Wednesday, November 06, 2013

The GROFT Principle...

Back in the days when I was a young computer operator, I had a supervisor who, for lack of a better term, was a southern redneck. I mean a real hillbilly plowboy, a tobacco-chewin’, country-music singin’, flannel-wearin’, swaggerin’ farmboy from the inbred regions of South Carolina (which covers about 96% of the state). Why, he was so Southern he pissed moonshine and crapped fried chicken.

But that’s beside the point. In retrospect, nearly 30 years later he turns out to have been one of the smartest people I have ever met. He typically would use a colorful turn of phrase to get a point across (“Why, that boy looks as nervous as a whore in church…”, “That generator ain’t turnin’ out enough power to pull a greasy string from a whore’s ass…”. Harry was obsessed with whores, but this was how he talked), but that was only ever a means to an end. He knew that if you wanted people to remember something, you had to give it them in a way that they would remember it -- so that it would stick.

One of the man’s most important maxims, however, didn't involve prostitutes, bathroom humor, foul language or whatnot. It was a phrase that he repeated over and over and over until you could predict it’s next utterance with a 99.9% accuracy rate:

“The General Rule of Thumb is….”

Whenever there was an issue that arose in the Data Center and you needed to formulate a plan of action or investigate what was happening in order to fix something, Harry was there with his The General Rule of Thumb to set the starting point for whatever came after.

Those of us who worked for Harry, lo! those many years ago, took to calling this The GROFT Principle. We used to play a game at work where we would try to apply the GROFT principle to just about any human activity or to inanimate objects, and laugh our asses off (did I mention that people who do that kind of work for a living are rather strange and geeky?). It was a big joke to us, especially when it was delivered with a southern twang.

However, the GROFT Principle has proven itself surprisingly resilient, and over the years there’s been many times when it’s reared it’s ugly head, and the circumstances have not been so goddamned funny. In fact, there’s times when the GROFT Principle has been applicable that make you alternately want to cry or shoot up a shopping mall.

(Not that we here at the Asylum advocate that anyone do so. But, if you do, please make it one in Tehran, Kabul or Cairo, where people deserve to die and you’ll be doing the world a favor by thinning out the herd of potential terrorists).

The GROFT, of course, varies in its application depending upon subject. In this screed, I’m about to apply GROFT to the subject of Barack Obama and his unmitigated failures that make Jimmy Carter giddy with the thought that he will soon no longer hold the onerous title of “Worst President in American History”.

Before we begin to apply GROFT, we need to set out a case on the phenomena of Obama, liberalism, his policies, and why they don’t – and can’t ever – work. Bear with me.

1. Defining Modern Liberalism

Although we rail against the evils of Modern Liberalism very often upon this page, we must begin by complimenting Liberalism, in general, on having achieved a great deal in it’s heyday, which I will date from approximately 1500 to about the ending of the Second World War. This is what we generally term “Classical Liberalism”, and it was the linchpin of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Revolutionary Wars of the Americas and France, and it encompassed a great deal more in terms of advancements in Art, Science, Literature and Politics.

Classical Liberalism, in a nutshell, encompasses a few key axioms that form the foundation of much of  modern political life. It is a philosophy in which the individual is assumed to have innate and obvious rights – to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It has recognized and codified the concept of private property. It established the equality of all men before the Law. It revived the old Greek and Roman traditions of democracy and republicanism.

In the Sciences, the Classically Liberal point of view stated that the mysteries of the Universe are not the sole domain of God (and by extension, his priesthood), much to the consternation of the hard-line Christian Conservatives of the Inquisition type everywhere, but are discoverable and understandable by the human mind. Science, as we understand the term, is something that exists in its own right. It is a process of observation and discovery, advanced by inches over time, which relies upon rational thought and the divorcing of established fact from religious and social dogma.

