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Do Not Blame Barack
American Thinker ^
| October 04, 2009
| Selwyn Duke
Posted on 10/03/2009 10:49:37 PM PDT by neverdem
Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page. I don't think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, he is an evil man. That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil. He mistakes it for good.
Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn't alarm me as much as the average American. To explain why, I'll present something Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero
said 2000 years ago when lamenting Julius Caesar's rise to dictator:
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions . . . . Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.' Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.
Barack Obama is only one man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause. Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment -- to ease immediate pain and hardship -- is certainly in order. But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient's midst.
Some of us lament the presence of self-professed communists such as Van Jones -- and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren -- in government, and how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers. But why complain now? We've had self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers -- and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren -- in academia for many decades. And good Americans still donated money to universities and still sent their most precious possessions, their children, to them. So, should it be any surprise that millions of these children would, knowing nothing and feeling all the wrongs things, flock to the polls and cast votes for people just like their teachers and professors? You may say that their parents knew nothing of these universities' true nature. But it was their place to find out. And Obama did not create the modern academy. He is more a creation of it.
We also criticize Obama for saying "We no longer are [just] a Christian nation" and while speaking in Turkey that "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation." But can we really say he's wrong? Has Christmas not become completely commercialized? How many of us say grace with our families before meals? How many of us pray every day? How many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the "separation of church and state" idea? How many of us say "God Bless" upon parting? Have the majority of American "Christians" not descended into moral relativism? It is here that some will call me a religious nut. All right, but I simply note that a Christian nation would actually practice Christianity and that if we are satisfied to be only nominally Christian, it lends weight to the argument that we're not actually Christian. Of course, we certainly can condemn Obama for attending a pseudo-Christian church and being part of the problem, but he didn't create our secular age. He is more a creation of it.
One thing Obama certainly did help create is the tea-party phenomenon. It is the largest, most impressive grassroots movement I can remember and I truly hope it grows beyond what even the most zealous reader would prefer. Yet, when I hear the protesters complain about the violation of the Constitution, I have to wonder we they've been. Did they miss the activist 1947 "separation of church and state ruling"? Have they learned about FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society? Don't they realize that the federal government long ago exceeded its constitutional bounds? Where is the constitutional mandate for Uncle Scam to involve itself in and/or fund housing, food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid, global-warming research, mass transit, and school sports programs? The fact is that most things the federal government has its claws into are none of its affair. Thus, to only now complain about constitutional trespasses is like having finally noted the invasion of Poland when the Nazis started bombing Great Britain.
We also have to ask how serious most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution. Here's a little test for them: Are you willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional adherence?
I thought so.
The average American has his version of acceptable constitutional violation, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg has hers, and Obama has his. And Obama didn't create the "living document" mentality. He is more a creation of it.
Then there is our putrid popular culture. Effete Hollywood types -- such as the Obama sycophants in
this bizarre Harpo Productions video -- thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty vessel to victory. Yet, while entertainment is a bastion of the left, it's not entirely a creation of it. The reality is that we, the people, empowered them. We watched their movies; laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous violence. We allowed our children to dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth. Like with so many other things, we helped create our entertainment -- a major symptom of spiritual malaise -- and then it helped induce many secondary symptoms. And one of them is Obama.
Of course, nothing is more associated with that symptom than the Shill Media, but I think you know what's coming. Who bought the mainstream papers for all those decades, watched the nightly news and bought all the lies? "How could people know?" you ask? Well, some certainly knew -- and some of those knew better than others.
Like Cicero, I'm sure I sound quite condemnatory, but I'm not here to lay a curse or consign anyone to Hell. I don't want to be found guilty of the George Bernard Shaw mistake G.K. Chesterton criticized most colorfully when he
wrote:
It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.
In reality, for us to have avoided that ever-repeated pattern of civilizational decline, the common man would have to be a very uncommon man, something, in the least, like a sublime moral philosopher. And, certainly, no person will have, metaphorically speaking, a hundred industrious hands, a hundred all-seeing eyes or even come close to enjoying demigod-like mental clarity. Yet a nation doesn't have to resign itself to being blind and crippled, either. We can usually manage one more hand and eye.
Truth be known, when we elected Obama, the nation said "Look, ma, no hands!" with its eyes closed. It required corrupted judgment to be blind to what Obama was. Note that "corrupted" is different than "corrupt." When saying a computer file is corrupted, there is no implication that it's evil; rather, it simply means it no longer functions as it should.
