Barack meets Raúl

                                                      





In the eight year of his rock star style Presidency Barack Hussein Obama made his way to Havana to pay homage to Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz.  We read that in anticipation Raúl had ordered his people to spruce up a bit the slum of his long making and it is likely that any of those unruly types who dared to occasionally complain about life in the Socialist Workers paradise were rounded up and dropped into the deep freeze during the President’s Potemkin tour.  Just to show who was boss, Raúl snubbed the American President, sending one of his flunkies to greet him on his arrival on the Havana tarmac.  Hermano mayor for decades enjoyed waving his middle finger at Uncle Sam. This occasion was, however, unique: Obama was the first American President to fly down and willingly get himself dissed in person.

Obama did not even catch a glimpse of the Damas Blancas (the Ladies in White), those brave women who Raúl’s goons regularly beat up for publically asking about the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons rotting as political prisoners in Castro’s vast dungeons. “Just hours before President Obama landed Sunday in Cuba for his historic visit to the communist island, Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 dissidents who were marching to demand improved human rights.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/20/cuba-dissidents-protesters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/

From the Washington Post: “A group of dissidents known as the Ladies in White was met outside Havana’s Santa Rita church by an organized crowd of Castro loyalists shouting insults and revolutionary slogans. Then, The Post reports, Castro’s secret police pounced on the women and ‘half-dragged, half-carried them to waiting buses,’ while men marching with the women “were chased, thrown to the curb and handcuffed.” As they were arrested, the crowd chanted ‘This is Fidel’s street!  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/castros-welcome-obama-to-cuba-with-a-slap-in-the-face/2016/03/21/c9d8d2c0-ef6b-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html.  Yes, those Fidelistas had it exactly right:  Cuba belongs exclusively to Fidel and Raúl, not the peons they boss around. It is their personal fiefdom and the clowns who spout that human rights nonsense deserve whatever abuse comes their way from the the guardians of “The Revolution.”

But that was probably just fine with Obama who apparently was willing to bear whatever indignities the regime cared to dispense, and who cares about the dissidents, anyway?  They have universal health care. What else do they want?  He was likely wearing his Che tee-shirt from his college days beneath his suit jacket.  Fidel, Raúl and Che, after all, were the young Hope and Change guys of the Caribbean when BHO was, as they say, just a twinkle in the eye of Barack Sr. Like President Obama during his 2008 Presidential campaign, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrefKCaV8m4), the Castros in 1959 promised a  complete transformation of  their homeland with some smoke and mirrors palaver about free elections and democracy.  And “transformation” is a handy euphemism for exactly what they did, namely make the island into a hell hole (gulags, summary executions and all) that Cubans have for decades been (literally) dying to leave.  It is now a vast slum which not withstanding the 60-year iron fisted rule of Fidel and Raúl is entirely, they claim, the fault of the U.S.    

One suspects that Obama feels much more at home in Havana, yukking it up with a decrepit dictator than in those red states in the U.S and has a much higher regard for Raúl than for any of those Republicans back home whom he likes to speak of as his “enemies.”   Obama’s comfort with Raul, one also suspects has its origins in a deeply shared conviction that the U.S. is a country, as his wife Michelle, so eloquently put it in 2008 that is “just a downright mean.”

(http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/05/michelle-obama-america-just-downright-mean.) 

Beyond that, for some striking evidence of the President’s affinity for the Castro brothers’ version of Hope and Change we have Obama’s very own testimonial in his autobiography.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."  [Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

Granted, this was how Obama represented his Marxist bona fides as a youth at the university.  That was then, and now is, well ….  One remains hard pressed to discover much of a difference in conviction and attitude between the twenty-something university student and forty-forth U.S. President.  Since his university days up to the present Obama has continued to choose friends and associates strikingly similar to his university pals – Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Van Jones, and, of course, the race-baiting, riot-fomenting Al Sharpton.  While we hope he is not grinding out his cigarettes in the While House carpet to express his alienation, Obama has demonized policemen (“bourgeois society’s” armed enforcers) and given tacit support to rioters, as in Ferguson, who burned the place down.  In 2011 Obama celebrated American poetry and prose with a gathering of poets, musicians and artists at the White House.   According to the Associated Press he invited Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. aka  “Common,” a notorious hip-hop artist famous for celebrating the killing of police officers and one notorious cop killer in general. http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-common-poetry-jeremiah/2011/05/10/id/395900/#ixzz43rTSr0KP   So, Obama, the alienated, Marxist university student, and Obama, the racial polarizing, Castro-enthusiast President seem to be separated only by years.  There is no evidence in word or deed that Barack Obama has ever relinquished the resentment and his affinity for the leftist radicalism that motivated him as a young man: he is just much more sophisticated in managing it. 

