Looking back at Obama the con man
I was impressed by Richard Fernandez’s recent piece on—what else?—Obama:
Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan are intelligent, well-educated people. Nobody has seriously suggested they are either perverse or evil. Now they see the truth. But once upon a time they didn’t have a clue. So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong?…
Given the paucity of investigative information on Obama, given his near absolute lack of a substantial track record, it was natural for Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan to be taken for a ride. Not because they were dumb, but because they were “quality” people.
Now the quality people can see certain kinds of truth, because they are familiar with the sort of data that now alarms them. Now that they can observe the betrayal of Israel, the lunacy of Obamanomics, and the erratic management, the full magnitude of their error becomes apparent. But they didn’t see it at the outset; lurking on the edge of his expression as he campaigned, nor in the little niggling inconsistencies the media was determined to ignore. Now the problems are as big as life: upheaval in the Middle East, the bankruptcy of the country, the scandals of the administration. Now they can use the Bayesian. Perhaps a little late, but better than never. “Welcome back to the fight, Rick. This time we win.”
But there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will.
The idea of Obama as huckster who appeals to certain people is one I explored close to two years ago, in this article for PJ. Here are some excerpts from it that I offer as a companion piece to Fernandez’s observations:
The con artist is able to gain trust by using the right vocal inflections to fit the mark (or, in Obama’s case, the audience), changing accents and speech patterns to match. In addition, a con doesn’t usually stay in one place very long (it has been remarked how often Obama changed jobs) because, although people may not catch on to his game all that quickly, he is afraid that if he sticks around they eventually will.
Even though most of us would like to think we couldn’t get taken in by a con””we would know better””the truth is that many people are vulnerable. It’s not a question of intelligence, because some marks are otherwise quite smart. What distinguishes them, however, is that they’ve been disarmed. For one reason or another, they happen to be susceptible to a particular con artist’s brand of charm:
The core ”¦ however, was that the mark desperately wanted to believe in the dangling get-rich-quick scheme. ..That is how the classic con is distinct from straightforward fraud: in the con, the victim is actively complicit in his undoing.
Both the con and Obama offer something the mark fiercely desires and show characteristics s/he desperately wants to see. For many wordsmiths (even Republicans such as Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley) that would be their perception of Obama as an intelligent, articulate, and especially a literary spokesman. For others ”” especially the young ”” the hook is Obama’s perceived coolness. For others it might be his race and his promise of healing the racial divide (in fact, he embodies this quite literally in his very own bi-racial person). For some, it was and is enough that he be the antithesis of whatever it was they’d hated about Bush.
For so many, it was the rhetoric of hope and change, which tapped into their earnest desire that ”” just this once ”” it would be different, and that this politician wouldn’t be crooked or in the thrall of special interest groups. And if the hope is that strong to begin with, the need to believe that great, then all the more reason to deny evidence to the contrary that comes in later. Who among us wants to admit to having been a patsy?
It’s no accident that we call the first 100 days of a presidency the honeymoon period. Obama’s honeymoon is over now, and reality is just beginning for many who fell in love with him. But don’t expect much change of heart soon. A cautionary tale is that of the famous British con artist Ronnie Cornwall, many of whose victims remained true to him:
[S]uch was [Cornwall’s] charm that none of the people he ruined went to the police: one even confessed to missing Cornwell’s intoxicating company.
As time goes on and disillusionment grows, people may come to miss the intoxicating company of the Obama to whom they originally felt so strongly attracted, and some will always remain in thrall to that powerful magnetism.
The process of learning about the con (or the grifter, as Fernandez puts it) is a sobering and disillusioning one. A lot of people have been getting an education in how it works.
Truly an insightful article by Neo two years ago. Obama is a con and the progressive his mark. The added factor is that the mark, in this case, not only gets conned, but drags down the rest of the country while hissing and spitting various types of venom.
Hey, I wonder who Troy Davis would have voted for? Kidding, just kidding. Kudos to Neo for that insightful blog as well, the many facts presented, a challenging question, and all done, it seems, at the speed of neutrino.
Curtis: thanks!
Although if “at the speed of neurtino,” it would be no trick to be insightful, because I’d be traveling back in time :-).
