Why Obama Disappointed...

It’s no secret as to why Obama disappoints Republicans and Conservatives, obviously. The constant drumbeat of socialism makes the Obama Administration naturally repugnant to those who, at the very least, still pretend to pay lip service to the founding principles of our Great Republic, if only because they are currently salivating at the prospect of being able to wield the levers of government in similar fashion, for the benefit of their friends, again, too.

(It is my contention that no sooner than Obama is removed from power, that the very next, necessary step in cleaning up our national mess is to get rid of the entrenched Republican establishment in Congress, replacing it with actual republicans and conservatives instead of  white-shirted, red-tied apparatchiks. Get to work, Tea Party!).


But since the not-insignificant middle of the American Body Politic is not, in the strictest sense, either rabidly democrat (small ‘d’ intentional), or militantly Republican, but rather squishily amenable to both on an issue-by-issue basis, and these are the votes that put Obama over the top, we must explore why it seems that they are not willing to give our Vacationer-in-Chief a Second Act.

There is a lesson here in the so-called Independent Voter for both parties to learn. The Republicans have pretty much learned that lesson – give the Independents jobs, low taxes, and a war where we’re kicking the crap out of someone, and they’re happier than a pig in shit – but the Other Side has not.

The secret to Obama’s success, as it was, is simply this: at a time of great national stress, where the economy was in free-fall, where the nation was embroiled in two foreign wars, where the electorate was split – on the verge of being violently so – by eight years of mostly-unnecessary rancor, no one with seemingly a fucking clue appeared set to float in above the horizon to save our sorry asses from ourselves.

Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2008 election behaved as if she had the whole thing sewn up, and when it became apparent to her that she might have to work for it, she simply went on television and cried and complained about how hard it was to have a vagina. Hardly presidential. Besides, the specter of Hillary in the White House brought back memories of the worst of the Clinton Administration. The ‘merican People were not going to vote for Hillary, no matter how much Chris Matthews (who would later switch his affections soon enough, the fickle bastard) wanted us to.

John McCain, likewise, left much to be desired. The Maverick had earned that reputation by being, to put it bluntly, a gigantic pain in the ass to the Republican Party. McCain’s resume included the McCain-Feingold Act that has all but assured us an unassailable, professional political caste. His fingerprints are all over Medicare Part D, which is a budget-buster and deficit enhancer. He torpedoed any chance at Social Security and Medicare Reform at a time when George W. Bush had all three branches of government in his pocket, some say out of spite at having lost to Bush. Most days on the campaign trail, McCain seemed confused, disjointed, and all he could say was “terrorism, terrorism, terrorism”, which was the mantra of the Right for nearly the decade prior.

The choice of Sarah Palin to be McCain’s running mate, to act as the whiff of competence to the Senator’s onrushing dementia, backfired spectacularly, as Palin was not Ready-for-Primetime. A point which was proven when she was outwitted on National Television by Katie Goddamned Couric, not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.

There was no one left to vote for, except this, to paraphrase Joe Biden,  “bright, clean, articulate, nonthreatening black man who could turn the Negro on and off as he needed it”,

Given a choice between a crying menstrual cycle in a crusty black pantsuit with her finger on the Nuclear Button, and a guy who reminded you of your crazy Uncle Ernie -- who may have once been locked up and medicated for something he once did in a chicken coop – still fighting the Vietnam War, the People plunked for the Great Unknown, thinking in their little heart-of-hearts “How much worse could he be…?”

It didn’t take us long to find out, did it?

Barack Obama, whatever his talents and intentions, has failed simply because he was unprepared for the job he begged you for over the 18 months leading up to his election. Obama was not prepared by education (for despite all the Ivy League qualifications, it’s apparent that Obama only got through school on an interesting racial heritage and Affirmative Action) , temperament, political skill and knowledge, and ideology to run this country. The shame of the Obama Administration is that having finally vanquished (one hopes) the scourge of racism from this country by the elevation of a (half-) black man to office, anyone who follows in his footsteps is going to wear this motherfucker around their necks like a radioactive lead albatross.

Why did Barack Obama fail, and how can we identify the Obamas of the future, so as to avoid making the same mistake?

The Liberal, given a choice between Fantasy and Reality, always retreats into Fantasy.

