That should have been obvious from the beginning:
Posted on 10/28/2012 7:21:26 PM PDT by smoothsailing
October 28, 2012
Rude, insulting language about Romney (“bullsh****r) from the president. Vulgar sexual innuendo, aimed at seducing young women to vote for him. The vice president asking a bereaved parent about the size of his murdered son’s testicles. It’s quite a spectacle. We’re a fractious people, and our politics have always been full of colorful language, but I can’t recall the current depth of vulgarity. The “politics of personal destruction” have gotten uglier. Does it mean anything? Should we try to understand it?
First, it bespeaks a coarsening of public language. No surprise there (Romney’s gentlemanlyness is more surprising, in fact); for a long time our movies and television have abandoned the rules that banned certain words and phrases. Still, until recently, our political leaders have avoided such vulgarities, at least in their public rhetoric. No more, at least at the highest level of the current Democrat Party.
Second, it shows the shrinking vocabulary of our political life. There are plenty of usable and powerful synonyms of “buls*****r,” but a graduate of Harvard Law School didn’t have any of them on the tip of his tongue. Or perhaps he just preferred the vulgarity.
Third, it is yet another step in the erasure of the line that once divided public and private. We always knew that there was (sometimes) a big difference between public image and private behavior. No man (except maybe Sir Winston) is a hero to his valet, etc. etc. But still, there were proprieties, rules for public decorum, and those who fell from grace in public were criticized and excoriated for falling. No more, at least so far as I can see among the Democrat faithful.
To be sure, there’s a difference between the two parties. When male Republican candidates make disgusting and ridiculous statements about rape, the faithful turn on them, properly so IMHO, but neither Obama nor Biden has come in for punishment for their use of obscenities and vulgarities.
So the rules for proper decorum are out the window, and the former arbiters of good taste are on board, ratifying the changes by their silence. It’s a shame, but there you have it.
But the arbiters–the intellectuals, the elite punditocracy et. al.–can’t dictate standards to the rest of us, even though they often delude themselves into believing they can. The politicians who indulge in the new nastiness clearly believe it’s fine with us, because they think their elitist friends dictate standards to the rest of us. I think they’re wrong. When only EIGHT PERCENT of Americans have a positive view of the media, it tells you something, after all. And when I read about the sudden 7 percent drop in Obama’s approval ratings in three days, I suspect it has something to do with bulls*****r and losing-your-virginity-is-like-voting-for-Barack ads, and Biden’s disgusting remarks [1] to a bereaved father.
It’s a continuation of a process that began with the first debate, in which Obama tip-toed out from behind the curtain on the central stage of Oz, and showed us who he really is. Not a great leader, certainly not a messianic figure. Indeed, as we now see, he’s a bum. It’s a shock to lots of Americans, who previously were willing to grant that the president had his faults but was basically a good man, a nice guy, and a cultured gentleman. He showed them he was none of those things.
I think that was a real shock to a meaningful chunk of the electorate, and it would not have been nearly so potent if it had come from a book or an oped. Its power comes from the fact that Obama showed it himself.
It shouldn’t have been hard to foresee the consequences of his self-revelation. So why did he do it? He’s certainly capable of dissimulation. The One who won the presidency four years ago did not present himself this way. He and his acolytes very carefully portrayed him as a transcendent figure, a new kind of leader, the incarnation of elegance and brilliance. And that succeeded. So what’s up?
I think he’s cracking, and the inner nastiness and vulgarity are on display. He’s losing, and he’s angry, and he can no longer sustain the pretense of elegance and coolness.
Nobody ever said he was disciplined, did they?
Moreover, he is the victim of his own myth, the “I have a special gift” legend that is the core doctrine of his powerful narcissism. He thinks he is so charismatic, and so wonderful, that if we see him in all his splendor, we will love him as he so loves himself.
I think that’s false, and I think the shifts in the polls–people suddenly like Romney, people suddenly turning away from Obama–demonstrate that. We’ll see for sure on the 6th of November.
Apparently the Democrat party admired him so much they purposely bypassed vetting the socialist/marxist/commie with ties to the Weather Underground, Reverend Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Khalid Al-Mansour and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
That was poetry ! !
I recall hearing that LBJ once called someone a "200-proof, double-dip motherf----r". Can't find the link (it was way pre-internet).
