Lies We Can Believe In
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Obama was elected because we, Democrats and quite a few Republicans, wanted to be saved from ourselves. We wanted to be saved from our policies, our debates and our guilt. In a time of crisis, we weren’t looking for a reliable experienced professional to do the job, if we had been, McCain, for all his flaws, would have won by a landslide.
The man we picked had no experience and no skills beyond his surface charm. He was irresponsible and that was why the country chose him. His irresponsibility made our irresponsibility look good..Even his racist associations were a plus, they made voters feel better about their own prejudices. Every wrong, ugly, stupid and irresponsible thing that he did only made him more appealing to the people who voted for him.
Every now and then people like to get drunk. When things are a complete mess, that’s when the temptation to open the bottle and pour it down the hatch comes. Things were a complete mess in 2008 and the country got stinking drunk. It decided to be completely irresponsible and, feeling sorry for itself, it elected someone who wouldn’t have been qualified for any position in his own Cabinet.
Since then the country has sobered up. It thinks that Obama is doing a bad job, but it doesn’t know how to tell him that he was only a one-night stand. He seems like such a nice guy and it would hurt his feelings to tell him why he was really elected. It wasn’t because anyone, besides zombie liberals, thought that he knew what he was doing. It was because he seemed like a cheerful bright spot in a dour time and everyone felt sorry about slavery and segregation.
The problem is that Obama won’t leave. 2010 was a sharp hint. Any halfway competent politician would have caught it and changed direction. But Obama refuses to understand hints. He refuses to understand the unspoken message because that gives him power. The power of the rude is in their rudeness. The rudeness is a challenge to anyone with manners to match him equally or shut up and take it. Some Republicans, like Joe Wilson, have matched him rudeness for rudeness; many more, like Justice Roberts, have chosen to take it instead.
A Head of State who refuses to follow the law is engaging in rudeness squared, but Obama is doing what the left has always done. The left refused manners and mores, it trashed the culture, threw out its morals, defied the law with acts of civil disobedience and once in office refused to accept any limitations on their power. And most of the time it won. It stared down the society, the police and the politicians, defied their rules and took their rulemaking powers for its own.
The power of the left lies in challenging the lies that society tells itself and creating the illusion of credibility and sincerity through that challenge. It succeeds when its enemies lack faith in their own ideas, their own policies and their own values. The more abrasively it challenges norms, the more it refuses to follow any rules but its own, the more credibility it gains as a liberation movement.
Obama is the apotheosis of the left’s project, a brat nurtured on self-esteem, weaned on white guilt, educated to play with words and rewarded for staged confrontations with equally staged surrenders. All these qualities have shaped him into the entitled monster that he is, squatting in the Oval Office and grinning from the covers of a hundred magazines, determined to always win the only way he knows how, by ignoring the rules of the game.
If you have ever encountered someone genuinely worthless yet successful, it was almost certainly a man or woman who refused to take “No” for an answer. That can be a useful quality in some fields, but it’s also a perfect way for people with no useful skills to get what they want out of life. These are the people who don’t get fired or denied promotions because it would cause too many problems, who get discounts they aren’t entitled to, because they keep demanding them, who use determination and confrontation as substitutes for knowledge, ability and competence– who become a success story purely based on their enormous sense of entitlement and complete lack of shame.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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One Response to “Lies We Can Believe In”
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I think the thesis that Obama would refuse to leave office is absurd atr best. While I certainly do not agree with many of his policies – particularly his treatment of Israel – I do not believe he (or any other American president) would refuse to leave office. It is not part of American culture and it certainly would not be supported by any other government institution. Even Nixon did not attempt a coup. Not liking a president is one thing, but believing he is a fascist usurper of power is another. This takes the birther weirdness to the next level.
This is easily the best summary of Barack Obama and the circumstances leading to his becoming president that I have ever read. Truly an example of the results of our refusal to judge someone by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Although I never met or heard of Obama while I was at Columbia — even though we were there at the same time and took courses in the School of International Affairs — I did encounter the phenomenon of arrogant, preachy students who used words with no content, and professors who were afraid to cut them off and simply educate. At the time, I viewed such students and their antics as harmless — of course, such students would at best receive gentlemen's Cs and sink into lifetime anonymity. Sadly, at age 22, I was very wrong. I hope the US is wiser than I was, and elects Mitt Romney, who is Obama's antithesis. That will be our national "teshuva".
Absolutely amazing, stunning and "spot on" article! Bravo!