Today’s self-proclaimed “liberals” would have no truck with the real John F. Kennedy, or LBJ, or Harry S. Truman, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or other patriotic liberals. If the phrase “patriotic liberal” has an odd clang today, you know exactly what I mean.

Obama, for whatever talents he may possess, is not an American patriot. Try saying “The patriotic Obamas” and then try not to cringe. JFK was an unblushing patriot, Truman was, and in his grotesque way, so was LBJ. They were Cold War liberals, who defined their political position by kicking out the  totalitarian Left (Stalin Branch) from the Democratic Party, after the Soviets stole the atom bomb, took over half of Europe, and generally acted like ravening monsters in a cage. Our strategy in the Cold War was to keep them in that cage.

John F. Kennedy was a liberal, but he didn’t go around the world ceremonially bowing down to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, or China’s former Despot of Tibet, Chairman Hu of the Communist Party. John F. Kennedy, the Boston aristocrat, would have disdained Obama’s international bowing campaign as too vulgar for words. This is an extraordinarily vulgar administration -- Obama’s gift to the Queen of England was an iPod with his own speeches. Imagine JFK doing that. Vulgar and theatrical.

Or try to imagine JFK bowing to Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev wielding his famous smelly shoe, to Chairman Mao with his little red book, or to Pol Pot with his murder camps. Or, for that matter, to El Jefe Fidel, who persecutes his subjects by boring them to death.

Well, Obama has done all that bowing and scraping and apologizing for White America, and we have the press photos to prove it. I hope you feel better about America, now that we have our first black president.

No -- modern “liberals” do not believe in liberty. Or in liberating oppressed women, half a billion of them, literally caged by Shari’a law in the good old-fashioned Muslim world. Today’s self-proclaimed liberals are certainly not anti-Communists, having been spoon-fed dumbed-down Marxism in college, and making  their radical  bones by taking the subway from Mom’s apartment in Upper Manhattan to be photographed crapping on the street near the fearsome monster of Wall Street. (And then leaving the disgusting streets to be cleaned up by black and Hispanic workers from the NYC Sanitation Dept.)

These self-indulgent infants are not anti-Communist, not anti-totalitarian, and not patriotic. They are just trust fund kids who were taught to hate the 1%, i.e., their own wealthy parents. Freud would have understood them, but not Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, or the other fearsome killers thrown up by their cult in its gory glory days.

This is a very nostalgic “progressive” generation, trying to repeat the jolly old days of the Great Depression, with the same slogans, the same labels (“progressive” is a term hijacked by Stalinists), and even the feeble remnants of the Communist catechism of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, with its inevitable March of Progress, whelped by Brother Karl out of Friedrich Hegel, while sitting in the British Museum penning the longest work of economics that nobody has ever tried to read.

(Quick now -- how does Brother Marx define “capital”?)

Modern liberals are so illiterate they can barely make their way through Marx and Engels’ popular’ pamphlet of 1848, with its vision of masses of 19th-century workers laboring in coal-fired  steel mills, ready to raise their real hammers and real  sickles  to the cause of bloody revolution, led by the skinny  intellectuals of 1900, the Vanguard of the Working Class, the unapologetically communist Communist Party.

The best way to teach Occupy kids the error of their ways is to make them read Das Kapital in the original German. That’ll teach ‘em.

Today’s Left is a theatrical cult, and Street Theater is what they know. The problem is that theater is fiction, their daily lives of TV and Facebook are fiction, whatever sci-fi books they read in high school are fiction, and fiction is what they aspire to. It’s the Selfie Generation, the kids who want to be famous for being famous, like Kim Kardashian. Show them a real ditch to dig, or a field to hoe, and they won’t last more than a brief commercial break. It’s too boring, it doesn’t have the drama of Occupy Wall Street, and their attention wanders to their iPhones already. Nostalgic Pop Marxism is a tatty copy of the original, with its verified 100 million dead, killed without remorse by real mass murdering Communist battalions in Siberia and the bloody fields of Cambodia.

Coming out of the theatrical Left, Obama is necessarily our most theatrical president ever. He does theater and nothing else.

And then there’s reality. Reality is not Obama’s forte, I’m sorry to say. You’ve heard about the “dance-away lover?” Well, our Hero is the first dance-away president (though Bill Clinton pioneered the genre). Dance-away presidents start by boasting about the fabulous things they will certainly achieve, then fail to do anything useful, and then, when things invariably go wrong, they lie their way out of any responsibility. And get away with it! To the hoots and hollers of Maureen Dowd and her ilk.

What’s that about Benghazi? I only know what I read in the papers! Nope, nothing to see there. Isn’t it time to move on? What, at this point, does it really matter?

Back to so-called “liberals.” Conservatives have a very bad habit of picking up whatever fresh new label the Left invents for itself -- such as calling fantasy radicals “liberals.” Or “progressives.” Remember, the bloody-handed Stalin Left called itself “progressive” because they could read in Marx and Lenin the inevitable march of Progress, defined by Karl as the Triumph of the Proletariat and its Vanguard leading to true Communism, the land nobody could even imagine because there would be no exploitation of Man by Man. Marx’s definition of Progress made an attempt at coherence (though you had to read Hegel to try to get it). Old Marxism was “scientific,” meaning that it made real predictions about the economic growth of real nations and social classes. All their predictions turned out to be wrong, of course, but hey, at least they tried.