This may be uncharitable of me, but I am not willing to give Noonan, Brooks, et al, a pass for being conned. Never did think much of Brooks, and whatever respect for Noonan I had is gone forever, and I will never waste a second of my time reading what she has to write.
I love Fernandez, but on this one, I think he is both over-thinking the analysis and is missing the mark.
People like Noonan were conned because they WANTED to believe. She kept her eyes screwed shut on purpose. She was a useful idiot. To this day, has she EVER come out and humbly apologized to her readers for HER silly and immature school girl crush helping in its own small way, to elect this absolute disaster we have in the White House.
For SOME of us, the absolute absence of any sort of investigative journalism inquiries into Obama’s very suspect and questionable past, raised red flags and a high level of suspicion, from DAY ONE. His own disengenous conduct sealed the deal. Ayers – “just a guy in my neighborhood.” BULLs–t. Wright “not the guy I knew; I never heard those things.” BULLs–t.
Those are just two examples. There are DOZENS.
How ANYONE could have been suckered by this shallow, narcissist, Marxist phoney, is entirely beyond my comprehension.
southern James: I don’t get the impression that Fernandez is letting them off the hook. As I see it, he is offering an explanation, not an excuse.
So the disturbing question is: how did they get it wrong?…
easy.. they were well-educated..
which is the same as having a progressive education
which is the same as being taught to think a certain way and see the world a certain way (domestication) at the expense of a lot of money and living in a box from kindergarten to your 30s with less time in the world than most people.
so a person raised in an expensive box, in which the teachers think hey have a mission to misrepresent the bad of the ideology to as their helping the cause…
makes for “well-educated” ignorant people who are very well educated about a world that doesn’t exist… is inoperable… but has everything PC as the politburo declares.
you realize that since the progressive education system of dewey after he came back from the soviet union… has managed to erase the actually smart rennaisance persons like edison, twain, etc?
well educated does not mean what it meant, it means well trained today…
REAL education gets you to think independently, not collectively.
training makes a collective, education makes an individual unique and important in time.
hey… when we stopped rearing our kids and started raising them, i knew it was over..
(you rear animals, you raise corn)
A lot of people have been getting an education in how it works.
all anyone here had to do was read one of the dozen books written by people way high in the ideological subversion camp who changed sides…
but as i say… the con can con because the victim WANTS to be conned.
and the population was set up for this con by having their values screwed up by feminism and other front camps…
who taught us that intentions are more important than empiricism? the people who got beat out of stuff when we used empirical measures… (who are at the front of equality. which is what they also say the soviets promised)…
who taught us that race, gender, and orientation are better proxies for merit than merit?
what group has the most power to make policy change, get special offices just for them, protected class status, and now is dipping below 1.3 children (a number which populations NEVER recover from. they are dead and dont know it)
what protected class wears the kefir for solidarity with the oppressed?
getting peeved at the con man is one thing
but i would be more peeved at the ladies who set their children up by changing culture, education, and even knowledge as to the real ideology… for 40 years…
they made us ripe for the picking…
we been picked, now being plucked…
the whole reason they are losing support and so on, is now that they genocided themselves demographically, they are a force that will be in decline no matter what they do…
ergo.. obama ignoring women in his cabinet… bowing to islam.. but then again.. he knows that the feminist women have no babies, and the islamic have 5 and more..
ie… bow to that which you will serve in the future, rather than siding with a dying losing population
so do we blame the con man or the people who prepared the way for the mark and led the mark to the con?
If you travelled back in time would you get to forget the present and all the other presents until you reached the past?
Brooks, Noonan, et al. loved Obama precisely because they were so utterly convinced that he was a Member of the Club, an establishment Ivy man, a man who would never, ever cross certain boundaries.
Oops.
1. Fernandez’s last paragraph has a grim warning. Neo quoted it. It is worth quoting again:
But there’s one last thing that nice people don’t know. It is that hucksters aren’t confined by the same boundaries they assume everyone else is contained by. They are capable not only of sucker-punching you, but of exceeding limits you never thought could be transgressed. Grifters are in some sense not part of the same civilization that Peretz, Brooks, and Noonan inhabit. Maybe they don’t believe this yet. But they will. They will.
2. Neo points out that:
The con artist is able to gain trust by using the right vocal inflections to fit the mark (or, in Obama’s case, the audience), changing accents and speech patterns to match.
