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Summing Obama up — 43 Comments

  1. VDH wrote, “Who is not for universal medical care and perpetual motion.

    I’m not.

    As somebody who works HARD, sweats night and day on tiling, replacing, painting, landscaping, pick-axing, planting….

    I know the best things in life come from hard work and perserverance.

    I do NOT want perpetual motion. I don’t want things to come easy. I want things to be hard. The fulfillment that comes from accomplishment IS what bring true happiness.

    This is why the largest class of people that I’m down on is journalists. They are lazy. They do not do the due diligence necessary to be an expert in a field before they negligently report. They are the largest failure today and they have CONRIBUTED to Obama and the dumbing down of Americans.

    I hold the press responsible for this mess. We will not get out of it until THEY shape up.

    Yet, I will continue to work hard. 🙂

  2. Neo, the second and third comments are terrific, especially the third, but the first one is overheated, badly written and full of grammatical errors. I know people write these comments quickly and don’t bother to edit, but frankly this one sounds ignorant. It’s long on accusations, short on documentation and examples. Its tone is a little nutty. Even though I’m in basic sympathy with it, I hate to see it held up as an example of a perceptive comment, especially by a careful thinker and writer like you.

  3. The MSM and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
    zero and Ayers and others disbursed $150 mill in the Chicago school system with no noticeable effect and NO STORY about where the money went.
    None.
    In CHICAGO.

  4. mizpants: That first comment is not well-written, and yes it’s very heated. I don’t agree with everything stated in the full comment. But I carefully chose certain parts to feature here because I do agree with them, at least in essence.

    The problem is that it is impossible to state what’s going on with Obama without sounding “a little nutty.” That’s what he counts on.

    I especially like this part of the comment:

    Action on any one individual issue means nothing to the nature of the problem nor will the conversations lead to any real solutions. Just the opposite. Misdirection is in play.

    Why? Because BHO is not about the details of the last political or legislative move by BHO functionaries. BHO and his cronies are about control.

    I have been astounded at the slowness of most Americans to grasp what’s happening. I think it is at least partly because to do so it’s necessary to connect the dots and see the whole picture. Most of the MSM is not doing that, and/or nowhere near enough people are paying attention to the few who are doing so. That’s the danger—and I hope many more people start paying attention (and connecting dots) before it’s too late.

  5. Well, Neo, I see what you mean, and even as I was writing my comment about the comment you quote I was thinking in some uncomfortable back room in my mind that my usual judgments about good writing and tone and careful arguments have somehow become archaic and obsolete. There is something terrifying going on, and it’s happening so fast.

  6. Gee thanks, Neo. I spend my lunch hour reading about the massive push for Obamacare to be done quickly. Then I come home and read this posting and it just depresses me even more.

    I wrote my Rep. about the health care bill and got back a form letter with the usual platitudes. It seems even who I thought were semi-reasonable Dems have drank the Kool-Aid. I guess there’s nothing to stop this sinking of the US. A year from now we’ll all be clinging to the “lifeboats” and wondering what happened while BHO and the Dems are enjoying the “good life”.

  7. mizpants wrote, “There is something terrifying going on, and it’s happening so fast.

    You nutball ! 🙂

    expat: Good one … You can’t use Colin Powell….

  8. neo: “I have been astounded at the slowness of most Americans to grasp what’s happening.”

    It’s partly, also, GWB’s fault! In this sense: relative to most politicians, GWB was forthright, and believed in modest government. Most voters had forgotten the vast deception practiced by most politicians. Some voters who were able to remember, for instance, Bill Clinton’s parsing deceptions, had died off by 2008, and were replaced by voters whose major impression of politicians was GWB’s comparative forthrightness. The scale of a typical politician’s deception was lost on a good portion of the voting public. As was the scale of the Democratic Party’s ardor for government control of our lives, which had not been much on display since the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.

    Just as, since 9/11, many Americans have lost their concern over fundamentalist Islam; so many Americans lost their appreciation of political deception and of vast grabbing for political and government power over American citizens.

    This is only one factor. And my proposed factor is interrelated with your observation that Americans are uninformed, and with the observation that many Americans do not know history – even, in some cases, the history of the 1990s.

  9. The problem is that it is impossible to state what’s going on with Obama without sounding “a little nutty.” That’s what he counts on.

    neo: Obama plays his cards so close to his vest that I don’t think anyone knows, beyond possibly his wife, what is going on with him. So we are all speculating.