This partially explains why facts often don't matter today. Just as correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when processed by a corrupted mind. And anyone with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in Obama. After all, there were so many indications, from his radical associations to his tolerance for infanticide (that's what you call a clue) to the fact that he once allowed his then two-year-old daughter to listen to rap to his empty sloganeering. Yes, we could've . . . known.
Yet my point here is not about the average person, who isn't reading substantive commentary anyway. It's that even most of us who oppose Obama and are political are just political, content to fight the battle with one hand and one eye. So many of us -- this includes readers and commentators -- are satisfied with boilerplate; it's Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill. This isn't to say there's not a place for such things, as many do need a course in politics 101. But if we want to have any chance of winning the war, we must move on to graduate work and fight it on the deepest levels, the spiritual and cultural. We must scrutinize ourselves and evaluate how we have been complicit in empowering the culture that spawns Barack Obamas. We must remember that those of us who are engaged are a minority weighed against an apathetic majority. A few stones however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million pebbles. But this can only happen if we so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is everywhere.
I once heard a man of the cloth put it perfectly, saying "Everyone is in a different stage of conversion." Every thought we contemplate, word we utter and action we take move us closer to or further away from perfection. And it's always time for another hand and another eye.
TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: americanthinker; duke; obama; selwynduke
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To: neverdem
Excellent Article, thanks for sharing.
To: neverdem
A few stones however, can be substantial enough to tip the scales against a million pebbles. But this can only happen if we so greatly increase the weight of our virtue that it outweighs the vice that is everywhere.Where do we find our 'stones'? McCain was another pebble.
42
posted on
10/04/2009 4:17:42 AM PDT
by
raybbr
(It's going to get a lot worse now that the anchor babies are voting!)
To: Fee
All of what you say is true but while we had maybe six years of power in Washington, the context of the article points out that the left has had power in the land for generations. The left has looked ahead and realized that the key to gaining and holding power was to win the future generations. They did it by taking over the schools, the universities, the media, and the mass entertainment world. Just look out there and you'll see what the article says is true. By and large, people today, of all ages, but especially younger ones, are almost constantly bombarded by leftist filth, some of it overt (e.g., singing praises to Obama in the public schools), to covert (e.g., revisionist historical "dramas" on TV and films or textbooks in schools).
The left has won the strategic battle by winning future generations. The traditional values people were running on momentum from the Faith of Our Fathers and the enduring document of the Constitution and a few voices crying in the wilderness here and there. But, over the course of decades, not years, the left has ground those down and is on the verge of stomping them out. That is the real lesson that the rise of Obama arrows for the future.
43
posted on
10/04/2009 4:17:46 AM PDT
by
chimera
To: neverdem
Thanks for posting this. It really is a good piece of writing with an excellent point. His scenario is true so long as people in this country continue to merely vote on party lines without discerning thought (and many other things, too, like a shilling media, etc.) because people have to start viewing truth as truth and lies as lies without the political filters. Moral relativism is doing us in. And to think, the sucking in of America started with political correctness... SPEAK TRUTH, PEOPLE!
44
posted on
10/04/2009 4:19:03 AM PDT
by
TrueFact
(perimeter alert)
To: NTHockey
45
posted on
10/04/2009 4:22:23 AM PDT
by
TrueFact
(perimeter alert)
To: Jacquerie
46
posted on
10/04/2009 4:25:25 AM PDT
by
plsjr
(<>< ... reality always gets the last vote.)
To: neverdem
"Givning up" Social Security isn't a choice. There is no money. "Giving up" Medicare won't be a choice either. I have been posting for months that it reallyh doesn't matter if they "pass" a bill for Health Care they can't pay for it. We are at the point where we have no choice but to go back to the Constitution.
Gummint should only do those things that only gummint should do. Everything else has to be left to what folks will provide on their own or will pay others to do for them. Our Founders understood this.
Μολὼν λάβε
47
posted on
10/04/2009 4:33:29 AM PDT
by
wastoute
(translation of tag "Come and get them (bastards)" or "come get some")
To: The Cajun; Fee
![](http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14680000/14688139.JPG)
This book should have been required reading before anyone was allowed into the voting booths in 2008 . . .
48
posted on
10/04/2009 4:39:06 AM PDT
by
BluesDuke
(We stand on the shoulders of giants. God help us when they sneeze.)
To: buzzer; Blind Eye Jones
Democracy---That form of government whereby the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.---H.L. Mencken.
49
posted on
10/04/2009 4:42:16 AM PDT
by
BluesDuke
(We stand on the shoulders of giants. God help us when they sneeze.)
To: NTHockey
I agree; but I would demand 12% compounded annually.
50
posted on
10/04/2009 4:43:20 AM PDT
by
SVTCobra03
(You can never have enough friends, horsepower or ammunition.)
