[andy58-in-nh]

A key to understanding Obama is to acknowledge that he is not that deep a thinker. His worldview is not as profound, albeit misguided as that of his educators.

Where others have assumed the President's penchant for cliché and indistinct language a gauge of advanced intellect, I detect the presence of superficiality. Perhaps it ought to be unsurprising that curious Americans have not been made privy to Obama's college records, lest others advance the same diagnosis and be left with uncomfortable, unanswered questions.

What Mr. Obama does possess in addition to the useful charms and low arts of popularity is an unshakable faith in his own intellect and rectitude. The proper term for such misplaced faith is "arrogance" and as you well note, he is "arrogant enough to assume that he is smart enough to overcome primitive, medieval, theocracy with enlightened atheism of the 21st century after the terrorists, like useful idiots domestically, have served their purpose."

To such men, "chaos" is a useful tool to be wielded against those who such a person views as a means to his preferred ends. In my experience, there is an inherent ruthlessness in people who view others as stepping stones toward greatness they secretly know they have not earned. Such persons are never truly concerned with where they stand in relation to others (i.e. - the "ladder of power") because they presume to dwell outside of such metaphysical constraints as "value" and "merit", but rather assume their achievement as a matter of having convinced others to follow them.

There is frequently a pathological quality to people like this: Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro: all were or are far less intelligent and perceptive than they themselves believed, but each possessed an ability to motivate others and to promote a novus ordum on the strength of their personality and will.

That said, I am not prepared to place Barack Obama among the prior cast except in terms of tendency: he has not yet evinced a will to sacrifice his countrymen to his vision; whether he ultimately does depends upon the depth of his pathology and, still, upon the willingness of the yet largely free country over which he presides to allow it.

[nathanbedford]

There is much to provoke thought in your reply but it seems that it all boils down to the "pathology" of our Manchurian Marxist. As you say in the last paragraph [what] "he ultimately does depends upon the depth of his pathology." It is worth note that his career path is strewn with many bodies and he seems able to discard his intimates quite cavalierly when they become liabilities. That is a symptom of the kind of pathology you cite. The cult of personality, it seems to me, is another indicator of this pathology. Before the election I wrote the following vanity which I think is relevant to your observations:

Our Republic has never before been confronted with a chief executive who might actually want to see the end of the United States as a nation state. It is conceivable, and I admit this is a leap of speculation, that Barak Obama, as an indirect product of The Frankfurt School, wishes to see the advent of one-world socialism and recognizes the United States as the single greatest obstacle to obtaining that goal. If he is in fact a socialist one worlder, Obama could very well exploit his treaty making powers and utterly enervate America.

THE OBAMA PATHOLOGY

The idea of the Authoritarian Personality originated in The Frankfurt School as a means of undermining the position of the father within the family circle and thereby undermine the family itself and ultimately the nation as a bulwark against communism. It was heavily larded with pseudo-Freudian analysis and was expanded to subvert all institutionalized authority. Every season we see an article, usually by some college professor with too much time in his hands or sometimes by psychiatrists acting either singly or in gaggles, opining that the current president, if he be Republican, is somehow psychologically deficient. No Republican president or Republican candidate in my lifetime has escaped this ritual psychoanalysis.

A recent excrescence of this genre is the book by Naomi Wolf in which she ludicrously argues that America, led by George Bush, is on the verge of descending into fascism. I have posted my objection to this sort of pseudoscience and I have tried to debunk this cheap propaganda so I am reluctant to engage hypocritically in the same game now. Well, I am going to do it anyway. I aim to indict about half of our whole society. The half, and likely more than half, that will vote for Barak Obama. My psychological conclusions do not pretend to the trappings of the "science" of the psyche and adorned with the word games of Freudian analysis, rather they are rooted in common sense.

The conclusion of anyone with common sense who has seen the films of innocent children singing their Obama songs or who has watched the quasi-military chanting and saluting of the Obama Youth in military garb must conclude that there is something very, very wrong with these people. I remember when I first saw the YouTube Children singing their Obama song I became conscious after a while that my mouth was gaping open, so appalled was I. My reaction to seeing the paramilitary gang marching into the karate hall was a mixture of embarrassment that these kids would make such fools of themselves and anger that adults would so brazenly manipulate children. Then I felt a creeping sense of unease that there was something potentially very sinister going on. Dear merciful God, this is Orwellian!

