AMERICA 101 WITH DEAN OBAMA

Obama has divided our country as no other president in history has done. The signs were there during the campaign, but too many were caught up in his aura. His polarizing finally became obvious with the 'teachable moment' and the police who acted 'stupidly'. In his July 2009 speech (doesn't give press conferences), he undeniably played the race card, which he attempted to cover with the first [of many to come] bogus 'summits'.

Obama excoriates the insurance and pharmaceudical companies, Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, British Petroleum and other oil companies, and yet takes their millions in campaign contributions. He is a man of many conflicts, as he tells us:

"We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

And yet he drives around in mega SUVs, orders extra crispy, french fries with onion rings, and keeps the Oval Office at a crisp 84 degrees. Obama is the so-called post racial president, but is race baiting the newly passed Arizona illegal immigration law, without reading it. Otherwise, he would not misrepresent a law which explicitly prohibits racial profiling and mirrors the federal law, which he will not enforce.

Victor Davis Hanson peels back the onion in another of his brilliant pieces in Pajamas Media:


America 101 with Dean Obama
by Victor Davis Hanson, May 15, 2010

America is now a campus, and Obama is our Dean
This is the strangest presidency I have seen in my lifetime. President Obama gives soaring lectures on civility, but still continues his old campaign invective (“get in their face,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” etc.) with new attacks on particular senators, Rush Limbaugh, and entire classes of people—surgeons, insurers, Wall Street, those at Fox News, tea-partiers, etc.

And like the campaign, he still talks of bipartisanship (remember, he was the most partisan politician in the Senate), but has rammed through health care without a single Republican vote. His entire agenda—federal take-overs of businesses, near two-trillion-dollar deficits, health care, amnesty, and cap and trade—does not earn a majority in the polls. Indeed, the same surveys reveal him to be the most polarizing president in memory.

His base was hyper-critical of deficit spending under Bush, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and government involvement with Wall Street. But suddenly even the most vocal of the left have gone silent as Obama’s felonies have trumped Bush’s misdemeanors on every count.

All this reminds me of the LaLa land of academia. Let me explain.

That Was Then, This is Now
Last week, Obama was at it again. He blasted the oil companies and his own government for lax regulation in the Gulf, apparently convinced that no one in the media would consider his last 16 months of governance in any way responsible for, well, federal governance. (I don’t have strong views on the degree of culpability a president has for lax federal agencies amid disasters, only that I learned from the media between 2004-8 that a president must accept a great deal of blame after most catastrophes [at least Katrina was nature- rather than human- induced].)

Obama also trashed, inter alia, Halliburton for the spill, as he had done on other matters ritually in the campaign (“I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all,” “The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton will be over when I’m in the White House”). Obama seemed to assume that few cared that his administration just gave Halliburton a $568 million no-bid contract.

Standards for Thee, But Not …
When a Senator Obama a while back weighed in on the ill-fated Harriet Miers, he quite logically predicated his skepticism on a dearth of publications (though I found that embarrassing at the time since Senator/Law Professor Obama was essentially without a record of scholarly work), and an absence of judicial experience—both legitimate concerns. So, of course, are we now to expect Obama to talk up his recent Supreme Court nominee Ms. Kagan, and ignore her relative lack of scholarly experience without a judicial past (sort of like being secretary of education without having taught anything)? Does the president, who as a senator voted to deny a court seat to Alito and Roberts, think Kagan is better qualified than either, and, if so, on what grounds—more scholarship, more judicial experience, a more diverse upbringing, intangible criteria like once recruiting Barack Obama?

I once wondered during the campaign whether such serial contradictions in the Obama narrative ever mattered. During his denials of ever hearing Rev. Wright engage in the pastor’s trademark hate speech, I recalled Obama’s 2004 interview with the Sun-Times when he was running for the Senate and wanted to boast of his religious fides. When asked, “Do you still attend Trinity?” Obama snapped right back, “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service.” Every week, but mysteriously not one in which Wright did his customary race-bashing?

