Barack Obama -- the Perfect American Stalinist

"If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun"

                                   Barack Obama

 

The ignominious American decampment from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese government and capitulation to the Communists coincided with the death of anti-Communism in the U.S. The parallelism is striking—military withdrawal abroad; cultural surrender at home. The many Marx-quoting, Castro- and Mao-admirers who occupied chairs in America’s best universities (e.g. the “Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies,” Bard College) made careers out of pooh-poohing the supposed evils of Communism and smearing anti-Communists. Whitaker Chambers was a psycho, the Rosenbergs were framed, McCarthy’s Communists-in-the-State-Department was a paranoid fiction, and Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam. Anti-communism was now the accoutrement of rubes and crackpots bearing all the marks of unsophistication, narrow-mindedness and chauvinism, and could be responded to with simply a shrug, a sneer or mockery. Anti-Communism was a failure to comprehend the profound dimensions of America’s own moral shortcomings. Communism, of course, had fallen short of its egalitarian, humanistic aspirations, but America needed to be called to account for the growing recognition of the multitude of its past transgressions – especially slavery and segregation.

Because the Communists excelled at pretending to be virtuous and at hiding their iniquities, it came as a big shock to the sophisticates in the West with all of their admiration for central planning when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in the early 1990s partly under its own dead weight of stagnation, corruption and incompetence and partly pushed by Ronald Reagan and Star Wars. Seventy plus years of Marxist-Leninist rule had turned Russia into a third world slum and thus revealed the essence of Stalinism – utopian promises; dystopian reality – a “Socialist Workers Paradise” whose vodka-besotted workers could not even produce a decent pair of shoes or blue jeans that anyone wanted to wear.

A Stalinist world is a universe of posturing and pretending where everything is the opposite of what it is officially declared to be. “Plenty” in reality was penury. The promise of liberation from exploitation unfolded in the Gulag and the creation of a massive system of lethal forced labor. The reality of equality became a caste system with the Party apparatchiks and bosses exempting themselves from the burdens and reserving the best of everything for themselves. Stalin’s much vaunted anti-Fascism was no less than a mirror of Hitler’s genocidal mass murder, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and brutal secret police. From Moscow to Beijing to Havana to Pyongyang it was the same, depressing storyline, a self-glorifying Stalinist proclaiming the perfection of his reign, while the people he ruled over were poor, hungry, scared and longing to escape.          

With the collapse of the Soviet Union America enjoyed in the aftermath an illusory sense of triumph over Communism. The U.S. Cold War “victory” over the Soviets was completely overblown. The economic and technological superiority of the U.S. was vindicated, but culturally the story was much different. American institutions had “flipped”, so to speak. A conceptual framework and vocabulary absorbed from Marx and Rousseau by America’s intelligentsia had been imperceptibly positioned as a filter that altered the basic perception of American history and American society. Institutions came to be viewed not as civilizing, ameliorating forces that helped to keep destructive human impulses in check and to provide large spheres of personal freedom, but rather as instruments of repression, domination and exploitation. 

Such instruments thus had to be dismantled, a process that required “consciousness raising,” on behalf of the exploited and dominated, helping them recognize their plight through an “unmasking” of the beneficiaries of the repressive order. Universities, schools, mainstream churches, the entertainment industry, all embraced a poly-thematic program that focused on the grievances of various “victim-populations”, on the promotion of subjective self-realization through escape from the confines of traditional norms, and the need to permanently atone for the un-erasable guilt of slavery and segregation. Social fragmentation and atomization followed with the explosion of divorce and single parenthood, the normalization of soft-core pornography, rampant drug trafficking and abuse, and a thorough coarsening and vulgarizing of the popular culture.

Eight years into the 21^st century, only 17 years after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, the country that fifty years earlier loathed the very notion of a Communistic-ruled society with its militant atheism, collectivism and unconstrained, ubiquitous secret police, elected as President a man whose personal history, instincts and aspirations are Marxist. As early as twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that an individual with such extensively documented antagonism and hostility toward the history and institutions of the U.S. would be seriously considered for any national, high office, much less the Presidency.

