An honorary degree recipient stupefies Rutgers
Barack Obama recently accepted an invitation to be the keynote speaker at Rutgers University’s commencement. After gracing the podium with the usual perfunctory niceties, rather than exhibit sensitivity toward Muslim graduates, Barack Hussein exercised his comedic chops by joking about whether New Jersey breakfast meat should be called pork roll or “Taylor ham.”
Then, after sharing that he has “soft spot” for “typical white” and 99-year-old grandmas in need of pacemakers, America’s classless president spent a great deal of time rebuking the Republican presumptive nominee.
In addition to admonishing Trump, President Obama used the commencement speech as a platform to lift up progressive ideology, put down political adversaries, and defend the last eight years. His remarks started with lauding the diversity of a graduating class that included a South Asian philosophy student and a “first-generation Latina student from Jersey City” who probably wouldn’t need a translator to understand Target’s new all Spanish ad campaign.
As an entrée to challenging the class to pursue social justice, Obama told them, “I'm fond of quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who he believes once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." One small problem, MLK didn’t say it, the 19th-century Unitarian minister/abolitionist Theodore Parker did.
After Obama expunged Winston Churchill from the redecorated Oval Office, the president, who exploited the Rutgers discourse to ridicule his political adversaries for lack of brainpower, had the misquote emblazoned on the rug.
At Rutgers, the guy who just said he has a “soft spot” for grandmas also injected divisiveness by suggesting that the older Americans are full of “fear… division and paralysis.” Then he commended #feelthebern moochers for their “cooperation … innovation and hope.”
The president told the soon to be alumni, “So you’ve got the tools to lead us…you’ll look at things with fresher eyes, unencumbered by the biases and blind spots and inertia and general crankiness of your parents and grandparents and old heads like me.” In other words, anyone who doesn’t worship Barack Obama is biased, blind, inert, cranky and “longing for the ‘good old days’.”
That’s why, the president informed the graduates, “the ‘good old days’ weren’t that great.” He warned that all talk about the past should be taken “with a grain of salt,” because it comes from a generation that flourished when “America pretty much did whatever it wanted around the world.”
After belittling the elders, Obama praised himself when he said, “In fact, by almost every measure, America is better, and the world is better, than it was 50 years ago, or 30 years ago, or even eight years ago” – a comment that thrilled the clapping seals in mortarboards.
For good measure, the president also brought up slavery, Jim Crow, and the suppression of women’s rights. Then he claimed that since 1983, the year his college transcripts went missing, crime, teenage pregnancy, and poverty rates have declined.
Obama chose not to quote statistics regarding illegal felons roaming our streets and threatening our children, 50 million aborted American babies, and millions of unemployed people receiving government subsidies.
Nor did the equal pay advocate mention that in his own administration women still earn less than men.
Instead, Obama bedazzled spectators with bluster about jobs, Obamacare, clean energy, and marriage equality. He even mentioned eliminating polio, and cutting infant mortality, but didn’t reference importing Third World diseases like MDR-TB, or Planned Parenthood peddling baby body parts.
Barack Obama is so clueless, that in an attempt to inspire his audience, the pro-choice president mentioned Alice Paul, who, besides being a “daughter of New Jersey” and a suffragette, was ardently pro-life.
After hearing the Rutgers University keynote commencement speech delivered by Barack Obama, it’s clear that the 44th president thinks he is the Bill Cosby of politics. The difference is that unlike Cosby, who was accused of drugging women with Quaaludes, to stupefy his audience, Obama infuses his delusional rhetoric with Cosby-style humor.
Thanks to Obama, Rutgers graduates have much to fear; yet the president encouraged them not to fear the future. That led him to a second point where he stressed globalism, which he defined as an “interconnected…world.” Then, Obama hinted that he believes responsible border security is solving a problem “in isolation.”
This is Obama’s rationale:
When overseas states start falling apart, they become breeding grounds for terrorists …that ultimately can reach our shores. When developing countries don’t have functioning health systems, epidemics like Zika or Ebola can spread and threaten Americans, too.
True, a wall won’t stop terrorism or disease. But, enforcing immigration law and refusing to import and resettle refugees that ISIS has vowed to infiltrate might help.
After hamstringing the U.S. military Obama then added:
But I worry if we think that the entire burden of our engagement with the world is up to the 1 percent who serve in our military, and the rest of us can just sit back and do nothing. They can’t shoulder the entire burden.
Then, further along in the speech the keynote speaker contradicted that logic when he said, “We can close tax loopholes on hedge fund managers and take that money and give tax breaks to help families with child care or retirement.” Put simply, when it comes to “leveling the playing field,” the excuse Obama uses to demilitarize the armed forces, he then uses to justify forcing a small percentage of earners to support those who “just sit back and do nothing.”
Lacking any quality input of his own, without uttering his name, Obama spent a lot of time taking Donald Trump to task.
After mocking Trump “building an endless wall,” Barack pulled out the “isolating and disparaging Muslims” card, the “betrayal of our values” card and the “important partners in the fight against violent extremism” card.
Oh, and right before some egghead in the audience yelled “Four more years!”, Obama insinuated Trump “blames [America’s] challenges on immigrants.”
From there, in an attempt to portray anyone who disagrees with his politics as uneducated, illogical, “anti-intellectual” and troglodyte in nature, Obama implied that those who contradict his views, namely Trump, lack “facts, evidence, reason, logic, [and] an understanding of science.” This from a guy who doesn’t believe partially born newborns are human and that greenhouse gasses are a bigger threat than ISIS teaching French boys how to kill.
With that in mind, maybe Obama should refrain from highlighting his own shortcomings by saying things like, “In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It's not cool to not know what you're talking about. ”
After emphasizing that the “good old days” should be taken with a “grain of salt,” Obama painted a certain Republican presidential candidate as unenlightened by calling upon our ‘enlightened’ limited government Founding Fathers, many of whom owned the slaves he alluded to when talking about disregarding our nation’s past.
Obama, who scorns rugged individualism and who once called our Constitution “deeply flawed” told his audience “rational thought and experimentation and the capacity of informed citizens to master our own fates…[is] embedded in our constitutional design.”
That was right before the man who thinks he’s “the smartest guy in the room” cited modern technology making us “more confident in our ignorance.” And, quite frankly, who better than Barack Obama to recognize that “a whole lot of folks who are book smart…have no common sense?”
Barack alluded to Donald when he mentioned leaders who have “a disdain for facts, when they're not held accountable for repeating falsehoods.” Maybe, instead of expelling CO2 when talking climate change, Obama should take some time to self-reflect.
In a call to the citizenry that sounded more like a quote from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto than a college commencement speech by an American president, Obama mentioned “collective decisions on behalf of a common good.”
Then, after implying that Donald Trump is a complete idiot, Obama, who clearly forgets what he’s reading off the Teleprompter, said progressive goals are reached through “advocacy… organizing… alliance-building, and deal-making, and …changing of public opinion.” Obama claimed all this “happened because ordinary Americans who cared participated in the political process.”
A legend in his own mind, what’s clear is that Obama doesn’t realize that those are the very things that propelled the “Art of the Deal”-maker to the front of the pack.
In the end, Obama offered the Rutgers graduating Class of 2016 insights he’s never taken to heart himself. That’s why, when the president uttered the words, “your generation will feel the brunt of this catastrophe,” it sounded more like he was referring to his presidency than an issuing indictment on climate change denial or Donald Trump.
Jeannie hosts a blog at www.jeannie-ology.com