Obama’s Dream

This is pretty good.

Of course, deep down I don’t think Obama wants a society like Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.  What he really wants is a society like Chicago, where the politicians have their hand in everything, spend much of their time giving out largesse to ethnic constituencies, and tons of people work for the government. In Chicago, as in much of urban Yankee land, there is absolutely no sense of a private realm free from government, no independence in the sense enjoyed by rural Americans, and no real connection to the limited government traditions of the Constitution.  Chicago is a corporatist and technocratic regime, where the government–as exemplified by a Mayor Daley–is in charge.  Obama wants that level of power and control over the whole country.  No May Day parades.  But no opening a business without “doing your part for the community” and “taking care of stakeholders” either.

Obama’s Corrupt, Power-Hungry, Pushy Administration

What a week!  Obama is making enemies everywhere.  He’s pissed off pretty much the whole political and military class on Benghazi.  The news world finally took a hit with the AP wiretap scandal.  And now the Tea Party groups have one more reason to hate Obama due to his a) special targeting of them in the IRS and b) handing off their confidential information to political enemies–one of which was decent enough to belatedly reveal this.

We sometimes wonder how did such horrible men as Pol Pot or Hitler or Stalin get it done.  Didn’t everyone just hate their guts?  Well, all these men had lots of enemies with whom they dealt very harshly.   But the average supporter or man on the street, who was neither an angel nor a monster, consoled himself with thoughts like, “these are just overzelous underlings . . . if only Dear Leader knew this would never happen.”

This kind of combination of partisanship and wishful thinking has really gone into overdrive in recent weeks among a great many perfectly ordinary Obama supporters.  Obama and his buddy Holder are banking on the assumption that such delusional blame shifting will continue and maintain their respective moral purity amidst all these scandals.

Only a fool would believe Obama is anything other than a political operative willing to do nearly anything to win and crush his opponents.  That’s the whole meaning of the Saul Alinsky inspired community organizing he did, his association with Weather Underground terrorists like Bill Ayers, and his dirty tricks used to win elections in Chicago.  He believes he’s right, he wants power, and he has no serious compunction about playing hardball with the right wing, because he thinks they’re a bunch of evil rich racists that deserve what they get in the end.

He speaks soberly and thoughtfully, but his views are pretty extreme, and this was apparent to anyone living in Hyde Park in the 90s.  Indeed, anyone who could get elected there at that time had to be politically left and extremist.  It was a university town interspersed with black power activists like Farrakhan.  It’s about as far from ordinary America and the life most people lead as you can imagine.

Finally, whether explicitly told or tacitly permitted, there’s a reason certain types of scandals happen in certain administrations.  There’s a reason Abu Ghraib happened under Bush, for example, or that petty financial scandals like Teapot Dome hit the Harding administration, whereas pretty low brow sexual scandals hit Clinton’s.  The scandals each exemplify the fatal flaw of the president involved, whether it was excessive certainty, cupidity, or outright lust.

Think about this.  Bush clearly treated al Qaeda and its supporters as ultra vires and subject to extrajudicial treatment.  He was convinced of his rectitude and purity of intention.  He spoke in grandiloquent terms of vanquishing terrorists form the earth once and for all and ushering in an era of peace and democracy in the Middle East.  The stakes were high and the “evil doers” were spoken of in the harshest possible terms.   The old rules from Panama or the First Gulf War did not apply. This filtered throughout the command environment.  Three letter agencies, unspoken acts of necessity, all occurred alongside the uniformed military, creating a kind of lawless environment in the field.  It was all for a good cause, but people got carried away and thought that nearly anything was permitted.

Was it the worst thing ever?  No.  But it was emblematic of the man, his times, and the kinds of “faults of overzealousness” one might expect under his command and in the circumstances our country faced at the time.

Obama, on the other hand, has an agenda at once much more expansive, but also much more ordinary.  He doesn’t just want to defeat al Qaeda and Iraq, as Bush did, but he wants to defeat a certain cohort of America.  He wants to transform (or bury) that old, fuddy duddy, “bitter clinging” group of rednecks, businessmen, gun owners, and the entire class of people who believe in genuinely American notions of self-reliance and not Marxist notions of common collective welfare.  In other words, his unifying principal–like Nixon to whom he has been compared as of late–is power and hatred of opponents coupled with a messianic zeal to teach them the right way. But he wants to do so by giving away cell phones, minor tax credits, and forcing us to get expensive health insurance.  In other words, the “pot of gold” really ain’t much to get too impressed with.

