you for your story re NPR. I am sorry to be such a downer, normally I never say anything, and I hope I’m wrong, but there is just something very odd going on. But yes, nihilistic thinking is not a good thing to carry around. i try to keep it at bay, but sometimes I indulge.
normally I never say anything, and I hope I’m wrong, but there is just something very odd going on. But yes, nihilistic thinking is not a good thing to carry around. i try to keep it at bay, but sometimes I indulge.
You should. Paranoia has survival value.
Who is pulling the strings?:
The Most Dangerous Man In the World
I think the Saudis are doing the pulling.
They couldn’t do it without the electorate we’re straddle with.
Divorce!
Neo:
Thanks for another fine analysis. I know you did not intend to make an exhaustive list of all the evils Obama has visited on this country, but I think the open immigration he has decriminalized and encouraged is as pernicious as many of his other misdeeds and will ultimately damage the character of this nation gravely. And I believe he did it largely out of racial hatred — I think he would like to dilute what he sees as “white America” racially in the hope whites will lose political and economic power. As with so many other leftist pipe dreams, though, this one is being diverted significantly as more Asians flood in, changing the racial balance and further minimizing the numerical power of the “brown races.” My own gut feeling is that it’s a fool’s errand anyway, as Americans are mixing in increasing numbers, so “brown” and “white” and whatever else will become less significant. But uneducated Latins continue to flood in and that will impact the intellectual strength of our nation more than the racial makeup.
Artfldgr:
If you are writing an essay about the penal system versus the older exra-judicial (or in some cases pre-judicial) system of honor/revenge killings, you would have a point.
That’s not what this thread is about. And the word “punishment” is not restricted to that one narrow definition; it has a more general definition as well.
You are way off base in terms of the discussion at hand.
We are speaking of Obama and the left, not a legal system—we are speaking of a human motivation/goal/desire that is expressed, taught, and nurtured through political and geopolitical action, as well as in rhetoric public and private and official and unofficial, in thousands of ways large and small.
“This great nation has many things going for it. With the right leader we can be great again. ” [J.J.]
After all, I still believe that it’s in our DNA.
J.J.:
I hope you’re right, and I remember 1979 as well, but I don’t see it the way you do.
In 1979, Carter was mistaken but not out to destroy or fundamentally change the US; maybe just tweak it a bit. The population was not quite as dumbed down or under leftist influence. And as it turns out, the Reagan interlude was brief and did not necessarily effect lasting change. To my way of thinking, at this point I see it as having been a speed bump along the road to leftism.
Artfldgr:
Why bother having different words? This is why.
English is a language especially rich in synonyms. Some of these synonyms reflect different word origins and the fact that English draws from many sources in terms of origins. Others reflect fine and often subtle gradations of meaning, with much overlap in meaning. Furthermore, each word often has many meanings, and it is through context that we decide which meaning is being referred to in any given sentence.
Pay attention to context and tone.
English is in particular not a language that’s set up like some sort of logical and scientific chart, where each word means only one thing and no other word means that same thing. I don’t know about all other languages—I doubt there are many that developed in such a way that one word always means just one thing—but if there are, English is most definitely not one of them.
And by the way, I know about “entryism.” Some of my relatives practiced it, many years ago. You may forget that I had quite a bit of exposure to the left when I was young.
What will it take for people to wake up? I’ve said it before: a mountain of corpses.
Although maybe not exactly literal, it’s no mere rhetorical flourish. There will have to be thousands on thousands of dead people, out in plain sight where the media can’t sweep it under the rug.
Only when confronted with undeniable horror of epic magnitude will people be open to questioning “how did we get here?”
I don’t know. I’m leaning toward coming down firmly on the side of incompetence rather than grand strategist. For instance, why in the world would Obama want Russia to be supreme? Surely he can’t want his name to be tarnished with that of thuggish, tsar-like Putin. Not to mention that the entire world is spinning into chaos.
Plus, all those golf games and selfies. Doesn’t that sort of behavior cut against an image of a careful responsible leader? An image that should accompany a grand plan, I would think.
@ djf
+1000
This struck me, from “Wretchard’s”* latest piece:
“What no politician has yet nerved himself to tell the public yet is that normalcy itself may be ending, and the actual facts of physical life may soon depend on actions and virtues our elites have long deemed obsolete or worthy of extinction.”
*Richard Fernandez’s old nom de plume
Mrs Whatsit
You might not want to check online what Mystery Babylon in the Bible is then.
It appears America has been defeated from within. Have we lost the battle or the war?
I think it is a battle and here is why: It was mostly trickery that won. People never fought because they were trained and scolded not to.
But a people does not necessarily accept defeat once it wakes up to the fact that it never had a chance to fight since it was all lies and fakery.
Let us see.
It can work both ways. What was won slowly and stealthily can be overturned in a flash if the people wake up and decide to overturn it.
President Cruz/Rubio/Fiorina and a R Senate and House?
I still say if you dismiss God you’re left only with demons.
This.