When for the first time since 1976 a presidential candidate reneged on promises to participate in public financing in the general relations, I remembered Obama’s early promise to do the opposite. The press slept on that.

The list of his blatant contradictions could be multiplied. I’ve written here about the past demagoguing on tribunals, Predators, Guantanamo, renditions, Afghanistan, Iraq, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act, and the subsequent Obama embrace of all of them, in some cases even trumping Bush in his exuberance.

The Never-ending Story
We could play this game with the entire health care debate—all on C-SPAN, will save billions, not cost billions as the CBO now attests, etc.—the pledge not to hire lobbyists or allow earmarks, the pledge to post legislation for a specified time on the government website, the pledge to prohibit his team from returning within 2 years to the private lobbying revolving door, and so on.

The blatant hypocrisy and untruths are superimposed on a constant (it has not yet begun to let up in his second year) refrain of either “Bush did it” or “the opposition won’t let me be bipartisan.”

Where does this disregard for the truth arise? On the most superficial level, of course, Obama realizes that the media is obsequious and sanctions almost anything he does. He knows that his base was always interested in power, not principle (has anyone seen any war protests the last few weeks against Afghanistan or Iraq, or Guantanamo, or the quadrupling of Predator attacks? Or for that matter, are there anti-Obama Hispanic protests over the increased crackdown on employers and greater deportations than during the Bush era?).

America 101
Yet again, neither the press nor his chameleon followers quite explain what is going on. Instead, I think we, the American people, are seen by Obama as a sort of Ivy League campus, with him as an untouchable dean. So we get the multicultural bromides, the constant groupthink, and the reinvention of the self that we see so often among a professional class of administrator in universities (we used to get their memos daily and they read like an Obama teleprompted speech). Given his name, pedigree, charisma, and eloquence, Obama could say or do almost anything—in the way race/class/gender adjudicate reality on campus, or perhaps in the manner the old gentleman C, pedigreed rich students at prewar Princeton sleepwalked through their bachelor’s degrees, almost as a birthright. (I am willing to apologize for this crude analogy when the Obama Columbia undergraduate transcript is released and explains his next rung Harvard.) In other words, the public does not grasp to what degree supposedly elite universities simply waive their own rules when they find it convenient.

In academia, there are few consequences for much of anything; but in Obama’s case his legal career at Chicago seems inexplicable without publications (and even more surreal when Law Dean Kagan laments on tape her difficulties in recruiting him to the law school—but how would that be possible when a five- or six-book law professor from a Texas or UC Irvine would never get such an offer from a Chicago or Harvard?).

What You Say You Are
On an elite university campus what you have constructed yourself into always matters more than what you have done. An accent mark here, a hyphenated name there is always worth a book or two. There is no bipartisanship or indeed any political opposition on campuses; if the Academic Senate weighs in on national issues to “voice concern,” the ensuing margin of vote is usually along the lines of Saddam’s old lopsided referenda.

In other words, Obama assumed as dean he would talk one way, do another, and was confident he could “contextualize” and “construct” a differing narrative—to anyone foolish enough who questioned the inconsistency. As we have seen with Climategate, or the Gore fraud, intent always trumps empiricism in contemporary intellectual circles. Obama simply cannot be held to the same standard we apply to most other politicians—given his heritage, noble intention, and landmark efforts to transform America into something far fairer.

Like so many academics, Obama becomes petulant when crossed, and like them as well, he “deigns” to know very little out of his field (from Cinco de Mayo to the liberation of Auschwitz), and only a little more in it. Obama voiced the two main gospels of the elite campus: support for redistributive mechanisms with other people’s wealth; and while abroad, a sort of affirmative action for less successful nations: those who are failing and criticized the U.S. under Bush proved insightful and worthy of outreach ( a Russia or Syria); but those who allied themselves with us (an Israel or Colombia) are now suspect.

The Intrusions of the Real World
How does our tenure with Obama as dean end?

I have no idea other than I think at some point Obama’s untruths, hypocrisies, and contradictions will, in their totality, finally remind the voter that he is a citizen and not a student.

