Where is the Refuge in Post-Obama America?

In 1989 Zbigniew Kazimierz Brezezinski, a premier theorist of totalitarian political systems, published The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. He lived a long and eventful life and unfortunately sold the services of his formidable Polish intellect to the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the feckless, attempted rabbit slayer, James Earl Carter Jr. (For those taken with odd coincidences, Brezezinksi was awarded his Harvard Ph.D. with a dissertation on Lenin’s terror-command state in 1953, the same year Stalin turned room temperature, leaving his second-string in charge of the one Lenin had created.)

One also cannot help but wonder whether Brezezinski ever came to regret that portion of the sub-title he gave to his book – the “Death of Communism” – having died in 2017, a couple of months after Barack “Mugabe” Obama was done with the “transformation” he had earlier promised of the United States of America back in 2008. In his mistitled book, Brezezinski made an observation that really jumps out at a discerning reader: “Communism thus appealed to the simpletons and the sophisticates alike…” Yes, except for the past-tense of the verb. Moreover, these days it can be a challenge to separate the sophisticates from the simpletons.

This insight does help to dispel the mystery of Obama’s rapid ascendency – from a no-account, back-bench, corrupt state senator to “heal the planet” President of the United States. Obama is a simpleton who passed himself off as a sophisticate with a great deal of assistance from high placed, fake-sophisticates like New York Times columnist, David Brooks. Recall, that it was Brooks, who after interviewing candidate Obama, was so smitten with the combination of his blackness and well-pressed slacks, gushed that that he was destined be a great President. Then, of course, there was Senior Newsweek Editor, Evan Thomas’s comment on Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Here is a clue as to how it unfolded, how Obama rose to divinity, happily documented for us by, again, the New York Times long before the thin, street agitator from South Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, or wherever he was from, proclaimed himself as The One. 

BOSTON, Feb. 5, 1990 — The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.” 

What the NYT scribblers omit in this article, one of their typical “first black fill-in-the-blank” panegyrics, is more interesting and relevant than what we get to read. But skipping through the boiler plate, reverential tripe, here, luckily, we have Obama captured, unaware, on record as the self-promoting simpleton he is and has always been. “The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress…. It’s encouraging.” Perhaps, but the little we know about Harvard and the lot we know about Obama suggest that this election had nothing to do with what most people think of as “progress.”

His remarks in fact do tell us all we need to know about the career path Obama had in mind and the fake sophistication that would be layered around him as he hustled his way up to the highest ring on the boss-ladder. “Progress” is a gem of Obama-Speak, one that captures the solipsistic equation of his personal advancement with “that arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.” Recall, this was a Martin Luther King apothegm, a favorite of OHB, used during his reign to keep reminding those “folks” out there that the course of his presidency and the “moral arc of the universe” were pretty much on the same track. This sort of theatrical moralizing yourself into the woven fabric of the universe is a common adolescent trait, usually forgivable because most adolescents grow up and wise up. Obama did neither and ended up convinced that the banalities that always seemed to be popping into his head and out of his busy mouth were profound moral revelations. “If you're walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.” Ok, well maybe this inspiration came to Obama after channeling that old Nancy Sinatra tune: “These boots are made for walking and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you,” which, when you think about it, is what happened to the American people when Obama started walking down his path.

But, on to “It’s encouraging.” Always the master of misdirection and condescension, even at 28 years old Obama was already posing as the sage elder who has divined the “right way” everyone needs to go and, if politely asked, is willing to point in that direction.

It was certainly encouraging for Obama, enabling him to tout himself later in quest of another presidency as a constitutional law scholar even though during his tenure as editor of this “most prestigious” journal he skipped on one of the standard expectations for appointment to the post, never publishing a single paragraph on the law or anything remotely related. In fact, he never published anything other than two books about his favorite subject, himself, and there is ample reason to suspect that, even with those, he had a lot of help. All of this was fairly common knowledge, but for the sophisticates in journalism and the commentariat (Brezezinski’s sophisticates, including his airhead daughter, Mika, it seems) it was time for white America to atone for its racist past. Obama was the right black, platitude-polishing slickster to make it happen, endorsed by the illustrious Senator Harry Reid for his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

We are in the post-Obama era, the bad news being that the eight- year-long lobotomy he performed on the country was successful. How else to explain that in the 2016 Presidential election campaign, the Obama-endorsed candidate, who was under a federal criminal investigation with a decades long history of graft, influence peddling and subornation, got almost 66 million Americans, the plurality in the country, to vote for her. 
  