@Ann
I think Obama wants to reverse American “imperialism” permanently. That means not only removing our troops and creating a power vacuum, but encouraging another power to fill the void.
I think that’s what Obama was referring to when he had his open mic “flexibility” remark. He was in the process of giving away the Middle East to Russia.
For instance, why in the world would Obama want Russia to be supreme?
Why would that be part of anyone’s strategy?
If you want to talk strategy, you might want to go through the orthodox list first.
Ann:
Two possible answers:
The first is that he’s a pro-Russian Communist.
The second is that he doesn’t want it to happen, but it’s a side effect of what he does want (the disempowerment of the US), and he’s indifferent to it.
Cornflour:
Thanks!
BTW, as I’ve also said before, all this hand-wringing over Obama’s motivation is a waste of time. Nobody here will ever know for sure.
It’s enough to know that his policies work to our country’s detriment.
But people have a compulsion about it. I think it must stem from some relation to themselves: the need for affirmation, the need to otherize someone…something like that.
@neo
It’s not a side-effect, it’s a requirement.
If the ME is handed over to a weak power, the next US administration could easily take it back. The only way that won’t happen on a whim is if the ME is now in the hands of a serious power.
neo: “In 1979, Carter was mistaken but not out to destroy or fundamentally change the US; maybe just tweak it a bit. The population was not quite as dumbed down or under leftist influence. And as it turns out, the Reagan interlude was brief and did not necessarily effect lasting change. To my way of thinking, at this point I see it as having been a speed bump along the road to leftism.”
IMO, Obama is not out to destroy the U.S. He is out to make the U.S into a an egalitarian, peaceful, diverse utopia that all the progressives believe is possible. A True Believer is what he is. He believes that the progressive way is far more moral than the free market, competitive, meritocratic society we believe best. IMO, he does not think to himself, “Hee, hee, I’m going to turn this place into a Third World hell hole.” Au contraire, he believes he is doing the correct and moral thing. He believes he is trying desperately to change America into a progressive paradise. Obama is wrong. Just as Carter was wrong. Of course Obama is wrong in a much more public way than Carter was because we have much more effective mass communications today. Also, we have a much more biased press. But we also have a much larger conservative voice – Conservative talk radio, Fox News, and conservative blogs. In Carter’s day Buckley”s “National Review” was about it for conservative opinion. What people found to be unusual was the conservatism of a Barry Goldwater.
One of the things that made Reagan successful was that he knew how to package conservative views in a folksy, non-threatening manner. He was not widely accepted because of his conservatism, but because of his likeability and communications skills.
The GOP nominee can use the same types of questions that Reagan asked the voters in 1980.
“Are you better off today than you were when Obama took office?” “Are the democrat policies followed by the Obama creating economic recovery?” “Are our international affairs in better shape today than when Obama took office?” “Do you feel safer from Islamic terrorism than you did when Obama took office?” “Is your healthcare better or cheaper than it was before Obama took office?” Etc.
Then there is the quote (attributed to Churchill, Bismarck, and ??):
“God watches out for little children, fools, drunks and the United States of America.”
It has proven true down the years. I am not ready to admit we have run out of such Divine protection..
I don’t ascribe to the “evil genius” school of thought. Obama’s evil but he’s no genius. He’s the avatar for a cult of losers that has willed itself to power. I don’t think they’re particularly wedded to any specific end either, like a specific type of socialism or to wipe out a certain group of this or that type of person or end America. If that happens, so be it, but it’s not a specific goal. In fact, there’s probably millions of goals.
It will never end on its own.
Obama, the guy, is not that impressive. It’s true when you think about it. (Go ahead, while you’re still allowed!) Objectively, his intellect, presentation, looks and charm are all paper-thin constructs, practically the only thing that’s transparent about him. The speaking voice is somnambulatory and his tedious verbal tics are never updated. The mannerisms are trite (the hand on the shoulder, the sudden gummy Julia Robertsy smile, the various “studied concentration” looks (probably thinking about golf)) and devoid of real feeling. He’s literally going through the motions. He’s average to good looking but dead behind the eyes. There’s no spark there that compels you to look again. No glamour. His policies are, obviously, all comically awful, dredged up rehashes of previously failed statist notions and academic enthusiasms from the 1980s and long before, all supported by the flimsiest of arguments … and vales of tears and rage and resentment.
Yes, admitted, I don’t like the guy – at all – but unfortunately, yes, I’m right about all of the above. What’s the argument FOR Obama? There isn’t one! (There’s millions, and they’re all sad and oh so personal.) Obama is constantly political, constantly wrong, constantly f*cking something up, including but not limited to his own game and peoples’ lives, and/or lying about something. So why and how has this obvious clown been allowed to hang around for so long in ADHD America?
Because “Obama” is not just Obama, it’s Obama AND all his highly emotional and emotionally invested followers. It’s a cult. It’s personal.