In Art and Literature, Classical Liberalism (and it’s older step-brother, Humanism), ceased to be the reserve of the rich and royal, and became an expression of the individual’s point of view, a graphic example of the hopes, fears and aspirations of society, as a whole. They are expressions of freedom, often in the face of scathing persecution of church or monarch.

Classical Liberalism has always been concerned with the primacy of the individual, and on a grander scale, the relationship between the individual and the greater society in which he lives, and has been mostly an exploration of how these two competing forces could co-exist. If not peacefully, then at least civilly.

Modern Liberalism, on the other hand, has been about anything BUT the primacy of the individual. It is mostly a repudiation of the progress of the past. The individual is only important inasmuch as she can be made to serve the greater whole, which in time has come to mean, inasmuch as the individual has use to the government, and in more recent years, only inasmuch as the individual has a use to the candidate or political party at any particular moment in time.

Today’s Liberal is nothing more than the reincarnation of those who once fought against the spread of Classical Liberalism. They are the new Inquisitors, the new Henry VIII’s, Tsars and Sun Kings. Where Classical Liberalism states that the government is the servant of the individual, and exists in order to guarantee individual rights, the Modern Liberal dictates that the people live to serve the government, that rights are conditional, the Rule of Law is not necessarily the Rule of Law, and this entire “freedom” thing is altogether inconvenient when it comes to ensuring that the Modern Liberal gets his way. 

The Modern Liberal behaves as the despot of old, believing in his innate superiority by virtue of either his political philosophy or (usually self-declared) elite status, and yet it is the Classically Liberal Conservative who is routinely accused of wanting to “turn back the clock”. Go figure.

This mindset is obvious in most of the Modern Liberal’s agenda: Progress in the developed world must be halted in order to “save” primitive headhunters in the New Guinea jungle (the better to exploit both). Capital punishment is a sin against humanity, but abortion must not be interfered with. Capitalism is bad, unless you need to beg Hollywood and Wall Street for enormous campaign contributions. The successful, productive and law-abiding are punished in order to reward the lazy, parasitical and criminal. Laws are to be obeyed, unless they run afoul of political need, in which case they can be safely ignored or subverted, or used as a weapon against your enemies. The concept of personal liberty is routinely shit upon in pursuit of the collective’s goals.

In the past, the Liberal was someone who dreamed big, who looked into the future and saw something better than what had come before. A landscape where life could be made much easier by freedom and progress, and wealth would become a general commodity and not just the plaything of the very few individuals who held a monopoly of force.  Those Old Guard Liberals had established a system – through debate, experimentation, and yes, sometimes through bloodshed -- whereby those dreams could one day become a reality.

Today, the Modern Liberal is a backwards-looking tyrant, a bully who hides behind the power of government and law to force he individual to conform to her (it’s usually a ‘Her”) way of thinking. They are the very “reactionary forces” that appear within much of the Left’s modern political literature, but which is a term applied to their enemies. Where the Classical Liberal sees hope, promise, great leaps to be made, the Modern Liberal sees a dreary Dickensian world of poverty, dirt, oppression, whether it truly exists or not.

So, when we speak of Liberals and the political philosophy of Modern Liberals:

GROFT – the Modern Liberal is a petty dictator who simply assumes power for the purposes of gaining more power. The purpose of power is to use it to dictate to the individual how he should live, according to the Modern Liberal’s tastes, desires, or dictates. Without the enlightened leadership of the Modern Liberal, we would all be living in some real-life version of Oliver Twist or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The truth, that we're living in a kinder, gentler, more hip version of 1984 is to be ignored.The Liberal takes power  so as to enact the Modern Liberal program of control of every aspect of life, and to enrich the Liberal at the expense of others.

In this quest to hold sway over the tastes, ideas, activities and welfare of entire populations, the Modern Liberal finds it necessary to do away with the concepts of private property, of individual rights, of Equality before The Law, of human brotherhood, while continuing to shout slogans to the contrary and keep the rubes in a state of ignorance. What matters is to the Liberal is the thought, not necessarily the deed.