The historically dumb progressives these days like the sound of “progressive”, since it means that anybody else is not in the cult. Other people stand in the way of Progress -- whatever that might be. Progress has nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution, which was shockingly dirty, and a lot of hard work to boot. Progress has nothing to do with real science or medicine, which keeps finding out things you don’t want to study, nor engineering, technology, farming, road building, or even driving smog-belching trucks. 

Instead, we have fantasy “global” horror scenarios parading as “climate science” to scare the dumbed-down masses into voting for imaginary Green Solutions. Fantasy horrors for a fantasy-led people.

When the Germans finally wake up and realize how badly they have been suckered by their own Green movement, probably in cahoots with Gulf Oil Arabs who just want to kill off any real energy competition, they might elect some adults for a change. The French will be laughing up their sleeves as usual, having built 40 working nuclear power plants to make clean electricity, subsidized by the harder-working Germans. Since our buddy Putin has just threatened to shut off the winter supply of Russian natural gas to Europe, that moment of truth may come very soon.

Let ‘em eat windmills, say I.

Not even German dreams of scampering across the Alps with Heidi in her dirndl, hand in hand, will warm their homes this winter. Frau Merkel deliberately gave Vladimir Putin control over the natural gas supply to Germany, to assure the poor Russians that never, never would the Germans be nasty again, and now Putin is madly tugging on the leash she gave him.

It’s a tough world, and Europe has steadfastly refused to face tough choices since the 1960s, conjuring up fictional global disasters instead, to keep the taxes coming in, and the bureaucrats flying into Davos in 1,700 private jets, ready to conjure up a slew of new and even scarier disaster scenarios. It was the EU elites who forced suicidal mass immigration of easily radicalized Muslims from Pakistan on European nations, a truly insane policy that still has not been halted. It was the EU elites who coerced poor countries like Greece and Italy to adopt the Deutschmark for their currency (now called the “euro”), making their exports of olive oil and wine impossible to sell on the world market. Greek unemployment is now around 50%, and a whole generation of young people is leaving. Force people into following fantasy economics and pretty soon they’ll have to eat imaginary bread.

What does Obama have to do with all this? What do so-called “liberals” have to do with it?

I think the common denominator is fantasy-driven cult behavior. It is the chic disease of our time.

Obama represents a radical Left cult, satirized immortally by Tom Wolfe in his book of essays Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Obama is literally the son of a Mau Mau politician who stayed out of Kenya spreading his wild oats around the world, while the head-chopping Mau Mau rebellion was going on against innocent white English farm families who kept the economy alive. Jomo Kenyatta didn’t think much of Obama, Sr., presumably because he wasn’t with Kenyatta at home when the rebels were fighting the British. Kenyatta soon fired Obama, Sr. from his government job when he started to talk about imposing his Marxist fantasies on post-colonial Kenya.

Obama is our first Radical Chic president, elected by phony liberals for his supposed radical credentials. Obama has no radical credentials in the real world. He has never missed a meal in his life, nor a trip to the golf course. Obama is a child of the upper class, the same class that learns all about Pop Marxism when its children go to Harvard and Yale.

In Wolfe’s great book, black radicals are hosted by Leonard Bernstein in his fabulously expensive Manhattan pad, mainly for their sexy scariness. Bernstein was a master musician, but also a compulsive homosexual, and Tom Wolfe simply reported what he saw and heard. While Black Muslims in the ‘hood were killing competitors like Malcolm X, Bernstein was going through his own fantasy soiree by flattering and glorifying a bunch of thugs who terrorized their own communities before going out to terrorize others.

Well, we get what we vote for. Unfortunately the part of the world that depends on America’s trusted word for its very survival is not doing so well.

Israel just bombed a dozen Hizb’allah thugs, meeting with Iranian military officers just north of its border with Syria, apparently planning their next invasion of the Golan Heights. Japan is now seriously rearming to face down an expansionist China. Putin invaded Georgia, then the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, just because the Ukrainian capital of Kiev was the ancient capital of Mother Russia. Cuba fired on, and sank a boat with 32 desperate refugees trying to cross over to Florida, just a few days after Obama announced U.S. recognition of the dying Castro regime. Egypt is making war on the Muslim Brotherhood, after Obama tried to put an MB puppet into power over there. Libya is still in chaos, after Obama’s invasion and coup against Gadaffi. Yemen has just fallen to another proxy terror group for the mullahs. Yemen was the poster baby for Obama’s anti-terrorist strategy, the last time Americans heard about that country. He probably forgot about Yemen in the SOTU stage play.

But Obama is scapegoating the Republicans, and being celebrated by the faithful for his courage.

These are not liberals in the mold of Hubert Humphrey. They certainly are not “progressives.” They are Tom Wolfe’s radical chic pretenders, selfie-taking preeners with no principles of any kind. Their cause celebre today is the poor, persecuted Wahhabi Muslims, the victims of Islamophobic racist white men with a Southern drawl. They know. They saw it at the movies.

Obama has empowered Iran to an unbelievable extent, so that the mullahs are now a rising power with advanced Russian missiles, a couple more nuclear power plants in production, the Saudis across the Gulf shaking in their desert sandals, and Hizb’allah killing a prosecutor in Argentina who was about to reveal how Iran’s proxy terror cult bombed a Jewish community center in 1994. Iran follows a global-war theology, and they don’t mind killing people in Argentina, Beirut, Israel, Tehran, Syria, or anywhere else to promote their mad imperialistic theology. ISIS is exactly the same thing, except that they hate the Iranians, too.

Obama is prancing on the captain’s bridge, and nobody is steering the vessel.

Cheers, everybody.