He is an avatar for each and every one of them. It’s difficult to get a handle on because it’s not a logical thing. The Cult of Obama is like those flocks of birds/schools of fish that all move together as one organism, impossible to pin down. They have their avatar but he’s not a real leader. People see what they want to see in Obama (Obama’s even admitted/suggested that) and will overlook/never see the stuff the conflicts with their vision of Obama even as they defend absolutely their vision of him, as they would defend their own integrity. The media is a big part of it, including and increasingly especially social media. They cover for him. They send out the signal that turns the flock. Example: yesterday’s speech about the Oregon shooting was a bad political miscalculation (one of many) but you’ll never hear about that. You’ll only hear that it was bold and risky and, at worst, cleverly took the attention of all the things that are going wrong elsewhere. People assume it’s all studied and planned and gamed and it is, of course, but the success of Obama is due to the cult. Example: Hillary! doesn’t have a cult. There’s tons of planning and scheming and yet …
Matt_SE:
Here are the ways in which it’s not a waste of time:
Understanding helps to predict Obama’s future moves and those of the left.
Understanding helps to prepare for future moves and perhaps prevent them or block them or fight them.
Understanding helps to recognize something similar when it happens in the future, or when it’s happening now in another person.
Understanding can help convince a person to see what that person didn’t recognize before in Obama himself.
Understanding can help the observer understand the role of the left in having this come about.
Oh, and Beware of “Ann, the oh so reasonable.”
Scalopus aquaticus.
AMartel:
That argument is an old one on this blog.
It’s a straw man. I don’t call him a genius. No one else on this thread has called him a genius. He doesn’t need to be a genius to do what he’s done. I said he was a controlled and consummate actor with a purpose and excellent and consistent execution. How do you get “evil genius” out of that?
See this for a previous discussion of this issue, with links to other discussions of this issue.
But that’s just it: you will never be sure that you understand anything. Did you just divine some personal quirk about Obama, or was it a faé§ade?
Who knows?
J.J.:
When I wrote “destroy the US” I didn’t mean “blast it to kingdom come and plow the ground with salt.” I meant what you said—destroy the US’s very nature as the US and build it into some new, unrecognizable-as-the-US, European-crossed-with-Venezuelan, welfare statist state, with the left permanently in charge and the populace totally disarmed.
Matt_SE:
There are very few things on earth of which you can be SURE. That certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to figure them out as best you can.
When I wrote that piece in 2009, I think I had come pretty far towards doing so. He hasn’t done anything since that has surprised me.
Rudyard Kipling had this guy figured:
“A Servant When He Reigneth”
Three things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book —
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon.
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.
His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.
Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.
His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy boken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave —
Oh, a Servant when he Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!
Neo you are spot on.
As your last paragraph indicates the lefts century long project to transform the populace has been successful. Thus I think there is a low probability of a Republican being elected President in 2016.
Things are proceeding apace:
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND UN ANNOUNCE GLOBAL POLICE FORCE TO FIGHT ‘EXTREMISM’ IN U.S..
No reactions from the Repubics …
America is at the malls …
Obama could never have been elected, or in particular re-elected, if generations of intellectuals and not-so-intellectuals had not spent so much time and effort boring holes in the bottom of Western Civilization.
“… global culture frankly is so distorted now that when we have words like “choice” covering abortion–when it’s really not about choice but that’s what they’ve made it about all these decades.
And the word “equality” has come to be the mantle for the, the movement to redefine marriage in law. And the word compassion”– which, we are compassionate people, is the mantle for the Euthanasia Movement. Our language is so distorted that we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Even though we’re using the same language. We aren’t, we really aren’t.
Video:
Author Shelia Liaugminas looks beyond politics and the theory of cultural relativism to get at the heart of what is truly “Non-Negotiable: Essential Principles of a Just Society and Humane Culture.” Hosted by Doug Keck.
Divorce!
There seems to be a fixation on Obama’s Leftism as motive for his animus towards America. Neither Leftism generally, or Communism specifically, sufficiently explain what moves within him, what motivates him. To think either is at the center is to greatly miss the point by rummaging about for an answer on the periphery. Who would believe that an ideology alone had moved Adolf to exterminate 11 million people in the camps? Who would think an ideology would dispose Stalin to murder 5 million by starvation and million more in the gulags? And Mao? Which came first to the charnel house, the ideology or the natural born killer?
There’s much more to O than ideology. Though not a natural born killer, he does seem a natural born hater and you don’t get that way by ideology. Such as that comes by way of evil and puts me in mind of one of Doestoevsky’s great works. The wickedness at play throughout Western society makes Dostoevsky’s novel warning in The Demons*, (set provincially in one small town) seem as little more than a walk on the wild side.
Ronald Hingley (British academic writing of Russian literature and history) writes of The Demons: “an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity…shows alarmingly few signs of heeding.”
When I had first read the novel long, long, ago, the translator had it titled The Possessed referencing those who had given themselves over to being possessed by evil. Later translators insisted that had missed entirely, Dostoevsky’s point of The Demons i.e., those who are doing the possessing.