Barack Obama was the Great Hope of the nation. He was going to win all the wars with speeches and by handing out cupcakes to our enemies. He would fix all the economic problems with more Welfare, higher taxes, more government control and a systematic stripping and redistribution of the nation’s wealth. The rapidly rising oceans would lower by his decree. The planet would cool off because his radiated cool was just that awesome. Doctor King’s dream was finally realized, and now the previously ‘downtrodden’ would have their day in the Sun. We’d all sing Kumbayah, the Racial Divide would be healed, the Gap Between Rich and Poor would disappear, and we’d have Free Green Electricity pouring out of our asses. Gay couples could finally get that dream wedding with a Vera Wang, registry at Fortunoff’s, four-tiered cake with two grooms on top, and the set of adopted Chinese twin girls to play Barbie doll with.

After all, he won the Nobel peace Prize for being half-black, for Christ’s sake! What couldn’t he do? It was like having every Morgan Freeman Magic Negro role you ever saw all rolled up into one great big ball of orgiastic awesomeness!

To deny that any of this was possible just because, well, reality still lurks at the edges of every dream, was to be called an obstructionist. A reactionary. To be characterized as mean-spirited, hateful, greedy, of being accused of wanting to see children die of starvation, the elderly turned into dog food, and women sentenced to the Star Chamber of Back-alley-coat-hanger abortions -- like that’s happened in a hundred years. To disagree was to be labeled a racist homophobe.

Strictly speaking, a racist homophobe is simply a conservative who has won an argument with a liberal, but I digress…

It would all happen according to The Dream because a) Obama said it would, and b) the Liberal wanted it to. The disconnect between the dream and reality is the next reason why Obama Has Failed So Miserably:

The Liberal Lives By Emotion, and Dies by Reason.

Eventually all the high-minded idealism must be translated into a plan of action. It must be given an intellectual underpinning that explains the all the pros and cons. There must be a direct communication of intent, mechanisms, and expected results that can be brought to the American People. They must be able to grapple with The Plan, to debate it, to explore its possibilities, to point out its flaws, to forge a consensus in the rough-and-tumble world of public give-and-take. They must be able to audit The Plan, and more importantly, The Man Who Gave Us the Plan.

The Liberal Vision under Obama has been to present Congress with a Liberal Wish List, everything ranging from free Cancer Treatment for Everyone to Leveling The Playing Field by making everyone equally miserable. The Obama agenda has been nothing but recycled Liberal pipedreams, a New-New-New-New-New Deal, or An Even-More-Greater-Super-Awesome-Society, if you will. The Plan has always been to extend the Welfare State into every nook and cranny of American Life, to invent new Welfare Programs and establish them in both the government and culture, and then lavishly fund them with money stolen from the people who have it (The One-Percenters. Remember them? Somehow, they all turned out to be Obama donors. Go figure).

That Plan has to run smack dab up against a host of realities. How do you reconcile the people who will, no doubt, be against it? How will it work? Who gets what and in what proportions? Is it legal? Is it Constitutional? Is that, strictly speaking, the Government’s job? Why do we need to do this, and why this way? Who pays for this? How do we enforce it?

The problem is that the Liberal Mindset (I know, an oxymoron) doesn’t carry the thought process that far, because anything after The Dream is Hard Work (see below). It is easy to be a Liberal: all you ever need do is react emotionally to things, and so long as that emotion you feel is the same as everyone else’s, then you’re allowed to stay in the club. The hard work of turning emotion into tangible policy is difficult work. Some might say it’s damned-near impossible, primarily because the reaction from Liberals to rejected policies is not, as one might expect, to go back and re-jigger them, plug the holes, change the paint job, or tune them up, but to simply insist harder for them.

In this way, they are much like the Ayatollahs who insist the Caliphate is just around the corner if only we get more wild-hair-fundamentalist on everyone's ass.

And the harder they insist, the more unhinged they become. It’s like watching a four year old who has just been told by it’s mother that she can’t have candy from the machine on the way out of the store because it will ruin her dinner. No matter how much you scream, stamp your feet, hang on Mama’s legs refusing to let her move forward, and make a public spectacle of yourself, the Candy-Before-Dinner Plan is a definite no-go, just based on the inevitable, foreseeable, quantifiable, undeniably known outcome of you not eating your green beans an hour later.

