Pravda could not have done any better in its bad old days as an organ for the USSR. But the journalists [sic] who wrote for it at least had an excuse of sorts: they lived in a totalitarian society and they were writing for the only game in town—except for equally-compromised Izvetzia, that is.
What’s Clift’s excuse? Is she a believer in the truth of what she writes? Or does she know she’s writing manufactured propaganda, and considers it necessary to further The Cause? Or is she mostly interested in furthering her own career at Newsweek, understands what she has to write to do so, and has no interest in the philosophical issues involved?
It’s often said that you can see what politicians really are about when they’re with cronies and supporters, because they don’t have to clean up their act as much. Sometimes they even forget that they’re still in public, and say very revealing things.
It’s also often said that power corrupts. That’s one of the hazards of becoming President of the United States—which after all is nothing if not a position of great power, especially for those Presidents who also have large majorities in Congress.
And then there are the perks of the office itself. The constant deference shown by underlings. The luxuries, the hundreds to do one’s bidding, the trips and the private airplane and the opportunity to pontificate at will. The knowledge that, even after leaving office, money will never be an object because of the ability to command big bucks as a speaker.
This is compounded by the fact that those who achieve the office of the US Presidency are hardly shrinking violets or humble souls to begin with, as a rule. And we all know—in fact it was a running joke during the campaign—that Obama is one of the most imperial and narcissistic candidates ever to run for the high office, what with his special seal and his reference to epiphanies and the eager and worshiping crowds chanting his name as though in a trance.
This tendency of Obama’s could only be expected to grow once in office, a position in which the president is isolated from the realities of the world and the public, and is surrounded mainly by sycophants and those dedicated to keeping on his good side and protecting their own jobs, often by telling him only what he wants to hear.
So I suppose it should come as no surprise to see the behavior Obama exhibits in the following tape of a speech he made to supporters of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds in MacLean, Virginia.
No surprise, indeed; but it should send a chill down the spine of every American, Left or Right, Democrat or Republican or Independent or Green or of any other party, who hears it:
Note the body language: the leading with the chin and the little smile at the end. This is a man in love with power who is angry at being defied, a man who has absolutely no interest in freedom of speech if it goes against him (no, that was too mild; he has an absolute antipathy to freedom of speech if it goes against him, and this has a long history with Obama—see this and this).
This is a man who says he takes responsibility while constantly blaming his predecessor, and does it in a way unbecoming a president—and in a way that no president before him has done, because of their respect for the office itself. This is a man who wraps himself in the mantle of the power of the presidency, saying “I am the President” at every turn (see this for my previous commentary on that ingrained habit of Obama’s). This is cockiness rather than accepting responsibility, something Obama has yet to do.
The verbal tendencies demonstrated in the above video are habits of Obama’s, and they are no accident. They represent his modus operandi: rhetorically pretending to take responsibility while at the same time shucking it (I’ve talked at some length about this ploy of his, here).
But what I see in this video that is new is the naked, unashamed need to silence the opposition, especially ironic in a man who posed in his campaign as the great listener, the great uniter, the great champion of dialogue. And I use that word “posed” advisedly: it was a pose, and now there’s no need for him to pretend any more.
Have we ever in recent history had a President who gives a message like this of the need to silence opposition rather than allow it and then answer it? If so, I certainly don’t recall it, and I’ve lived a long time through many administrations, ones I’ve liked and ones I haven’t. The closest I can come to this was Richard Nixon, but even he was never as global in his condemnation nor as naked and open and unashamed in his desire to silence the opposition.
Note that I wrote “in recent history” in the paragraph above. I did that for a reason. The closest parallel I can think of is the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the administration of John Adams. Actually, not the “Alien” part of the acts, which only applied to aliens, but the “Sedition” part:
The Sedition Act (officially An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States; ch. 74, 1 Stat. 596) made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its officials. It was enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801.
The opposition was fierce, and the act was so unpopular that it was largely responsible for the permanent downfall of the party sponsoring it, the Federalists. I hope that will be a lesson to Obama and the present-day Democratic Party, who are going down a terrible path that now includes demonizing the opposition, and asking people to report to the White House all “fishy” communications that “misrepresent” Obamacare.