    My take is that he’s a confused leftist narcissist who believes at least half of what he is saying, that he’s living in a movie fantasy where he gets to play FDR/JFK/MLK all rolled into one, so of course he takes grand decisive actions like taking over auto companies and banks, nationalizing healthcare, bitch slapping CEO’s, and passing immense climate-change bills so the seas stop rising.

    So far, I still don’t believe Obama is trying to destroy the economy or America or become its Supreme Leader. I believe Obama assumes America is like the magic salt mill from the fairy tale which will continue to turn out salt no matter what happens. It’s just up to Obama in his all-knowing majesty to decide how that salt is doled out for the good of all humanity, not just Americans.

    If he was really serious about being the American Lenin, subverting our country into some people’s paradise, he would be paying much more attention to the details of his crown jewel plans instead of handing them off to hacks like Pelosi and Reid and saying, “Make it so.”

  10. huxley: See this for what I have to say about Obama, Pelosi, and Reid:

    I used to agree with exactly what Althouse is saying here–that Obama the narcissist would trump Obama the ideologue (how’s that for a choice of what to hope for?). However, as recent readers of this blog know, in the last month or two I’ve jumped the shark and ended up thinking that Obama is deeply committed to his agenda, and willing to sacrifice members of Congress and even his own second term in order to implement it.

    Far from Congress enacting its own agenda which is more to the Left than Obama’s, I think they are at the very least in agreement, or that it’s Obama who’s more to the Left than Congress. He delegates the details to the Pelosi/Reid Congress because he knows those two are on much the same far Left page as he, and it also gives him the ability to say “It’s not me; it’s Congress!” Theoretically, this affords him some deniability if he should ever need to activate it.

    I think it was Honduras that turned the tide for me into thinking of Obama is a dedicated ideologue above all else.

  11. Honduras. oh. i see.

    This is one of the most fascinating discussions to me.

    hm. lost to ponder.

    on the economy and health care and energy – i feel like $empty;bama just does not have the curiosity to explore alternative arguments to see if there are better ideas or solutions. I believe he feels he is right/correct and doing what it takes to fix things.

    Yet he is surrounded by yes men/women who share his ideology.

    The Honduras/Israel/Iran/Cuba/F-22 efforts just have me scratching my head.

    What is the liberal world view on these topics? Why was John McCain so against the F-22. Who else believes we need to insert Zelaya? Why do they believe this way.

    Maybe knowing the answers to these questions will help…

  12. I have said before that the EU now is soft totalitarian. Needless to say, this is something very different from a hard tyranny. The EU is far away from a hard tyranny and is at present not in danger of becoming on.
    In many discussions on Obama at the conservative side the question seems to be whether Obama will bring about something like Europe or something even worse like Chavez.
    Both options, however, could be devastating. The US is not Europe. The culture, the history, the geography, the people, the languages that are spoken, all is very different. I have fought very often here those who want to reshape Europe into something like the US. Given the huge differences it is madness to impose the foreign US model on Europe. One reason the EU is failing, is that, given the European situation of many peoples and languages etc, a EU central government can never have the same emotional connection to the Europeans as the US central government has to the Americans.
    But it also works the other way around. I didn’t particularly like the European welfare state-model, but in little homogenous states like Sweden and Holland (at least until recently) it can work and indeed it did work. It will not work, however, in a huge heterogeneous country like the US.
    And this is why I fear the current US situation more than the European one: even when Obama only wants to Europeanize the US, the results could be far worse.
    Because when you leave the simple American creed of individualism and equal opportunity, the country will fall apart in different groups fighting one another. And this of course would legitimize authoritarian, even tyrannical, central government.
    Is Obama deliberately after this? Some say yes, I don’t know. I can’t get a grip on the man; to me he is an enigma, a chameleon. I fear, however, people like Emmanuel and Axelrod.
    But whatever they may have in mind, I hope the Americans will wake up soon and make it clear that they don’t want these dangerous experiments brought upon them by a bunch of leftwing zealots.

  13. Contrary to huxley and Baklava, I think that there are enough different strands being woven by Obama out there to be pretty confident about what the garment will look like when it is done.

    We have his almost immediate and otherwise inexplicable steps to take control over the Census, steps taken–it would seem–so that he could “fix” the final Census counts and, thus, the Democrat/Republican ratio in Congress to assure continued Democratic dominance. As a side benefit, such inflated totals would also assure that more federal funds flow to states that voted for him, states that will find that the new Census director’s “statistical sampling” programs will miraculously discover that they will have moe than enough “undercounted” or “overlooked” people within their boundaries, to justify their receipt of more federal funds. Doesn’t this sound reminiscent of Honduran President Zelaya’s computers, loaded with Zelaya’s winning results in a referendum that never took place?