So, for such a familiar, but unusually ambitious type of politician, there is no characteristic scandal.  One minute he’s spying on political opponents.  The next he’s harassing political opponents.  Then he’s sending guns to Mexico as part of some elaborate attempt to demonize gun owners.  And then he’s spying on the media.  Then he’s comparing gun owners to spree shooters.  It’s all narrow and provincial, though.  It’s like the crappy politics of Chicago, where people are always getting hush money and giving bribes of some kind to Alderman, and things get done but don’t really change much for the better, but Obama dresses it up like he’s Don Henley waxing nostalgic for Woodstock.

People often say history repeats itself, and they really don’t mean anything in particular when they say it.  That said, history does provide parallels, lessons, and demonstratives of the human personality writ large.

I’m reading a good book right now on the imposition of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.  One of the most striking things is how the communists were just so angry and simultaneously confused by their opposition.  They had a pretty good concept of reaching young people, starting off moderate, infiltrating every sector of society, dividing the majority from the so-called rich, controlling media and culture and the like.  But, the real striking thing was their fanaticism and simultaneous confusion.  Like Muslims, they were willing to proselytize for a moment or two, but if you didn’t agree after that, you were simply being defiant, reactionary, a wrecker, saboteur, a spy an ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.

Obama and his hair-brained rhetoric has this quality too.  He starts of appearing even-handed and looking at both sides.  But when one side remains convinced and becomes defensive in the face of attacks, he just completely loses it and loses whatever perspective he once had.  We see this especially when he thinks he’s among friends, knocking gun owners and Christians and defending crooks like Trayvon Martin.

So Obama’s scandals have all the pseudoidealism, certitude, discredited leftism, power hunger, busy-bodyness, duplicity, and all around pettiness that characterize Obama himself.

I hope this does him in, but the guy has nine lives, and certain Republicans are cooperating with his efforts to “elect a new people.”

Benghazi Cover Up: The Media is in Overdrive

The scale of the lies and misinformation that occurred in the wake of this attack is pretty staggering.  Equally staggering, though not surprising, is how the media, such as today’s official NY Times editorial, are in the bag for this administration.  They’re almost Soviet in their degree of indifference to some basic, uncontroversial standards of public life, such the idea that the government should not lie simply to avoid embarrassment and inconvenience.

The NY Times today complains of Republican conspiracy thinking, but they fail to mention (not even once!) Susan Rice, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many of their proxies, all went around for weeks telling lies about this attack and blaming it on youtube videos.  Further, they knew better, and they themselves were responsible for altering initial intelligence reports that pinned this attack on al Qaeda.  This is not exactly a very complicated conspiracy; it’s a basic administration p.r. campaign that clearly was authored and vetted at the highest levels.  It’s like when all of a sudden gun control became “gun safety.”  This wasn’t an accident and you don’t have to believe in the Illuminati to see that sometimes p.r. strategies have authors, planning, and cooperation.

And why did they do that?  At first it was a bit unclear, but it’s become more clear why in recent weeks.  First, the Obama administration doesn’t want us focusing on our piss poor and thoughtless security arrangements in these newly destabilized countries. Second, because their official narrative is that their North Africa policy is a success and that al Qaeda is a waning force  worldwide, it pays to downplay events that show it as a persistent, slippery, and sometimes leaderless expression of the worldwide jihad movement.

Above all, any lies the administration has told are designed to make Obama appear to be more successful than he has been.

Empty Threats

While the prospect of war in Syria is bad, it is also bad to be involved generally.  There is still great value in national credibility.  Obama earlier said that the use of chemical weapons would be a “game changer” and “red line” Syria should not cross.  It’s possible the Syrians just did.  I’m not sure why this is so much worse than the mutual massacres taking place on both sides, but let’s set that aside.  It’s considered a really bad thing.

Obama, the polar opposite of W. and Reagan in his ability to deliver a credible threat, had this to say at his press conference when asked about the changing situation:

So when I’ve said the use of chemical weapons would be a game changer, that wasn’t unique to — that wasn’t a position unique to the United States, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

 

And what we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don’t know how they were used, when they were used, who used them; we don’t have chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened. And when I am making decisions about America’s national security and the potential for taking additional action in response to chemical weapon use, I’ve got to make sure I’ve got the facts.

