The scandals, the public, and the left: believe it

The New Neo Posted on by

The last week or so has been filled with so much news that I can hardly keep up despite spending a ton of time reading and listening and thinking. You probably feel the same way.

And yet I know—I am nearly positive—that way too few people are paying much attention at all. Why would they? Boring stuff, much less interesting than—well, take your pick of whatever it is that people are more excited about in their lives, be it trivial or important, serious or fun, active or passive.

That’s not really surprising; it’s human nature. And it’s a human nature on which the left relies to do its dirty work. What galls me more and more as time goes by (and I was already plenty galled already) are the transparently duplicitous, manipulative, hypocritical, condescending, and cynical attitudes of way too many (although not all) writers, pundits, activists, and politicians on the left, who have reacted to the three or four scandals that have erupted (somehow the Sebelius Obamacare donor problem has fallen by the wayside) with either minimization or mockery or both.

Scandals? What scandals? they say. All fakes, drummed up by the right. Obama did nothing wrong, no one did anything wrong except Republicans, yada yada yada. Those hawking this line think Americans are way too lazy to read for themselves, way too uncurious to find out for themselves, way too stupid to think for themselves, and the left plays on this and has played on this for as far back as I can remember.

Whether these writers (I hesitate to link to them, but they are easy to find—just go to RealClearPolitics, look at the lists of articles during the last week or so, and click on the appropriate headlines), believe what they are saying or whether they are cynical manipulators of others hardly matters. It’s of mere psychological interest; the effect is the same either way.

I wrote about the phenomenon before, in a post from 2009. But it’s so important that I’m going to reproduce that entire post again right now. The title is, “The willingness to believe that two plus two makes five.” The gist of the message is in the line, uttered by protagonist Winston Smith in Orwell’s great masterpiece 1984, “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four,” and the knowledge that the essence of being a mouthpiece of the left is to be able to avoid seeing what is in front of your eyes, and to believe that two and two are five if it would suit the party aims to say so.

The post follows.

I read Orwell’s masterful dystopic political vision 1984 when I was about twelve years old, old enough to get what it was aiming at but young enough to be especially frightened by some of its most memorable images, which have stuck with me ever since.

Of course, there was Room 101 with the rats—who could forget that? But another image that made a deep impression, but that described a concept I didn’t quite understand at the time, was that of Winston Smith’s manipulative and brilliant interrogator O’Brien torturing Winston in order to force him to say—and what’s more to believe—that two plus two makes five if the Party willed it.

Here’s the relevant passage:

“Do you remember,” [O’Brien] went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back toward Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”

“Four.”

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O’Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four.”

The needle went up to sixty.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”

“How many fingers, Winston?”

“Five! Five! Five!”

“No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”

“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”

Abruptly he was sitting up with O’Brien’s arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O’Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.

“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.

“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston, sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, you haven’t got one.

At this point in my life, I think I understand the passage all too well. It ties directly into observations such as the following one by Hilton Kramer (he is referring to Stalinism, but he could just as well be talking about the most rabid adherents of any sort of Leftism):

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying—and not only to others, but first of all to themselves—a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.”

I saw this propensity first-hand myself as a child, in an uncle of mine who was a pro-Communist and whom I’ve described in this essay. My uncle had no problem integrating any new fact about Communism into his pro-Soviet world view.

At the time, my uncle’s behavior was a puzzlement to me. But now I know that he was a true believer, and the goal was the most important thing. If the ideals of Communism (or progressivism, or socialism, or whatever far-Left movement one is considering) are considered the greatest good—equality, “fairness,” help for the poor—then one never has to notice all the evils that are knowingly committed in its name, or all its dreadful although unintended (and yet inevitable) consequences, even for the poor people it is supposedly designed to help. In fact, one is obliged to deny them, no matter how strong the evidence.

To keep one’s eyes on the prize, whether that prize be the idealistic goals cited above or the simple drive for absolute power voiced by the fictional O’Brien when he tells Winston “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power”—it is necessary for the follower to filter out reality and to believe whatever is seen as bringing the world closer to the goal.