    We have Obama’s otherwise inexplicable and illogical, early and persistent actions to see to it that billions of dollars in federal funds were given to ACORN, under investigation by 19 states and indicted for voter registration fraud among other things; an organization he has longstanding ties and ideological bonds with, and which legislation passed by Congress now gives a major role in the hiring of Census enumerators. See Civilian National Security Force below.

    We have Obama’s bizarre and ominous call, during his campaign speech on Service, for the creation of a huge and well-funded “Civilian National Security Force”; which was– one would think–a very major and controversial proposal that the MSM deliberately did not report (they published the text of his speech as written, and not as delivered; his speech as delivered included his inserted proposal for a Civilian National Security Force http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwaAVJITx1Y) and the few MSM outlets that did report this proposal blew it off as insignificant.

    We have his successful and early efforts to vastly increase in size and create several new “public service organizations,” and introduce the idea of “mandatory public service.” See Civilian National Security Force above.

    We have his tax policies, which will vastly inflate the welfare class of people who do not pay any federal and, now, state and local taxes; people dependent on the Obama administration for handouts in the form of “tax credit” checks. See Civilian National Security Force above.

    Let’s not forget “cap and trade” and “health care reform,” hate crime legislation and the Fairness Doctrine.

    Let’s see, creation of a civilian power base and captive, compliant voters, ability to fix the number of Democratic seats in Congress, the elections, and the flow of federal funds, and let’s not forget, unprecedented control over vast portions of our economy and our energy supply, ability to muffle or jail critics; seems to me like Obama & Co. are settling in for the long haul.

  14. I seem to have lost a comment somewhere. I was trying to say that I don’t think Honduras means anything to him. It was an opportunity for him to appear as a staunch defender of democracy from a right-wing military takeover. He has gotten through life parroting lefty clichees and thinking he knows what he is talkiing about. This time he spoke too fast and too loudly so he will have to create some wiggle room if the real story gets out beyond the blogosphere.

  15. Wolla,

    If there were more evidence about messing with the census for political gain i’d be swayed to the sinister side.

    I’ve read articles about the census.

    I like Michelle Bachman’s stance on it.

    Just inform the census taker of how many people live in your house and be done with it – as there are TOO MANY questions on the census now.

    But until something perverted ACTUALLY happens with the census – I think a lot of speculation is going on…

    Does that make sense?

  16. Wandriaan,

    Your description on the apples and oranges comparisons of America and Europe is spot on. There are an awful lot of well-paid analysts and pundits on both sides of the Atlantic that are completely unaware of our differences. I’ll go even further: they don’t appreciate how societies work and how many small pieces are necessary to make the whole. They are so in love with their theories and utopias and with their own brilliance that they are dangerous.

  17. Ah, but Art, who’s going to answer the casting call for Ernst Roehm?

  18. expat: I wish you were correct, but I disagree. Reports are that Obama worked hard behind the scenes to keep Zelaya in power; this wasn’t just grandstanding for the public. He seems to have a dog in this race.

  19. neo,

    He is really hard to figure. I can’t quite give up the narcissism angle. Maybe it’s time for a jello post. I’ll buy the nails and we can all have a shot at trying to fix him to the wall.

  20. Concerning Obama, it might help if we really knew who was behind him. Were the markets manipulted just before the elction (?)– I mean besides the whole thing that had been building with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for years.
    I cannot help but shake the belief there are powerfull forces out to destroy the sovereignty of the US. Collapse it all and here comes an international currency to “save us”. One more nail in the coffin, and with our own judges citing “emerging international opinion” in cases at the Supreme court and now Al Gore recently admitting global warming would help bring about “global governance”. If “AGW” does not work they will have some other crisis behind it…..I was at a dinner not too long ago, with a varied group of people in their 30s-50s and somebody mentioned Texas Succession due to the direction of things- almost half joking. No one opposed and several agreed.

  21. I was just looking at an article over at sfgate and basically the left thinks that all this is the same as bush stuff, and they cant even tell the difference between a colb and a bc. so in all their fishbowled ears they are really only hearing that its tin hatters and nut jobs that cant see that he showed it, etc.

    so basically, they aint going to believe anything, even if he came forward and said it himself.

    they cant make distinctions, so they cant discuss any issues, they just kind of – function.

  22. First let me invoke my post of several months ago, in which I said that, in order to make sense of what Obama is doing, we must apply the new and novel template of “bad faith” and “tyranny,” rather than the standard template we have been so fortunate to be able to use up until now, the template of “good faith” and “democracy,” and that we must venture into what had formerly been “tin foil hat territory.” I am sure that, not so many decades ago, many people also thought that to worry about that failed artist and mad Austrian low life with the funny mustache was venturing into “tin foil hat territory” back then, too.

