Obama the Reactionary
In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That's after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their "scientific" policies this time around.
Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.
So much for eradicating human nature.
But Obama hasn't given up. That's the only reason I can imagine for some of the wildest policies of this deeply irrational administration. Deep down Obama is a reactionary, in rebellion against western civilization, who really believes in going back to some world of Noble Savages, when all the Andalusian Muslims were devout and civilized, the Jews were kept in their place (which is not Israel), the Brits had not colonized the Falklands, and all the native peoples of the world were singing rap songs and smoking dope. True, the Mayans were sacrificing children on top of Chichen Itsu to make the sun come up the next morning, but on the whole it was paradise on earth.
This is not a "progressive" vision, if by "progress" you mean marching toward some cleverly engineered Brave New World. Obama's romantic utopia is old, old, old. It's the world of tribal peoples whose happy lives we see among headhunters in New Guinea, the fierce and murderous Yanamamo in Chile, and the Pashtun badlands of Afghanistan. What a dream to admire and emulate.
You have to remember that Obama was given nearly 100 million dollars of play money by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, courtesy of Bill Ayers, supposedly to fix the inner city school system. When the money was all spent Obama's campaign was launched, but nothing had changed in Chicago's schools. Obama was quoted as saying that maybe a "jazz curriculum" was the answer, essentially the old Jim Crow line that all God's chillun got rhythm dressed up in multiculti costume. Chicago's inner city children were left behind, and liberals noticed nothing amiss. But then they wouldn't, would they?
Reactionary: How else can we explain foreign policy grotesqueries like this?
1. On the Falklands, Obama ignores the independence vote of Falklanders in favor of Argentina's land claims against the Brits, who gave up their empire around 1950. Argentinians are certainly more exotic than Queen Elizabeth, and they are far more tanned, so this administration's responsibility to history is clear. Up yours, Brits!
2. Obama's most significant policy statement on Israel is to tell the Jews to go back to the cease-fire lines of 1949, which leaves that country looking like some slithery gerrymandered district in Georgia. This is like giving Manhattan back to the Indians, which may well be the highest priority of a second term. Who knows?
3. Publicly bowing down to archaic tyrants like Abdullah of Arabia, whose tribe was herding camels and raiding neighboring desert clans before World War I. Or bowing like a low-ranking peasant to Japan's Emperor, predictably infuriating the Chinese, who thereupon insisted on an equally deep bow to President Hu, the terror master of Tibet. Obama complied. The media didn't skip a beat.
Old news, I know, but just think about it for a second.
America arose as the first great democratic nation in a world of petty and murderous monarchies. From George Washington onward no American president has bowed to a foreign potentate, because everybody in the world knows what a deep bow means. If you doubt that, take a look at Egyptian temple walls that show foreigner after foreigner kneeling in submission to the reigning Pharaoh. This went on for three thousand years. It happened in India, in China, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Bowing is the symbolic act of submission all over the world. Fighting wolves roll over and bare their throats to the teeth of the victor, but the message is the same. I'm at your mercy, master.
Like all presidents, Obama was briefed on standard US diplomatic protocol. What Obama did was therefore not an accident and it wasn't a sudden crick in his back (as a liberal friend tried to tell me). It was a gesture of deep submission that knowingly went straight against two hundred years of American diplomatic protocol. In giving the historic slave bow to pre-medieval tyrants, Obama was giving America his great middle finger.
I know it looks like just another wacky thing in this supremely goofy administration. Like Michelle's World War II Victory Garden on the White House lawn. It feels wrong, but in a silly way. Still, novelists and psychiatrists learn to look for little signs as big portents.
I think it has to reflect Obama the eco-Marxist, the weird product of the post-modern radical Left, which no longer puts its faith in "national electrification," Lenin's formula for Soviet progress. The Po-Mo Left doesn't look to electricity and iPhones to bring the millennium on earth. Instead, it yearns for a mythic past of ecological simplicity. That's why little old ladies in Marin County wear copper bracelets, hang crystals in their windows, and place their faith in some weird superstition to cure whatever ails them. That's why Steve Jobs (of all people) is said to have avoided mainstream medical treatment for his cancer until it was too late. Liberals are not the most rational thinkers in the world, let's face it. They fall for one ecofraud after the next. They need some transitory faith to cling to.
I'm half convinced that Obama himself believed in the miracle of "green jobs." No sensible engineer pays attention to large-scale solar energy, because the conversion efficiency of sunshine to electricity is dreadful, which is why venture capitalists walk away from it. It's simple high school physics. But Obama might believe in miracles; or rather, he might figure it might just work (who knows?), and if it didn't, his big bundlers would still walk away with half a billion dollars in tax money, so it's a win-win for him either way.
This is the stuff of satire, except it's really happening. Satire is funny when you know it's not real. When it gets real, sensible people head for the hills. That's why the economy is frozen: Investors are fleeing the risk of four more years.
4. The worst foreign policy since Jimmy Carter.
Heard about the "Arab Spring" lately?
When Obama publicly ordered President Hosni Mubarak to resign because Now means now! -- all the liberal media were singing Hosannas to the Arab Spring. On television you could see the young and idealistic Egyptians demonstrating for democracy in Tahrir Square, proudly twittered by the revolutionary hero of the New York Times, one Wael Ghoneim. Mr. Ghoneim was Google's Veep of North African Sales who was allowed to take time off from his job to organize a vast uprising all the way from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain, and all from a little loft in Manhattan.
And if you believe that, I've got a Persian rug to sell you. Cheap. Just because I like you.
The "Arab Spring" suddenly blossomed all over the media, even after Lara Logan got gang-raped by those nice protesters right in the middle of Tahrir Square, and Cairo cops were giving "virginity tests" to women caught walking outdoors without a male escort. No sane Egyptian believed in the Arab Spring, but the New York Times and its legions of middlebrow followers were cheering Obama's brilliant foreign policy stroke for months and months.
