Posted on 07/28/2012 11:08:26 AM PDT by parisa
One cannot help noticing the struggle between Barack Obama’s natural instincts and the serene and benevolent persona he projects to the world. Beneath the visage of a cosmetically populist, post-racial, post-partisan reformer who wants to “perfect” America and to have “millionaires and billionaires” “pay their fair share” is just another condescending, self-important, sarcastic, academic liberal Democrat, who believes in false consciousness and in scholastic theories that success in life can be attributed to birth or luck or community but not to individual effort and grit. Obama may be talented at self-fashioning, but he cannot maintain his public face constantly. The mask sometimes slips.
The real Obama emerges. He lets loose in the self-consciously ironic and pretentiously omniscient argot of the American ruling class, lecturing audiences in what he, Elizabeth Warren, and the segment producers at MSNBC treat as the new catechism. The reaction to these gaffes is always the same. His remarks spark justified criticism. There is a frenetic effort to paper over his comments and restore the impression that he is just another dad who wants to take care of one big American family. He and his lieutenants and other members of the “truth” posse indulge in mock outrage. They say the president’s words have been distorted, that he did not really say what he said, that he meant something else entirely. The activity is convulsive and furious because David Axelrod and David Plouffe understand that an unplugged Obama will damage his brand. He is not actually likable at all. And he is liable to wreck years of hard work and mythmaking the moment he goes off script.
That is the “context” behind the president’s July 13 outburst in Roanoke, Virginia:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me—because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t—look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The focus has been on Obama’s words in the second paragraph: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” But this misses the point. Whether or not “you didn’t build that” refers to the “roads and bridges” of the previous sentence is irrelevant.
Not flagged as excerpted, but it is. Click the link and read the rest of the article.
These are people who are so blinded by their own egos and simply cannot admit they made such a bad choice that they will continue to ignore what they can see and hear with their own eyes and ears. When the elephant is in the room, it is wise to find a way to get him out...or move! Staying in the room only means you will get trampled.
Yes, thank you! Please read the rest at the link. It is a good article.
His “didn’t build that” line in the second paragraph gets all the attention but the first paragraph is just as galling, especially when you take his snotty tone into account.
It is impossible to put those two sentences, those 2 thoughts, together, and not give the impression that you have intentionally left off qualifying words.
You didn't...somebody else did. That is awfully clear. It could have been, "Your business enjoys advantages because of our sytem." I doubt anyone would have even winced at that statement. But, "you didn't and somebody else did" pretty much suggests that the gov't was right there with you putting in 18 hour days in your shop.
Sounds like the Islam-o-fascists. They will even lie to each other.
“The” skidmark actually believes what he says because he never lifted a finger to get where he is, nor did Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farakhan, and many others. Most of his life was “made up” by the media.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I absolutely cannot stand Obama’s voice. I know to some it’s a very easy voice to listen to. But for myself it gives me an almost instant headache.
I would rather read his speeches than listen to him. At least then I can discern what it was he was trying to say without a headache making listening agony.
Thanks parisa.
And to all, a good day. My plan is, no more FR (other than tomorrow’s APoD) until Monday. Wish me luck.
I think the debates will be worth watching this time. Obama won’t be going up against a dottering old man that had spent so much time across the isle he didn’t know which side he was on. Romney is fast on his feet, well educated and knows his stuff and with any luck should be able to push Obama’s buttons.
Obama’s earlier measured baritone voice has become that of a Black Pastor, lecturing and preaching.
“Let me be clear, folks...”
It is creepy how he parodies people who did actually go to school.
Not only that, but even a worse waffler than Mitt (except Barack virtually always waffles the WRONG way).
Even worse, suggesting that the gummit broke its back there while you goofed off or were a minor gofer.
The amount of ego invested in this is so stupendous that people suspend belief. Those who grew up in communist cult of personality regimes can watch this and say “here we go again.” Americans who never heard a president talk like that are just dazed and half hope it’s hyperbole that will go away.
This is an overweening ego. No doubt about it. Says let us be clear then says something impenetrably foggy, hoping to intimidate.
“Says let us be clear then says something impenetrably foggy, hoping to intimidate.”
I don’t think so; I met some exchange students when I was in school, and one of them used “In fact...” at the start of many of his sentences. He heard an American say it, and thought that was how Americans speak (for EVERY sentence). Obama is merely parroting literate people, without knowing the proper context as to when it should be used.
Outstanding. A succinct, cogent delineation of the ‘real Obama’ that we all know - and want out of the White House as soon as possible.
As a post notes the site is not on the excerpt-only list, here is the balance of the editorial.