I submit that there are also con artists who operate on the intellectual level, by presenting as their core principles ideas that their audience of the moment wants to hear.
3. The Left does not have a monopoly on political con artists.
I think Obama as a con man is right on target. Throughout his life he has managed to be just vague enough to get everyone he talks to believe he completely agrees with.
However, I think being a good con requires more than just mimicking the mark’s vocal inflections. In college I dated a guy who had the uncanny ability to accurately “read” a person in under 5 minutes. Like a chameleon, he could then easily charm them by playing into what he had figured out would most appeal to them. He was also able to predict how my friends and acquaintances would behave in various situations (and he was always right). This skill helped him succeed very quickly in the business world, but he could have been an amazing con man.
Do you remember during the campaign the cover of the New Yorker magazine depicting Obama as an Islamist and Michelle as Angela Davis?
I wonder if anyone else read the article that went along with the inflammatory illustration? If so, they would not be surprised in the least about the conduct of “our president” right now.
As several commenters have pointed out above, and as I said a couple years ago when Neo first posted about Obama as con, I will never forget a quote from my criminology class 50 years ago: “you can’t con an honest man.”
Con men all say the mark has to have a little larceny in their heart or the con won’t work. Either you’re both working against “the man” or against a bank or a horse racing track, or something like that. And the con admits right up front that he’s breaking the law, and with your help he’ll really reel in “the man” and you’ll both win.
Obama’s big con was in co-opting the Democrat’s nomination procedure, with the assistance of a whole lot of Democrats, so Hillary could not win. But long before that, in Illinois politics, Obama was a nasty piece of work who co-opted a whole lot of party activists and government officials to get into office and move up the ladder at lightning speed.
Then when he started his presidential campaign he threw political niceties aside and went for the jugular.
Even so, he would not have won but for several factors that combined to create the perfect storm. One was his race, another was the journalists who went along with his con eagerly (and that’s a whole book there, just waiting to be written), and still another was a willing Democrat party that wanted to win at any cost. Well we’re paying that cost now. I’m very sorry we can’t get some kind of moral refund from the folks who threw morality, honesty and tradition in the garbage heap and pushed 53 million Americans to pull that lever. F
F. I’d like a moral refund from the 53 million.
It would be one thing if a guy is fooled by a great liar, a cleverly-designed plan to misrepresent the situation, complete absence of contradictory evidence. The mark could say something like, he got me, I should have been more careful.
The fiddy-three-ers instead have to grapple with the fact that they begged to be conned, combined with the vitriol the directed at the rest of us. I’m saying climbing down from that is a ton harder than admitting fault in the first case.
I’m not inclined to cut Noonan much slack on this one. She’s built her post-Reagan era career on her “perceptive insights” shared in lengthy columns. I expected more of her. Anyone with “eyes to see” could see Obama for what he is, it was evident early on.
Noonan bought into the idea of Obama and was reinforced by her elite new circle of friends in the MSM. I can’t even listen to her anymore and I used to be a fan.
The problem is not totally Obama,but the jackwagons who swooningly loved the Wun, the Lightbringer.,the worst are the ones who still bitterly cling to their dark fantasy.
I’m with CV and everyone else who is not willing to give the elite a break on being victims. They had exactly the same information the rest of us and they choose to ignore it in favor of some sort of magical groupthink. They helped make the election of 2008 a national disgrace, proof that there is something wrong in the national character. I suspect that over 60 years of incredible prosperity bred a people incapable of distinguishing a vote for American Idol from a presidential election (I know this has been observed before). Noonan and company are representative of a national tragedy.
From Thomas Sowell’s October 25, 2008 column: “Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.” http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226099/obama-con/thomas-sowell
Brooks, Noonan, et al: in a word, snobs. Look back at their writing at the time: it is full of smug self-regard.
Mike Walsh,
That’s it in a nutshell. It was like a festival of smug self-regard in 2008, with Obama laughing all the way to the bank.
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Noonan should have known better. In the book she wrote about speechwriting for President Reagan, she told how inferior she felt among other White House aides because she went to a lesser-regarded school (Farleigh Dickinson). She didn’t dress like the cool kids, and was regarded with suspicion because her previous job was writing for Dan Rather.