We find ourselves now not in a situation where we little heed the warning. We find ourselves in a situation where we have allowed the demons not just free reign, but culturally and legally sanctioned influence. They had done their work, over the course of the fifty years, monstrously well. Satan would be proud of them if he could take pride in anything other than his own self (a reflection of the LibProgLeft, whose greatest conviction is the righteousness of their very existence).
The novel introduces, as the source of all the town’s problems, the archetypal liberal idealist, a free-thinking intellectual, the professor, and his lover and co-conspirator, a wealthy widow and patroness of the outré who subsidizes his parasiticism, and is mother to a demon-seed of a man-child Nikolai Stavrogin — the central character of the story) upon whom she dotes who expresses himself thus “I neither know nor feel good and evil, and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil… and that it is just a prejudice”.
Stavrogin has his wife and brother-in-law murdered and later confesses (in a chapter originally censored by the publisher and present in modern versions as an addendum) to raping an 11-year-old girl and driving her to suicide to which he is present, though in hiding. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky insists is not possessed of evil but a personification of it, a demon. Stavrogin is not Hans Beckert (of Fritz Lang’s movie “M”) serial murderer of children who is possessed, driven by a compulsion, of which he is fully aware and at times disgusted. Stavrogin revels in all the pleasures (hatred) of his moral depravity — the pleasure of the act, and more, the pleasure it evokes in him after the fact, and still more, the pleasures of the disgust it may evoke in the ‘squares’, Christians, the God-fearing, and God himself.
If any would think this goes too far in explaining O, I would remind them of his affinity for death. The greatest moment, to my mind, was when he had opposed the Born Alive Act. He relented only on the promise that no-one would, as a result of the passage of the act, undertake to limit abortion. I have always had an image of him, since that time, holding in one arm an infant, and in the other hand, a pistol, pointed at the infant’s head. The caption reads: “Make one move against abortion and the kid gets it”.
All that hate Me love death.
Proverbs 8:36
The next comment will be a one liner.
Dostoevsky’s epigraph to Demons (Besy — English transliteration of the Russian word) a poem of the same name by Pushkin
Demons
In bygone days when life’s array –
The sweet song of the nightingale
And maidens’ eyes, the rustling woods –
Still left a fresh impression on me,
When loftiness of feeling,
And freedom, glory, love
Artistic inspiration
So deeply stirred my blood,
My times of hope were cast in shade
And pleasure dimmed by longing,
For it was then an evil genius
Began to pay me secret visits.
Our meetings were quite dolorous:
His smile, his glance mysterious,
His venom-filled and caustic sermons
Poured frozen poison in my soul.
With endless slandering remarks
He tempted Providence;
He claimed that beauty’s but a dream;
Felt scorn for inspiration;
He had no faith in love or freedom;
He looked on life with ridicule-
And in the whole of nature
He did not wish to praise a single thing.
– Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Dostoevsky and Pushkin might just as properly have called their works The Gnostics (гноÑтики — gnostiki).
Okay, the next comment.
neo: “I meant what you said–destroy the US’s very nature as the US and build it into some new, unrecognizable-as-the-US, European-crossed-with-Venezuelan, welfare statist state, with the left permanently in charge and the populace totally disarmed.”
A very apt description of what will happen if we can’t find a new leader who can steer us into a change of course. What’s interesting about that description is that it is nothing like what the progs envision. I have family who are deep in the prog camp. Because they have no idea of where our wealth and power come from, they just assume that the wealth and power will remain as it is. They see no connection between conservative policy and good fortune for the country. Things will only get better (more equal, more fair, more diverse, more peaceful) under their “more enlightened” policies. They see no connection between what’s happening in Venezuela and leftist policies.
What we are witnessing with the economy on life support, the military unable to carry out its mission in full, the ME in flames, and Islamic terrorism on the march is just how bad policies can create chaos. But they don’t see it.
I watched Obama’s presser today. He blames our struggling economy on the Congress. He blames the problems in the ME on Bush and the Congress. He blames Congress for failing to compromise with his budgetary demands which lead to possible government shutdowns. He sees the problems in Syria as solvable through negotiations – a political settlement. He will not be drawn into doing anything “rash” in the ME that could set back the possibility of negotiations. Isn’t that just special?
Nothing is ever his fault or that of his policies. His belief in settling things through negotiations in Syria is, IMO, to believe in unicorns and rainbows That is what is so maddening. He and his progressive fellow travelers are a cult with an unshakeable belief in the rightness of their policies and cause. It ain’t reason, it’s faith. In many ways it is as dangerous to the success of the country as is Islamic jihad. For the LIVs it just isn’t as obvious.
George Pal:
Leftism is one motive. It’s not the only motive. Anger about the racial history of America is another (mentioned in the quote from my 2009 essay).
Dinesh D’Souza came up with a whole book to explain another, having to do with Obama’s father and colonialism. And of course there are psychological factors, too.
I know what Obama is doing wrong. Has anyone said why what Putin is doing is wrong?
He’s in Syria bombing people like we bomb people over there.
What if he defeats ISIS?
The enemy of my enemy – ISIS and Obama – is my friend, no? Putin may be a nasty guy. Obama is fr nastier. There was an article today someone linked to called “The Most Dangerous Man in the World”.