    Surveying the available news over the last few years it seems to me that there are indications that Obama has been planning things for quite some time.

    First, there is the report that around 2005 Kirk & Ellis, a law firm with ties to Obama, was researching ways around the “natural born citizen” requirement of the Constitution and, in fact, that this research resulted in a law review article by Sarah Herlihy entitled, “Amending the Natural Born Citizenship Requirement: Globalization as the Impetus and the Obstacle” published November 23, 2005 in the online version of the Chicago Kent Law Review, which argued that this requirement was discriminatory (http://tinyurl.com/oe8quj).

    Next, and more intriguing, is Obama intense interest in the particular Sense of the Senate Resolution, S Res. 511, that included very short opinions on the “natural born citizen” requirement by two eminent jurists–one conservative–Ted Olson, one liberal–Lawrence Tribe, and gave the non-binding opinion of the Senate–passed by “voice vote”–that Senator McCain, despite being born in the Canal Zone, was a “natural born citizen”. This is curious because, in his two years in the Senate Obama was usually somewhere out on the road in campaign mode and rarely interested in the day to day work of a Senator; he sponsored only one routine, minor bill that became law, and as chairman of a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee for Western Europe, he held no hearings at all. Yet, he showed up, and with Senators Leahy and Clinton became a cosponsor of this Resolution.

    I call this laying the groundwork in anticipation of a future attack.

  23. Baklava–for me, the magnesium flare that signaled that something very unusual and very wrong was happening was Obama’s fixation on wresting control of the Census from the very first days of his administration. Although Census’ enumerations are essential in determining how many Congressional seats each State has and for the distribution of federal funds, it is otherwise dull as dishwater, and–as far as I know–all previous administrations have been content to let it stay under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce, where the Constitution placed it.

    To have Obama & Co. pay such close attention to and to be concerned about the Census when they were in the midst of dealing with the supposed greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression” struck me as very odd.

  24. Wolla,
    Not only would (will?) Barack have ACORN helping tabulate the census numbers, but the Dems are pushing for a survey estimate type of counting. This means counting persons who are not there. This will have two big results:
    1) increase census figures in Northeastern cities with dense urban populations
    2) make fraudulent estimations easy to obtain.

    If hanky panky census tabulations occur, the hanky panky calculations would likely add numbers to Northeastern cities which just happen to be a Democratic power base. This would counteract the population movement into the the Southern states, and would counteract the ongoing increase in Repub Congressional power which is resulting from that demographic shift.

  25. Wolla,

    Magnesium burns very bright.

    You make a good point.

    Though I guess I still have a belief that there must be evidence of census figures or practices gone bad.

  26. Baklava–by the time any evidence of tampering with the Census is reported by this MSM it will be far too late.

  27. On another interesting note.

    No jobs, no insurance: hard times for young adults
    http://www.physorg.com/print167413569.html

    they are attempting to use this towards a health insurance thing, but what comes out of it is the glaring fact that with socialism they cant get work.

    yes kiddies, you voted in the man who quashed your entry level positions as the wealthy business owners hunker down waiting to find out what will happen so they can figure out what to do.

    the impoverished live on hope and always pray for change.

    its like those soviet jokes i put up. when will it be like it was?

  28. Soon they will join the military to eat and have work. then the adventures start.

  29. Speaking of the Census, I have seen some interesting charts projecting what the total tax burdens in each high tax state will be if Obama’s plans for taxes become law, with some of the total tax rates approaching 60% on “wealthy” individuals. I can well imagine quite large numbers of the hated “wealthy” voting with their feet, with figurative caravans of the “wealthy” taking themselves and their wealth and leaving such high tax states headed for low tax states–sort of like the Oakies fleeing from the Dust Bowl states during the Great Depression. I wonder if all the governors of those high tax states–mostly Democrats, I believe–are so thrilled with this development.

    If Obama’s class warfare shtick and demonization of “the wealthy” scapegoat class keeps up, it will soon be almost as perilous to be one of the hated “wealthy” as it was to be a Jew in Germany when the Nazis came to power. If he is successful in passing his programs, look, too, for Obama & Co.’s definition of “wealthy” to be expanded ever downward to include more and more taxpayers to pay for his enormous programs.

    The thing is, though, if America is changed into some sort of Socialist/Fascist/Marxist dictatorship, there is no better place, no real refuge to flee to.