Obama’s autobiography is a study in self-absorption, self-pity and racial resentment with no detectable appreciation or affinity for anything distinctively or uniquely American. His life’s influences, both personal and intellectual, cited and acknowledged by Obama himself, or undeniably obvious, are all Marxist – Frank Marshall Davis (Dreams from My Father), “Marxist professors,” “Frantz Fanon” (Dreams from my Father), Jeramiah Wright (Obama’s twenty year pastor and mentor), Bill Ayers (Obama’s colleague on the Chicago Annenberg Exchange and suspected ghost-writer of Dreams of My Father). Obama’s influences and associations were all brought up by his critics and opponents during the 2008 campaign but the revelations made no impact. Why? Well, because Communism as a benign, well-intentioned system of social order had become a reflexive, mainstream attitude. While generations of school children had learned all about the Jewish Holocaust, Ann Frank and Hitler’s racism, very few ever heard about the three to five million Ukrainians starved by Stalin, his order for the murder of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn, Mao’s Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions of Chinese or Pol Pot’s murder of as many as a fifth of the Cambodian people. Americans were inundated with movies, books, articles and documentaries on the evils of the Nazis but the far more vast crimes of Communism drew little attention. The slant on Communism from the likes of the New York Times has been its idealism and humanism and the heroics of its “anti-Fascism.”  When Fidel Castro finally expires, his New York Times obituary will go on for pages about universal health care in Cuba, ignoring the fact that for decades that while many people have died trying to get out of Cuba, no one has died trying to get in.

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech in 1983 the outrage from the intellectual class was clamorous and predictable. Eight years later Reagan was vindicated as the Poles, Baltic peoples, East Germans and other countries long subjugated by the Soviets ecstatically threw off the yoke. Reagan’s critics were aghast at the “amiable dunce’s” (courtesy of Clark Clifford) anti-Communism, but people who actually had to live under Communist rule acted out the truth of Reagan’s charge.  Even the suggestion that any of the many aspects about Obama’s past radical associations and perspectives elicited scorn and incredulity from the mainstream media and the opinion makers.     

Obama’s assent to power was neither a fluke nor an accident. His election was inevitable, a consequence of the cultural triumph of the soft Marxism that had been seeping into the corners of America for decades. By 2008 America’s dominant culture-shaping institutions – the schools and universities, the popular culture and entertainment complex, the main stream media and the news syndicates – were solidly Left wing propaganda outlets that: (a) peddled an amoral hedonism steeped in a patois of multiculturalism and moral relativism, and, (b) relentlessly promulgated the rationale for a system of moral blackmail that made white America permanent hostage to the guilt of slavery and de jure segregation. Racism was transformed into something far more complex and multi-faceted than it was originally understood to be, a bigoted belief in the in the innate inferiority of members of a different race.  Racism now permeated every crevice of American society. Protean and ubiquitous it could be direct, indirect, overt, covert, systemic, institutional and only practiced by white people.  Moreover, racism was the only offense such that the mere accusation alone was sufficient to convict. Denial is just more evidence of racism’s invincibility. In 1973 “micro-inequities” were discovered by a Ph.D. from MIT, defined as “as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be different.”

One can look back to the 1960s and observe the unfolding of an ironically perverse inverse social dynamic: as the practices of racial discrimination dropped away and attitudes of racial bigotry and white supremacy atrophied and diminished, racism eventually elbowed out every other social malady, becoming ubiquitous, defining America’s character and dominating its history.  The “white man’s burden” had become “white privilege.”         

The ubiquity of American racism gave birth to a new industry comprised of well compensated individuals who are experts in helping make our institutions and work places, as they say, “more diverse,” the main obstacle of which is racial prejudice and bigotry. Some are appointed to multicultural or diversity vice presidencies at universities or companies where they mandate and supervise “sensitivity” training programs and search for “microaggresions”. Others, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are more ambitious free lancers, consummate publicity seekers who show up anywhere there is a likelihood of spinning a “hate crime” or exploiting racial tensions and make incendiary speeches. Their reputations and livelihoods have flourished by intimidating white people with their racial accusations and extorting apologies and concessions. The America they like to portray is permanently frozen in the early 1960s and every county sheriff is Bull Connor. Every career incentive and motivation for their ilk is for America to be viewed as it was in 1963 because in America 2014 there is no need or demand for people with their “talents”.         

