I really hate President Obama. I hate him with the white-hot intensity of 1000 suns. That being said, I can’t help but note that it is a genuine human tragedy that a man who’s very presidency is historic by virtue of his mere physicality is LITERALLY wadding up an opportunity to be hailed as the savior of his country and throwing it in the trash because of his stubborn refusal to throw away his ideological straitjacket. It is amazing to see the power of quasi-religious fervor in action–an unwavering belief in a course of action taken utterly without regard to the consequences. The cognitive dissonance must be killing him!
With bad economic news mounting, Obama has the chance here to put the OPPOSITE of everything he has tried into action–HIS methods aren’t working, why not give it a whirl? He doesn’t seem to grasp that the PEOPLE dont CARE whether the means he uses to turn the economy around are consistent with HIS worldview or not–they wouldn’t CARE if it was laissez-faire capitalism that did the job HE would get the PERSONAL enduring credit for saving us from this mess. He would be hailed as the second coming of the Founders forever, he’d probably be point on Mt. Rushmore. That he is not trying to accomplish this is dispositive proof that he suffers from some manner of ego deformation in that his entire image is vested NOT selfishly in his OWN personal success, but self-sacrificially in success of an external ideology. For all his haughty mien, there is a lack of a “there” there with regards to his conception of self, and no amount of Mussolini faces can hide it–he is an Empty Suit wed to a null set of ideas that are destroying us.
Minarchy 
Dana,
One could argue, and I think rightly, that it was laissez-faire capitalism that got us into this mess to begin with, with the very ones who talk a mean game about the “free market” then begging for the very kinds of “handouts”, uh, that’s “bailouts” that people like you rail against when it comes to so-called “NAMs” (even though, at present, about one in six Americans owes their very existence to some sort of gov’t assistance program-including a heck of a lot of Whites, including those in the Tea Party). Well, as it turns out, those programs-begun by Bush, and continued by Obama-have stemmed the tide of bloodletting on the markets. But it’s still a long way toward fixing them, and I’m sorry, more of what got us here to begin with ain’t the way to fix it.
It fascinatesme how you and those of your ilk can blame Obama for everything under the sun, yet be completely silent when it comes to Bush, who presided over the biggest deficit ever seen in US history, when he started out with a surplus, thanks to Bill Clinton’s balancing the budget.
But, given the psychology involved (yea yea, we get it, you just HATE HATE HATE stuff like that), perhaps it makes sense after all. Today’s post on my blog takes up the psychological reasons as to why a significant-and growing-number of Americans-like YOU hate Obama with such “1,000 suns” intensity.
Check it out!
O.
Hey Obs
i completely disapproved of huge swathes of what bush did, from his altruistic self sacrificing conduct of wars fought not to win but to SERVE the enemy, to the bailouts, to HIS push for increased minority homeownership at the publics expense, to his views on immigration, his religion and more things than i can remember right now to detail
thing is–he ain’t prez anymore and i wasnt ADDRESSING things like that in THIS post–but addressing OBAMAS refusal to break out of his ideological shell EVEN IF the end result might be to save the country and provide him a place among the greatst luminaries of our presidents.
Andre Maurois asserted that people who are *highly intelligent but not at all creative* tend to be rabid believers in *systems* and often apply these systems more rigidly and literally than their creators ever envisaged. I would perhaps modify Maurois’s line to *highly EDUCATED but not at all creative*, but the basic thought is correct. C S Lewis expresses a similar point in his description of Mark Studdock, the sociologist who is protagonist of That Hideous Strength:
“..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”
See my post the dictatorship of theory for related thoughts.
hm i read perelandra and that hideous strength when i was a kid right after the narnia books, maybe 30 years ago now(!)? i think a refresher may be in order
It is like that old joke:
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Dogmatic theories are great for learning a new concept or introducing new ideas, but once understood you need to loosen the strait jacket.
To be fair, I see some of the same wedded-to-ideology with free-market types. They seem to hold a fear that if any collective action were ever allowed it would invalidate the general correctness of the principles. This is most evident in immigration and free-trade arguments.
testing
testing again
completely silent about Bush
17,000 results
In the end the US has been taken over by a Rentier class of parasitical rich. These bloodsuckers are busy offshoring American Peasant jobs to the third world while at the same time importing the third world into America. This process will continue until there is a revolution in which power is stripped from Wall Street and other oligarchs. Obama is but a bit player in all this.
Politically the Rentier class need the Democrats to take the lead for the next few years. They got as much out of the Republicans as they could (much lower taxes on the rich) but there are some jobs that only the Democrats can do; like passing a corporate friendly health care reform and cutting social security. But Obama needs help from the Rentier class; specifically he needs them to outragously attack him in order to reinforce the cohesion of his left leaning supporters.
In the end all the fervid concentration on the differences between individual leaders, whether it be Clinton, Bush II, or Obama, is a deception away from what really matters, the policies the governments enacts. It is a little like going to a symphony and obsessing over who the conductor is. True, just like a conductor, the President picks the key players of his orchestra (government). But what really matters is the piece of music being played; and for quite some time it has been the Rentier class’s Ode to More Wealth for US that the various conductors have been playing. Now sure, each conductor puts a little of his own personal style and flair into the piece. And as mentioned above, some conductors might push the woodwinds (taxcuts for the rich) a bit more while others favour the strings (cutting SS). But in the end the end goal of each symphony, more concentration of wealth to the Rentier class, remains the same.
Totalitarianism is expensive and risky, but just like rape, if the population openly consents to it (in this case by means of an election), it is not totalitarianism. So if the Rentier class can get the American people to openly consent at the ballot box to the rough pounding that the rich have been dishing out so much the better. And since hate is a much more powerful emotion, and much easier to provoke than love, look for continued outrageous attacks on Obama. These are not intended to hurt Obama, or bring him down, these are intended to convince wayward left-leaning voters to consent to at least two more years of depredation. Just look at how hard the establishment left-leaning blogs are pushing all these attacks on Obama.
On the one hand with this whole Tea Party thing, it is depressing to see the Peasant’s adolescent attempts at class struggle. But on the other hand at least they are stirring, albeit in the wrong directions, which is more than we can say for the Bourgeoisie, who concentrate much more on problem solving than in changing existing power relations. The Peasants of the Tea Party remind me of a young teenager who lives with an overbearing father (Rentier class) who beats both the kid (Peasants) and his shrill and shallow mother (Bourgeoisie). The kid instinctively understands the injustice of the situation but he has lived so long in fear of his father that instead of taking him on directly he instead cowardly directs his rebellion elsewhere. Instead of leaving his father’s house (Republican Party), he just moves into the garage where he not only helps his father abuse his batty mother (who refuses to leave her man in any case because she is sure any day now she will lead him to the correct path) but also takes his anger out on the family dog (the Lumpenproletariat) who are admittedly shitting on the carpet from time to time.
Instead of worrying about abstract notions like liberty and obsessing on stupid shit like gay marriage and supposed socialism, the Tea Party should focus like a laser on Peasant employment (stop exporting Peasant jobs to the third world and stop importing the third world to take Peasant jobs). They should also focus on rebuilding the social institutions of the middle class, for example schools, universities, child care, health care, pensions, etc.