Unless it is one of their own who is thinking or doing it, and then all bets are off.

Human equality is to be avoided at all costs, because if it were ever achieved the Modern Liberal would have no reason to exist. With true equality the Modern Liberal could not justify his actions and would have to be truthful about his motives.

Just remember that when a Modern Liberal speaks of fairness, liberty, equality, he means none of it. When the Modern Liberal speaks of defending the Constitution and promoting our “shared values” he’s lying to you. For the defense of the Constitution requires recognition of what that document specifically states: that the power of government is to be limited, that the individual has a corresponding system or rights and responsibilities, and that the ultimate arbiter or power is the People, and not the government or the bureaucracy or the parasitical elitist snobs who draw their sustenance from them

For if there’s anything a Modern Liberal hates, it is these three things: to be responsible, to be held to any sort of standard of behavior, to be forced to accept the consequences of their actions. This is the foundation of Modern Liberalism, with it’s vocabulary of victimhood, it’s seeming desire to turn every institution upside down and inside out, with it’s imperative to undermine the traditional values and replace them with a judgement-free zone where anything goes at taxpayer expense. It hides the fact that the Modern Liberal can only do what he does because the Constitution is no longer enforced or often just completely ignored.

Especially by, and for the benefit of,  Modern Liberals. Why they should do this brings us to point Number Two.

2. The Liberal Mentality

Generally speaking, all Liberals suffer from a variety of mental defects. The major defect is that they cannot deal with reality.

This sickness manifests itself in several ways. For example, the feminist ideal that there is, fundamentally, no difference between men and women. Occasionally, this idea runs smack dab up against Reality, and is then proven to be untrue. If you doubt this, ask yourself why it is that you don’t see many 5-foot-nothing-90-pound offensive linemen in the NFL, or why the US Marines don’t give female recruits live grenades to train with, or why your local police academy has one set of physical standards for men, and another for women.

Another example: if African-Americans score poorly on the SAT, it’s not because they’re stupid, poorly educated, lazy, or don’t put a priority on being prepared and ready to compete at the collegiate level; it’s because of the Legacy of Slavery, or because the test is “Culturally-biased” despite the fact that the majority will have been born, raised, and conditioned by the common American culture. This requires a system of Affirmative Action to remedy, in which we must pretend the obviously unqualified are just as good as those who put in the effort. When the failings of Affirmative Acton become apparent, there is suddenly a slew of new Civil Rights Legislation which does little more than deprive the non-African-American of his Civil Rights.

And this sort of thing carries through no matter what variables you plug into the equation: race, income, academic performance, relative intelligence, productive capacity, the efficiency of private enterprise versus government, etc.

The typical reaction of the Liberal Mindset to Reality is to ignore the fail. When it can no longer be ignored, the next step is to whine about it in the hopes that someone will do something to artificially “level the playing field’through gerrymandering the Law and by Judicial activism, and to keep this up until the opposition has been worn down. When the artificial leveling fails, the lying begins. When the lying no longer suffices the bullying and violence follows. At each step, the Liberal seeks  to keep the fantasy one step ahead of the Reality. Reality is too painful for Liberals, especially for those at its controls, because if Reality ever became apparent to a majority of people there would soon be no more Liberals.

And they would have to find real jobs.

And this possibility frightens many of them. Not just the ones at the top, either. Your rank-and-file Liberal is literally scared to death that she might have to, one day, re-evaluate her system of beliefs, or give up her special feeling of uniqueness, or mostly-made-up drama of persecution which has become so rewarding and remunerative. It’s generally just easier, particularly psychologically, to live in a state of denial about all things 24/7/365.

Primarily, this is because most Liberals are not great thinkers. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that most Liberals might actually suffer horrible, physical pain if they had to exert themselves in the Thought Process. Hell, in most circumstances, an original thought and cold drink of water could conceivably kill one. This is because most Liberals are emotional rather than rational people.