One, however, should be careful with comparing Obama and Raúl  Castro.  To be fair to Raúl, as a Marxist, he is the real McCoy, one tough hombre, enduring in his youth the precarious Granma expedition from Mexico and the harsh rigors of the Sierra Maestra mountains as a guerrilla fighter, taking on Batista’s troops, getting shot at, taking hostages and executing them.  In the early days of the Revolution Raúl was even by his older brother's estimate a brutal fellow.  

"As the 'brothers show' developed, Fidel carefully and deliberately nurtured the myth of 'good brother, bad brother.' Whenever he wanted to threaten people with the results of his possible demise, he pointed to Raúl — 'He will be much worse than I,' he warned repeatedly. And he may have been right. Sierra fighters like Lucas Morán called Raúl's front a "small totalitarian state in which discipline was rooted in the terrible drama of death by execution." Geyer, Georgie (2011-02-01). Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story Of Fi (Kindle Locations 3285-3288). Garrett County Press. Kindle Edition.   

Obama would not know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, and it is doubtful that the man has an ounce of physical courage.  His Marxism is of the prissy, academic sort with all of its usual hand wringing devotion to the oppressed and its self-righteous, self-congratulatory posturing but is personally squeamish with a preference for softer approaches to coercion and, as he said in 2010  “punish[ing] our enemies and … reward[ing] our friends.”http://www.weeklystandard.com/obama-to-latinos-punish-your-enemies-in-the-voting-booth/article/511932  Like his close friend, Al Sharpton, his style (dropping his “g’s” when necessary) is to demonize his critics and keep the rabble on a slow boil with artful demagoguery while working the system for all of its perks – golf, basketball,  jet-set vacations, celebrity hob knobbing, etc. 

From Havana the Commander and Chief flew to Buenos Aires where he was photographed practicing his Tango steps with a luscious Argentine partner.   When he becomes an ex-President and Hope and Change is long forgotten, when asked about his years at the top he can with a smirk quote Sen. George Washington Plunkett of the old Tammany Hall days: who in his memoirs wrote, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

 

Obama: The Projectionist and Chief

We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2010

We can teach our children the hazards of tribalism. We can teach our children to speak out against the casual slur. We can teach them there is no ‘them,’ there’s only ‘us.’”
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2014



Psychological Projection:  the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others

One of the formidable challenges in attempting to fathom just what kind of person the 44^th President of the United States is and what he actually believes is to reconcile the many stunning displays of self-contraction that emanate from his ubiquitous oratory such as the one cited above. This particular example is richly ironic with Mr. Obama’s tenderly expressed concern for the “hazards of tribalism” for our children, coming from a man who conducts his politics as tribal warfare (Chicago style), holds his opposition  in open contempt as benighted and corrupt, and routinely slurs them, sometimes casually, sometimes with great calculation. Consider our “post-partisan” President in 2011 drawing clear invidious boundaries of “us” and “them”.  In stark contrast to his aspirations for Americans to be healthy and employed, the Republican plan in his words was “let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance. So far at least, I feel better about my plan” – sarcasm in the service of moral superiority.   

Mr. Obama with his immense self-regard seems to have a strong affinity for first person pronouns – I, me, we, us. “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” Obama confessed to House Democrats back in 2008. These pronouns are not just his vehicles of self-infatuation they are also particularly useful to him as instruments of misdirection and obfuscation. Obama typically launches his insults, defamations or slurs with the “I”s, to set his starting point, the absolute, pristine clarity of his vision and purpose then to move to enlarge the moral universe of which he is the center and to complete the population of the community of the virtuous with his “we’s and “us’s”. Consider his comments after the Newtown school shooting, April of 2013.

