Posted on 07/12/2012 5:18:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
Being president was always easy for Barack Obama.
But delivering on the big words has been considerably tougher.
In part, Obama’s troubles stem from the rigidity of the left’s broken ideas. They admit of no compromise. Consequently, Obama has subsumed his whole personality into an unworkable progressive ideology that was dead outside of academia- and news rooms- until he resurrected it.
It’s the idea that a benign government of technocrats and academics can engineer near perfect justice at the trivial cost in liberty and money to most of us.
Everyone gets a mortgage, even though that’s an idea that already killed our economy once; renewable energy creates jobs, even though the federal investment in energy has shown no return in 30 years; everyone gets unlimited healthcare, even though the variety of healthcare already limited by the government is forcing us to bankruptcy; everyone gets a job, even though producing that result means forcing some out of the workforce. And to deliver on these promises all we have to do is take more money from people who have already given more money than rest of us combined.
What could be fairer?
His life and presidency can only be understood by recognizing this Obama idée fixe goes beyond merely his ideology and merges into that of his personality. Because only when one realizes that he personally identifies with his ideology in the same way that he identifies himself as a father or husband, can one finally understand how tightly he clings to it.
In his State of the Union address Obama actually urged us to model a failed program of the Great Depression, the Hoover Dam, as an example America can use once again. There are many good arguments to support the construction of the Hoover Dam- it’s a neat engineering feat and helped open the West- but it’s didn’t do a thing to solve the issues of the Great Depression it was proposed to solve.
Today, it wouldn’t even make it past OSHA, the EPA, the State Department or the Canadian Convention and Visitors Bureau’s approval processes. Thus it’s a typical liberal big-government proposal that resembles our president- high on grandiosity and iconography but poor on real results.
And in order to reconcile their grandiosity and iconography with inconvenient economic facts, liberals, like Obama, depend upon the unreliable magic trick of redefining words to mean the opposite of what any plain speaking person in the USA would understand them to mean.
With words as their weapons, the “good, kind-hearted, fat, benevolent people,” as Twain describes Obama’s progressive friends, can assure honest poverty for the rest of us- and we can feel satisfied that very few people are richer than the rest of us. And as long as we call that condition “liberty,” all is right with the world.
That’s why good, kind-hearted, fat Warren Buffett agrees to promote a tax he’ll never pay to ensure he and his fellows maintain an ascendancy that can’t be compromised by the majority. Or good, kind-hearted, fat George Kaiser goes knocking on the door of the White House for a subsidized loan for his failing private venture. The first rule of capital is to preserve it in the same way that politicians first preserve power.
And thus, in Obama’s world, everyone is supposed to be happy and grateful.
But we are not happy and grateful and that reality confronts Obama’s ideology.
It was so much easier for Obama to be president when all he had to do was come up with sunshine words and rosy promises, as opposed to, say, executing unworkable legislation, controlling a suspicious congress, creating policy that gives more to his rich donors in order to secure “liberty” for most of us
That’s why Obama talks about immigration reform, but ignores immigration law -or not- depending on how the spirits move him. That’s why he plays the part of constitutional law professor, while ignoring the duty to defend the constitution. That’s why he tells banks to lend money to poor people, but punishes banks through extra-legal means- because they loaned money to poor people.
He can’t be both a president and an ideologue both.
And that contradiction creates misgivings in most Americans; and those misgivings are strongly confirmed by the economic failures they have engendered. All you have to do is subtract the Obama expectations from the Obama result. What you are left with is a remainder that confirms that this isn’t a presidency, but rather a magic act.
It is interesting to note that the essential defect of this president was pegged by Sarah Palin early on.
“But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform,” said Palin at the 2008 Republican convention while she was accepting the spot as vice president on the McCain ticket.
Obama still hasn’t authored anything much but speeches; speeches which contain nothing new; “not one” new idea, said his friends at the New York Times about his “landmark” energy policies. That’s because his progressive ideology is old fashioned, essentially a relic of the industrial revolution.
In every decade since 1950, progressives have been sounding the retreat world wide. Far from ushering in age of hope and change, Obama can be more rightly seen as the last stand of rigid ideologues who think they can make the world conform to their wishes rather than to its nature- “a cry for help—our last shriek on the retreat,” that William H. Seward once warned about.
It’s explains the progressives’ failures, their inconsistencies and their hysteria.
Barack Obama is their last, best hope. And that hope is shrieking away.
Excellent opening statement. It makes you want to read the entire article.
‘“But listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform,” said Palin at the 2008 Republican convention while she was accepting the spot as vice president on the McCain ticket.’
To whit:
From the man whose voice sounds reassuring
Completely firm and so alluring, Like’s he’s lived a thousand times before
And seen the world from shore to shore
With the calmness and tranquility that oozes credibility
With the wisdom and the confidence that seem to scream out common sense
And it makes you feel just like a babe
Daddy holding you tight and safe
Hush babe everything’s all right, Daddy’s gonna stay with you tonight
Now he’s got you by the balls, he can sell you anything at all
From morality to diamond rings to genocide to magazines
From religion to cosmology to the end of a democracy
- Danny Elfman, Oingo Boingo, “New Generation”
The rest of the song is equally germane to the Obamination. http://www.boingo.org/lyrics/NewGeneration.html
Obama can be more rightly seen as the last stand of rigid ideologues who think they can make the world conform to their wishes rather than to its nature-
Unfortunately, 0bama was born 95 years too late. Joseph and Vladamir would have been so proud of their boy.
5.56mm
You said it
Sadly, there is no such thing as a benign government of technocrats and academics. They may believe that they mean well, but the very foundations of their ideology—that you institutionally place the welfare of the group ahead of the welfare of the individuals within the group—inevitably leads to the destruction of individual liberty. Once the population begins to feel the pain it becomes intransigent forcing the so-called benign government to move toward totalitarianism. Consider the shift from legislation to regulation and executive order.
Obama's ideology has been tried over and over in history and has always failed. If that does not come to pass in our situation, we have only God and the wisdom of our founders to thank. I fear that if it does come to pass we will have ourselves to thank.
Obama is one of those guys who can talk a good fight, but put him in the ring, and he’s trying to crawl out under the ropes.
Sure Hussein is good at strutting around, eating waygu beef, making pronouncements, bowing to foreign dictators and potentates, spending our money, destroying the economy, weakening our defenses, unsealing our borders, running guns to mexico, issuing edicts for us peasants to follow BUT
Every day he must wake up in fear that he will be exposed as the fraud he is and shown to be a usurper! and
it's obvious he didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express because he's NEVER shown that he is even a little adept at playing president!
Fantastic article, excellent.
“Obama’s ideology has been tried over and over in history and has always failed. If that does not come to pass in our situation, we have only God and the wisdom of our founders to thank. I fear that if it does come to pass we will have ourselves to thank.”
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I don’t understand the IF! It IS being tried here after we have fought against it in war after war and it WILL fail, there is no more doubt of that than there is that water is wet. The only question I see is whether we can manage to crawl out from under the rubble, the structure that the founders gave us more than two hundred years ago has already crumbled.
What scares me most is the helpless condition of so many Americans who may have a high school diploma or even a college degree but don’t have the education that an eighth grade dropout used to have. Many literally cannot name a single founding father of this nation and have no idea what country we went to war against to gain independence. This is something that cannot be quickly turned around. A huge percentage of Americans have the logical thinking ability of Joe Biden AT BEST AND THAT IS ON A GOOD DAY.
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