Obama was the right candidate at the right time.  First, he was black and as such a candidate of redemption offering white voters the opportunity to prove, finally, that they were free of racism, a deep moral shame that for decades they had been constantly reminded that they had made and perpetuated.  Second, and equally important, he was a black man of the Left, which made him an immediate object of adoration by the elites who inhabited those spheres of influence in the media, political commentary and opinion shaping, and the entertainment industry.  He was proclaimed by these supposedly mature observers as “a sort of God,” a “Lightworker”, a “genius,” etc. Obama’s political assent unfolded rapidly into a cult of personality, which was particularly remarkable given his utter lack of executive experience and political accomplishments, his record of trimming and going-for-the-groin Chicago-style politics. Certainly, there were plenty of highly successful, articulate and brilliant black Americans of conservative pedigree, but they did not fit the right profile and convey the message of American guilt.  These Americans were marginalized and ridiculed not because of their skin color but because they did not reside on the ideological plantation run by the Leftist overseers.                 

Obama’s 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of 21^st-century Stalinism in its pretending and posturing, a gigantic head fake toward the middle of the road largely a-political block of voters, a wholesome non-threatening change agent spouting clichés no one could disagree with – his administration would be the most transparent, competent, smart, accountable, compassionate, etc., etc. – and a projection of cerebral self-control and GQ cool.  He was also lucky to have an aging harridan and an over-the-hill incompetent as his major opposition in the primary and fall election.   

Now some years after the launching of "Hope and Change" it is obvious to all but the blindly partisan that Obama has turned out to be the polar opposite of what he promised he would be. The post-racial, post-partisan miracle man of 2008 was a mirage. Racial tensions and political polarization are the worst since the Vietnam War. Shortly before the 2010 congressional elections, Obama, dropping his ‘g’s’ told a Univision audience, “We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” spoken like a true street organizer with a brass knuckles view of politics. His 2012 campaign, a work of pure character assassination, was the real, “If they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun” Obama.

Obama’s Presidency is the consummation of 21^st century American Stalinism. First for him politics is war, the object being not to electorally defeat the opposition but to discredit it, to destroy it. This approach is rooted in the foundational premise of Marxism, “All history is the history of class struggle.” For Obama, the opposition is a corrupted class of exploiters, characterized primarily by their greed and racism.  Such morally benighted types are not the kind of people with whom you can share power. And so the second Stalinist feature of the Obama Presidency, abuse.  Stalinists, self-perceived, are the “good guy”, the virtuous ones, the smart ones.  Those who oppose and disagree are corrupt and/or stupid, and as such deserve to be reviled.  Republican’s from the beginning of Obama’s first term were, as he called them, “the enemy.”  He routinely attributed the basest motives for their politics and policies. They wanted “dirtier air and polluted water.”  In a speech early in 2013 Obama said:

“They [The Republicans] have a particular vision about what government should and should not do, so they are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research. So they’ve got a particular view of what government should do and should be.”

This is just one of many examples of the politics of character assassination. As Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary. “During the 2012 election, Obama’s vice president said Republicans want to put African-Americans “back in chains’ while Obama’s top aides and allies implied Governor Romney was a felon and flat-out stated that he was responsible for the cancer-death of a steelworker’s wife.”