After all, America is not a campus. It has real jobs that are not lifelong sinecures. Americans work summers. There are consequences when rhetoric does not match reality. Outside of Harvard or Columbia, debt has to be paid back and is not called stimulus. We worry about jobs lost, not those in theory created or saved. We don’t blame predecessors for our own ongoing failures. Those who try to kill us are enemies, whose particular grievances we don’t care much to know about. Diversity is lived rather than professed; temporizing is not seen as reflection, but weakness.

And something not true is not a mere competing narrative, but a flat-out lie.

TECHNOCRACY: THE DEMOCRATS' TECHNOLOGICAL THUGGERY

We have all heard about the corruption of politics, but not with the force this administration has wielded. We not only heard about it, but witnessed it in a front row seat. The Democrats always overreach, but this time it was in your face, to use one of Obama's favorite idioms. A classic example of things to come was the scene outside a Philadelphia polling place with Black Panther thugs wielding nightsticks intimidating white voters [charges mysteriously dismissed], but most people didn't want to face that little tidbit.

After being dismissed as unruly children, we have seen the likes of Pelosi, Reid and Obama ignore the cries of the American people, shutting them out to make the decisions they want to make while blaming their opponents for it not working and blaming the private sector. Talk is about all they do best, because the actions do not support the rhetoric. This is why you have to focus on their actions, not the words.

Although Obama may have lost his lockhold, he still has a lot of power, enough to do great damage to this country in the next three years. He has his Article 2 powers, and that in itself is enough to scare the living daylights out of every freesom loving citizen.

An excellent piece about this treachery by Phil Elmore in World Net Daily:


Technocracy: The Democrats' Technological Thuggery
by Phil Elmore, January 21, 2010

Force is technology.

It is crude technology, but it is technology nonetheless. Technology is the application of a tool or tools to human effort. This produces a result greater than can be accomplished without the tools used. In the case of naked force, technology could be a clenched fist wielded with intent – or it could be the truncheon in the white knuckles of a Black Panther who is bullying elderly voters.

The technology of force can also be thieving, manipulation and intimidation of any democratic or bureaucratic process, in this case as nationally exhibited by the Democratic Party. Force, as misused by the Democrats, is the application of violence, abuse of process, libel, slander, propaganda, theft and a variety of other criminal behaviors to gain and keep, through any means necessary, the power to rule, arrogantly and presumptuously, every miniscule facet of your waking life.

Democrats engage in this reprehensible, morally bankrupt, hypocritical behavior even as they breathlessly exclaim that their political opponents mean them harm. The example that springs most readily to mind is the bug-eyed, botox-paralyzed, Medusan visage of Nancy Pelosi as she feigned crocodile tears at the thought of those awful, mean "tea party" people waving imaginary Nazi symbols and somehow implying violence because they dared to oppose the socialization of American health care.

Meanwhile, as hand-wringing Democrats engaged in these histrionics, their union thugs were beating protesters in an effort to silence them. A supporter of socialized medicine bullied, assaulted and then bit off the finger of an older man who dared to oppose Obamacare. Supporters of amnesty for illegal aliens attacked Americans opposed to the invasion of their nation. Conservative protesters were pepper-sprayed and beaten by homosexual activists.

Republican protesters risk their well-being whenever they dare to stand up for their political beliefs – and the left-leaning popular media turn a deliberately blind eye to their Democrat fellow travelers' crimes. While all this was going on, Democrats and the media were falling over themselves laughing to redefine "tea party" protesters as "teabaggers," a sexually vulgar term that left-wingers across the mainstream media are now free to use with impunity. Winking and nudging your co-anchors while uttering the word is optional, incidentally.

Take Steven Benen, for example. Benen's a typical liberal whose first reaction to the news of Kenneth Gladney's beating by SEIU thugs was to sneer that, well, if the guy could still walk around afterward, it couldn't have been a very big deal. Why, conservatives must have been busily manufacturing a cause celebre ... and why doesn't Gladney have health insurance? Benen was, in fact, much more concerned with who was paying Gladney's hospital bill than he was with the assault on a black conservative.