Obama’s Presidency with its culmination in Cult-Marx, identity politics vastly expanded the population of Brezesinski’s simpletons who swoon when the “free stuff for everyone guy” comes along and says things like “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Identity politics, crudely reductionist in its approach and primitive in its emotional appeal, makes the natives even more restless. The mad scramble is on. All the incentives are to join, if you can, one of the communities of the marginalized and oppressed, articulate your grievances, agitate for revenge and demand the assistance of the state in taking it. If none is immediately available for membership more are under development, and barring that, you can resort to being a self-flagellating advocate for one of them. There are many self-serving options.

The moralists who call the shots now are all about structuring this new social order so as to protect and reward the oppressed, and then punish the oppressors after they are outed. Most importantly, in such an order it is obviously neither healthy nor prudent for anyone to risk being branded as an oppressor of any sort, or even suspected as such. Which is why in the post-Obama era not-being-a-racist certification has become the most coveted social prize. “Please, really, I am not a racist. How can I convince you? I’ll do anything.” Consider for a moment the power dynamics in play here, and then you quickly understand why political resistance has almost completely collapsed to the moral-extortion racketeering that Obama and his minions institutionalized and now operates openly in both parties.
   

In her great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed.” Written long before the arrival of The One, it is comforting to believe that if she had been alive to contemplate the crackpot of Hope and Change, she would have been a one of the few sophisticates who did not fall for the scam.

Nicholas Kristof -- Away with the Hitler Metaphors

You have to give the devil his due, and the devil I speak of is Nicholas Kristof, a preening, self-righteous ideologue who pretends to be a journalist. He belongs to a very exclusive troupe of professional pontificators known as New York Times columnists.  These haughty sycophants serve the Democrat party in a Pravda sort of way, predictably parroting its officially sanctioned propaganda talking points and relentlessly hectoring and smearing any and all outliers who might resist the iron fisted orthodoxy peddled by the “progressives”.  For the shills who man the loud speakers of progressive politics the only obstacle to the complete institutionalization of the progress they envision for all of the lesser lights under their tutelage is the moral malignancy of the political opposition, immersed as it always is in the evil of racism and its progeny, sexism, homophobia, and on we go to infinity. There can be no good faith opposition to progressive policies which embody everything that is good, just mean, selfish people who discriminate and hate. Boiled down to its essence progressive politics is about really good people who should be in charge (them), and very bad ones who should not (us). 

By my count there are nine of these regular pulpiteers, the best known likely being the globe-trotting, blow hard, Thomas Friedman, a prolific but mediocre wordsmith unsurpassed in being able to say so much about things of which he knows so little.  A close second might be the supremely arrogant and condescending Paul Krugman, a master of vitriol who at some point forsook economics to become a party scribbler, a hack ideologue who preaches only to his own little choir.  Oh yes, and there is the NYT-designated resident “conservative” in the claque, David Brooks, who in 2008 swooned over the “crease” in Obama’s slacks, an intellectual pretender who seems to be taken seriously only by himself.

But my favorite, as suggested above, is Nicholas Kristof who is the complete New York Times columnist package, political correctness incarnate. He is more akin to the “good cop” of the NYT enforcers and goes busily about, hither and yon, proclaiming himself as the “voice” of the oppressed, specifically, those “victims” chosen by the Democrats and most recently by Hillary Clinton.  These are the various mythically persecuted legions who needed protection from the rampant bigotry of the millions of “deplorable” voters who for some inexplicable reason could not stomach the prospect of a professional grifter and her sexual predator consort once again polluting the rooms of the White House.  