The truly revealing and disturbing idea is in the first paragraph, in which the president of the United States of America, the richest nation in the world, says he is “always struck” by “people who think” that individual smarts and hard work are responsible for success. The fools! Don’t they know achievement is a function of lavish government contracts to education and construction unions? Can’t they comprehend that innovation results from taxpayer-financed loan guarantees to companies owned by Democratic Party donors?
If the sentiments expressed in Roanoke really were as innocent and commonplace and “pro-business” as the Obama campaign and its apologists would have us believe, there would have been no need for the president to release an advertisement saying his words had been taken “out of context”; for his deputy campaign manager to record a three-minute video gushing over small business; for some peon on Jim Messina’s 700-person staff to design a shoddy website rebutting “Mitt Romney’s Misleading Attack Ads.” The media would have continued to engage in Jesuitical reading and interpretation of Romney’s contract with Bain Capital, and in gnostic speculation about the contents of the former Massachusetts governor’s tax returns. The plan to negatively define, and thus destroy, Romney would be proceeding apace. Obama ruined the story—and not for the first time.
“Obama’s biggest blunder yet” is how the incumbent’s most devoted Internet advocate described the moment when the first gay president spoke his mind to the raucous Virginia crowd. And indeed, there have been plenty of other blunders, stretching back many years. One could write a history of the Obamian Slip, telling the story of those instances when the president inadvertently disclosed his inner self, and diverted from the Axelrod message of hope and change and unity.
A rough timeline might look something like this. On July 23, 2007, at the CNN-YouTube Democratic primary debate, then-senator Obama made his ludicrous and unrehearsed pledge to meet personally with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in the first year of his administration. There was the stunning January 5, 2008, debate before the New Hampshire Primary, when Obama insulted the former First Lady and two-term New York senator Hillary Clinton by sneering she was “likable enough.” On April 6, 2008, he told a rather cartoonish audience at a San Francisco fundraiser that “it’s not surprising” he wasn’t winning the votes of working-class whites in the Democratic Party, because years of betrayal by the political class had made them “get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or … uh, anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
The blunders do not stop. Obama’s August 22, 2009, remark at a press conference that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” by arresting a disorderly Harvard professor created such controversy that the president hurriedly convened a slapdash “beer summit” that seemed like a parody of racial comity. The next January, while campaigning for Massachusetts’ attorney general Martha Coakley to replace the late Edward M. Kennedy in the U.S. Senate, Obama seemed obsessed with Republican state senator (and eventual victor) Scott Brown’s pickup truck, poking fun at it repeatedly during a last-minute campaign rally. A month later, at the health-care summit, Obama could not hide his contempt as John McCain explained why his constituents and a national majority opposed the president’s proposal for a health-care overhaul. When McCain finished, Obama dismissed him by sniping that “The election’s over,” as though the four-term senator had no legitimate grounds for opposition.
Obama’s impromptu rhetoric is laced with the arch, dry, and bitter humor of the liberal bourgeois who write our newspapers and magazines and books and Comedy Central “news” shows. This is the cynical and snarky voice that informs comments such as “You’re likeable enough” and “the election’s over” and, at the June 13, 2011, meeting of the president’s jobs council, “Shovel ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”
The critical detachment with which the president sees himself, his office, and his country is also apparent. He thought he could confide to Dmitri Medvedev that a second term would give him “more flexibility” to negotiate away America’s missile defenses, nuclear arsenal, and interest in democracy and human rights within the Russian near-abroad. A “hot mic” spoiled it for him. Obama thought he was stating the obvious when he said “The private sector is doing fine” in his June 8 press conference. Anemic private sector job creation, minimal GDP growth, stagnant wages and incomes, weakening manufacturing, record-low yields on U.S. Treasuries, and the longest sustained period of over 8 percent unemployment since the Great Depression all suggest otherwise.
Since 2007, Obama has been able to maintain a façade of positivity, nationalism, and mainstream goodwill, even as he harbors ideas, attitudes, and reflexes peculiar to a highly educated and overly compensated legal, corporate, and cultural elite. But the foundation of his appeal is eroding. The negative campaign against Romney accelerated the process. Obama’s favorability ratings are down. Democratic enthusiasm is down. The Roanoke speech—“You didn’t get there on your own”; “There are a lot of smart people out there”; “You didn’t build that”; “Somebody else made that happen”—may come to be seen as the juncture when the president sundered the connection he forged with America in the summer of 2004.
Who will be blamed for demolishing such a dazzling countenance? Obama alone. Nobody else made that happen.
His 2012 campaign is turning into a disaster because he's running as a bitter, angry black man.
An angry marxist mulatto.
Obama is running as a bitter, angry white man.
It figures you wouldn't notice.
“His 2012 campaign is turning into a disaster because he’s running as a bitter, angry black man.
Obama is running as a bitter, angry white man.”
I have started to question which half of him is racist.
I'll take 'Both' for a $1000, Alex.
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