But now she’s one of the cool kids, and wants to stay that way. Thus her sneering regard for Sarah Palin, and her love for Obama.
Noonan is like so many eyewitnesses. You lead her on and she’ll say whatever you told her is the truth, so long as she wants to believe in it.
Noonan, btw, is also an example of why people lack faith in females leaders. If females are so easily tricked and dominated by their male authority figures, and easily abdicate individual judgment in favor of SMARTNESS of males, why put females into positions of power to begin? They’ll just make decisions based upon what their male advisers tell them anyway.
And thus, Noonan is the perfect example of that. She sought out Reagan for similar reasons. A follower, in search of a master.
I see that Noonan graduated from a high school in Rutherford, NJ. That’s pretty close to New York. Friend of mine who lived there told me that most of Bergen County and areas just outside are oriented toward NYC, either in terms of employment, providing goods and services, or education.
Sometime back, looking up something or other, I came across an extensive listing of dialects. One, sometimes referred to as American Theater pronunciation, was also called “Mid Atlantic Dialect” and is said to be obsolete. An example is FDR’s phrase, “…to feeyah is feeyah itself”. He did not link a terminal “r” to a following vowel.
Anyway, listening to Noonan, I find it hard to think she and her high school buds talked like that, or as she does now, back then.
Self-remade. You know, it’s easier to be a big frog if the pond is smaller. But if you just have to, must, be in the big pond, you’re going to have a tough time. Maybe make some compromises. Sell somebody out.
While I did not explicitly consider Obama a con man, early on in the electoral campaign I decided there was a discrepancy between his self-presentation and the reality behind that self-presentation – which could be a definition of a con man. Contrasted with his “Mr. Rainbow…brings us together…neither red nor blue” campaign shtick was what he did to Alice Palmer and others in getting her off the ballot in his first campaign for the Illinois legislature.
. What he did to Alice Palmer was the action of a cynical, hard-nosed Chicago politician. It was not the act of a Mr. Rainbow who will bring us together.
That convinced me that his Mr. Rainbow self-presentation was just an act. I then thought of a TV special featuring the Gershwin musical “Of Thee I Sing” which I saw back in 1972, starring Carroll O’Connor, then in his heyday as Archie Bunker. O’Connor starred as Julius Wintergreen, who campaigned for President- and won- on a platform of “Love.”
Just like Obama, I thought to myself.
To my surprise, Carroll O’ Connor had a decent singing voice.
What do you think of the idea that people tend to move from voting more liberal to more conservative as they get older, or perhaps to put it more accurately, as they gain real world experience? In practical terms, they move from voting D to voting R. Do you think, over time, they come to see the Democrats as con men? Promising all sorts of things that people want to hear but not really delivering on them. Just using the voters as marks to gain power. Is that an apt analogy on a longer time scale to the reaction to Obama on a shorter time scale?
kcom
Promising a voter that he’ll have a chicken in his pot and a Ford in his garage is one thing. When the two fail to appear, the voter notices.
Obama promises the marks that they will feel really, really special about themselves. And, no matter what he does, there’s no way to notice that they shouldn’t feel special about themselves, shouldn’t have felt special about themselves, and have no reason to feel special about themselves.
I’d make the analogy, probaby not a very good one, about having a bum ankle and knowing you have a neurosis. The ankle is “Out there”. It’s not you. The neurosis is “you”. Far easier to accept the bum ankle.
Obama’s marks have the whole thing inside them. Not like they got fooled by a card sharp. They simply can’t afford to give that up, or a chunk of who they think they are disappears. Do you think they’d vote like the bitter clingers? Is there any combination of objective circumstances that would cause them to vote with the god-bothering, cousin-marrying, racist rednecks?
How ANYONE could have been suckered by this shallow, narcissist, Marxist phoney, is entirely beyond my comprehension.
This.
Those recanting their faith now are laughable, and should be the subject of derision. They act as though no one could have perceived the situation accurately. They’re like a guy who marries a 6 foot transvestite who sounds like Barry White, has a protruding Adam’s apple, gigantic hands, hair on his back, and subscriptions to motorcycle magazines, and then when the awful truth comes out, turns to the assembled multitude and plaintively bleats, “But who could have foreseen this? I was conned!”
Please.