More in contact with reality than Friedman, more condescending but less openly arrogant and vitriolic than Krugman, less ponderous and intellectually pretentious than Brooks, Kristof is the perfect progressive -- earnest, oozing with compassion, his sensitive moral antennas ever alert to pick up the faintest signals of any of the “isms” or “obias” (racism, sexism, xenophobia, “you name it”, as Hillary croaked to her LGBT groupies in New York) wafting up from and infesting those vast regions of the country outside of the DC Beltway, Manhattan, Boston, Hollywood, and our staunch bastions of free-speech and moral courage, the universities.    

You have to experience Kristof in person – his irritating, prissy sounding voice and goody-two-shoes demeanor -- to really appreciate what a smarmy, self-promoting, snake oil salesman he is. Some years ago I sat through a slide show he gave at a university in Ohio, the content, as I vaguely remember, the tear-jerking details of one of his many sojourns through a third world hell hole.  All in all, however, the talk was all about Kristof.  He is a master of what now is called “virtue signaling” – following the proper grievance mongering protocols, publically voicing your deep concern for the oppressed, the point being that everyone needs to know that goodness beats in your heart -- and a university audience was the perfect venue for him to hit all of the right notes to demonstrate his compassion for the right kinds of people, who are, of course, victimized by the worst sorts of people, and, we all know who those people are.

Kristof’s columns as well are tributes to his virtue.  The best of his most recent efforts came shortly after his world came a tumbling down with the election of Donald Trump.  Thus: “A Twelve Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/a-12-step-program-for-responding-to-president-elect-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fnicholas-kristof&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection&_r=0

This piece is vintage Kristof, just the title alone with Kristof playing the therapist for the traumatized millions who, unfortunately, believed the the New York Times pundits as they confidently proclaimed that Hillary would follow Obama into the White House.  Things didn’t quiet work out the way the wise men thought they were supposed to, and the surprise election of the “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “you name it” Trump was not simply an electoral defeat for the progressives. It is now, you see, January 30, 1933 once again, and Adolf Benito Grand Kleagle Trump will soon be resting his jack booted feet on the White House coffee tables. When you make every possible effort to paint your opponent as Hitler, Mussolini, the voice of the Klan, too vicious, stupid and incompetent to win – and he wins, yikes! – well, “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” But reality must at some point intrude even for Saint Nicholas. The Reichstag is not on fire. Time for the grief counselors to go home.  Kristof must rally the cry babies.

 “A Twelve Step Program” does not read well on a queasy stomach, but it does capture the essence of the ideology that defines Kristof’s New York Times hermetic world. Here we go.

“I will accept that my side lost, but I won’t acquiesce in injustice and I will gird for battle on issues I care about.”  Yeah, “gird for battle” -- wouldn't you like to see Nicky in a You Tube video girding himself up. As noted above, the opposition does not operate in good faith and its victory in the election means the subversion of justice. The “battle” will continue which means the racism-sexism propaganda barrage will be ramped up.  Much of what Kristof writes turns into verbal smog:  what exactly would he be doing if he “acquiesced in injustice”?  As if anyone would suggest that he would – more virtue signaling.

“I will avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else.” Well, this sounds nice and civil of him, but don’t get your hopes up, because … “I’ll call a local mosque to offer support, or join an interfaith event. I will sign up for an “accompany my neighbor” list if one exists for my area, to be an escort for anyone who is now in fear.”  The horror, the fear, yes, indeed.  Kristallnacht is next on the agenda.  You see, those Trump supporters he instructed you not to demonize are now out on the streets hoping to be able to beat up your Muslim neighbors on their way to prayer.  As I recall, the last ethnic people in the U.S. to be rounded up and placed in detention camps were Japanese Americans, done under the administration of … wait a minute …. Democrat Patron Saint, Franklin D. Roosevelt, opposed by Democrat arch villain, J. Edgar Hoover.

“I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade.”  This one is really worth parsing.  The Nazi name-calling tactic didn’t work so well for the election. “Nazi” and “Republican” have been interchangeable for long time, so maybe a different approach is needed. Kristof counsels his readers to eschew Hitler metaphors not because he believes they are wrong, but because those rubes who voted for the Klansman aren’t buying it. 