The third Stalinist feature of Obama’s Presidency is the flagrant dishonesty. Remember, Stalinism is a pretend-world where what is proclaimed and promised is the opposite of reality. In the fall of 2013 this was dramatically illustrated during the roll out of ObamaCare as thousands of Americans were being dropped from their health insurance policies and the promise of Obama was seen for what it was, a deliberate lie, calculated to ensure his 2012 re-election.  President’s weekly address, June 6, 2009: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.  If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.  The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”  There were at least 37 documented instances where the President or his top aides made similar promises, yet when the reality of the rollout in late 2013 exposed the gross deception, Obama then lied about the lie he had told.  On November 4, 2013 he said, “We said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”     

Anyone who paid close attention to Obama’s past in 2008 could have seen all of this coming. Unfortunately, his own party had long embraced his ideological agenda, and the mainstream media smitten with his 2004 Democratic Convention speech and delirious with prospect of a "progressive" black man in the White House seem to have decided that his personal history and his political track record really did not matter.  Obama’s 2008 election was a con job – shame on him.  His 2012 reelection was a hatchet job – shame on us. He will be gone soon; his damage will remain with us for a very long time.

THE STALINIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LEFT -- JOHN KERRY

ce, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out.  (John Kerry)

n Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

    Remarks before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971

   

John Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, most likely from a stroke, stricken late during the night in his sleep. In his dotage and pathologically suspicious of doctors, Stalin’s cowering associates hesitated to call for medical assistance fearing his wrath. So he lay helpless for some time, unable to speak or otherwise communicate, soaking in his own urine before his final exodus. When his closest henchmen, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, confirmed that “the Boss” was finely and safely dead, they scurried off to the Kremlin offices to clean out the files and papers that might document their extensive complicity in Stalin’s long reign of terror and criminality.  

The Georgian Bolshevik was seventy three years old.  As the undisputed God of the Communist world his passing unleashed paroxysms of grief in the Socialist Workers Paradise of his making and regions elsewhere under the banner of the hammer and sickle. The CPSU bosses set his embalmed corpse next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. Eight years later he would be quietly evicted by the ‘kinder, gentler’ Nikita Khrushchev after he began to ponder with his colleagues at the 20^th Party Congress the “imperfections” of the reign of the General Secretary, his long-time mentor and father of the world’s first modern terror-command state, and what they might signal for his own political fortunes.                                 

Stalin’s legacy was not just two and a half decades of repression and mass murder. He also left posterity the gift of Stalinism, a unique form of tyranny that combined systematic terror with an ideology at once rigid yet flexible and adaptable, held together with a mindless cult of personality. The ‘mold’ of J.V. Stalin stamped out a number of working copies – ambitious, overachieving Stalinists wielding vast power in many places. An assortment of vicious, self-infatuated monsters such as Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Communist chiefs of the Eastern block countries, like the Master, devoted their waking energies to the celebration of their self-perceived genius and the wreckage of the millions of lives of those under their domination. The authors of the Black Book of Communism estimate that Communist rule snuffed out the lives of some 100 million people during the 20^th century.     

Stalinism survived Stalin – survived and flourished in fact. In the 21^st century its practitioners have cleverly adapted themselves to the changing world but, like the Bolsheviks from the early days, continue to embrace Stalinism’s core conviction – that they, the Stalinists, alone possess a cognitive and moral superiority that entitles them to wield whatever power they need to smash the old, corrupt order and micromanage the lives of others. The old guard Stalinists were open, confident and ardent about what they intended to do to their real, and imagined, opposition; the 21^st- century ones tend to hide behind the customs, institutions and traditions they loath and surreptitiously work to destroy. Twentieth-century Stalinists were about Revolution: twenty-first-century Stalinists promise “transformation.”

After WWII the Stalinists of note in the U.S. could be found undercover high up in FDR’s government—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins being some of the better known, as we now know from the Venona decrypts. The America’s mainstream, however, for a season disdained every feature of Communism. During the Cold War, particularly in the early years, most Americans were appalled by the grim spectacle of Soviet imposed helotry in central and eastern Europe and the murderous fanaticism unfolding in Mao’s China, Stalinism with an Asian accent. Americans were also threatened by the Communist self-confident assertions of their superiority and inevitability. “We will bury you!" ("Мы вас похороним!") predicted Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

Reflecting the sentiments and convictions of the American people post WWII, both the Republicans and the Democrats at least appeared resolutely anti-Communist. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was close to Joe McCarthy, and early in his career Bobby Kennedy worked for the Wisconsin senator before the American Left accomplished it’s most successful and enduring smear. Nixon of course launched his political career combating Communism in America, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race.  Nixon dubbed her as “the pink lady … red down to her underwear.” President Kennedy warned the country of domino threat of Communism to Southeast Asia and following General Maxwell Taylor’s counsel, sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam to support the Catholic, anti-Communist, South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm.