That’s what the American people would expect. And if we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we can find ourselves in the position where we can’t mobilize the international community to support what we do. There may be objections even among some people in the region who are sympathetic with the opposition if we take action. So, you know, it’s important for us to do this in a prudent way.

John Wayne, he is not.

This is one problem with these types of situations.  They’re unmanageable.  And they demand action or they impose a loss in credibility. Surely Obama should have known better than to make a threat that had absolutely no weight, and that there was a reasonable chance would be violated by the belligerents. 

Our policy should be one of peace through strength.  We should use deterrence and words before arms.  But we are better to remain silent and aloof than to make threats we have absolutely no ability, will, or interest in doing anything about.  We look weaker, and even four plus years into his presidency, Obama still doesn’t get it.

So I’m opposed to this prospect of war in Syria, opposed to the aid provided to the terroristic rebels so far, and also opposed generally to Obama’s handling of it from the perspective of US interests. 

The only thing worse than events to date, however, would be to go further down this road because of the supposed necessity of restoring our credibility. There is no reason to jump in the shark infested waters just because we mistakenly walked a few steps onto the plank. War has its own serious impact on national strength and morale that are more imposing.

Syria and Aggressive War

Americans like to flatter ourselves that all our wars have been just and in self defense, but this hasn’t been the case for a while.  Clearly WWII and Afghanistan make the cut.  And others at least had a broad defense rationale like Korea, Vietnam, and Grenada. Iraq was sold largely in terms of a necessary preemptive defense, but is the least defensible of the aforementioned..  But Kosovo?  Somalia? Libya?

These wars, like the proposed action in Syria, are part of the “idealist” concept of foreign policy and war. These are wars done because it’s the “right thing to do” and we’re “helping the good guys.”

We of course have no idea who the good guys are in this part of the world.  And our track record in these wars is typically doing little more than elevating one group of thugs over the legacy thugs.  It’s basically what happened in Iraq.  And let’s not forget the Christians are on Assad’s side.  So not only would the moral calculus be dubious, but the older requirements that the enemy actually have attacked us and we’ve exhausted other options and the war implicates something other than a nation’s internal affairs are all missing.

So this war is a colossal mistake waiting to happen, and I cannot believe so many people are unchastened by recent events in Libya, Egypt, and elsewhere to propose US boots on the ground.  Doug Bandow has a good piece on the details.

I hope it’s no longer controversial to say wars should be avoided, only undertaken as a last resort, only when vital issues of national interest are at stake, and only when there is a reasonable chance of success. 

Is College Worth It?

Bill Bennett writes a good piece on one of my hobby horse issues.  Frankly, no for most people.  They’re either not seriously motivated, not smart enough, or it’s not worth the money.

It’s not like education of the “acculturating oneself” variety cannot happen outside of college  I’ve learned more reading on my own than I did in college, simply by the sheer force of volume.

Most important, though, college today and its great expense is a consequence of the deadly combination of government and the private sector that so often yields insanely high levels of expense for mediocre quality.  A college degree is approximately 1,000% more expensive than it was 30 years ago.  It’s certainly not 1000% more valuable or 1000% more ROI.  It’s a joke, and it takes advantage of the great cultural weight of a college degree, the great value a degree had back when fewer were offered in the Baby Boomer era, and the gap between benefit and pain that student loans entail.

Truther Industrial Complex

There must be some kind of “Truther Industrial Complex” that gets to work whenever there is a big, politically inconvenient news event.  I don’t recall this getting into swing over Tim McVeigh, but for the 9/11 Hijackers and now the Tsarnaev brothers (and even the Aurora Colorado shooter), we already have people talking about “fake prosthetic limbs” and the massive set up that has taken place. 

Like the JFK conspiracy theorists, there is the slight problem that these guys got into a shootout with ordinary cops, just like Oswald did with JD Tibbett.

I would say conspiracy thinking is a waste of time, talent, and brains, but the one striking thing among all these people is how pseudointelligent they are.  The notion of logic, testable hypotheses, and nonselective reading of all the evidence is completely missing.  In other words, while very critical of officials, they lack all critical thinking.  They simply are results-oriented, stupid, and deranged, as well as possessing a flawed moral sense.  I think they are a sign of the tenuous grip on reality that is implanted in a great many people by our flawed educational system.

It also doesn’t help that you have US Presidents giving some of these idiots street cred.  I’ll never forget Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore side by side in a skybox at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.  What a low point for the country . . . only to be outdone by some future atrocity, no doubt.