“I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks for his willingness to hire and promote refugees. Likewise, I will give blood and register for organ donation — for at least they’ll make me feel better. As will a tub of Chobani.”  This might be the best one of all.  You eat the politically correct food, feel good about yourself, (feeling good about yourself is really what this is all about) and …. “support the society [you’d] like to see”. Clearly, he doesn’t like the society he sees now. And, what kind of society might that be?  One without racists. Kristof is a one trick pony and yet once more, the de rigueur “racist” smear.  Of what race are refugees?

“I may not be able to prevent a sexual predator from reaching the White House, but at events I attend, I may be able to prevent a sexual predator from assaulting a drunken partygoer.” Whoa, where did this come from? Maybe Kristof is laying awake nights in anguish, worrying that President Trump will be lounging in the Oval Office commandeering blow jobs from the twenty-something interns he keeps in tow and ejaculating on their dresses. With Hillary and Bill back in the White House, this, of course, would never have been a concern. But we will look forward in the times ahead for reports from Kristof’s heroic efforts at stopping sexual predators from assaulting drunks at parties. Perhaps there are a lot of them in the parties he goes to.  Maybe Bill Clinton will be at some of them with his travel pal from the “Lolita Express,” convicted sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein.    

“I will not lose hope. I will keep reminding myself that politics zigs and zags, and that I can do more than shout in the wind. I can fight for my values even between elections, and even at the micro level I can mitigate the damage to my neighbors and attempt to heal a social fabric that has been rent.”  This is step 12, the last chirp in this particular installment of “fight the good fight” from the ideological cocoon Kristof lives in.  What is he hoping for? What is the “social fabric that has been rent”, and how does one "heal a social fabric"? This is some sort of therapeutic-sounding babble. What is “damage” that has been done his neighbors? The person they voted for lost the election.  In an election someone has to lose. “What is the “mitigation” involved?  None of these questions Kristof could answer in language that connects with anything other than the abstract, anodyne pieties that he constantly employs to bolster his delusions of moral heroism and perfection. His agony is now that the wrong people are now in charge, and he will continue toiling away with his non-stop accusations of hatred and bigotry.

Thomas Jefferson and the Grievance Mongers

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                  From the Monticello official website

Grievance = by definition: a feeling of having been treated unfairly; a reason for complaining or being unhappy with a situation; a statement in which you say you are unhappy or not satisfied with something.

We are amuck in the age of grievances, grievances of gargantuan proportions that cut vast swaths across times, places and peoples, grievances of tiny magnitude, registered these days under the heading, “micro-aggressions.” The grievance mongers lie in ambush everywhere.  Grievances multiply to open up coveted space in today’s “Pantheon of Victimhood”.  Installation in the Pantheon as a certified victim means you get to wear a permanent moral halo and remain immune from criticism of any sort. You possess the “superior virtue of the oppressed”, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell put it.  New York Times columnist David Brooks recently concluded his review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me, an anti-white diatribe by an angry black man by asking himself if he, “as a white man has the moral standing to question any part of it?” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/white-america-dons-the-shroud-of-guilt/article25971483/). The answer to this absurd question is painfully obvious: David, quit writing reviews or anything else. Join a monastery. Devote yourself to good works for the poor.  Of course, you have no “moral standing”. Not because you are a white man, but because you have completely surrendered whatever slim capacity you once may have had to grasp basic facts, reason and think straight. This is the same David Brooks, by the way, who after interviewing then Presidential candidate, Barack Obama back in those halcyon days of “Hope and Change” wrote: “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant … and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” (http://hotair.com/archives/2009/08/31/the-obligatory-david-brooks-really-impressed-with-obamas-pants-post/) And I’m thinking, (a) do we ever want to hear from this New York Times deep thinker again and (b) if we did, why would we take him seriously?

