PrintMay 5, 2009
Psychotherapy for liberals
Talking with liberals is frustrating, because you can't just talk about facts. That will only get them all upset, and all they will get out of the experience is never to listen to people like you. Most liberals live in their heads, or in little fluffy white clouds floating right above their scalps and resist efforts to engage them in rational conversation.
Our media are perfect examples. They never learn. They never listen to any other points of view. They know they have nothing to learn. Intellectually they are stuck, stuck, stuck.
(That's why the media are finally going bankrupt, thank goodness. But for years they got away with an endless parade of flagrant nonsense. Some of them still do. It's embarrassing.)
Talking to liberals is very much like doing therapy. The first lesson any psychiatrist learns is that most clients don't listen. They only pretend to listen, and then they never follow any sensible advice. So talking doesn't do the trick. It never does. If talking helped, they wouldn't be there in the first place.
So what do you do?
You wait for life to happen.
And then slowly, a tiny little bit at a time, you gently point out the ways in which clients defeat themselves, over and over again.
Therapists don't change people. Life does -- sometimes, if we are lucky and very patient.
A good therapist can turn life into learning opportunities. But you have to be very, very patient and forbearing. And the client has to be pretty desperate to learn.
Talking to liberals is like that. As the Obamanistas run out their string of self-celebration, preening and prancing before the world's media, as they keep bumping into the harsh walls of reality, getting a bloody nose here, a black eye there, there will be life lessons galore. Every day will bring new lessons. Already, the Obees are acting like George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq -- notice that? Their actions don't differ in any visible way from the most scapegoated administration in history; all they've changed is their talk.
Big deal.
On the economy they're hopeless. Already Midwestern Democrats have refused to commit political suicide with carbon Cap and Trade. So that is going nowhere.
As the economic downturn starts to bite, watch for the Obees to blame Republicans for not saving them from their folly. It is crucial for Republicans to remind the American people that they do not approve of Obama's egomaniacal fantasies. Hold fast, ride out the storm, and the people will come around when they feel their pain.
If the United States of America is very lucky, Obama -- who always acts like a bright grad student, always hopping up to prove how well he has learned his lessons -- Obama, as I say, may learn to avoid the biggest international traps and pitfalls.
If we are lucky.
If not, the United States will get Carterized again and again -- in Iran, with Russia, the Middle East and the UN. Those are all the places where Jimmy Carter got royal bloody noses. And then blamed the Republicans for his mistakes.
With Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, Jimmy Carter twisted Israeli arms over and over again, and finally got a so-called peace agreement that never worked. He walked away with a Nobel Prize from the suckered Oslo Nobel Committee, but no real success on the ground. Guess who got the blame for those failures? When somebody is mentally stuck, they only have one story to tell, no matter how reality turns out. They just have to blame other people for their disasters -- the alternative is to blame themselves, and they are not capable of doing that.
With Russia, Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan after telling Jimmy he wouldn't, and with Iran, Jimmy Carter enabled the worst medieval throwback tyrant of modern times, Ayatollah Khomeini, to take over the fastest-modernizing country in the Middle East and drive it back to the Dark Ages. Iranians are immensely talented people. In the West they do extremely well, when their opportunities are not limited and their lives are not oppressed.
But in Iran itself the last three decades have been painful for no reason at all. The war between Iran and Saddam Hussein cost a million lives. Saddam would not have attacked Iran with the Shah in charge, because the United States would have backed the Shah. The Shah would not have sent teenage "martyrs" on motorcycles into minefields to open the way up for his assault troops. The Shah, even with all his flaws, was a great modernizer, and would have spared his people endless pain and suffering. Today Iran would be a model of Islamic modernism but for our hero Jimmy Carter. But now it threatens a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, one that can spread the plague to the whole world.
Carter didn't like the Shah, and allowed him to be overthrown out of sheer, liberal guilt for what the United States did to Iran's Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1954, twenty years before Carter came to power.
See how well liberal guilt works in the Hobbesian "world community"? The world is not a "community." It is a wilderness full of predators. Liberals are just like that woman in the Berlin zoo who decided to jump into the polar bear enclosure, and got chomped. Want to understand Vladimir Putin? Remember that polar bear.
What we are seeing today with Obama is a neurotic repetition compulsion. All the things that didn't work for Jimmy are being tried again by Barry O. They will end up not working again. Only a fool could be surprised.
Obama is a natural follow-up act for Carter. Right now he looks like Jimmy Carter, Jr., with even more self-righteous arrogance and even more towering folly -- which is quite an accomplishment. Oh, yes, and he's black, which delights the media, because our media airheads always confuse symbolism with substance. But being black is only skin-deep. It doesn't guarantee anything. You have to be a fool to believe otherwise.
Being our first black president won't save Obama from the consequences of his arrogance. Nor will it save the country. Sorry about that. Reality always gets the final vote.
We have never seen an administration that lived more in its heads and less on Planet Earth -- the real earth, that is, not the fantasy dream of Mother Gaia. We have never seen a more mentally stuck power-mad gaggle of innocents abroad. Their mistakes will mirror their arrogance.
The prancing and preening Obama crowd is a natural victim for all the con artists in the world -- and that's practically every real enemy of the United States and Western civilization.
That's the way it is. Get used to it, because any therapeutic intervention first requires them to bump into reality. Just listen for the loud bangs as they go bouncing off the walls.
We can predict the Obama administration will run into trouble, because they have set out plans that are self-contradictory and doomed to failure. We also know what will happen when they fail really big: They will blame the grown-ups. That's what such people do. It's how they keep their self-esteem in the face of repeated failures.
The question is not, "Will they blame the rest of us?" They are bound to.
Rather, the adult question is: How can we protect the United States and the civilized world, even with mentally stuck Keystone Cops in charge?
Take just one little example, a very minor blooper, but one that defines this administration: The PR disaster of flying an Air Force One backup plane right over the Statue of Liberty, with an F-16 on its tail. Those are serious planes, with serious purposes. They are not manufactured to make pretty pictures. But that's evidently what the White House thinks they are for. It's like a kid trying to drive his Dad's car because it looks so cool.
The fly-over freaked out New Yorkers, as all sensible people knew in advance. But the White House still did it. Bottom line: PR considerations and a power-hungry, mentally stuck White House overrode simple common sense.
Sounds just like therapy, right? We know the White House was advised not to do this. But good advice has no effect on people who just want to keep bashing their heads into brick walls.
This is not the only mad PR move of the Obamanites. PR is really important to them. That's how they think they won; and with too many voters, it was how they won. They are mostly PR. The styrofoam Greek columns were another one. Promising to stop the rising seas was another one. Michelle's $540.00 tennies at the charity affair for poor people is another one. The iPod for the Queen and the deep bow for the King of Saudi were two more.
In fact, the Obama team has constantly overreached on public relations stunts. They have a predilection for that. It's part of their predictable neurosis. And eventually, when people get the joke, they will run head-on into a brick wall of public laughter. They will never laugh at themselves, nor confess their arrogance and ignorance. They can only steam straight ahead, running right into that looming wall. Again.
And when they do, the rest of us have to be ready just to point out the obvious.
It's beginning already.
Don't expect quick results, just remember that reality always gets the last vote.