The mental gymnastics involved are described very well in another literary work, this time one of nonfiction, the autobiography of Communist-turned-government-informant Whittaker Chambers, entitled Witness [emphasis mine]:

When I first knew him, Harry Freeman [who later become the assistant US chief of Tass, the Soviet news service] was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history…the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange, that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrasment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.

O’Brien would be proud—now that’s the sort of mental flexibility that the Party needs and desires.

Of course, rationalization and denial of facts that don’t fit a person’s previously held beliefs is not just a province of the Left. It’s a general human trait, and that is why a mind is a difficult thing to change. But the Left carefully nurtures, fosters, advocates, and even requires this sort of denial, whereas it is my observation that the Right (and this was something that was formative in my own change experience), while hardly immune, is much less demanding that its adherents dismiss and deny logic and inconvenient facts.

Are we paying attention yet?

The New Neo Posted on by

Gallup headline: “Americans’ Attention to IRS, Benghazi Stories Below Average.”

Ho-hum, says America. Or does it?

When I looked at the actual figures, they weren’t quite as bad as I had originally thought from reading the headline. In fact, slight majorities described themselves as “following very or somewhat closely” the Benghazi hearings and the IRS story (the poll was taken on May 14-15). As one might expect, Republicans are paying more attention (in the 60s). But Independents are over the halfway mark, and even Democrats are in the 40s (although my guess is that a lot of those are probably paying attention merely to learn the liberal spin about how awful the Republicans are to be pursuing this).

Why does Gallup say “less than average” interest? Because “the level of attention being paid to each is below the average 60% of Americans who have closely followed more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured over the past several decades.” So the pollsters are comparing these stories to attention over decades; I wonder what would happen if they compared them to attention over the last five years or so. My sense is that attention in general has dropped—those famous “low-information voters” we talk so much about are probably more numerous.

Somewhat encouraging is the following, though: “Most Americans agree that both of these situations are serious enough to warrant continuing investigation, with little difference in views of the two — 74% for the IRS matter and 69% for Benghazi.” That includes “strongly agree” and “agree” responses.

More:

The amount of attention Americans are paying to the IRS and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years. This overall lack of attention is due in part to Democrats’ and, to a lesser degree, independents’ lack of interest, which stands in sharp contrast to the significantly above-average attention among Republicans.

Republicans are also much more likely than Democrats to strongly agree that both situations are serious enough to require investigation. But, this partisan gap is much larger on the Benghazi news than on the IRS issue. This may reflect that rank-and-file Democrats are following the administration’s lead in putting greater emphasis on the importance of the IRS crisis, while downplaying the importance of continuing investigations into its handling of Benghazi.

Ya think? It is almost certainly due to the way the IRS crisis strikes home as opposed to Benghazi. Benghazi is far away, complicated, happened back in September, and has been spun every which way by Obama and other Democrats and the MSM since the time it occurred. The IRS scandal, on the other hand, has left them with very few ways to spin it—at least, they haven’t found their footing yet. And of course the IRS hits people where it already hurts; you don’t have to understand a lot to understand that you don’t want the IRS messing with you any more than it already does, which is too much already.

[ADDENDUM: I hope the American people are paying attention to this ridiculous testimony, because Miller would have us think he’s certainly not been paying a bit of attention:

Life imitates art, and the art is comedy. Except in life, it’s really nowhere near as funny.]

Remember, Obama’s an Alinskyite

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many many things that has long puzzled me about the election of Barack Obama is how many terrible elements of his resume had to be ignored in order to like him, trust him, vote for him.

A good example was his community organizer and Alinsky experience, which (unlike his connections to Ayers or Wright) he didn’t even bother to disavow, but instead celebrated. Obama was probably relying on the fact that leftists would love him for it, and everyone else except the right would misunderstand what that background meant.