This becomes obvious in the modus operandi of the typical Liberal. They do not speak in realistic terms, but always in grandiose, flowery language which belies a detachment from physical reality. Symbols and Sloganeering substitute for direct communication because the symbols evoke raw emotions and the slogans are easier to remember than truth. Think back to every Liberal slogan of the last 50 years, and you’ll find they all have several things in common: they contain four words or less, can be easily repeated until you can remember them reflexively, they are purposely ambiguous or downright spurious:

No Blood for Oil, Hands off My Bush, Meat is Murder, Hope and Change, Think Locally/Act Globally, Split Wood Not Atoms, The (1 or 99) Percent, The New Deal, The Great Society, No Justice No Peace.

The Emotional aspect of Modern Liberalism is all too apparent: the appeals of  “for the children”, or the democratic party’s habit of dredging up the worst examples of The Exception to The Rule for beatification during political campaigns, are simply manifestations of this emotional condition or brazen attempts to take advantage of it. These appeals, these examples, are intended to tug at people’s heartstrings, and thus, influence their behavior and activities. Recently, the Right has begun to do this, too, and in both cases, it’s rather disgusting. But that is beside the point. What counts is that the Modern Liberal must always be in a peculiar emotional state – standing on the knife-edges of fear, hatred, envy, jealously, guilt, convinced that everyone and everything is, in some way, “unfair”. People who live in this curious state of emotional turmoil are easier to manipulate. Combine this emotional condition with a large dollop of Welfare, and you have created a monolithic voting bloc.

The Faithful are kept on the reservation by a compliant media who are largely sympathetic to the Modern Liberal cause, and who, in general, are even less inclined to engage in critical thinking than the average Liberal. The people at the top feed the media their daily talking points, the media repeats them endlessly, the common Liberal – especially in today’s world – is simply inundated day-in-and-day-out by propaganda. In fact, in this time of The Internet and mobile, instantaneous communications, 24-hour cable news, the Modern Liberal is never out of earshot from his leaderships’ propaganda. It is in his newspaper, entertainment, news programs, books and educational experience. This Age of Facebook and MSNBC, where people can self-identify and find like-minded people with hardly any effort, ensures that the Modern Liberal only need interact (if at all) with people who prop up his own self-protecting fantasy. The Modern Liberal lives under the constant drumbeat of his own propaganda during nearly all of his waking hours. It reinforces all of his pre-conceived notions about the world, while relieving him of the responsibility of forming an opinion of his own, and he takes great comfort in this.

It has been said that a Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality. In practice, this means that a Conservative is someone who at one time managed to escape the mental cage most Liberals erect around themselves as a means of keeping Real Life at arm’s length. It indicates that, at some point, someone faces up to a reality that can no longer be ignored. In most cases, when this happens the Liberal simply retreats into a more strident, more offensive form of politics (what we call The Far Left), but in a few cases, it becomes a startling revelation that changes a life forever. And no four-word slogans or appeal to emotion serves as a shield against reality, or substitute for a personal opinion, ever again for those people.

A secondary mental deficiency of the Modern Liberal is their desire to be released from any sort of obligation or personal responsibility. In this way, the Modern Liberal is typically little more than a moody, whiny adolescent in an adult body who simply wants what he wants when he wants it, and who doesn't often understand the practical reasons why it should be denied to him.

This is, strictly speaking, why you find such overwhelmingly emotional and terribly-argued opposition from Modern Liberals on just about everything. Because they’re like 14 year old girls.

GROFT- the Modern Liberal is an unthinking creature who is guided by his emotions and desires. When presented with a conflict between Reality and His Fantasy, the Liberal will retreat into fantasy every time, or sulk about how he’s being persecuted unfairly. The Liberal mind is one that cannot grasp how the world works and which denies the existence of human nature.He is intellectually lazy and incurious, and prefers to live in an echo chamber where he is constantly validated by others who suffer under the same handicaps.