Vietnam, as we now know, was a disaster for the Americans, fifty-seven thousand soldiers who perished fighting there, and, of course, for the Vietnamese all of whom ended up living under a repressive Communist regime. The Vietnam War marked a major turning point for Americans in their engagement with Communism. Rife with political assassinations, race riots and radicalized universities during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. hard-turned to the Left. Vietnam became for the Left a propaganda fulcrum used to de-moralize America, its traditions, history and promises, all exposed as a various elements of false consciousness that disguised its essential character – a viciously, hopelessly racist, rigged system propped up with a phony, exploitative Christianity and Horatio Alger mythology.

America, John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty”. Liberty-Schmiberty, throw away lines for the naive and the dummies. Such sentimental schlock was quickly turned upside down by our adversarial intellectual class who were busy polishing their favorite Marxist leitmotifs and disseminating a view of American history (Charles Beard comes to mind) that that read exploitation and oppression into the country’s foundational fabric. 

Southeast Asia refracted through the hermeneutical Marxist lens became a theater of imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from America’s underclass – poor and minorities dragooned and dropped into rice paddies half way around the world to bomb, napalm, and devastate a colonialized third world people. The American presence in Vietnam stripped of anti-Communist rhetoric was shown to be in essence about its true core, aggression and racism: the white imperialist descendants of American slave owners were conscripting young, black Americans, discriminated against and marginalized from the slums at home, to wage war on Asian people whom they (the leaders) viewed as racially inferior, culturally insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly in all of its ugly Vietnamese contortions became an external (international) reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its chauvinist history.

One especially notable indictment of American racism in Vietnam came from none other than the future Massachusetts U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had returned home from active duty to throw away his service medals and help organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Among other symbolic gestures of condemnation of the U.S. government prosecution of the war, Kerry carried a North Vietnamese flag in a protest march. His book, The New Soldier denounced the architects of the war as racists hiding behind a phony vale of anti-Communism. “We are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism…  [W]e watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.”

It would not be quite correct to say that Kerry was opposed to the war.  It was far more than that. The war itself was a manifestation of something much worse for him. “The country doesn't realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.” It is difficult to know what to make of this sweeping, slanderous verbiage, a poisoned cocktail of vituperation and nihilism that one might expect to hear from a raging anarchist on a street corner, not from a decorated veteran testifying before Congress. This “monster” was made up of his comrades in arms some of whom had died believing, perhaps, that they were about more than dealing and trading in violence. Kerry’s personal history and ascendance to high office—from a 1960’s anti-war radical, communist sympathizer to high establishmentarian is a splendid prototype of the political trajectory of many of our current elites and helps to explain why American political and social institutions now bear scant resemblance to what they were a generation ago.

Thus: many years later when he appeared before a national audience to accept the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for the Presidency, Kerry opened his speech with a snappy salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty”, apparently having calculated for purposes of garnering votes that the “biggest nothing in history” he had fought in and subsequently with great fanfare denounced as an enterprise concocted and conducted by war criminals was now an illustrious entry in his autobiography. And so, from John Kerry, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” as he put it in his testimony before Congress … to John Kerry, the proud war hero! This was the sort of amoral reversal that reminds one of an earlier volte-face from a cynical power monger, Joseph Stalin: Stalin was for Hitler (Mototov-Ribbontrop pact 1939) until he was against him (1941-1945). Kerry’s opportunistic affinity for Stalin-like switcheroos was captured in his risible, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq war] before I voted against it." Needless to say, Kerry did not during his Presidential campaign bring up the authorship of The New Soldier and his characterization of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as he so delicately put it, “a filthy obscene memory.”