You guessed who.
Amen!
Neo-neocon,
All the motives are easily accessible but unhelpful. They’re certainly in play, they may aggravate the condition, they may mitigate the guilt, but they don’t delve near enough to the answer. It’s like the psychiatrist divining issues, Oedipal issues, Electra issues, power issues, ressentiment, and all the rest of the jargon. It’s an insistence that evil, visceral evil, can play no role in a material world. The neuromancers are now at it — mapping the nodes of the brain. Chemically or electrically stimulated, massaged, (but not lobotomized we know better now for we know so much more) we will eradicate hatred, violence, etc.
Surely one can account the episodes of a conventional life as significant and make proper allowances for this that and the other. Unconventional men, having formatively unconventional lives are not doomed to ressentiment, hatred, revenge, etc. But one comes along and there’s something about him, he’s different, he gives off vibes, he makes one uncomfortable. He might be Ted Bundy, or Barrack Obama, or George Soros, or any number of characters in all manners of evil — although the manners of evil always distill to death in some way.
A moment from a movie that I think deals more essentially with what’s at play. It doesn’t make the argument, it merely refines the premise.
From the movie Tombstone”
Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?
Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.
Wyatt Earp: What does he need?
Doc Holliday: Revenge.
Wyatt Earp: For what?
Doc Holliday: Bein’ born.
Being born constitutes an affront for Gnostics, for they would have nothing to do with God, his creation, or nature. To what are we to attribute, after three thousand years of understanding life as one thing, the sudden appearance of life as another thing entirely, from sex, sexuality, marriage, and life — LIFE — itself. I believe it to be a hatred of God. And having no way of getting at him, they attack his creation, life, and the nature of nature.
Finally, were you aware there was a movement called Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I wasn’t until just recently. This group believes humans should stop reproducing so that our species eventually ceases to exist. Why get rid of humanity? We’re bad for the environment and other species of animals, or so they would have us believe. In Genesis, upon that day’s creation, God would look upon his work and remarked, each time, “it is good”. On the day of the creation of humans, Adam and Eve, made in the image of God, he remarked “it is very good’. Is it any wonder that evil so hates life?
Finally, were you aware there was a movement called Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet
On the other hand maybe we are the highest creation of Gaia and her only hope for the continuation of her DNA is to spread off this rock before something bad happens.
I call him a Commie sh*t f**ker, because everything he f**ks with turns to sh*t. Everything. The economy, national debt, healthcare, illegal immigration, welfare, race relations, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Israel, Russia, Sotomayor, Kagan… The list is much longer.
Since he has a propensity to always turn things into sh*t, I’m assuming it is by design. Name one piece of gold. Name one thing he has accomplished that every American could be proud of. I can’t think of a single thing.
The most distressing thing is that he has gotten away with it scot free. That’s not quite true. He has cost the Democrats dearly in Congress and in state legislatures. Unfortunately, the jellyfish that Republican voters sent to congress have done nothing, as in absolutely nothing, to stop Obama f**king things up further. The cave on the Iran deal is typical. Planned Parenthood is free to continue its Mengelian practices. Little wonder outsiders are dominating the GOP race.
Where do Valerie Jarrett and George Soros fit into the puzzle? Do they communicate with each other and come up with various ideas on how to mess up the United States?
I recall that George Soros was funding a plot to take over the Secretaries of State of various states in order to have control over counting ballots in the 2012 election. Now there seems to be a plot to support ISIS while also supporting Iran. Meanwhile the DOD promotes gay soldiers and sailors. Etc., etc. How are Jarrett and Soros involved in these schemes?
Promethea Says:
October 3rd, 2015 at 12:22 am
Where do Valerie Jarrett and George Soros fit into the puzzle? Do they communicate with each other and come up with various ideas on how to mess up the United States?
$$$
The curious reality is that Barry can’t stand to listen to George, the fawning Valerie girl is more to his taste.
Soros speaks too far over 0bama’s head… especially math and all that logical stuff.
Valerie, in contrast, is great company — like sitting across from a mirror.
Fernandez and others are so erudite. However why do we not simply look at Obama’s actual background. Dig deep. Leftist SDS Ayers is said to have started Obama but Look deeper- Alice Palmer, openly commie. And many others. And billionaire globalist friends. Why does Val Jarette have such power and Secret Service protection. How many of the inner circle have worked for tge globalist Center for American Destruction besides Podesta, van jones, Samantha powers. And more. I keep waiting on FOX, TRUMP, brilliant bloggers to dig into this cabal this stole trillions and want trillions more with cap and trade scams. When will the light be shown on those who deserve it. Mitt could have exposed them but was too soft. Who will stand??
“I said he was a controlled and consummate actor with a purpose and excellent and consistent execution.”