At some point Clinton operative Stan Greenberg was sent to Israel to stir up some spring riots there as well, but Israeli protesters were the most well-behaved ones in history, putting little tents on the center strip of the main highways into Tel Aviv, being nice to the cops, and peacefully protesting the intolerable cost of cottage cheese.
Meanwhile, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen were having a civil war and killing people en masse, while the Israelis, the real targets of Obama's destabilization policies, discovered huge new shale gas deposits under the Eastern Med. Capital was fleeing from Egypt to Switzerland, Greece and Southern Europe were going under from Obamaniac overspending, and Israel, which liberalized its economy ten years ago, was an island of stability. The storyline was straight out of a Roadrunner cartoon, with Obama playing Wiley Coyote.
Meanwhile, Obama was doing nothing about Iranian nukes, infuriating Iran's neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which was once attacked by the Ayatollah Khomeini right in the middle of the Hajj, and which still pursues a thousand-year religious quarrel with Iran. Iranian nukes inevitably mean Saudi nukes, as even the CIA should know. If you think we've got trouble now, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
But when the mullahs explode their nukes, Obama and the media will blame George W. Bush.
Count on it.
Jimmy Carter allowed the pro-Western, pro-Israel, pro-modernist Shah of Iran to be overthrown, thereby ushering in thirty years of misery and despair for the people of Iran. Carter welcomed the first Islamofascist throwback regime, which taught radical Muslims around the world that a regression to the distant past was possible, and that American Democrats were fools enough to support them. Today "neo-Ottomans" control Turkey, and the Salafists and their ilk may win in Egypt -- which is why the Egyptian military is going all out against the Moo Bros who assassinated Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel.
Today we have a civil war in Syria, bringing in the Russians to fish in troubled waters, and a near civil war in Egypt. Libya has had its own civil war with a little assistance from NATO, and if you can tell who the good guys were in Libya, please let me know. I can't.
Nothing has changed in the Arab Middle East, except that Iran has not been stopped, and the West has again demonstrated its spectacular yellow streak to the world.
Obama is now said to be sitting in the White House every evening, carefully designating whoever is due to be assassinated by Predator strikes the next day, like Jimmy Carter poring over the White House tennis schedule. His control freak tendencies have finally found their natural outlet. But, being a liberal, Obama is still against capital punishment. OK, let's kill Abdullah Al Libi tomorrow, guys and gals!
Tell me this is normal presidential behavior.
Please.
5. Barefoot dancing in the White House.
In this White House style is substance, because there's no substance. Even ObamaCare was left to the drunken spenders in Congress to slap together. The new book by Democrat Edward Klein says it all: The Amateur. The Democrats are now panicking -- four years too late. They should have panicked when Obama smeared Bill Clinton as a racist, thereby bullying his way into the Democratic nomination and driving Hillary out.
But Obama is not an amateur at all: He is a professional "community organizer," which used to be called a "communist organizer" back when newspapers still told the truth. Obama is not acting out of character. He's not even particularly incompetent. He's just not interested in being President of the United States, if that means protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States. Obama treats the US Constitution with unconcealed contempt, as he has shown the country time and time again. That's why the Supremes may be getting ready to show him some spine.
For this White House, sending Winston Churchill's bust back to Britain was an act of policy, because Churchill was a proud British Imperialist who fought the Mau-Mau rebels in Kenya, and Obama's Daddy was on the side of the head-hacking terrorists. Even if little Barry only saw his bio-Dad but once in his life, even if Kenyan socialism was a pure British export from Bloomsbury and the Labour Left, Obama is playing this like a spaghetti Western. He has an amazingly childish vision of the world.
It all comes down to what the psychiatry manual calls the 'oppositional defiant" theme of Obama and his buds, like Bill Ayers standing on a crumpled American flag on the cover of a recent book, the poopy kids of Wall Street literally being photo-opped excreting on a police car, while waiting for the blacks and Hispanics of the New York Sanitation Department to clean up their mess after they decamp, chanting slogans against the evil capitalists whose useless spawn they are. Oppositional defiant disorder is infantile, and of course it's utterly narcissistic. It's the style of the Terrible Two's, much more primitive than teenage rebellion. And yet it defines Obama's foreign policy, and like any other impulsive and revenge-driven policy, it ends up killing people.
So the question for Obama is not "what is the most beneficial action the United States can take?" It's "What will show the world how much we, the Wretched of the Earth of Obama's imagination, have suffered? What will really shove it to whitey and shift political power in this country to its politically correct victims?"
For his 50th birthday party, we are told, Obama and his invited guests, rap artists and such, did barefoot dancing for several hours. The usual suspects deep-sixed that story, unlike the New York Times' treatment of genuine national security secrets this past week. I'm not a fan of barefoot dancing, since I'd rather not hurt my feet, so I've skipped that experience. Maybe it's a treat for better dancers. I don't know. But I suspect real dancers would rather not risk injury. That's what shoes are for. This looks like another case of symbolism, the symbolism of Up Yours, American Middle Class!
Just as the words of rap songs are nothing like the music and poetry of real tribal cultures, but rather an elaborate FU! to the parents of teenage kids, just as Obama's phony deep bows to King Abdullah of the desert sands has nothing in common with genuine expressions of respect to friendly nations, and just as the "Arab Spring" started with a pure, imperialistic demand for a 30-year ally of the United States to leave office in disgrace, barefoot dancing in the White House is this administration's version of Bill Clinton's sexual abuse of the Oval Office. It has no rational basis. It is an expression of a personality disorder, and the sooner we get rid of people like that at the center of American power, the safer we will all be.