Kerry's ambition to be President in 2004 was foiled in part by emergence of his former naval Swift Boat comrades from the Vietnam days who had served with Kerry and told the voters the truth about his self-exaggerated war heroics and reminded the voters of his sweeping condemnations of the American military in which he served. For their efforts they were smeared by the Left for doing what Stalinists most resent from those who oppose them, telling the truth.    

ObamaCare and the Font-Size Dictatorship

Command economy – Instead of allowing dispersed buyers and sellers to determine their own economic activities according to the laws of supply and demand, a higher authority would issue commands determining the overall direction of the economy following a master plan.

                                       Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine

In March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), AKA ObamaCare, into law. Near the end of 2013 as the jaws of ObamaCare begin to close Americans now find themselves immersed in the chaotic economics of health care unfolding through an arcane command system that the President hopes is his great legacy.

The Democrats, apparently drunk from celebrating Obama’s improbable 2008 election and their impressive congressional majorities, asserted their “higher authority” and rammed through Congress an insanely complicated piece of legislation that none of them had read or even remotely understood.  Details be damned and contamination by Republican input be eschewed, this was to be a “master plan” that would make health care affordable to all Americans. A decades-long aspiration of Democrats was universal health care. It now, they could boast, was the law of the land: the U.S. had had finally and proudly achieved the moral stature of Fidel’s Cuba, long and much admired by the American Left.

To call the vast, incomprehensible compendium of dense, turgid legalize set forth in thousands of pages of ObamaCare a “plan”  in any regular sense of the term, however, attributes far too much intelligence, rationality and foresight to the legion of nameless, backroom, pettifogging hacks who drafted it. But whatever one decides to call it, the ACA’s primary function is to strictly order the behavior of buyers and sellers of medical services and to allocate the resources of health care for 300 million people through coercion and a dizzying maze of regulation rather than through the mechanism of the market. 

The not–so-affordable Affordable Care Act is dream work of command economics that could be admired by the defunct apparatchiks of the former Eastern Block, infested throughout with thousands of “shalls” and “shall nots.”  For example, in (SEC. 2713 42 U.S.C. 300gg–13 Coverage of Preventive Health Services)   “A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall, at a minimum provide coverage for and shall not impose any cost sharing requirements for— …”  and on it goes for paragraphs seemingly intent on incomprehensibility. These “shalls” and shall nots” pile up page after mind numbing page, and at the end of any attempt to peruse the whole document the only understanding that even the most astute reader will take away is that he now stands bewildered and helpless, at the mercy of an impenetrable Kafkaesque bureaucracy. 

But to get at the heart of command economics:  “The Secretary of the Treasury, acting through the Financial Management Service, shall administer the collection of penalty fees from health plans that have been identified by the Secretary in the penalty fee report provided under paragraph 3.” (Sec. 1104)  Here we have ACA in its most elemental, punitive form and function, making a real contribution to the better health of Americans.

The extent and detail of the regulations and requirements thus contained in the entire act is truly staggering.  No single individual could ever begin to comprehend all that is allowed, required and forbidden in this legislative bog.  If Americans were actually required to read the complete legislation and then asked to vote in a plebiscite as whether to accept or reject the act, it is hard to imagine that it would not be overwhelmingly repudiated as the design of some Rube Goldberg in an advanced state of dementia. A political system that produces laws like the ACA is in full, abject surrender to the faceless, unelected occupiers of regulatory agencies with vague, arbitrary power that make us helpless, frustrated and miserable and keeps them forever employed.

Consider as just a snippet of how the regulation works SEC. 2715 [42 U.S.C. 300gg–15]. DEVELOPMENT AND UTILIZATION OF UNIFORM EXPLANATION OF COVERAGE DOCUMENTS AND STANDARDIZED DEFINITIONS that sets forth the “rules” for formulation of the documentation for insurance consumers. First, the documentation has “appearance” requirements:  it must “not exceed 4 pages in length and…[must] not include print smaller than 12-point font”.  The “language” of the documentation must be such as to “ensure that the summary is presented in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner and utilizes terminology understandable by the average plan enrollee."  It is a sour tasting irony to have the anonymous hacks who wrote this monstrosity that the legislators never read ordering someone, anyone, to "utilize" understandable "terminology." 