To: NTHockey
“I would gladly give up Social Security AND Medicare. Just return the money stolen from my paychecks over the last 40 years. Do that and we’re square.”
Common sense makes a comeback.
IMHO
51
posted on
10/04/2009 4:55:31 AM PDT
by
ripley
To: neverdem
Wonderful essay! Worth keeping and worth sending to others.
52
posted on
10/04/2009 5:11:18 AM PDT
by
syriacus
(I guess the IOC believed Obama's' 2 years of public comments that the US is bad, bad, bad.)
To: Right Wing Assault
To: Fee
Agree with everything you say. Let’s not forget ‘sharing power’ when they didn’t need to.
54
posted on
10/04/2009 5:18:57 AM PDT
by
carmody
To: neverdem
I don’t. obama is just being obama. I blamethe traitors that put him in office. In fact, I saw two more obama-Biden 08 bumper stickers on vehicles Wednesday. Both were driven and occupied by Whites.
55
posted on
10/04/2009 5:27:09 AM PDT
by
sport
To: neverdem
56
posted on
10/04/2009 6:06:27 AM PDT
by
Caipirabob
(Communists... Socialists... Democrats...Traitors... Who can tell the difference?)
To: NTHockey
I am to the point of keep it. Just stop taking it from this point forward. I am willing to say WE took the risk and it failed. So, stop the taking, stop the dumping into a losing fund.
57
posted on
10/04/2009 6:18:37 AM PDT
by
EBH
(it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government)
To: neverdem
Amen......Bammy was elected by DANGEROUSLY STUPID PEOPLE>
To: neverdem
Excellent article! Thanks so much for posting it! It made me remember an experience I had a few years ago. I am 59 years old and have been a Christian all my life. I was in my early 20's when Roe vs. Wade was decided, but I was newly married and it did not really impact me. I would never have had an abortion, but I did not realize it was (and still is) being used for birth control. Through my own difficulty in getting pregnant and my experience in working at a hospital where the "salines" who were too far along to be an out-patient were admitted, I came to a different opinion. Not only would I not have had an abortion, I began to see that it was indeed morally wrong.
The experience I want to recount came much later when my two beautiful twin daughters were almost grown. I would have said that I was as pro-life as it was possible to be, but I was wrong. I am not the "protest at the abortion clinic" type; and I did not go out of my way to express my opinion about the issue because my husband always tells me to avoid three topics of conversation - politics, religion, and sports. This is hard for me since they are my three favorite subjects!
I was flipping through the channels one night and came upon the late Dr. James Kennedy speaking on the topic of "The American Holocaust". I paused to listen and after just a few moments it became obvious that he was talking about abortion. At the end of the sermon he looked into the camera and seemed to say directly to me, "If someone were to ask you what YOU did personally to stop this terrible tragedy, what would you say?" I realized that, no matter how pro-life I believed myself to be, I would have to answer that question, "Not very much." I am afraid that I still do not do very much, but I do give what little money I can spare to the local pregnancy clinic which tries to give these women another "choice". I teach anatomy and make sure that I have my students look at the pictures of a 20-week old fetus and try to mention, without proselytizing, how abortion does kill a human being, not just an "unviable tissue mass". I also speak out in Sunday School and among my friends when the topic comes up instead of simply trying not to offend anyone with my "extreme" views. Although it is not very much, I have reason to believe that at least some innocent life may have been spared by my small efforts.
59
posted on
10/04/2009 6:28:11 AM PDT
by
srmorton
(Choose life!)
To: neverdem
Selwyn Duke's columns through RenewAmerica:
Link.
Selwyn Duke is spot-on as usual. Friday my daughter came home from the University of Illinois to attend her high school's Homecoming weekend festivities. She told me that The Cardinal Newman Society (which is strong at U of I) led an
outdoor confession in the quad area at the college. There were six priests there, dispersed over a large area, some with screens and some face-to-face. There was a huge photograph of Jesus displayed in the center. There were students that are part of The Newman Center that were on hand to answer any questions regarding Confession to those passing by. While there were six priests "working," there was only eight people confessing at the time. But as Mother Teresa of Calcutta has said, when asked why she does what she does because she is helping so few of the world's poor, "I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time - just one, one, one. So you begin. I began - I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand....The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin - one, one, one."
As to U of I's attempt at righting the world's woes by reaching out to a few kids on campus, my daughter said, "You should of seen it, mom. I went to Confession. It was so cool."
60
posted on
10/04/2009 6:33:26 AM PDT
by
mlizzy
("It is impossible to walk rapidly and be unhappy" --Mother Teresa of Calcutta.)
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