Beyond a very healthy repugnance to the spectacle of brainwashed children put on display, beyond the inescapable Maoist symbolism of it all, a commonsense person asks, what kind of man would permit this to go on in his name? What kind of parent would not seek to protect his child from such a man? What kind of pathology would lead parents who presumably love their children to consign those children to the demons of mind control? How could Americans fall for such a transparent cult of personality?

Unfortunately, we need not be uncertain about what kind of man would permit this grotesquerie to be advanced in his name. History provides us with plenty of examples: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-Il come to mind and now we add Barak Obama to the list. Why has he not spoken out and repudiated this? Would not a decent man do so if only for the children?

If Obama will not speak out now as a candidate when a little modesty, even false modesty, would advance his chances, what will he do when he gains office with no resistance anywhere on the horizon; no opposition in either the House or the Senate, no voice in traditional media to be raised against him, no institutional resistance on a national level of any kind organized to discourage him? Because he condones this obscenity one must ask, Is Obama really a narcissist as has been claimed? If so, how far will he go when he has the levers of power in his hands when there is no effective resistance to his ego?

How dangerous is Barak Obama?

Is he too dangerous to be put in a place where he could literally get us all killed? Or Is he the indispensable man in some sense? I do not think so. There is nothing in his career that suggests that he is the man for this season. In a time of war he has no military experience. In a time of looming financial disaster, he has no economic credentials. If he is potentially dangerous and if he is not indispensable, why would so many people want to put him in a position where he could do us harm, even get us all killed?

My commonsense explanation is that there must be a pathology, a mass psychosis, that brings people to the point where not only are they eager to make him the most powerful man in the world but they are invoking his name and calling upon him to be their savior. This they do rather than falling on their knees out of fear of The Real God.

This is the Obama pathology.

To a middle-class conservative who instinctively rejects conspiracy theories and normally wants to think the best of people because that's what he learned in Sunday school, this deification of an empty suit is as bewildering as it is frightening. What in the world are these people thinking? Do they not weigh the risks of consigning their fate to an unqualified man, worse, a person tainted his whole life with stunningly dangerous confederates including felons and Communists and terrorists? What is the upside? What is it about this man whose career is utterly uninterrupted by any accomplishment which would motivate these people to risk their children and my children to whatever he might do to them? How do they know? How can they be sure? Don't they have any doubts?

My problem is that I am seeking after that which I cannot find. I want to find an explanation in logic for a phenomenon of emotion. It is easy for middle-class conservatives to overlook the power of emotion even though history provides plenty of examples even within our own culture in America. Can logic explain why so many drank Jim Jonse's Kool aid? Why Charles Manson commanded such blood loyalty? How many cheered OJ Simpson's acquittal? Why did princes Diana's passing traumatize a nation? These are not questions which are answered with everyday commonsense. One almost has to go to the Bible to see the answer in Old Testament allegory which lets us know that evil is and there will always be worshipers of the golden calf.

I fear that in November we conservatives might find ourselves involuntarily embarked upon a journey that is foreign to our epistemology. We may be going into dark places and we might well be pushed into a netherworld where our common sense values are of no use because it is a place where down is up and black is white, a place where gravity does not pull but pushes, a place where we will need a pocket translator in order to converse in English with our government, our children's teachers, and our keepers even though they superficially use the same words we do. We sense we are about to be overwhelmed by forces guided by the ghost of Saul Alinsky.

I fear the downside of the Obama Pathology after his election may extend to dimensions we cannot begin to fasten to our everyday understanding or to our common sense. We have no way of knowing what will come because we don't know anything really about Barak Obama. We do not know if he is purely evil, we do not know if he is a committed communist, we do not know if he is a racist, we do not know if he wishes to see the submergence of the United States into a greater world order, we do not know if he is a megalomaniac, we do not even know, God help us, if he hates America. We do not know, in short, if we are backs - to- the- wall confronted with the Liberals' quadrennial nightmare: A real Authoritarian Personality.

We do know that Barak Obama has already encouraged a cult of personality whose implications are truly frightening and fundamentally un-American.