She refuses to believe that people are not always born equal in terms of their talents and intelligence, that it is easier to pretend or scapegoat than it is to face facts honestly, and that when the bubble of fantasy is finally broken the levers of government are able to keep reality at bay only by a self-defeating program of oppression that ultimately diminishes the human freedom and equality they pay lip service to.

He lives in a world of ignorance, broken only by moments of emotional release, and he does not fully comprehend that these moments are engineered for him, and that the timing of the release is often planned by those he follows or puts his trust in, and never for his more-than-momentary benefit.

She is easy to manipulate and misinform; it is child’s play to evoke the proper emotions in her. She can be lied to without much effort because she is preternaturally programmed to avoid truth. Facts are fungible to her, because they don’t really matter; all that matters is that she is protected in every way – from reality, from having to play fairly, from the consequences of her actions, and she foolishly believes, from the ultimate results of what she advocates be done to others.

It’s why they can swallow the most contrived tripe whole: Hillary Clinton is the Smartest Woman in the World, The Lewinski Affair was just about Sex, Barack Obama is a transformative figure and effective leader who never lies. He is brilliant, yet he never knows anything. It's why you need to pass laws before you find out what’s in them. It's how a country that spends more than the rest of the civilized world on Welfare is caricatured as a cruel place. It's a state where an education is only valid depending upon how much
money you've wasted upon it with no tangible results at the end of it all.

This brings us to the President of the United States, and how he got there.

3. Barack Obama

We now get to the subject of the President of the United States, himself, for he is a product of the Modern Liberal Mindset and the end result of Modern Liberal social engineering. He is the visible pustule that signifies the presence of the underlying disease.

And in true Modern Liberal fashion, this fact is never to be recognized or addressed. If you should do so, the bullying, petty bitterness and raw emotion that are the most powerful weapons in the Modern Liberal arsenal, are brought to bear upon you. To disagree with Obama on principle is to be branded a racist. To oppose any policy of his is to be likened to Hitler. You are accused of wanting to starve children, kill the elderly, return women and blacks to a servile state.

Yet it is the Modern Liberal who desires these things more than any other person alive. For in denying reality and by using the apparatus of government to paper over all the flaws in American Life, the Liberal makes us all slaves to his ideology, ans his ideology has but one destination:

The diminution of liberty and the reduction of the individual to little more than a slave of the State.

It was painfully obvious to anyone with half a mind in 2008 that Barack Obama wasn't qualified to be the dog catcher in a town full of cats. The pity of it all was that what the opposition offered was so much more pitiful, but that is for another post. Barack Obama had never held a job before in his life that didn't in one way or another draw a paycheck from government. He had supposedly studied and excelled in America’s best universities, but shows no sign of having learned anything of practical use. he cannot speak coherently off teleprompter. When confronted by a country in crisis – embroiled in two wars, economic crisis looming, a divided nation – Obama’s main thrusts revolved around nationalizing the (unionized) Auto Industry and banks, “reforming” the healthcare system by effectively setting it on the path towards nationalization, and by apologizing abroad for the country’s very existence, anything but the immediate problems.

Obama was, and always has been, a marketing campaign, and one that has and always was, targeted directly at those who were most likely to buy the load of crap he was selling, i.e. the Modern Liberal, who lives in a fantasy land and who could be easily frightened and propagandized.

Mitt Romney didn't lose that last presidential Election because he ran on a bad platform or because he was a bad candidate, but because Brand Obama had a better advertising agency that better understood the consumer market.  While Obama ducked the important questions, he was still being presented as The Savior Of the Universe, while Mitt Romney was pitifully trying to make the case to a few constipated religious Republican minds that voting for a Mormon with a streak of (maybe misguided) federalism wasn't the same thing as voting for Satan.