“But they didn’t see it at the outset; lurking on the edge of his expression as he campaigned, nor in the little niggling inconsistencies the media was determined to ignore.”
Of course they saw it. They chose to ignore out of years of conditioning by liberal White Guilt. They like others had been set-up. Enter the Wolf.
Gringo: It was the story of Obama and Alice Palmer that told me very early on that Obama was a sham and a con man in terms of his persona. He was a hardnosed cutthroat guy who would do anything to get ahead and didn’t care who he stepped on, and how.
And it continues to astound me how little traction the Palmer story got—how many Obamaphiles have not even heard of it. It’s not that they dismiss it; they just seem unaware of it.
I wonder whether Brooks and Noonan know about it, even today. My guess is that the answer is that they don’t. I’d be curious to know, though—and if they knew about it before the election of 2008, I wonder how they justified it or wished it away or incorporated it with their love for Obama.
Neo-neocon: the power of propaganda knows no bounds. For with nuclear weapons, everyone knows it was used and where. But with propaganda, it is amazing how many people neither know the target nor that it happened.
Let’s not forget that just before the financial crisis broke, McCain had achieved a small lead in the polls. The lead vanished after his erratic behavior while the markets plunged. McCain seemed out of control whereas Obama looked composed. There’s no room for error when you’re going for a bigger upset than Truman vs. Dewey.
Of course, we now know that Obama’s composed self-possession was itself a con.
Not bragging, but as soon as I found out that Obama, a guy I had just recently become aware of, had written not one, but TWO! autobiographies, I knew he was a conman.
Oh, okay – I’m bragging.
I am embittered by the way the average conservative American saw right through the Obama facade, and for demonstrating such insight, got called racists and idiots by the media.
When I read a column in a newspaper, I would like to have some hope that the author has insights that I do not. But it turns out they had no insights at all, and were succumbing to the flaw that they will haughtily accuse the layman of being defenceless against – peer pressure.
Who wants to pay to read the opinions of people who put their readers down, and then convincingly demonstrate that they are much less insightful than most of their readers?
Do you want to make somebody reeeeeally angry and gain an enemy for life?
Tell him (or her) that she (or she) has been badly conned.
butch
Right, right on.
Absolutely.
Butch-
The key is subtlety.
You might instead tell him/her –
“If you supported Obama in 2008 to prove how cool and tolerant you are, you might want to support the other guy in 2012 to prove you’re not a total sap.”
What?
Not subtle enough?
Let’s not forget that just before the financial crisis broke, McCain had achieved a small lead in the polls. The lead vanished after his erratic behavior while the markets plunged.
I strongly suspect we have Soros to thank for that. I don’t think he engineered the financial crisis – that took decades of Democrat malfeasance, going back to Carter and Clinton and Fannie and Freddie – but I think Soros probably triggered it. The timing was so exquisitely perfect for Obama, and for a Soros, stampeding a jittery market would probably take only a few phone calls. Child’s play.
Soros probably made money off it as well. Because they knew Fannie Mae was covered in foam, they sold all the shares they had when the value was high, thus crashing the market. When everyone else realized this, they began to sell as well. And not just stocks. Certain organizations and individuals had bought the rights to mortgage loan “risk groupings”. It was their money the banks were using to float themselves up. When those people left the market, the banks were left with a bunch of debt that wasn’t going to be repaid.
So essentially, the super rich transfered all the wealth out of people who were left holding the debt books, into the hands of themselves because the superrich knew ahead of time what might happen.
The evidence that this was engineered was simply because Obama didn’t start his “Republicans” did it thing. Whenever Obama was truly surprised, what did you see? Obama’s real nastiness play out, that’s what. But he looked cool and deliberate when the crash hit. Why was that?
Very good and thoughtful point, Ymarsakar.
Excellent point, Ymarsakar. I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right.
Some folks get it and some don’t.
Youtube “taking chance” and “honor flight” and associated pieces.
Some folks get it and our elected officials are among those who don’t. This is a situation which cannot remain stable.
How sophisticated has psy-ops become? Can one be made to want what you’d normally despise through advertising and switcheroo?