It’s not for nothing that our Founding Fathers felt the overwhelming need to protect our freedom of speech, and to try their best to ensure the rights of the minority party and its supporters. President Obama seems ignorant of this little detail of history—either ignorant, or contemptuous.
Remember that phrase in the DNC video, “This mob activity is straight from the playbook of high-level Republican political operatives”?
Well, Mary Katherine Ham has unearthed the identity of that “high-level Republican political operative” [sic], and what was actually written on his website.
It’s enough to make you weep—for the fact that our country is in the grip of our current Democrat leaders and their lies, as well as the media that covers for them.
I’ve got a piece up at Pajamas Media today on the Democrat demonizing of the health care reform opponents at the town hall meetings. Please take a look and have a read.
[ADDENDUM: I moved this to keep it at the top of the page.]
In the dystopia thread, commenter “ModDem” (moderate Democrat? modern Democrat? modest Democrat? modish Democrat?) writes:
If the whole idea [of Obamacare] is unconstitutional then I guess you think Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional? Or did you not realize they were government run programs like Reagan administration economist Art Laffer who is so dumb he said on CNN yesterday: “f you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait until you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government”
Ha, what an idiot!
There are many out there who do not know Medicare and Medicaid are government run. And what’s more they are successful and more well liked than regular run private healthcare.
I thought I’d highlight a portion of my response to his/her claims:
As for the popularity of Medicare and Medicaid, the poll you linked to is based on the entire system that’s in place now. If you read the fine print, the satisfaction is based on good access to treatment as opposed to managed care plans. But Medicare and Medicaid do not revamp our health care system in the manner that Obamacare would, and they depend on the entire health care system being in place for this access to continue. In other words, even Obama has acknowledged that the cost-cutting needs of Obamacare would result in more rationing (although he hasn’t usually used that r-word, of course). This would put in place the sort of managed care and long delays that have caused problems in Canada and the UK, for example (ever read about the niceties of NICE?)
The Medicare and Medicaid with which people are presently satisfied ride on the back of our present system, and are also subsidized by it. That’s another thing very likely to end with Obamacare.
Oh, and before you get too giddy laughing at Laffer, pay attention to what he actually said (love those truncated quotes, don’t we? They’re so much better than the truth). After speaking about how the costs of Obamacare have been underestimated, he then said [emphasis mine]:
I mean, if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government; I mean the single provider I think is a real problem.
Laffer is unquestionably talking about the change in the system as a whole to single provider, which he sees as the hidden goal of Obamacare that will inevitably flow from it, and to a new Medicare and Medicaid embedded in that system. The person he is talking with then responds to him as though she understands his argument as being about the larger change, because she responds by saying single payer won’t happen with Obamacare.
More has surfaced since I wrote my piece for Pajamas on the Democrats’ “astroturfer” accusations.
Here, for example, is a description of the crowds at one of those town meetings. Sound like astroturfers to you?
And let’s not forget this perverse video on the subject, put out by the DNC itself. Here’s a transcript I’ve made, the better to study it (with my interpolations in bold):
The right-wing extremist Republican [isn’t that redundant? Aren’t ALL Republicans right-wing extremists?] base is back.
[We see a rear-view of a woman standing in the crowd and yelling “…not an American citizen.”] [Yes, let’s not miss an opportunity to make it seem like the nirthers are in the majority in the Republican Party, and speak for them all].
They lost the election [and we won! We won!].
They lost on the recovery act [is this a more acceptable synonym for the now much-derided stimulus act?], the budget, and children’s health care.
They’ve lost the confidence of the American people after eight years of failed policies that ruined our economy [which the Democrats had nothing whatsoever to do with], and cost millions of jobs [and those jobs lost under Obama’s watch? Bush did it! Bush did it!.
Now, desperate [methinks there might be a wee bit of projection here; who’s sounding desperate themselves?] Republicans and their well-funded allies [more projection—or perhaps you’ve never heard of Soros, or the fact that Obama and the Democrats have been exceedingly well-funded lately] are organizing angry mobs [if I were a Democrat I wouldn’t emphasize the word “mob” because of the Chicago mob associations, but maybe that’s just me], just like they did during the election [shadowy reference to just what, exactly?].