All Liberal policies have this childish quality to them because:

Liberals are eternal children, trapped in adult bodies. They are forever seeking to avoid – or to receive permission to ignore – consequences, and escape responsibilities. The Liberal speaks grandly of The Future, but knows only the here-and-now. Instant Gratification is his only motivation.

Part of this desire to escape responsibilities manifests itself in the continued failure of Liberal intellectuals (another oxymoron! How could you?) to translate dream into concrete policy. This happens, primarily, because Liberals are averse to doing actual work, and also because the Liberal strives mightily to avoid blame for inevitable failure.

The people who are most likely to promulgate the crap that has flowed from the Liberal Mind for the last 60 years are people who are likely to be employed in fields that produce no actual goods and services, and which exist solely by the Government’s ability to extract the wealth of others.

College professors, community organizers, public defenders, the Think Tank, The Public Education Unions, Lawyers, Activists of a Thousand stripes, have, historically, been the wellspring of Liberal ideals. These people do no real work, in much the same way as they accuse the Ownership Class of doing no productive work. The difference is that the Ownership Class at least invests it’s money in America, a positive force, though often difficult to see, while this Liberal Intelligentsia spends the majority of it’s time tearing down America, a truly negative force.

Think about it: when was the last time you ever heard a positive idea from a Liberal? Their negativity is almost reflexive, and even when they try to put a smiley face on a policy, there’s always the hint of negativity involved. The good the Liberal thinks she (it’s usually a she) does is always cast against certain backdrops – the evils of war, the travails of poverty, starving children, emaciated elderly, oppressed minorities, mutilated kittens – that readily lend themselves to invented villains; White People, Christians, The Rich, The Military-Industrial Complex.

Anyway, fixing the problems that arise in any society requires people who are able to roll up their sleeves and do something, rather than people in tweed coats with leather elbow patches who sit on the sidelines making snide remarks around the stem of their pipe. And therein lies the problem:

If you say you will fix it, you have taken responsibility. If you say you’re willing to help, then people expect you to work. If you say you have the solution, then people expect you to show results. And since getting results requires a work ethic, an attention to detail, a willingness to test often opposing ideas, to incorporate suggestions, to learn from past mistakes, and honest effort, the Liberal almost always fails. Primarily because he or she spends their life avoiding both work and responsibility, sans the real-world experience of having to meet deadlines, or turn a profit, but primarily because:

The Liberal Cannot conceive of a problem that Government cannot fix. The Liberal cannot conceive of any activity that Government cannot regulate, tax or interfere with for The Common Good, as that concept is defined by a Liberal.

You can’t fix anything when this is your central tenet, and when the amorphous notion of 'The Government' implies the transfer of responsibility from individuals to the collective.

This mindset assumes that greater mass of The People are mindless sheep, whose intelligence is suspect, whose opinions do not matter, whose permission is not needed. It assumes the Democratic Process is unimportant. What is necessary to create the kind of society that the Liberal dreams of is simply control of the levers of power, and an 'enlightened' attitude.

However, those levers include the police apparatus. The Tax apparatus. The Court System. The Military. It includes every monopoly of every force you might imagine. The U.S. Government is a monstrosity of thousands of Cabinet-level departments, Bureaus of a Million Sorts, Departments of Everything, Commissions of This-That-Or-The-Other, and they often have overlapping and competing authority, and for most, their activities go on in great secrecy hidden by the vastness of the bureaucracy and public apathy. Combined with the prejudice that comes from 'enlightened' people who are convinced that they are unassailably right, it spells disaster for anyone on the receiving end of all this government 'help'.

Certainly a government that employs that many people, says the Enlightened One, that does that many things, that can regulate, tax, legitimize, legalize, criminalize, can be turned to the problem of say, Unwed Teenaged Mothers and their Fatherless Children? Certainly the country that can turn the Middle East into a glass-topped, self-lighting wasteland is capable of pawning a few warheads for the purposes of ensuring the Homeless have only very best refrigerator boxes under those railroad overpasses? Surely, if we can do all of this neat stuff, then we can simply pass a bunch of new laws to make anything possible, right?