I think Obama is a well groomed con whose assignment was to ready the country with Soc. medicine, stuffing of the bureaucracy with fellow travelers and soon, nationalization of the banks… all in readiness for the next con. Obama is the perfect foil for Hillary. He has made straight the way for her with his horrible policies. Now everyone wants him gone, and an unlikable commie harridan (who wouldn’t have been electable without this prep work) is thought to be preferable.
“I ain’t no way ti-ard” Now there ‘s a phony who will bring on the youth brigades.
Thanks for the info.
Ymarsakar may be right about the reason Obama was cool and calm during the financial meltdown of 2008.Another possible explanation for Obama’s being cool and collected during the financial meltdown of 2008 was that because the meltdown had occurred during Dubya’s watch, Obama had no responsibility for it. Because Obama had no responsibility for the meltdown, and absolutely no one thought he did, he could sit back and inwardly smile at Dubya’s- and McCain’s misfortune.
Obama’s pulls his “Republicans are to blame” shtick to deflect responsibility from his own shoulders. As no one thought Obama was to blame for the financial meltdown, there was no need for Obama to blame the Pubs.
Who knows?
While I cannot prove anything, I also suspect that Soros had something to do with the meltdown.
I’ve long believed that Soros had a hand in the Sept. 08 meltdown.
Here’s a guy with a long history of manipulating currencies, economies and elections around the world for his own benefit. It’s not a stretch to believe he was involved in this. Not a stretch at all.
He was fined or censured or something in, I think, Hungary or somewhere for manipulative economic trickery in . . . fall 2008.
I don’t buy the Obama-as-con-man analogy since the President truly believes what he is saying and selling. A confidence man, on the other hand, knows he is deceiving his mark. Historically, it would be as if William Jennings Bryant won the presidency. Bryant was a fountain of bad ideas, but he believed in all of them. Bryant was neither cynical nor sly, and while the President may be a little of both, that doesn’t make Obama another Bernie Madoff or Charles Ponzi.
The problem isn’t who’s doing the selling but what is being sold, which is American Progressivism, a euro-socialist knockoff with elements of red-to-green radical environmentalism and Chicago Way cronyism thrown in. That’s the problem.
Troy Riser
I don’t buy the Obama-as-con-man analogy since the President truly believes what he is saying and selling. A confidence man, on the other hand, knows he is deceiving his mark.
I would agree with you that the President truly believes what he is saying and selling now: more taxes, more government control, soak the rich, the Pubs are to blame.
While he said some things during the 2008 campaign the indicated this direction, such as “share the wealth” to Joe the Plumber, and the remark he made several days before the election about transforming changes, he also presented himself as a centrist, as a moderate during the campaign- and before.
I also refer you to Alice Palmer.
I don’t buy the Obama-as-con-man analogy since the President truly believes what he is saying and selling. A confidence man, on the other hand, knows he is deceiving his mark.
Obama is no more con man than Charlie McCarthy was, and for the same reason.
Obama is politics’ answer to Milli Vanilli and the Monkees – a pure product of the marketers’ art. Obama himself is simple enough to think it’s all about him. It isn’t. He himself is an empty vessel, and is irrelevant. If it hadn’t been him, the comrades would have chosen someone else to do his impression of Velveeta.
PS: After the “Austrian” gaffe, one has to wonder if Soros has instructed Obama’s handlers to tell him that people in Hungary aren’t, and that we can’t help them by encouraging them to reach out to Turkey (or Chile).
HAHAHAHA!
And speaking of gaffes — how about that Jew tax?
There is a mid-point between out and out con man and simply delusional and that is what should be designated the Obama niche. Add in trite rehashes of 1930s populism like “soak the rick” and you have almost summed up glorious leader. This also explains why he remained calm in the 2008 meltdown; bewilderment, the whole was too far outside his box. His whole M.O. was to avoid making decisive statements thereby selling his charm and letting the voters fill it the blanks. Indeed the only thing we can be sure is genuine about the guy is his contempt for Americans and democracy (see Honduras, bitter clinger Freudian slip), two traits common among those who recognize their own superiority.
Odd all those high I.Q. types writing for editorial pages everywhere missed what any 14 year old with average intelligence should have been able to see.
Now here’s some weapons-grade delusion. Check this out. Someone named Feingold wants to kill the wealthy and expropriate their wealth.
Didn’t a certain Central European power try that some time ago? The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.