Romney lost because those votes stayed home and Obama managed to win the messaging war, with help from Candy Crowley and CNN.

In terms of real accomplishments, Obama has few. We haven’t been allowed to see his grades from Harvard and Columbia. It hasn't been explained how he became the editor of the Harvard Law Review and yet never submitted an article of his own. It’s obvious that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize simply because the Europeans who make these decisions were quick to make an icon out of a black man who rose to power in what they consider a racist country. There was no legislative record, whether in the Illinois State House, or in the United States Senate, unless you count voting “present” a few thousand times as a record. There was no proven history of leadership.

I believe that Obama is simply the by-product of the Modern Liberal system. Raised up by Affirmative Action, defended and insulated by the thuggery of racial politics, fortunate recipient of the Liberal tendency to play Let’s Pretend, and marketed as all things to all people to a culture and a citizenry that was eager to lap it all up. He was elected because the alternative couldn't speak down to people in the same way, and re-elected because the alternative couldn't make it’s own case, even with a rotten economy, rampant unemployment and a terrorist attack a month before Election Day on it's side.

Obama was always simply a political campaign. He looked the part. He read (written by smart white guys and stuffed into a teleprompter) “Great Speeches” that were long on words and lofty ideals, but short on meaning, but which stirred the heart. His mixed racial heritage appealed to squishy and irrationally guilty white liberals who still insist upon apologizing for slavery, and to a black electorate that was under the impression that they finally had one of their own who would shower them with Whtey’s cash. The unions wanted him to save their jobs even though they had done their level best to bankrupt both private employers and the taxpayer, the lazy wanted him to save their welfare, and through a masterful campaign of deliberate lies, casting blame for everything on his predecessor, a compliant press, and an electorate that couldn't find it’s own ass with both hands and a flashlight, he succeeded.

Ever since, he’s done little more than to reveal who he really is (a moron) and what he really stands for (Socialism), and how incompetent he and the rest of the Modern Liberals truly are.

And true to form, the Liberals have rallied to his side, denying reality at every step of the way. Those who still have a sense of shame merely deny that they ever voted for him, his minions deny he said the things he has so obviously said. Large swaths of the democratic party mosaic deny that they were (willingly) duped, too. His hagiographers deny that the resume was always thin, the ghostwiritten autobiographies fake, the racial hucksterism always obvious, the application of double standards manifest, the speeches totally separated from reality.

For the Modern Liberal, Obama is the vehicle by which they have taken complete leave of Reality, while simultaneously staying true to ideology. He shouts the slogans, he stirs the emotion, he lies with a silver tongue to masses who don’t really care so long as the check shows up, and even if it means the complete destruction of civil liberties, crushing of the free press, Americans murdered with impunity abroad, the organs of government turned against citizens exercising what are supposed to be their Civil Rights, it still doesn't matter whether he actually said “You can keep your doctor if you like him. Period”, or if an innocent filmmaker in California goes to jail for an Al’Qaeda attack in Libya.

What counts is the Symbolism of Obama. What matters is the feeling one gets from throwing their unbridled love and support behind the descendant of a formerly-oppressed people. What you gain from loving Obama is a sense of superiority that is, as always, completely unreal, but which eventually leaves you hollow and more eager to follow the next would-be Messiah. You may feel good about your vote or support of this man, but in the end, what has it really gotten you?

Well, if you live in the real world, it has gotten you the highest unemployment since the Great Depression; a full-time job that will soon become a part-time job; higher insurance premiums (assuming you haven’t been dropped or cancelled); an economy that is stuck in neutral; a $17 trillion debt; two wars have become five, The Government is reading your e-mail and listening to your phone calls, terrorists are stopped by American citizens on a plane to Detroit and in Times Square (not by the rapidly expanding police state) and the government still takes credit for it’s Anti-terrorism regime.