That black man – whom Benen apparently thought probably deserved a good roughing up – was one of the many people MSNBC's execrable Contessa Brewer condemned as "racist" for daring to oppose Obama's socialist agenda. Considering the topography of left-wing political beliefs, the reasonable man finds a disturbingly large number of Democrats who are entirely comfortable with the thought of roughing up their political opponents. Failed Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley certainly had no problem with one of her aides knocking down a reporter for the Weekly Standard. Who do those conservative journalists think they are, after all?

When they're not libeling or beating their opponents, Democrats are busily changing the rules to their benefit in the middle of the political process. Never was this more obvious than in the battle over the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy. Democrats in Massachusetts changed the law half a decade ago to stop then-Gov. Mitt Romney from appointing a Republican Senator to fill the seat that would have been vacated by John Kerry (had he become president). The Democrats then changed the process back so a Democratic governor could appoint a Democrat to fill Kennedy's seat after "the Lion of the Senate" died of cancer. When the people finally got to vote on that seat and put a Republican in office, it threatened the 60-vote majority needed to prevent a Republican filibuster in the Democrat-ruled Senate.

The Democrat response? The lisping, bloated self-parody that is Barney Frank sputtered and stammered and spat his way through a statement in which he hinted that the Democrats might do away with the filibuster to prevent this challenge to their imperial reign. This shouldn't surprise us at all; it wasn't too long ago that MSNBC host Ed Schultz said he was perfectly OK with vote fraud to keep those "bastard" Republicans out of office.

In the vote-fraud department, illegitimate officeholders like Al Franken are way ahead of Schultz. Franken stole his Minnesota Senate seat from Norm Coleman by (as tried and true for Democrats) changing the rules in the middle of the process – manipulating the recount of a close election to usurp that election's rightful winner. We can thank the precedent set by Democrat Al Gore in his attempts to commit similar theft of a presidential election.

The damning evidence is clear: Democrats are violent, corrupt, arrogant and self-righteous. A Democrat believes that his cradle-to-grave ideology makes him special. Whatever a Democrat does is justified in his mind as what is best for the masses, regardless of whether the proles know what is good for them.

The Democrats will continue to lie, to cheat, to steal and to trample the Constitution of the United States. They will be removed from power only through the most vicious of battles, and they will have to be dragged, kicking and clawing and screaming, from the table of government. The technology of their tyranny is all around us. The infrastructure of their arrogant imperialism is inescapable. Only when we are willing to acknowledge the fact of their thuggery will we have even the slightest hope of combating it. Only when we admit publicly that Democrats individually are villains will we have any chance of overcoming them.


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Phil Elmore is a freelance author, technical writer and publisher of the self-defense e-zine The Martialist.

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE LEFT-WING PLUTOCRACY

Conservatives live with hypocrisy on a daily basis. Take, for example, the constant disgusting verbal assaults on President Bush, while any opposition to Obama is called racist.

Another example is the quiet, peaceful, and respectful queries made by tens of thousands of citizens to their elected officials on the government take-over of our health care, while several other citizens were arrested for their out-of-control assault of Sen. Lieberman in favor of government run health care.

An excellent analysis of this anomaly in PajamasMedia:


The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy
by Victor Davis Hanson, November 3, 2009

Gorism

The news of this week made mention of Al Gore as our soon-to-be, first carbon billionaire. Accounts included both his earlier and contemporary angry denials that he was greedy, or had used his vast network of government contacts to influence public loans, contracts, and regulations, in parlaying a 2001 net worth of $2 million apparently into a green empire of several hundred million.

In Gore’s telling, he was worried only about the planet, put meager investments into promising green companies, and then, given divine intervention, found himself worth perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

Still, I’m not so interested in how Gore made his fortune, or even the ethics involved of barnstorming the planet in a first wave of scare tactics, then following up with a second wave of financial reaping from what his fear mongering had sown—but rather instead the divide between the world he advocates and the life he lives. After all, with cap-and-trade, our energy is going to go a tad higher—the rich oblivious to the cost, the poor to be recipients of government subsidized help.