Let’s let an expert on the left, David Horowitz, explain. In his book Radicals, he devoted a long chapter to Alinsky, containing the following telling excerpts:

The focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obama’s [2008] presidential campaign. “When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!” In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: “From the moment an organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army.”…

Guided by these principles, Alinsky’s disciples are misperceived as idealists; in fact, they are practiced Machiavellians. Their focus is invariably on means rather than ends. As a result they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies or theoretical dogmatisms in the way their still admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.

Horowitz’s book was published in 2012, and it’s not about Obama. But there’s a great deal in the Alinsky chapter that’s relevant to what we’ve seen unfolding in his administration. Read the following in light of Obama’s vague “hope and change” mantra in 2008, and you will understand its provenance even better:

Communists identified their goal as a “dictatorship of the proletariat” which generated opposition to their plans. Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming their goal, except to describe it in abstract terms like “social justice” and an “open society.” They do not commit themselves to specific institutional aims, whether it is the dictatorship of the proletariat or government ownership of the means of production. Instead, they focus on identifying their opponents as “Haves” and the “privileged,” and work to build a power base to undermine the existing arrangements based on private property and individual liberty, which lead to social inequalities. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify goals, they are better able to organize coalitions of the disaffected, which otherwise would be divided over the proper means to achieve their ends…

The demagogic banner of Alinsky’s revolution is “democracy”…But it is not democracy as Americans understand it. Instead it is a radical democracy in which earned hierarchies based on achievement and merit are targeted for destruction…

“[The] failure of many of our younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous,” Alinksy wrote. What he really meant was their honesty was disastrous—their failure to understand the art of mis-communication. This is the art he taught to radicals trying to impose socialism on a country whose people understand that socialism destroys freedom. Don’t sell it as socialism. Sell it as “progressivism,” economic democracy,” “fairness,” and “social justice.”

Obama, of course, not only worked in various Alinskyite organizations, but also taught Alinsky workshops, although he never met Alinsky himself. And it’s not as though these facts were unknown in 2008; they were well-known. It’s just their significance that either was not understood by enough people, or not cared about by enough people.

Also, in line with the trumped-up charges that the Tea Party is racist, see the following from Horowitz’s book. Here he is quoting a biography of Alinksy written by an admirer, Sanford Horwitt, entitled Let Them Call Me Rebel, in which Horwitt describes a group of students in the early 70s who were planning to go to a Tulane University speech given by George H.W. Bush (who was UN representative at the time). They asked Alinsky for advice on how to picket or otherwise protest the speech:

That’s the wrong approach, he rejoined—not very creative and besides, causing a disruption might get them thrown out of school. He told them, instead, to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and whenever Bush said something in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and wave placards, reading, “The K.K.K. supports Bush.” And this is what the students did with very successful, attention-getting results.

Alinsky did not of course invent this sort of ends-justifies-the-means moral inversion. But he preached and perfected it. The fact that Obama was always known to be an Alinskyite should have engendered a great deal more skepticism and loathing than it did. We are reaping the dubious rewards now.

IRS, Obamacare. What could possibly go wrong?

The New Neo Posted on by

From 2009 to 2012 Sarah Hall Ingram was commissioner of the IRS tax-exempt organization office. You know, the one that, under her aegis, targeted the right for some very special tender loving care.

But some time after that, Ingram was appointed head of the IRS’ Obamacare office.

Nice.

ABC News seems to have gotten this information today from the IRS. Isn’t it interesting what the MSM is still capable of discovering if only it’s a tiny bit motivated, which it hasn’t been in quite some time?

What’s more—and this starts sounding like The Onion, except of course it’s not:

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Grant announced today that he would retire June 3, despite being appointed as commissioner of the tax-exempt office May 8, a week ago.

[ADDENDUM: In further news (again, uncovered by the MSM—in this case the WaPo), there’s some doubt as to whether the security leak that supposedly occasioned the AP phone record seizure was actually a security leak at all.]

Holder recused himself…

The New Neo Posted on by

…from the decision about the AP phone records, but he can’t remember when. Or how. And he didn’t do it in writing, which is exceedingly odd (meaning “suspicious”).