White guilt, like that displayed by groveling idiot-intellectuals like Brooks, gives an enormous boost of legitimacy to the blustering maestros in the thriving grievance industry, experts in the practice of the art of moral blackmail. (See my blog, The Left: Masters of Extortion)

(http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-left-masters-of-extortion.html) These guys you provoke at your own peril! They are “professionals” fermenting in the juices of resentment, always in a permanent high dudgeon, always wanting to remind you of how insensitive you are. They are the self-selected representatives of the burgeoning legions of the righteously aggrieved. They give “voice” to their feelings of being treated unfairly and their unhappiness with the raw deals that are the standard fare in America for anyone who is not a white male. They now maintain vast inventories of “micro-aggressions”, invent new ones, and make lots of demands, non-negotiable ones. 

Consider the ruminations of Desiree H. Melton, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame of Maryland University specializing in critical race theory and feminist philosophy, a fully credentialed grievance professional. She does not disappoint.

 A recent tour of Monticello aroused her critical race theory ire which then led to the appearance of “Monticello’s Whitewashed Version of History” in the Washington Post listed as an opinion piece. That the Washington Post would publish such a mindless piece of bilious, self-righteous posturing masquerading as serious thinking is evidence that for our intellectually elite gatekeepers of opinion white guilt trumps any standard of dispassionate reflection and critical insight that might be applied to the “conversations on race” they keep insisting that we have.  No connection with reality is required (David Brooks, case in point).  Equally depressing is that Ms. Melton gets paid to transmit her tendentious, resentment-laden drivel to young college students.   

For Ms. Melton, the Monticello tour was painful from the beginning as she complains that the other, “mostly white folks” on the tour were insufficiently somber. “To my surprise, I was not saddened by the experience. I did, however, get angry. I was angry at the utter lack of reverence and solemnity.”  Anger for grievance mongers is always the first reflex. You see, the critical race theorists of the world, like Ms. Melton, cannot comprehend why everyone else around them does not vibrate as they do with the same exquisite sense of moral outrage that comes from ruminating every waking moment on how awful it is to be a black person in America.  “Reverence and solemnity among its white visitors were missing from Monticello because it did not demand it of them.” It is not clear that there is an “it” behind Monticello that can make these sorts of “demands”. Aren’t reverence and solemnity supposed to come from within? Perhaps the tour guides at Monticello are supposed to replicate the sessions of quivering, angry, uncensored, unmasking of America’s fake, whitewashed heroes that the students in her in her 101 classes at Notre Dame are subjected to. No pedestal can remain occupied. ”Why,” she asks, “does Monticello allow visitors to tour the house and then skip over its related slave sites? Why? – well, maybe because visitors to historic sites might have their own priorities, interests and perspectives that don’t quite match up with those of the angry professor.  Maybe it is because the visitors to Monticello are not (yet) political prisoners to be perp walked through the grounds, reeducated and forced to confess (Chinese, Cultural Revolution style) that American history is nothing other than the ugly story of racism and the subjugation and exploitation of black people. 

Ms. Melton’s is in a great wrath over Monticello’s supposed whitewashing of Jefferson’s slaver ownership. Did she even bother to look at the official Monticello website which gives ample considerable attention to the many aspects of slavery at Monticello? (http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery) Included are a number of online exhibitions such as: Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello; Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty; Getting Word: African American Families of Monticello  Also, on the website there were a number of articles relating to the reality of slavery at Monticello, Jefferson and Slavery and Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  What is lacking? Reality, it seems, makes no impression on this professor-visitor. She seems determined to enjoy her anger and bitterness.  Grievance professionals are about grievances – facts do not matter.

The problem Ms. Melton opines is that white people just don’t want to face the truth. “If white people cannot accept the awful truth that one of the nation’s cherished founders held people as property, and that slavery was indeed horrific, why would they acknowledge the covert ways in which blacks are still oppressed?”

.    

This is clearly a trick, “if-then” question. Let’s respond by turning it back around with a different “if-then” question. So:  IF black critical race theory professors are unable to grasp some simple obvious facts (a) that it makes absolutely no sense to talk about what truths white people as a single, collective race accept or do not accept because there are none, (b) that most white people do know and accept the fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, (c) that most white people as well as all other people would strongly aver that slavery is horrific (d) that the ancestors of many white Americans today, those particularly in the immigrant waves of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – Italians, Greeks, Jews from the Russian pale, etc. – had nothing to do with American slavery, many of whom were serfs and peons back where they came from, (e) that slave trading and ownership were not solely practiced by white people, (f) that white Christian abolitionists in England and America were primarily responsible for ending slavery in the western world,  THEN should critical race theorists, like Ms. Melton attempt to acquire a basic grasp of logic and critical thinking, study more history, work at becoming a little less censorious and self-righteous or perhaps, just find a more productive line of work?   

