PrintFebruary 11, 2009
Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle and Barack Obama
What happens when everything that can go wrong in a person's character formation does go wrong, and that person continues to be promoted to his level of incompetence?
President Barack Obama happens.
I'm well into my sixth decade of life and have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle in a single individual.
Proper character development is the overriding aim of good parents in raising their children. Mature parents, especially those Judeo/Christian parents with faith, believe it sinful to raise a child without strong self-constraint, a well-formed conscience, ingrained humility and an ironclad respect for the rights of others. Children raised thusly become self-supporting adults, honest in their dealings with others and prone to be contributing members of the society at large.
The world is purely chock full of bad parents, however. Plum chock full.
Barack Obama was conceived out of wedlock to an eighteen year-old girl, who was herself the product of non-religious, rebellious parents, intent on unraveling the fabric of WASP America. Stanley Ann Dunham met Barack Obama Sr., an already-married African Muslim man, in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii in her very first year there. According to President Obama's memoir, his biological father married his mother about three months into the pregnancy, even though he already had a wife and children on his home continent. Hence, very shortly, the father abandoned the new mother and her child to seek his own fortune and yet another wife-to-be at Harvard.
Bigamists are not known for fidelity, are they?
The end result of this convoluted beginning of the man who would become President was that his maternal grandparents became his primary caregivers. With the very best of intentions, I'm sure, these white grandparents doted, scraped and groveled to make the little abandoned child's life as picture-perfect as it could possibly be under the awful circumstances of parental abandonment. This is a recipe for disaster in the area of character development.
Believing that the child, Barry, needed lots of attention and as few hard knocks as possible, these grandparents proceeded to spoil the ever-living daylights out of the precocious, charismatic, bi-racial child of their only daughter. Through his grandmother's connections, Barry got a scholarship to the elite Panahou Academy and became one of only five black children in the posh school, where teachers, too, bent over backwards not to offend, not to discipline. For added umph to this already-disastrous formula, Barry's grandfather made sure the child got lots of father-figure mentoring from a self-proclaimed pedophile and avowed communist, Frank Marshall Davis.
As a young teenager, surrounded by opportunities for drug abuse and tomfoolery, Barry bragged that he had a deal with his doting grandparents which entailed his being able to do whatever he wanted while they looked the other way and pretended not to notice.
After all, they surely reasoned, this pitiful little boy had enough pain in his life.
Paying consequences for delinquent behavior would have been entirely too much. Too much. Oh, just too much to bear.
As President Obama's school transcripts (all of them, from start to finish!) remain among his stack of unreleased documents, we have no way of knowing how our current President did in school. However, we do know that he was doing drugs, that he was not involved in any demanding athletic program and that he was not otherwise making a big name for himself on campus. We know also that Obama's first gig on the mainland was at Occidental College, which is a fine school I am sure, but far from Ivy League. I'm fairly certain that those grades at Panahou were nothing to brag about, and there is no evidence whatsoever that there was anything else to brag about either.
At Occidental, however, young Barry Obama discovered the one gift that would eventually make up for all other deficiencies: his oratorical talent. Coupled with natural charisma and an Eddie-Haskell styled ability to guile, Barry Obama had arrived.
This was the story hailed by Axelrod as bedrock, middle-class, Kansan upbringing.
And 52% of the American electorate bought it faster than you can say prime-Florida-swampland-with-a-view-sold-to-dumber-than-dumb-Yankees.
Barry Obama made his entrance into mainland politics by frequenting all the Occidental socialist clubs, rallies and protests, and the first time he took to a podium, his rhetorical talent unveiled itself. Then, it was off to Columbia and a shadow existence, which eventually culminated in President Barack Obama, the first African-American President and the first man to ever assume the highest office in the land without one whit of experience other than running for office and beguiling a public begging to be beguiled.
Along the always-sunny yellow brick road to the White House, Barry was hailed as brilliant-beyond-brilliant, the veritable savior of his people and in the words of his now Vice President, a "clean, articulate and bright" black man. Nowhere, at any time during Barack Obama's near-miraculous rise to power, did he come into contact with anyone that would have demanded a character test.
The characters in this President's closet are too strange for fiction -- Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, the New Party, Billy Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Louis Farrakhan, Mayor Daly, Rod Blagojevich, George Soros, assorted tax cheats and pay-to-play schemers of every variety. When any sentient person adds it up, he gets a man without principle, someone so enabled in his avoidance of reality about himself that one can only call it Murphy's Law applied to character development.
Every single thing that could go wrong has indeed gone wrong.
Enter a mainstream media so swept off its feet with tingles and its own utter lack of religiosity -- a group purely primed for false-savior seeking -- and what one could call the Murphy's Law of picking a President is perfectly, positively, poignantly complete.
From Stage right and Stage left, and from below and above, we see the Peter Principle in all its inglorious dimensions set to wreak havoc upon this entire Country.
In only three weeks' time, this President has signaled to every terrorist on the planet that we are a sorry, groveling, ashamed Nation ready to come to the diplomatic confessional. He is closing Gitmo within one year, has suspended trials there, and dismissed the charges against the U.S.S. Cole plotter. American penance is coming and it's coming fast and feebly on its knees.
President Obama has just put our money where his mouth is and is using $20.3 million to bring in Palestinian refugees from Gaza, the Hamas-controlled region where folks prefer bomb-making to bread-baking. Instead of helping Israel defeat them, this President brings them here.
As if we did not have enough home-grown terrorists.
The new politics of "hope & change" is looking like a Hollywood remake of "Larger-than-life Dopes and Same-ole-same-ole Corruptocrats" with tax cheats flanking the new Cabinet, an Attorney General who never saw a pardon he didn't like or a terrorist he couldn't love, a porn-protection guru as his Deputy, and a man without an ounce of intelligence knowledge or experience now the wartime head of the CIA. Add to this mess a Secretary of State whose husband owes far more than any other American alive to foreigners. The new Secretary of Education was in charge of Chicago schools, where more than 500 verified acts of child battering by teachers went unpunished and teacher unions trumped student rights. This Cabinet is shaping up to be worse than Bill Clinton's and Jimmy Carter's combined, while President Obama throws cocktail parties with $100/pound steak.
President Obama's definition of bipartisanship: "I won."
President Obama's definition of leadership: "Nancy can handle the details."
Our new President had the gall to pronounce the so-called economic stimulus bill absolutely free of "earmarks" and "make-do work," while spinning his prosaic campaign rhetoric before an international audience in a prime-time "press conference." This bill has close to a trillion-dollar price tag, but according to the Congressional Budget Office will do worse to our overall economy than no government action whatsoever. So, if this bill has no pork or earmarks in it, then it is pure socialist folderol run amok before it even gets implemented - in the face of the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."
The Peter Principle has reached its pinnacle in President Barack Obama.
If one wants a hawks-eye view into the minds of Obama voters, all one need do is read this piece published by the New York Times last week, detailing the fantasies, dreams and drooling-envy delusions of his followers. Their celebrity is now their President.
The perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle has arrived to explode in our faces.
In the words of Britain's most eloquent commentator, "America, what have you done?"
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver@gmail.com.