Their goal? Destroy President Obama [yes, no doubt they’re out to kill him with those pitchforks they’re carrying] and stop the change Americans voted overwhelmingly for in November [was there a landslide for Obama that I missed? And was Obamacare as written in the present bill the proposal Americans were evaluating at the time of the election?].
[Voice of DeMint saying “It will break him” and then Rush Limbaugh saying “I hope he fails”] [What meanies.]
This mob activity is straight from the playbook of high-level Republican political operatives [more projection here? No, of course not; Democrats and Alinsky-esque community organizer Obama would never think of doing such things!].
They have no plan for moving our country forward [no plan we’ll pay attention to or consider, anyway].
So they’ve called out the mob [once again, it’s an odd image for those supporting Obama the Chicago politician to conjure up—not just “a mob” but “THE mob”].
[Seemingly the same woman as before standing with placard, saying “And I want to know why you people are ignoring his birth certificate.”] [:You just can’t get enough of a good thing, can you? Let’s hear it for those birthers and how much we can emphasize them instead of quoting the things the people at the town hall meetings actually said in criticism of Obamacare].
Call the Republican Party [shows phone number of the RNC]. Tell them you’ve had enough of the mob [there’s that ill-advised mob reference again. Go figure. It must take one to know one].
At the end of the video, the DNC instructs people to call the Republican National Committee to express outrage. Callers who dial the RNC’s main number to voice their concern about the DNC’s charges are told to press 1, which sends them to the DNC’s main switchboard.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those swastikas turn up one day at some town hall or other, perhaps carried by undercover Democrats to make it seem as though Nancy Pelosi is telling the truth.
This is the level of political discourse we’ve come to—under that well-known uniter, not divider, President Obama.
There was a discussion in the comments section here a while back about just what type of tyrant Obama might end up being. Commenter “huxley” wrote:
Stalin and Hitler were aware of how people approved of them, but no more than that. When it came to kill inconvenient people, neither hesitated.
Wake me up when Obama is functioning at that level.
It’s true that Obama is not in the mold of either of those epic tyrants of history. He’s following a very different template.
As a young teenager of about twelve or thirteen, I read the novels Brave New World and 1984. I was absolutely terrified to the point of nightmares by the latter, but the former seemed more odd than frightening.
Yes, I could see that the society described in Brave New World was a dystopia. But compared to the far more horrific world Orwell’s imagination had created, Huxley’s vision seemed relatively pleasant, with the feelies and the soma and the sex. It was much lighter, and contained a certain amount of humor, an element notably absent from the exceedingly dark 1984
As I grew older, I came to understand that the two books described twin tyrannies, the yin and yang of dystopias (“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice”). There was Huxley’s (the author, not the commenter!) clamp of a science-controlled society on the human spirit, and then there was Orwells’ brutal stamp of the boot on the human face forever.
Freedom is what’s missing from either vision. Yes, if I was forced to choose, I’d choose Huxley’s world over Orwell’s. But both societies are nightmares.
Obamaworld is not like that of 1984 (except for his habit of Orwellian Newspeak); it’s a kinder, gentler universe more like that of Brave New World, where people are ministered to for their own good, soft music plays in the background, and we’ve got sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Meanwhile, liberty is just as dead in that world as in the other. And it’s hardly necessary to kill people for that to happen.
Yes, the following clip of Carla Fracci is almost irredeemably corny. It features one of the oldest (and most old-fashioned) ballets in existence, “La Sylphide.”
And Nureyev as the male dancer looks exceedingly uncomfortable. The restrained and delicate style required was most definitely not his much more flamboyant cup of tea.
And then there’s the camerawork, which had me tearing my hair out as it breaks to reaction shots of Nureyev during some of Fracci’s most delightful moments.
But Fracci, ah Fracci! Please be patient and watch the whole thing, in order to see what genius can do. She’s made entirely of gossamer and air:
I think part of it is the whiteface, which is a characteristic of the Joker persona, but is easy to read as having racist (or at least racial) overtones.
But by far the main reason for the outrage is that the agitprop of the poster shocks the Left by taking a page out of the Left’s own playbook: “Hey, wait a minute,” they say, “we’re the ones who are supposed to be clever and audacious enough (and trendy and artsy and ironic enough) to do that sort of thing—not you!”