For a politician, that is as close to genius as you are likely to get. Once again I am going to disagree and say he is a knave *and* a fool. Or not exactly a fool but he is not engaging in “excellent and consistent execution”, especially in foreign policy though he certainly has a purpose. What people don’t seem to grasp is that this does NOT prevent the outcomes from being as bad as they would be if he were in complete command as you suggest. In fact I posit that if he were as clever as you say it would be *less* obvious what he is doing because he would be more successful in covering up how bad his policies are for our country.
Take Benghazi (please). Maybe I’m naive but I do not think he intended for the gay ambassador to be murdered by terrorists and then dragged through the streets. In fact that is why he had to come up with that ludicrous lie about the video. The aftermath also was a perfect example of how the knave gets away with being a fool – the MFM reflexively covers up for him.
The bottom line is that his policy and actions are informed by his disdain for American interests and values, and that since he has the power and prestige of the Presidency he does not need to be exceptionally clever or competent for those policies and actions to be extremely damaging to our country. How smart do you have to be to undermine the US when your going-in position is that you are going to suck up to Iran and Cuba while throwing Israel, Eastern Europe and the Kurds under the bus? And no matter what you do you know your media toadies will explain it away?
It is bad for the country, but this is the sort of thing that led to 40 years of mostly republican presidents after FDR.
—————
Huh?
Truman, JFK, Johnson, and Carter, all wonder what you’re talking about.
FDR died in 1945. Truman succeeded him, and then was elected himself in 1948. Eisenhower, a Republican, won in 1952, and again in 1956. But Democrat Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960. Johnson took over when Kennedy died, and then won his own election in 1964. Republican Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and then again in 1972. And after his resignation, he was replaced by Ford, who lost to Carter in 1976. Republican Reagan beat Carter in 1980, and was still in office in 1985, on the fortieth anniversary of Roosevelt’s death.
Roosevelt died at the start of his fourth term. So you’re looking at five terms with Democratic presidents, and five terms with Republican presidents.
Maybe I’m naive but I do not think he intended for the gay ambassador to be murdered by terrorists and then dragged through the streets.
How do you explain HRC removing his bodyguards then before the event, while he was requesting more military units to stand by?
And why do you call him gay?
Those of us in Chicago who have followed Mr. Obama’s career since 2003 or so know that the answer is simple: he does things the Chicago Way. That is, politics is about punishing your enemies and enriching your friends. And ultimately you have one constituent: yourself.
What’s different about Mr. Obama (vs, say Daley or Madigan or Cullerton) is that he actually believes his own BS. Which is what makes him more dangerous than the usual Chicago Machine hack.
Our language is so distorted that we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Even though we’re using the same language. We aren’t, we really aren’t.
Which is why I often use a foreign language to parallax scan Leftist mind control viruses. It’s amazing what comes out.
Scott Peck aka “The Road less Traveled” wrote a book about people like Obozo. It is called “The People of the Lie” .
As best I can remember he tried never to engage these people or have anything to do with them because they had no conscience or principles other than their goals and their narcissism.
If you look for the book on Amazon, be sure to go through Neo’s Amazon link.
Time for this working ant to get to work so the Pied Piper can give my hard earned grain to his grasshopper supporters. 🙁
Thank you Neo for another insightful post.
Sadly, I think you and Fernandez are right. These horrible policy failures are not “bugs” but “features”.
What may be Pres. Obama’s motives? I’ve long thought him to be a Marxist of sorts. His sympathies for Islam are apparent, not that I think he is a Muslim. Rather he and and much of his circle are profoundly anti-Christian and Occidentialists and share Islam’s antipathy for Christianity and Christendom (a long forgotten term).
My decades of experience with Progressives suggest to me that their antipathy for Christianity arises from hostility to the “Greatest Commandment” Matthew 12:29-31:
You will of course recognize the Shema and this quote from Levitcus therein:
As Nietzsche understood, loving thy neighbor as thyself places limits on one’s instinctive vengeful behaviors and misanthropy.
Perhaps Pres. Obama is motivated by acute misanthropy? … in addition to a generalized desire for revenge.
Pres. Obama may share Islam’s antipathy for Jews (much like Rev. Jeremiah Wright). But I suspect the he, like Nietzsche, finds Judaism’s pro-human impulse at the core of Christianity. Would Pres. Obama also share Nietzsche’s annihilationist anti-Semitic views? I fear he does.
Ok, now I’m depressed about our chances of recovery from the destruction wrought by Obama.
Ymarsakar:
And why do you call him gay?
Um, because he was?
It’s always struck me as bizarre and foolhardy to appoint an openly gay ambassador to a country where the dominant religion prefers to hang homosexuals, or throw them off tall buildings.
That’ll get the diplomatic relationship off to a good start.
I understand the leftlings psychotic need to apply affirmative action to every area of life, but come on, have some common sense already. There are some very bad people in this world, and not all of them have the same feelings about “diversity” and “inclusion” and “social justice” as those in the Religion of Pope Karl of Marx.
I don’t think Obama is hard to understand, at all, and never did, not even way before he was touted as a candidate.
Maybe it’s because I spent many years of my life living and working in majority-black situations (not upper middle class, either).
Obama is just another shuck-‘n-jive n**ger.