To distill Gorism is to live in a 1,000 sq. ft. solar house, bike to work, and take the train on long distances; but to promote Gorism, one lives in a mansion, jets on private planes, and is chauffeured from airport to conference center—a rather heavy carbon footprint indeed. I mention that because this week he has insisted that he only invested in what he believes in and is thus not a hypocrite—sort of like a 1990s Fannie or Freddie director saying he is only taking mega-bonuses because he believes in public support for housing.

A Charming disconnect

What has the liberal leadership become? It garners more Wall Street money than the Republicans. The high-income brackets favored Obama. The shriller the populist or nihilist—think everyone from Arianna Huffington to Michael Moore to Noam Chomsky to Gore Vidal—the nicer the home. Think of the vast diversity of such celebrity hypocrisy: John Edward’s “two nations” is defined by his own vast estate—and those outside it. Michael Moore profits in the millions from, of course, damning profit-driven capitalism.

A Sean Penn or Oliver Stone praises the egalitarianism of Latin American thugs whose socialist utopias would jail both in short order if they ever moved in pursuance of their egalitarian rhetoric. The Obama populist team hires Wall Street insiders to bail out friends, whose firms they will shortly join when out of office.

Rev. Wright is back in the news. In Animal Farm, pigs-on-two-legs fashion he is sermonizing on the joys of socialism as he is ensconced in a three-story, 10,000 sq. ft. mansion, paid for by his relatively modest flock in thanks to his virulent race-baiting (the real story of his Fox-news-aired clips was not his racism or anti-Americanism, but the standing ovations he received from his congregation for his unadulterated hate.). A Nancy Pelosi shouts slogans from the barricades, while her husband subsidizes her aristocratic liberalism through a network of arcane deal-making. Chris Dodd worries about the roguery of credit card companies while he finagles an Irish getaway “cottage” through influence peddling. The list could go on.

More than hypocrisy

But everyone is a hypocrite, you object? Again, the mystery is not liberal hypocrisy—as I have written, after all, pompadour-haired, leisure-suited evangelical preachers are regularly caught in flagrante delicto or up-from-the-bootstraps corporate farmers garner vast federal ag. subsidies—but rather the apparent unconcern that revolutionary populism and the desire for great wealth and the elitism it bestows don’t mix.

What are we to make of the George Soroses and Warren Buffetts and the club of the mega wealthy preferring the populist rhetoric of Barack Obama? Why did a “redistributive change”, “spread the wealth” Barack Obama move into a million-dollar mansion, or a “truth to power” Valerie Jarrett make out like a bandit from questionable insider Chicago real estate deals, or Rahm Emanuel cash grab as a director of a scandal-plagued Freddie Mac, or raise-our-taxes Timothy Geithner in the most tawdry fashion avoid taxes? In short, why the liberal fascination with money and privilege—and populism?

Pick an exegesis

Choice One: There must be some syndrome at work of psychological compensation. For many who seek out the high life, but who are cognizant that the big house, the good vacations, the good schools, the nice night life and socializing, are beyond the reach of most, some sort of genuine guilt ensues. One way of squaring that circle is to go hard left in the abstract as a form of psychological penance that costs little in the concrete—the bloodthirsty medieval knight stopping in at the abbey to confess before the gore of battle.

The more Sean Penn praises Castro, the more the perks of Malibu become to his mind OK. Boat around New Orleans after Katrina and you can cruise around the Pacific Coast Highway with a good conscience. Being rich and left-wing is like a 16th-century sinner buying an indulgence through purchasing a few blocks for the dome at St. Peter’s. Moneyed liberalism allows one to feel good at very little personal expense—surely not having one’s child bussed to an inner-city school, or giving up your legacy slot at Princeton for someone more diverse, or waiting at the LA emergency room with a sick child.