Hannah’s Obama – the Genius and the Crackpot

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. 

                          Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, a brilliant jewel of a political thinker, made this trenchant observation in her monumental work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, post WWII. She was speaking specifically of Hitler and the “magic spell” he had cast over his German listeners. The fascination with the Fuhrer, she adds, rested on “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions – whether they dealt with the harmful effects of smoking or with Napoleon’s policies – could always be fitted into an all-encompassing ideology.” (305)  

So, it is hard to resist the suspicion that the occupant of the White House for the past seven years is just the sort of “crackpot posing as a genius” that Arendt was describing.  Consider: in 2008 a self-proclaimed “genius,” devoid of the relevant credentials and experience burst upon the political landscape promising to heal the planet, change the world, bring racial harmony and move the country beyond the frustrations and impediments of partisan politics. Well and good. Crackpots and their delusional promises abound, but sanity and common sense usually inoculate us against the nostrums of bloviating political charlatans, especially ones who promise things like “complete transformation.”

With the ascent of Obama in 2008 one could only contemplate with astonishment the rapture, the delirium, the intoxicated enthrallment with which hordes of serious, grownup people basked in the saccharin smog of vacuity that came out of his traveling carnival show.  College students, yes, but not only did the members of the fourth estate – professionally obliged to be skeptical – consume the snake oil, they stupidly joined the frenzied rituals of apotheosis. Evan Thomas of Newsweek with a straight-face proclaimed The One to be “a sort of God standing among us.”  Well … just what “sort of God” was he?   One that uttered proclamations such as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, silly, bewildering humbuggery, a grandiose slogan of egotism and solipsism that one might expect from a collection of spoiled twerps running for 10^th grade student council. The dogged determination of the press corps to remain amnesiacs with regard to Obama’s past helped to put into office a man whose basic instincts, personal history and ideological fixtures were deeply inimical to America’s history and traditions.  He aspired not just to lead America, but as he said shortly before his first election, to “completely transform” it. That arrogant display of colossal egotism and condescension by itself should have finished him.

Shortly after his first inauguration before he even began being President came his Nobel Peace prize – gotten like the presidency for nothing related to any substantive achievement – and installation in the Pantheon of the Greats (FDR, Lincoln, JFK) by the adulating media. Years later, however, no one, including Evan Thomas, comments on the divinity or even the genius of the man who was proclaimed during his campaign as a “Lightworker.”  No comparisons now with FDR. He is sometimes likened to Jimmy Carter – Jimmy Carter, minus the humility. No president has ever produced such a vast disparity between the promises of the campaign and the fulfillment in office. His 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of illusion, deception and misdirection: his 2012 campaign was an unprecedented and depressing work of slander and character assassination. 

Our experience clearly shows that Obama from the beginning was pretending to be something of which he was the polar opposite. Transparency, moderation, civility, mutual respect, accountability, responsible stewarding of resources, racial healing, post-partisan politics – none of these have ever been remotely in evidence, which he is always eager to say is the fault of others. The Hope & Change act was a cynical cover for his deeply resentful and adversarial mentality and his intolerance and condescending disdain for any political opposition.

    