Just this tiny fragment reveals an insidious descent into servitude and a future that brings far reaching control over and manipulation of our lives by individuals who are politically untouchable.  What we see in ACA depressingly resembles the work of the corrupt autocrats who for decades ran the Soviet Union and turned a huge, resource-rich country into a third world slum. So much for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: ours is a ‘dictatorship of the “font size”’ equipped with a language police enforcing an “understandable terminology” for the “average”  man, and directives that impose “appropriate” measures of “cultural” and “linguistic” sensitivity in written business communication, “appropriate” being whatever some Kommizarette in the federal bureaucracy in between coffee breaks at the moment decides it is.  The level of generality and leeway for the government enforcers to interpret what is “culturally and linguistically appropriate” is about the same as it would be for “enemy of the people.” A government that asserts this micro-managing range of control over its citizens is one that can do whatever it wants. Citizens no more, we are now mere subjects. Subjects are passive creatures who are subjected to the arbitrary dictates of their superiors.  This was the intent from the beginning, the creation of a massive edifice of arbitrary power.

Lest there is any doubt it is the government regulators, not the buyers and sellers, that determine the cost of the services and that health care will be a government run enterprise, see ‘‘SEC. 2794ø42 U.S.C. 300gg–94 ENSURING THAT CONSUMERS GET VALUE FOR THEIR DOLLARS. ‘‘INITIAL PREMIUM REVIEW PROCESS.— “The Secretary, in conjunction with States, shall establish a process for the annual review, beginning with the 2010 plan year and subject to subsection (b)(2)(A), of unreasonable increases in premiums for health insurance coverage…. The process established under paragraph (1) shall require health insurance issuers to submit to the Secretary and the relevant State a justification for an unreasonable premium increase prior to the implementation of the increase.” (my bold)  It is comforting and reassuring to know that our business people must run through a gauntlet of unelected bureaucrats who, following some “process for an annual review”, get to determine what “reasonable” means and who can enforce whatever whims they entertain.  No one but the most impossibly naïve can imagine that the power given to the “Secretary” will not be augmented over the years and will not at some time be abused.

ObamaCare is not and has never been the product of anyone hoping to make it easier for Americans to afford health insurance or to make the health care industry more efficient and effective: it is rather the consummate work of cynical opportunists and power grubbing ideologues and a prime example of 21^st century velvet authoritarian politics.  The desperation of the Republican right wing to resist and defund ACA is steeped in the perceptive realization that unless it is quickly overturned ACA will entrench itself and rapidly metastasize in its domination over the lives of Americans.

ObamaCare has been intended as a monument to Obama and it delivers on his promise shortly before the 2008 election to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” A different approach to making health care more affordable would have been to make a more modest and gradualist effort with input from the opposition party and a garnering of greater popular support. But Obama from the beginning has always disdained the opposition Republicans -- his "enemies", as he prefers to call them -- as stupid and greedy, essentially unworthy to participate in the process. Transformation is what he wanted and promised and transformation is 21^st century argot for revolution. Obama’s goal has always been to overturn the status quo not to fix or improve it.   

.

But with the approach of 2014 the ACA “master plan” bearing all the marks of the “higher authority” of its creators collides with reality. With some relish the reviled critics observe at the very beginning of the law’s implementation the hugely symbolic crash of the 400 million dollar HealthCare.gov website three years in the making. Moreover, President Obama now has to experience the deserved embarrassment from the full exposure of his repeated lie that satisfied policy holders would not be forced form their coverage, a lie that registers on the far end of the "Whopper" scale. The implementation appears to be unfolding in modes of disaster that even the Republicans did not envision. ObamaCare could become the best I-told-you-so, Obama’s detractors ever imagined.  

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.