Obama's credit-grab

How's this for hubris: President Obama extolling his "new strategy" in Iraq -- even though it never would have succeeded had his original vision prevailed?

The president struck a triumphal tone this week about the Iraq mission coming to an end -- but shunned the word "success." He spoke of "ending" the war, but took pains to avoid context.

Indeed, Obama couldn't bring himself to give a shred of credit to the man who most deserves it: George W. Bush.

Bush's surge -- and Gen. David Petraeus' on-the-ground leadership -- created the conditions for Iraqis to take full control of their country, allowing Obama last year to introduce his "new strategy."

At the time, then-Sen. Barack Obama said of the surge: "20,000 troops is not going to make a difference."

A year later, he responded to Bush's State of the Union Address by declaring that "tonight we heard President Bush say that the surge in Iraq is working, when we know that's just not true."

Obama's lack of graciousness even barred him from noting that his speech occurred 20 years to the day after the invasion of Kuwait. He couldn't offer even a small nod to the first President George Bush, who led the liberation of Kuwait.

It is overbroad to assert that to an ideologue there is no history but only ideology. Ideologues on the right are concerned with history and, even when a few have distorted it, they at least often feel some sort of intellectual obligation to deal with it. But to an ideologue of the left, history is but one more indicia of slavery. The leftist has been bequeathed an intellectual matrix that tells him that history, all history, is a lie and the only truth which can be relied on is the truth of Marxism. So it becomes ultimately true that there is no history to the leftist but only ideology.

We have seen how this works in our modern universities in which, operating under the critical theory provided by The Frankfurt School, conventional history is "deconstructed" and a new reality is substituted. We see this baleful phenomenon prominently at play in black studies departments and women's studies departments. But the cancer has metastasized deep down into our educational system touching even kindergarten kids.

So when Obama speaks hypocritically and utterly dismisses history, even history that he himself had personally created, it is not so much a question of arrogance, although arrogance is a necessary precondition for this kind of intellectual vacuity, but it is rather a spasm of ideology. Obama cannot conceive that George Bush, the apotheosis of cracker conservatism and the hyper patriot who personifies America as the aggressive obstacle to the on-March of Marxist destiny, could possibly play any role other than that preordained by his Marxist ideology.

For Obama, ideology is history and therefore to Obama it is history that says Bush: bad, Obama: good. Obama has an eschatology cobbled together from Marxism and Black liberation theology. It is virtually immune to reality. Just as the African-American community which has demonstrated by its votes decade after decade that it is utterly immune to the reality of their political condition in America's cities, a plight which that ideology has visited upon them. Reality, as Mae West said about goodness and the process by which he acquired a diamond ring, has nothing to do with it.

Alas, Obama's distorted eschatology is not an isolated example of the triumph of ideology over reality.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

WAKE UP AMERICA