Since there was so little evidence of anything Obama had done or experience that he had that would justify his ambition, one must ponder the question: how was this pretender able to succeed? The answer captured in the title of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Everybody Knows” was bluntly and correctly asserted during the 2008 Democratic primary season by Geraldine Ferraro, who happened to be working for Hillary Clinton.  “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”  For her honesty and perspicacity she was promptly sacked. Indeed, the country was “caught up in the concept,” the concept being that Obama was no ordinary mortal candidate: he was in fact an opportunist extraordinaire posing as a miracle man. Thus he appeared at the right time and right place with a deal – white redemption, guilt no more.  “He can be President and we can finally be done with racism,” seemed to be the barely sublimated motif.  Obama was not selling his experience – he had none. He was not selling his ideological convictions – he hid them. He could not sell his integrity and character – they were compromised and questionable.  He was selling himself as a nice, well-intentioned, well-spoken, well-educated black man possessed of unique, transcendent qualities of personality who would be a President like no other. Doing that required a carefully honed message empty of content, wildly bold and grandiose, yet anodyne and non-threatening, and, it necessitated that he dissimulate his past association with the unseemly likes of  Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, a past inconsistent with the wholesome, “we’re all in it together” change agent image that David Axelrod had helped him craft.  Plus, as Ms. Ferraro pointed out, he was, indeed, lucky. Young, sleek and fresh with the GQ looks and the crisp crease of his slacks that so impressed New York Times pundit, David Brooks, the cool and confident Obama stood beside the dumpy, “been-there-done-that” harridan in a pants suit, Hillary Clinton.  

Obama’s “deal” was a bait-and-switch.  No post-racial America in the horizon as some may have hoped with the election to the Presidency of a black man.  Racism is an unrelenting refrain of the Left, and the charge has been constantly used as a smear for anyone on the Right who finds fault with what the President does. A careful reading of Dreams from my Father reveals that  Obama, like his pastor-mentor, Jeremiah Wright is reflexively hostile on matters racial and can never be expected to relinquish his grievances.

Once in office throughout his presidency Obama appears everywhere – magazine and book covers, talk shows, interviews, speech after speech – delivering, as Arendt puts it, “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun,” all of it wrapped into a crude neo-Marxist ideology that finds exploitation and oppression and unfairness everywhere. The America he had sought to lead was in his mind a rigged system, burdened with iniquity, its “bitter clingers to their guns and religion” needing to relinquish their shotguns and bigotry. The remarks of his wife during the 2008 campaign captured the usually dissimulated rancor and bitterness of the Obamas: “[L]ife [in America] is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is just downright mean…”  In the White House for these long years, we have a President and First Lady long marinated in the juices of racial resentment, palling around with scurrilous race baiters and riot fomenters like Al Sharpton, meditating upon and nurturing the myriad grievances of identity politics, and insulting and vilifying anyone who happens to disagree. 

Rather than being humbled by the responsibilities of the office he had assumed, Obama’s arrogance and conviction of infallibility seemed to expand exponentially.  Again, Hannah Arendt: “The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can proved wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run.” (348-49) 

Obama’s intellectual and moral conceit renders him incapable of acknowledging shortcomings or mistakes and of according any respect to those who differ with him.  He is the personal embodiment of progress, a force of rectification, The One who was destined to turn that “mean America” into a just America, and, not just America.  As his wife, high on the vapors of Obama worship in 2008 told a group of admirers, “Barack is going to change the world.” He  has surrounded himself with the sycophant celebrities of Hollywood, and to protect his thin skin and swollen ego his handlers usually put him in venues fully orchestrated where to the amusement of his adulators, he dispenses his sarcasms and insults his critics. He disdains the press conference where on occasion his wisdom is called into question.

For his much vaunted “superior intelligence” little evidence has ever been  produced.  His university grades, test scores and school records are all under lock. Though touted as a constitutional law scholar and professor he has produced not a single published page of scholarship, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review.  His only two publications are about his favorite subject, himself, and of these his authorship remains somewhat questionable. 

Obama’s infallibility rests, as Arendt suggests, not on his superior intelligence but on the mantle he adroitly donned as the great orator for “progressive politics.”  His national prominence came from a single speech. From the beginning, the foundation of Obama’s “genius” was to rest on his supposed inspirational, eloquent oratory.  But the more he talks, the less he says. When he is not mean spirited and petulant his talks are composed of boring and predictable cliches. At the end of year seven there is no inspiration or eloquence. Mocked for his teleprompter dependency, not even his admirers can find the remnants of oratorical brilliance. His genius, whatever it was supposed to be, is long gone.  When he leaves office and recedes into history, he will increasingly be come to viewed as the sort of "crackpot" so ably described by Hannah Arendt.