The problems with government in the hands of Enlightened Dreamers as the Engine of Change in American society are these:

a. The Government doesn’t have to show much in the way of results. Since much of what the government does is hidden from the view or beyond the attention of the majority of the population, and is staffed by unfirable people who’s only qualification was that they passed a watered-down exam, who really expects the government to fix anything? They have no motivation to do so, and no one pays attention to them, anyway.

b. The Government can continue to operate at a loss, indefinitely, unlike private business. This has led to the phenomenon wherein every failure by government is chalked up to a lack of funding. The Liberal believes that any result is possible if you simply throw enough (other people's) money, strained through as many government bureaucracies as possible, at it. The result is that nothing improves, everything gets more expensive, and taxes rise commensurately, with a corresponding decrease in economic activity.

c. The same insulation that protects the bureaucrat from the results of his actions, likewise functions to shield him from the realities outside his office window. The government often only talks to the government, bureaucrat speaking to Congresscritter or to another bureaucrat. Therefore, the government routinely under- or over-estimates just about everything, especially costs and results, and the only feedback it ever gets is from…you guessed it….other parts of the government.

d. The Dreamers, as we have already discussed, are unaccustomed to reality, unwilling to actually work, and truly only seek to avoid personal responsibility while transferring the same to some other entity, and to do so for their own peace of mind, rather than the general peace.This means, ultimately that responsibility gets passed around like a teen hooker at a Hell's Angels bender, and no one ever can tell just where it ultimately lands.

Government is not the best tool to use in order to engineer a society. Everywhere it’s been tried -- The Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, any one of a hundred Islamic Caliphates, Ancient Egypt, Rome and Sparta -- it eventually fails. It simply must, if only because it suffers from the basic defect of being unable to cope with immediate change, for government is often large, unwieldy, with too many bureaucratic and political prerogatives to protect, to rapidly adapt to changing situations.

This desire to avoid work and responsibility, while shielding the Enlightened from the consequences of failure,  inevitably leads to this:

The Liberal communicates by Symbolism. Symbols invoke the proper emotional response in the illiterate, and because Symbols allow you to communicate a feeling – sympathy, empathy, solidarity, anger – without ever having to utter words that can later be used against you. The  Symbols themselves are always subject to interpretation, and re-interpretation, as needed.

The “great’ Socialist thinker Antonio Gramsci once postulated that if a Socialists were truthful about their aims, and about how they intended to achieve their goals, no one would ever voluntarily vote them into office. .

Gramsci went on to set forth a theory of “Invading the Institutions” as means of keeping Socialism viable, that I won’t go into here. It’s the first part  that we’re concerned with here.

If a Socialist ever told the truth…

The Liberal is never really able to explain what she hopes to accomplish, because doing so requires an ability to tell unvarnished truths. Liberals are inveterate liars, when the need arises, and live in a state of denial, in any case.

But, words can be funny things. We see this even today in our own politics in the argument over whether or not President Odingbat used the word “terrorism” in it’s proper context in a Rose Garden press statement. Words, you see, have consequences, and if there’s anything we have already covered (repeatedly) in this screed, it’s that Libtards try to avoid consequences like whores avoid church..

One of those means is to avoid saying anything of consequence that can later be used to pin responsibility upon you (hence, we get arguments over the meaning of ‘is’, over the context of ‘terrorism’, the true definitions of ‘recovery’, ‘saved or created’, ‘investments in our ______’, etc.) while still imparting whatever message they intend to convey is the use of Symbolism.

For example, when you see images of Barack Obama standing before the U.N. General Assembly, in the White House situation Room, dramatically posed in one of those supposedly ‘unguarded moments’, juxtaposed with well-known World Leaders and Famous figures, you’re supposed to get the impression that this is a great man, doing important things, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, without anyone having to tell you such. When you see Obama standing before Styrofoam Greek Pillars, you get the idea that this is man meant to accomplish Big Things. Obama with his hand on the shoulder of a black man in a wheelchair, standing in solemnity over the flag-draped casket of yet another Dead Marine, is supposed to give the impression that this is a man who cares.

But, if the reality were to be put into words, rather than images, it would go something like this:

Obama stood before the U.N. and sold his country down the river, apologizing to the Muslim World for us daring to be Americans, and for our shocking respect and misuse of that pesky thing called Free Speech. Obama stood before those Styrofoam Pillars and promised to do that which is perhaps beyond the powers of mortal man and Save the Planet. Obama is at that ceremony for the dead Marine because his policies of winding down combat, undermining Karzai, and courting the Taliban got the kid killed in a ‘Green-on-Blue Incident’.

If words, truthful words, were attached to the images, the reaction to Obama would be much different. He might be burned in effigy, he might even have been impeached.