Choice Two: With money also comes a sort of refinement by the very fact that hoi polloi are usually kept at a distance—the Kennedys discussing health care from their beach compound, John Kerry from one of his numerous homes lambasting greed, Governor Corzine, awash in $400 million of Goldman-Sachs bonus money, deploring rightist obstructionism to his anti-poverty plans. In other words, the rich like their alliances with the distant objects of their affection, as long as the many remain suitably distant.

There are never consequences for crazy theoretical positions; money and status ensure insulation from high crime, welfare dependency, or the pernicious culture of the underclass. And to write as I do here is to be envious, impractical, irrelevant, blind, etc. to equally bad rich conservatives (who at least admit to being champions of the capitalism that enriched them and to want others to do as well as have they).

The key I think here is an ill-at-ease feeling, not with the poor, or even with the middle class, but with the upper-middle class, or anyone in general that strives to be rich. This is the image of the town-hall money-grubbers, without kids in prep schools, without proper degrees, the ancient polypragmones of Aristophanes’ comedies who hustle to make a drachma through tanning, pottery, and shipping. Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin is like Petronius’s freedmen who stoop to bite and pick up sesterces in the dung, and are soiled by the efforts at acquisition.

Obamamism’s targets are wannabees, who lack the proper sophistication that real wealth ensures. Again, note the hatred of Sarah Palin and her followers: how dare this upstart sell her memoirs, this winking, you-betcha tart whom we’d never let in a Georgetown party. For many, liberalism, in contrast, is the proper social accoutrement for big money, a tasteful indulgence like driving a XK-150 Jaguar rather than an Escalade, cruising in a Gar wood boat, or having hardwood, machine-worn hickory floors in the kitchen instead of linoleum. Yes, snobbery is part of high liberalism. It is a fashion marker that says: “I want high taxes, because for me they are as superfluous as white lace and crystal.”

Choice Three: There is some real big money in leftwing capitalism. Look at Gore again, and his outrage when asked about the propriety of it all (his argument boils down to: ‘How dare you to insinuate that me, Al Gore, savior of your planet, would ever be interested in making a hundred million off it!), or Charles Rangel’s furor at questions about his corruption, or the Kennedy shock that anyone would ask how the former bootlegging fortune out-trusted ninety years of inheritance laws to reach distant offspring intact.

We don’t associate hardball, tawdry shenanigans with the creation of the Buffett, or Turner or Gates fortune. Even modest fortunes like that of democratister Terry McAuliffe do not receive careful scrutiny when we understand their creators are “with the people” and for whom money-making was always incidental, a brief pause between public service.

Franklin Rains essentially looted what he could get from Freddie Mac, but as a man of the people such despicable compensation was, well, a mere distraction from populism. In other words, liberalism is smart business practice in the world of big money, an enhancement of right-wing capitalist me-first money-making. The wealthier the Wall Street wheeler-dealer, the more likely, in Robert Rubin fashion, one was to embrace Clinton and Obama. Hundred-million-dollar liberalism not only legitimizes and shields great wealth, but says, “Oh, by the way, for a few years I dabbled as one of those lucre-chasing capitalists and found what they do quite easy, actually.”

So what?

A couple of final thoughts. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s fair deal Democratic party, like it or not. The theme seems to be that high taxes hardly hamper liberal elites but are necessary to fund the entitlements for the poor and lower middle classes, who in turn promise political support for those for whom money has become of less interest. Not all of this is new: think of the noblesse oblige of FDR or JFK. But rarely has the quest for the good life so permeated the ranks of liberal elites and been so juxtaposed to the rhetoric of fairness and egalitarianism.

Government—the mother’s milk of the poor and wealthy

The push-back to all this is not Republican, but a populist distrust of elites and the cozy government they craft. Americans by and large not only resent higher taxes, but feel that the additional revenue makes things worse not better, by either politicizing public service or corrupting the nature of the recipient. The rich liberal has others go to the DMV for him. The lower middle class gets a job at the DMV. But the middle class waits in line for hours for service from the SEIU clerk behind the window, who can’t be fired as a loyal constituent of big government. Sorry about the stereotyping of hard-working public employees (who more than anyone deplore the corruption of their workplace), but you get the picture.