I don’t say it that way to be offensive. I say it as a precise description, using the correct term. People like him are called exactly that by their own people, in their own neighborhoods.
The only difference with Obama is that he is incredibly talented at shuck-‘n-jive, to the level that Hitler was talented as a speaker; and inside he burns with a hatred of America and what he sees as white imperialism. So he uses his talents at shuck-‘n-jive to damage the objects of his hatred, rather than the more typical use of enriching himself (not that he will come out of this impoverished).
What’s tragic is the confluence of his talent, his hatred, and a West so enfeebled and burdened with self-inflicted guilt (guilt seen as moral virtue) that instead of being laughed off the stage, which is what would have happened at any earlier time in our history, he was embraced, and held up. And even that wasn’t for Obama’s sake; it was for the sake of assuaging that self-inflicted guilt.
Pretty damn expensive therapy session.
One would expect that he learned “shuck-‘n-jive” in Chicago. It seems rather more likely that he learned Alinskian Marxism in Chicago.
From whom in his youth in Jakarta and Hawaii would he have learned “shuck-‘n-jive”?
Just remember, even if people can’t and shouldn’t touch Hussein, there’s always your friendly neighborhood Democrat and all your friends on Facebook, that you can spit in the eye of for effect.
Indeed, that is how i feel too.
.
If Pres. Obama is motivated by a deep seated misanthropy, as i suggest above, one has to worry whether his actions are ultimately directed at “leveling” the status and power of America and Christianity (and maybe physically leveling Israel).
Consider the apocalyptic motivations of the Iranian regime, the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS. ISIS has been rather clear about its intent to use nuclear weapons to create worldwide chaos. So too the Iranian Twelvers.
What can motivated these people?
What if they are not alone?
Why should we expect the modern secularists might not also desire Gutterdé¤mmerung?
Not by chance did Robert Oppenheimer invoke Shiva: “”Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” At least some secular Progressives seem to privately expect and desire Pres. Obama’s Iran deal to cause nuclear holocaust in the Middle-East.
What if, behind his mask, Pres. Obama is a nuclear arsonist?
FOAF:
You misunderstand me.
His “execellent and consistent execution” is in his persona (acting and control). His cleverness (a word I didn’t use in this thread) is in his domestic politics, and that is mostly in terms of getting what he wants domestically (incremental implementation of leftist agenda and more statism, as well as enhancing the demographics of the left in terms of letting more illegal immigrants in) and outfoxing the opposition (granted, that’s not hard to do, domestically). It certainly is the way he got re-elected.
He is not “clever” on the world scene in the sense of engineering every event that happens. Plenty happens that he doesn’t foresee in the details, plenty that he didn’t intend in the details. But that isn’t important; he’s getting what he wants in the big picture, which is to undermine the standing of the US in the world and sow distrust in the US going forward. He has done that very well. The details are irrleveant to him, as long as he can weasel out of any political consequences at home.
For example, I certainly don’t think he intended the details of the Benghazi debacle. They were side effects, as it were, of certain policies he put in place. The details were unfortunate as far as he was concerned, and not specifically foreseen, but he evaded the consequences politically and in the big picture he got what he wanted, the undermining of US influence, strength, credibility, power.
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Obama could never have been elected, or in particular re-elected, if generations of intellectuals and not-so-intellectuals had not spent so much time and effort boring holes in the bottom of Western Civilization.
Shorter version: BS-ism is the first step to Bolshevism.
Oh, and Beware of “Ann, the oh so reasonable.”
Scalopus aquaticus.
Beverly
I think it is fine to have a devil’s advocate, if they provide interesting material.
It shouldn’t affect your Willpower when it comes time to cut down Evil, after all. And anyone that would be swayed from the Path by abstract knowledge, is not quite ready to face the tasks at hand with relentless focus.
Being capable of rationally thinking of both sides in a war, doesn’t mean you are on the fence or part of the enemy’s side. The only thing that matters is what is in your heart, Beverly. Do you truly think you have enough doubts that people could sway you? Or are you confident in the Path you have taken.
Most everyone has to answer that sooner or later, come off the fence sooner or later. So why not give them many viewpoints and povs. To the true believers, they will not be swayed by the whispers of the devil.
Weakening and destruction of the West’s institutions had been done before the man of destiny’s arrival. Without the preparation, Barack’s work would have been impossible. Given his psychological weaknesses and petulance it would be good to point out to him that, while he is the man of destiny, anyone else could have done it better.
Luther was asked what he would do if told the world would end the next day. He replied, so it is said, “I would tend my cabbages.”
So, I say something not completely in tune with the chorus and now I’m demonic? Sheesh.
Our language is so distorted that we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Even though we’re using the same language. We aren’t, we really aren’t.
Which is why I often use a foreign language to parallax scan Leftist mind control viruses. It’s amazing what comes out…
Not just language…
Not just language:
See picture media presented of the Oregon shooter here.
Helloooo sheeple!
“Obama is just another shuck-‘n-jive n**ger.”