And even the words of the Obama slogan, Hope and Change were, themselves, recycled, long-held Liberal symbols. “Hope” puts one in mind of FDR and JFK. “Change” was the RFK, LBJ and Clinton mantra. The words themselves evoked a certain Symbolism.

But symbols can also often have power bestowed upon them by others that they don’t automatically have in and of themselves, and Obama has probably fallen victim to this idea. He was the Symbol of a New America; He was the Symbol that, finally, the Black Man was in Charge; He became the New Face of Modern Socialism, his very image conjuring up dreams of redistribution that would make the average Commie cream in his pants. He was more than just a President, he became the very living embodiment of the Promise of the 1960’s in a way that Bill Clinton and John Kerry, actual hippies, could never be.

Obama became the very symbol of the Summer of Love: no more war, no more poverty, only Love, Black Power, Brotherhood, a respect for nature, and free (at least prescription) drugs for everyone.

Now, whether that was ever true is open to debate. I don’t believe that Barack Obama was ever anything except a (bad) politician and Affirmative Action beneficiary who couldn’t speak his way out of a wet paper bag without a teleprompter full of someone else’s words. But, it became true for millions, and probably unconsciously, and it would not have happened had it not been for the Symbols. The Shepard Fairey neo-Stalinist image; the schoolchildren singing his praises; the Union Goons marching in Solidarity with him; the fainters deliberately placed in prominent positions – certain to get on television – at Obama Rallies; 'The Youth' coming out in numbers to cheer for him, to give the impression of a revival of the Woodstock generation; the evening newscast that was nothing but wall-to-wall praise for a largely unknown man with a non-descript record of questionable accomplishments.

They all bought it; the died-in-the-wool Socialists, the Communism-was-a-good-idea-only-poorly-executed bunch, the Blacks who despaired of ever seeing a viable (half-) Black Candidate, the Old Guard Civil Rights Shysters, the Professoriat, the Dopey College Kids under the impression that voting for Obama was both a mark of the ‘enlightened’ individual and something secretly naughty, the laziest people in America – by that I mean the Press – getting the chance to recreate the magic that was once Camelot.

The Symbol turned out to be nothing like The Reality.

The promise of Barack Obama was always just that – the Promise of Barack Obama. And with Obama we know there was never a promise made that wasn't immediately reinterpreted as just a strong suggestion that someone else do something, and always with a retroactive qualifier and an expiration date just as soon as the polls turned.

His actions and policies were largely foreseeable to anyone who ever had even the slightest understanding of how Liberals think and behave.

The Results Barack Obama got were entirely predictable given the mechanism – more government – and the cocoon of no feedback, aided and abetted by a compliant press, provides..

If anything, Barack Obama has probably accomplished at least ONE thing: and that is that he has – with his “Soak Whitey” rhetoric and symbolism, the Social Justice/Managerial Socialist ideology, the inability to face reality, the inability to speak off teleprompter, the incapacity to explain policy in a coherent fashion, the deliberate denial of reality, the constant campaigning and hard selling, all while having no trouble picking up the paycheck and enjoying the perks that come with the office – reinforced every negative stereotype you ever held about Black Men, and Liberals.

Not as smart as He thinks He is. Unengaged. In over His head. Unqualified. Vindictive. Resorts to the race card too quickly. Sensitive about being asked direct questions. Not detail oriented. Doesn’t seem to work. Seems disinterested. Probably cheated his way to the top. Affirmative Action hire. All of these now seem to cling to Obama like a bad smell.

And the real stink of all that, whether it’s deserved or not, is whenever an African-American candidate with real ability should stand for election to the same office, he or she will wear Obama around their necks, for there is also another bit of Symbolism – albeit unintended – in Obama, and that is the idea that he is representative of the Modern American Black; a slick trickster who gives good speech, but otherwise couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight.

In which case, Obama’s just Jesse Jackson, only with better marketing.

And that was not Hope and Change, and it doesn't appeal to Mr. and Mrs.-Middle-of-the-Road. Obama once interested them, now he's been judged as not their cup of tea.

If that’s all you have got, then its no wonder that you were so spectacularly bad at the job. See you on the golf course, permanently, Mr. President, very soon.

UPDATE: My apologies, but somehow I managed to paste my unedited, unrevised first draft of this missive. It has since been corrected for grammar, logic and spelling!