Will Holder finally get his well-deserved place under that bus? And if so—what difference will it make? He’s done plenty of damage already. And Obama will just replace him with someone equally willing to do the same things as Holder.

There’s long been speculation about Holder’s imminent leavetaking, and so far I have always said ain’t gonna happen. I said it in this post in 2010, and I said it in this post in 2012, and gave my reasons both times.

Those reasons still hold; nothing has changed in the proxy mind/meld relationship between Holder and Obama. But in the 2012 post I added:

I suppose Obama might sacrifice [Holder] if it becomes necessary for strategic reasons (after all, he’s been known to do such a thing). If the decisions they both support because so unpopular Obama feels the need to disassociate himself from Holder and use him as scapegoat, it will happen. But this would only occur in the most extreme of situations…

Has that extreme situation finally arrived? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I think it’s at least possible now, whereas before I felt very very confident that Holder was staying.

Speaking of mind-melds with Obama, here’s another funny bit from Jon Stewart about Obama’s know-nothing stance, much like Holder’s (or perhaps Holder’s is like Obama’s). When Jon Stewart is mocking Obama this way, you know there’s trouble in the Obama administration. The part I’m talking about begins at 2:20, where I’ve started the tape, and ends around 4:24, with a great line about how Obama might have learned about the killing of Bin Laden:

[ADDENDUM: A lot more, here. The AG can’t “informally” recuse himself; it must be done in writing and notice given.]

Those talking points emails

The New Neo Posted on by

Stephen F. Hayes analyzes the lies the administration told about the emails related to the Benghazi talking points.

And that involves only the emails the White House has deigned to release; there are apparently many others that remain private.

But this focus on the emails is somewhat like paying a lot of attention to a hangnail with a limb is becoming gangrenous. I understand that the emails at least furnish us with something obvious and analyzable to deal with—actual evidence that can be compared to the actual evidence of what the Obama administration has been saying (although one trick the Obama administration has long used, about Benghazi and myriad other topics, is to say a whole bunch of contradictory things so that they can point to one occasion where they actually said the right thing). The larger, deeply important, and still-unanswered questions with Benghazi, however, involve the lamentable lack of prior security, the motivation behind the lies about the video, the imprisonment of the video’s creator, the failure to respond to the attack (in particular the “stand down” orders), the whereabouts and activity of Obama on the night of 9/11/12, the odd role of Candy Crowley in the second debate, and the inadequacy of the subsequent investigation of Benghazi by Obama’s appointees.

What’s more, the continuing attempts by Obama and company (including his still-remaining press lackeys, of whom there are plenty) to paint efforts to understand what happened re Benghazi as much ado about nothing are, quite simply, reprehensible.

The liberal government bureaucracies

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the many many reasons that conservatives should want to curb government power is that bureaucracies are manned and womanned by liberal Democrats, so any biases that are not already built into the structure and charges of the agencies themselves will almost certainly lean in the pro-left direction.

We see that quite clearly in the IRS scandal, whoever may have ordered it. How high the rot goes is an exceedingly important question to answer, but one can assume the rot goes up and down and all around:

Eliana Johnson points out that the director of the Office of Rulings and Agreements, which oversees the determination of tax-exempt organizations, is a donor to Barack Obama. Holly Paz donated $2,000 to Obama’s 2008 campaign, according to Open Secrets, which maintains a database of individual political donations.

Liberal Democrats comprise the vast majority of federal bureaucrats. For example, in the past two presidential races, roughly 85 percent of the money contributed to a candidate by IRS employees went to Barack Obama.

This is consistent with what I observe here in the Washington, D.C. area. I estimate the percentage of bureaucrats to be at least 85. And most federal bureaucrats I know hate conservatives as a class…

What’s the remedy? I can’t think of one, other than the aforementioned trying to limit the power of the federal government bureaucracies. The bias towards liberals is baked in the cake, as it were, because liberals rather than conservatives tend to be more attracted to those sorts of jobs as a career path.

[ADDENDUM: Much much more here.]