No. While his race has been an extremely useful political tool for him, his far left background explains him much more than his skin color.
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As I have noted many times and many places — PostModern Liberalism is a societal cancer, eating away at the very foundations of Western Civilization. There is no cure but radical surgery. We lack the will to perform such surgeries, well, Islam and others are quite ready to do it. But they will hack off a lot of other relevant tissue in the process, possibly killing the patient.
FOAF Says:
October 3rd, 2015 at 4:31 pm
“Obama is just another shuck-‘n-jive n**ger.”
No. While his race has been an extremely useful political tool for him, his far left background explains him much more than his skin color.
His Islamic background is equally relevant.
G6loq Says:
October 3rd, 2015 at 4:22 pm
Our language is so distorted that we don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Even though we’re using the same language. We aren’t, we really aren’t.
Which is why I often use a foreign language to parallax scan Leftist mind control viruses. It’s amazing what comes out…
Not just language…
Not just language:
See picture media presented of the Oregon shooter here.
Helloooo sheeple!
&&&
Thread winner.
That link deserves a write up.
WHAT A SCANDAL.
Winston Smith lives !
Three men stand out in my view as having done much of the theoretical preparation.
Frederick Nietzsche
Antonio Gramsci
&
Martin Heidegger
“His Islamic background is equally relevant.”
I can’t say you’re wrong. His father and stepfather were both Muslim and undoubtedly this helped to shape his view of the world.
But I think that even without that he would still show an affinity for Islam common to leftists in their contempt for the West. The contradiction of supporting gay marriage and Islam at the same time never seems to have bothered leftists much. And I think his leftist background would cause him to do mostly the same things he is doing now even without the Islamic influence.
Weakening and destruction of the West’s institutions had been done before the man of destiny’s arrival.
Frankfurt School.
We got the bastards out of the German Socialist grip and they then proceeded to destroy our cultural fabric.
We need more refugees!
Weakening and destruction of the West’s institutions had been done before the man of destiny’s arrival.
And is proceeding apace:
Merkel and Zuckerberg Caught on Live Mic Conspiring to Censor Resistance to Muslim Invasion
Hey Zuck! Is that good for the Jews?
Bitch!
G6loq…
The boy is a psychopath.
Get a load of his neighbor relations.
Get a load of his college relations.
Well, at least he speaks Mandarin.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2014/oct/23/mark-zuckerberg-beijing-speaks-mandarin-video
So, he gets along swell with despots — world wide.
Obama is pushing forward with some undefined kind of recognition for Native Hawaiians. One more wrong to be righted?
Larry Says:
October 3rd, 2015 at 9:46 pm
Obama is pushing forward with some undefined kind of recognition for Native Hawaiians. One more wrong to be righted?
%%%
That’s a Leftist inspired rage based social minefield.
The recognition that they want is that the democratic revolution that kicked the Queen (autocrat) off her throne was an international crime perpetrated by evil White men.
Whereas, the revolution was democratic — and dominated by the Alii — the local chiefs — because the Queen was REVERSING the liberal policies of the prior King, basically taking liberty away from the Alii. ( a’ lee’ ee )
The reason the Hawaiian revolution was bloodless: her palace guard was solely composed of the sons of the very Alii that wanted her gone. They simply refused to fire on their fathers and uncles. (!)
She was escorted across the street into the other main building of that time — which is now the Hawaii State Supreme Court building. That was a pretty plush ‘jail.’
The radicals want immense economic compensation and massive land grants such as to let them live the life of English lairds over Ireland.
THAT’S what the Hawaiian deal is all about. This hope has been fermenting since before Barry met me — in 1983.
FOAF Says:
October 3rd, 2015 at 6:54 pm
That “contradiction” is only an apparent contradiction. Viewed from the Gramscian perspective of the New Left (circa 1950s-1970s) there is no contradiction. Traditional marriage established a most important bedrock subsidiary institution of Liberal Capitalist Democratic societies. Antonio Gramsci advocated the such institutions needed to be destroyed for Socialism/Marxism to succeed. Prog/Left gay marriage and Islamic polygamy both undermine traditional marriage and the American nuclear family thus erode and destroy a necessary subsidiary institution of American Society.
So, I say something not completely in tune with the chorus and now I’m demonic? Sheesh.
The times are what they are, Ann, and nothing you or I can say will change that.
Well, I’m gonna be one commenter here who shares Ann’s perspective on disagreeing without being disagreeable.
Ann, 4:16 pm — “So, I say something not completely in tune with the chorus and now I’m demonic? Sheesh.”
Ann, I agree completely with your sentiment. (Some) others, let’s not eat our own — please! It’s not like Ann is some sort of islamist or leftie/progressive type. Can’t she put forward her individual perpsective here, that’s “not completely in tune with the chorus,” without having an ugly response thrown at her?
Can’t we be better than those other guys?
Ann Says:
October 2nd, 2015 at 5:11 pm
I don’t know. I’m leaning toward coming down firmly on the side of incompetence rather than grand strategist.
Ann, I think you are wrong. I much hope that you are right.
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