You are daily lectured to by your supposed betters about what’s best for you, and if you don’t agree you are a sexist/racist/homophobe, or just too stupid to know any better. You don’t get nuance. You don’t understand that when the President says something, it means something else today and something else tomorrow, depending on what the news cycle requires. You have a Modern Liberal-controlled Senate that dare not put anything with the man’s name on it up for a simple vote because it’s afraid of assassination and unemployment.

Your support of Obama brought you a trillion-dollar Stimulus plan that largely went to reward his political allies and did nothing to spur economic growth. You got a President who speaks out of both sides of his mouth and his rectum, simultaneously, about questions of fundamental fairness and then he arbitrarily retracts, restricts, or re-writes, or grants waivers to his own laws as he sees fit. You got a promise of economic salvation by government “investments” in Solyndra, Solar One, and a host of others who all went tits up as soon as the government money ran out. You are the recipient of a brand-spankin’ new health care website that cost $634 million,…and which doesn't work.

There’s 300 million or so people in this country: the federal government could have given us each a million bucks to buy insurance and it would have been cheaper than ObamaCare's website, but then there would have been no opportunity for graft, Michelle couldn't grease her former roommate’s palm, and half the democrats in Washington would have had nothing to campaign for re-election on a year ago.

You are confronted daily by the spectacle of a President who insists he’s in charge, but who is never responsible for anything, or even aware of what his own government does. It’s a shock to him to discover, in the wake of a Benghazi attack, or an IRS scandal, that he is, indeed, the President of the United States and that the buck does stop with him. Yet, he has no trouble taking the paycheck or the perks of the office: A ride on Air Force one to go on a date night in Manhattan, the golf courses at Andrews or Camp David, the ability to vacation every few weeks in the tony destination of your choice, guarded by the Secret Service.

Those things Obama knows how to do. The rest of it not so much. One gets the impression that Obama only remembers he’s President of the United States when it suits him to, and the rest of the time he leaves it all up to others.

And what a Rogue’s Gallery of Modern Liberalism that is: Joe Biden, Valerie Jarret, Kathleen Sebelius, Eric Holder, I could go on and on, but you get the point.

GROFT-  One must assume that President Obama is, if not a complete retard, at least something very close to it. He is a vain and thin-skinned man who has never been trained or prepared, by experience, temperament or education for the job he now holds. He is, sadly, a figurehead, much like the British Monarchy, who are kept informed of the day-to-day activities of government, but not directly a part of it (unless it becomes necessary to deny that Obama is even informed of the day-to-day activities). It is enough that he simply stand there and give great speech, that he be photographed in the War Room or Oval Office (to later re-write History in Symbolic, rather than concrete terms), that he be the face on the poster, the voice on the televisions. It is enough that he is (half-) black, and that he spout all the proper rhetoric to keep a bunch of fake Reverends happy, and make irrationally guilty white libtards feel better about being secret racists.

He is the ultimate expression of the Modern Liberal ideal: he is part savior, part victim. His talk is lofty and flowery and his accomplishments few. He is both responsible and not responsible. He has power and the next day is the plaything of his servants who cause him to misspeak.

When he says something and it is recorded on videotape, you are supposed to believe that he meant something else entirely and reject the evidence of your lying eyes and ears. If you catch him in a lie, or corner him logically on policy, you are a bigoted hater who should be sent to a concentration camp…or at least subjected to a five-year audit. If you don’t want to pay more taxes you’re a Grinch who wants to steal Christmas from the children, force the elderly to survive on dog food and whatever they manage to forage from garbage cans., and who wants poor people to die in agony for lack of care (I plead guilty on all three counts; they’re not my children, it’s not my grandmother, and the sick should be allowed to die as Nature intended for the preservation of the species. We don’t have any “poor” people in this country, just an underclass of parasites).

There you have it: The General Rule of Thumb that explains how it is that we got here, and as plausible an explanation as any you’re likely to find as to why we need to seriously consider just who gets the right to vote in this country next time around.

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