Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 9:49:44 AM
I will watch none of the Inauguration festivities and solemnities tomorrow. I shall spend most of the day alone with my wife, who understands my feelings about the ascension of Barack Obama to the highest executive position in the free world. I believe that the election of this President, at this time, is nothing for our country to be proud of. I do not say this because I do not believe a black man should never be President, far from it. If the Democrats had nominated a man like Roy Innes (or his son Niger, assuming he's old enough), I would have voted for either of them above John McCain. It isn't just that I feel that Barack Obama is grossly unqualified by experience, temperament, or ideology for the office, although I firmly believe that he is deficient in all of these areas.
No, the main reason that I shall refrain from any but ill feelings toward the raising of Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency is that I believe that the majority of voters who voted for him did so for the wrong reasons. They elected a symbol, not a man. The Cult of Personality has come to America. Let me elaborate. I'll begin with a riddle:
What do you get if you take away Barack Obama's black skin?
Dennis Kucinich, but with a thinner resume.
Ideologically, there isn't much to chose from between our 44th President and the lefty fringer who kept us amused for months by insisting that he could be our President. I do not think that an honest, intelligent person truly believes, deep down inside, that a white man (or woman, Hillary) could have been elected with Obama's thin resume, soda-pop speeches, questionable associations, and consistent hopscotching of the line of truth. From the trickery involved in only promising to use the public-financing-of-campaigns system until Republican opponent John McCain said he would, and then quickly reversing his field by announcing that he would accept all of the domestic (and foreign) money that people could contribute on, or under the table, to the unnecessary lies and "corrections" regarding contacts with the Senate seat selling Rod Blagojevich, he proved himself to any fair-minded witness to be a man with no regard for the truth. Why lie about contacting the Governor of Illinois about his successor in the Senate. There is nothing inappropriate about that, and yet he lied instinctively ... unnecessarily. This is Clintonian behaviour. Do we really need to go through that again?
Anyone who watched the campaign saw Barack Obama reveal himself to be a cold, arrogant, humorless man who showed no great mental agility when forced to speak "off the cuff". He could deliver a speech in a rich tone of voice that sounded authoritative, but his speeches were very often merely platitudes strung together to form a sonorous, semmingly dazzling message of ... of ... what? Mostly nothing at all. He counted on the American electorate to be too dim or too dazzled to notice that he had told them nothing of substance, and he also relied on the media not to give the game away by pushing him for direct answers to important questions.
He was right on both counts. Generation X-Box, which is what I call our youngest voters these days, was too dazzled by the craftily-manufactured youthful tone of the Obama campaign to notice the contradictions and occasional blatant deceptions of the daily messages they received. They at least have the excuse of their youth, although I can't help remembering that I knew more about how the world works at 13 years of age then they do now. The media has no such excuse. Indeed, they would not use it if they had it. Their role in this campaign was, to my crabby old eyes, the most disturbing facet of this whole campaign.
I am forty-nine years old. I have been watching political campaigns since 1968, and this was the first time I ever watched the major media outlets chose their candidate for President four years in advance, build him up for three years, blatantly campaign for him for 18 months (there is some overlap there, obviously), and carry him into the White House. For example, do you remember what event first brought him into the national spotlight? That's right, it was his brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Do you remember anything he said? Neither do I. So how do we know that his speech was "brilliant"?
Because the media never ceased telling us that it was.
Many of us kept believing that the American voter would eventually be tipped off to the suspicious nature of the story the media allies of the Obama campaign were selling by its sheer volume of repetition and exaggeration. We had, however, a crucial error in our thinking -- we measured the average voter's attention to politics by our own. To us, watching with critical eye, the endless repetition of Barack BS was a reason to suspect its accuracy; to the average voter watching only 10% as closely as we, that 10% was quite convincing. The Barry boosters were canny enough to avoid too much detail in their pitches, as modern Americans confronted with the challenges of data and logic will usually wander back to their video games or "reality" TV shows. They just told the viewers and audiences "Barack Obama has the answers", and the voters said "Great. I'm voting for
him!"
On my old website, I once predicted that America would be the first great nation to fall not by external invasion or internal corruption, by by the sheer dead weight of its citizens massive ignorance. Thomas Sowell once predicted that the greatest threat to America's future was its populations of economic principles. I still think we're both right.
What is most frightening to me about Barack Obama is his total inhuman coldness on the "life issues". A recent nationwide poll revealed that 92% percent of the American people want abortion to be restricted or banned outright. (Of course, the media hid this fact throughout the campaign, asking about his beliefs and his record on abortion nearly never.) Thunderous majorities want the hideous "partial-birth abortion" procedure to be banned outright. Even the National Abortion Rights Action League (or whatever NARAL claims that their initials stand for these days) refused to defend the outlawing of the gruesome practice, but Senator Obama did. With near-unanimity, the people want so-called "live-birth abortions" (in which the baby is delivered, and then left to die) to be banned. Please note that I said "near-unanimity". After a courageous Chicago nurse named Jill Stanek publicly revealed the existence of the shocking practice, the Illinois State Senate considered legislation that would make the brutal practice illegal. One guess who the only Senator to speak against this bill
was?
During the early months of the campaign, Obama proved himself just as callous at the end of life. In answer to the question "What do you think the worst vote you have cast in the Senate was?" (or some such; I do not guarantee I have the wording exactly correct), our incoming Chief Executive named the vote he cast to protect the life of the helpless, disabled Florida woman, Terry Schiavo. Terry Schiavo was threatened with death by starvation, by court order, despite the fact that she was neither brain-dead or on life support. Poor Terry eventually died this unnatural death, at the request of her estranged husband Michael Schiavo and by the order of the inhuman Judge George Greer, after the frenzied efforts of her natural family (I use this word with the obvious implication) and good hearted people across the country had failed. (Full disclosure -- I was a financial contributor to the legal efforts to save her life). I find it most alarming that the man whom American voters elected to "the highest office in the land" on the repeated media testimony that he was an almost "Christ-like" figure, would reserve his greatest regret for a vote he cast to save the life of a disabled woman.
Many observers have tried to tell us that the election of Barack Obama is at least a partial fulfillment of Dr. Martin Luther King's dream. I believe that it is nothing of the kind. Dr. King dreamed of a day when his children would not be judged by the color of their skin. Great black leader Malcolm X (whom my father remembers and respected) would not have rejoiced at seeing a black man elevated to the White House not as a man, but as a painless expiation by guilty white liberals of a crime committed by white oppressors long dead. My father told me that Malcolm X would have spit on Affirmative Action programs; his attitude was "I don't want your help, just get out of the way!" I do not believe, from what I have read of Frederick Douglass, that he would have rejoiced to see a black man exalted for any reason other than as due justice for his merits and acheivements.
So you will excuse me when I do not join the celebrations. The people have elected a symbol for a post which must be filled by a man (or woman, of course). Instead of a qualified candidate being refused a position simply because of the color of his skin, we have now elected an unqualified candidate simply because of the color of his skin. We are still not achieving Dr. King's dream -- we are just missing it to the other side.