  30. The real question is, how do we fight back?

    it too late

    the time to fight was when everhyone was making fun of the people explaining what was going on in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

    that was what was called the event horizon.

    from then on, we never fully turned back, and now the system is so restructured that any one that questions things at the federal level and is too pushy about it will go to jail. that is legal acts when put together make for illegal and punishable things. so like beria said, show me the man and i will find you the crime.

    we lost when we stopped believing in subversion, stopped conserving our ways as unchangeable, and stopped living life and started being told waht it was by a fwe people.

    we ejected the old as fuddy duddies, got stoned, which broke the transmissino of culture, and we died.

    all the moves that would be needed to fix things are impermissible and unconcionable to most people. and the things needed to make ourselves be heard and change the state are not allowed for us as we allowed it for them.

    we never realized that those protests were normalizing terrorism. that is the protests denied that the system had a means of change built into it. so they pretended it didnt, and moved it to terrorism.

    now, if we take to the streets to change things back, we will be fascists and racists and will be painted as not worth living. the worse it gets, the worse the propaganda gets.

    and so, you start a fight between individuals, while you wait and after they are done killing each other, collect whats left over. rinse repeat.

  31. Artfldgr, it’s not too late. They have all kinds of weaknesses, and some of those vulnerabilities will prove fatal.

  32. Oblio,
    that only applies if the rules apply, the rules no longer apply, so that doesnt apply. they are breaking huge things like the rule of law in contracts and such. if they are willing to break that, they are willing to break any of them. but ONLY when they have to. doing otherwise would be like pulling the mask off early.

    the WHOLE game is to make you miserable enough to protest and do things, then you can be labeled, adn then you can be made an example of.

    its like hitting a knee with a hammer, they are just waiting for the reflex, and in the interim just goring the bull till it gets too pissed off to be effective.

    ultimately it will be those who believe falsely fighting with those that beleive truly, and neither can tell which is which.

    its WAY too late. their weaknesses and vulnerabilities mean nothing as long as others are colluding.

    the otehr day a democrat in ny used the ni***r word… of course the newspapers refer to here as REP, which dumb people think means REPublican, not REPresentative, so they dont dig farther to find she is a (D). but there was ZERO fall out for her.

    when the president can support despotic rule over self determination and aligns himself with hard core communists in power, break the constitution by appointing czars, and so on…

    and we dont react, well, we aint going to till its so far gone that no one can argue against it.

    so in essence, we are already past that point.

    we have already gotten used to them violating things for 40 years, the population, especially diluted by unassimilated immigration, does not care or know any of the foundational principals.

    what your going to see is that the protestors in the near future are all going to be of a certain color. or their majority will be. and they will become rightwingers and enemies of the people. their very protests will be described as the oppressors wishing to preserve their power…etc.

    they have done this in over 40 countries… you think they might have it to a process after 100 years of that?

    right now, everyone is sitting aroudn pretending they know more, when they are so far behind the curve its not funny. they dont know enough to know how far behind they are.

    when the crap hits the fan and things might look messy, which way do you think our potential population will run.

    here is one that cant even take a cockroach.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT4XO3Hjp7M&feature=player_embedded

    Last night i was watching the newer movie of a industrialist who rescued his family by giving himmler everythign he had.

    years before that, before this crap, i wonder if people around their earned estates thought they were greedy?

    for after the germans took over, he had to sign away everythign he owned just to get his wife, himself, and a few others to switzerland.

    i wonder if the people who called him greedy 10 years back thought that him having enough to pay to live.

    after all, if he had not made that money, as the wife said in the movie, they would have been gassed long before that.

    we are not moving into that older cruder fascism, we are moving to a newer more subtle technofascism, which constantly tries to maintain the appearance and cargo cult image of what was before, while the gutted institutions serve the higher powers.

  33. artfldgr, there is a difference between alerting people to a danger by explaining the methods and tactics of the adversary and promoting defeatism. I am sure the latter isn’t your intent, but shouldn’t you put your formidable intelligence to work on counter moves and counter-tactics.

    “I will not cease from Mental Fight”

  34. I would, but if i cant get a bunch of people to pitch together to bring a piece of technology to market, make a large amount of money and change the world that way, I sure cant motivate them to employ countermoves and things that they dont understand. their opinion is equivalent to my experience, so i lose the debate and everyone sits aroudn and does nothing.

    i would not be so defeatest if even one of them in the past 8 years asked what can they do. even you are telling me to do so for others, who dont want to listen to me at all…

    in fact i have already laid out so much that if things do go south, rather than i being overlooked i will be first in line to be worked on.

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