 “When Newtown happened, I met with these families and I spoke to the community, and I said, something must be different right now.  We’re going to have to change.  That’s what the whole country said.”  

“I met… I spoke… I said…” – which evokes in pathetic comparison another triptych from a much earlier time and from a leader of many fewer words:  “I came. I saw. I conquered.” (veni, vidi, vici).  Caesar came, saw and announced that he had conquered: Obama met, spoke and announced that he had “said something.”  In this case, that “something” whatever it might be, must be different”, however that might be.  And lest we doubt the urgency, “right now.”  As with many of the President’s pronouncements, we know at the end of them what we knew at the beginning, that he is a very important person who says things, many things.

The key point, however, is the misdirection. “We’re going to have to change.”  Who exactly is the “we” that must change? There is no “we”.  He (Obama) doesn’t have to change nor do his camp followers.  The “we” in this clumsy, egotistical verbal bramble suddenly, however, turns into the voice of the “whole country” an absurdity given the fact presumably obvious to the President that the whole country is and has long been bitterly divided about guns. Obama clearly has change in mind, no mention of hope, and it is for “them”, the rural Pennsylvanians and the like he singled out during his 2008 campaign who did not vote for him, those “white folks”, as he calls them, who “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Here then is one of Obama’s more memorable and condescending slurs that gives full register to the deep grievances that fester within and occasionally slip out when he talks unguarded to his own “folks”.  Worth mentioning in this regard is that candidate Obama’s vicious stereotype was delivered in San Francisco in front of his glitzy Hollywood adulators and sycophants, the genuine “we” and “us” who stand apart and far above the back woods, fundamentalist, shotgun toting bigots who cannot rise above their antipathy.  This time when he spoke in California there was definitely an “us” and a “them”.

Mr. Obama disapproves not only of gun owners, except the ones that guard him and his family, but drivers of SUV’s, and people who deviate from his norms of diet and home heating temperatures. And so, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

Again, the phony “we,” along with one of his signature non-sequiturs, the misdirection to conceal his staggering sense of moral omniscience and his megalomaniacal drive to order everyone else’s life.  “WE can’t drive…” etc. really means “YOU … will drive, eat and adjust your thermostat according to my high standards and requirements in these matters.”  Behind these deceptive words one senses the channeling of Erich Honecker with an East-German-like mentality of someone who lives in a fundamentally bifurcated world of I-we, the enlightened who give the orders versus you-them, the unwashed and benighted who do what you are told.    

Barack Obama, however, is never more duplicitous and deceitful than when it comes to the topic of race.

 “I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.”  

This, of course, is Obama speaking his real mind, albeit in his typical inelegant, sophomore-ish style.  No misdirection or obfuscation in this. By itself and out of context there is nothing remarkable about this comment.  It reflects a perspective on race relations in this country that is widely held in certain circles, particularly on the part of the Left, the “diversity” industry and the grievance-mongering, race-careerist friends of Obama like Al Sharpton.

But then contrast this peevish and pessimistic plaint with the soaring rhetoric that put much of the nation in a swoon back in 2004.

“There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. 

True today; false tomorrow: welcome to the post-modern world and the post-modern Presidency. That was then and this is now.  So much for the The One, who besides healing the planet was going to escort America into an era that would transcend race and partisanship.  What we know now is that the President is the opposite of what the candidate appeared to be, and that much of what he says with the constant self-referencing is a continuation of the spectacular deception he worked in 2008. His second term ended with impotence and recrimination. We he departed, finally, showing himsel as he has always been, a vain and mean-spirited man, caught up in his own mendacity, incapable of viewing his critics and opposition as anyone but “enemies” whom he seeks to “punish”.  The lofty side of his rhetoric, such as the example above, with its invocation of toleration and sympathetic sense of being able to see ourselves in others is belied by what seems to be a deep ideological conviction premised on grievance and resentment –  “America is just a downright mean country” as echoed by the First Lady in 2008. The grievance and resentment that he harbors and sometimes fails to dissimulate make a vision of “us” versus “them” inevitable, and a politics of tribalism the normal order. One then perhaps would do well to understand the President’s gestures and language as classic “projection,” attributing to others those shortcomings and untoward impulses that he feels within himself.

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.