Being black and being a street thug is Obama's chosen vocation, not his identity. To achieve his career objective, he needed all the help Frank Marshall Davis, Reverend Wright, Valerie Jarrett, and Billy Ayers could provide.
Proper street thug blacks take umbrage at Obama the Interloper:
Very insightful!
He;s a DEMOCRAT....they are CLASSLESS!
You can get a person out of the gutter, but you canot get the gutter out of a person....
LBJ was famed for his colorful speech (and you must admit, that’s not only colorful, but pretty funny!) but he usually kept it to conversations with private parties and it wasn’t meant for general consumption. Occasionally he’d do something just to shock (such as showing off his appendectomy scar to the press) but in general he behaved himself in public. The same is true of Nixon, whose speech wasn’t colorful but just nasty, and Clinton, who was given to bursts of anger and whose speech was crude and full of expletives...but not for the news media or the public.
The difference with Obama is that he really has so much contempt for us that he doesn’t care, and he has systematically been cheapening the office of President in every way, from his media call-ins (remember the “Pimp with the Limp”?) and appearances with foul-mouthed, grunting rap “artists” to his own personal speech and behavior in public.
That said, I think with Obama and Biden both these are attempts to portray themselves as something they’re not, by adopting behavior they think would typify the image they want to express. Obama is very effeminate, and he probably thinks a “real man” would speak crudely and bluster. Biden is a product of a private school education and a family that, except for a couple of years, had money and thus he has absolutely none of the “working class” background that he has tried to adopt as a condescending, insulting vote-getting mechanism. But in his tiny mind, he thinks that a working class man would make “manly” remarks such as the appallingly crude comment made to Woods’ father, and that this is reinforcing the image of Regular Joe.
In any case, no matter why they do it, they’re disgusting.
Because he’s a Kenyan-Muslim-Marxist fraud? I understand they are humorless and arrogant. That is as an apt description of Dear Leader as any.
Democrats, and particularly Obama, make feral Huns appear highly sophisticated.
You seem to assume that an individual's personality can only be made up of actual experiences. But Obama's book Dreams from My Father is entirely about the attitudes and resentments he took on based on his father's experiences and those of Africans and blacks in general.
Obama is a mixed-up mess of envy and resentments he's taken on from various aspects of the black experience, and the Third World experience, few of which he actually expereienced in any real way while growing up, and certainly not while he was given affirmative action access to educational oportunities he had not earned based on merit.
But still, he's taken on those resentments and attitudes and the attitudes of the street thug is often a part of it.
I am no Nixon admirer but Obama would need a stepladder to tie Nixon’s shoes.
“Why does poop smell bad? Because it’s poop.”
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Having been born and raised on a tiny farm where we used draft animals I can tell you that some poop smells a LOT worse than some other poop. That from a horse that works hard all day without protest has a smell but while not exactly pleasant it does not knock you down. That from a pig that lies around in the shade, occasionally wallows in the mud and grunts and squeals in expectation of having food brought to it smells a lot worse.
What's sad is that this scumbag has kids, himself. Can you imagine how disgusting their homelife must be?
He's mean, he's snide, he's just a terrible, terrible person, but our young people lap up every blasphemous and obscene thing that comes out his his cesspool of a mouth. His creepy sidekick, Colbert, too.
Obama's been on Comedy Central and picked up all the filthy patois.
Or a 9 on the ACT. Perfect score on the ACT is 36.
Because Obama is a follower of Alinsky!
That should have been obvious from the beginning:
No, it isn't -- my point entirely about "sprayed-on" toughness. Real toughness, though, goes to character, and that is acquired through experience, good or bad. People who haven't had it tough aren't tough, is the way to say it.
As for all the rest, you seem to be agreeing with me about its artificiality. If Obama really represented his background, he'd be a go-along guy minding his own business. The interventions of others -- FMD, Red Mommy, Red Granny, all the rest -- certainly account for changes in him, but I don't see anyone in his background who will have imparted the kind of personal tough-guy attitude that someone who'd been up the river for 15 years brings to the table from experience.
Someone went underground once, long ago, with the Weathermen for several months, in order to write an article about them (don't remember where -- it might have been Rolling Stone), and his insight was that Ayers, Boudin, Gold, and all the rest were suburban kids trying to learn to be tough by living rough and not doing the dishes. But they're not the same thing, and he doubted they ever really imbibed the kind of toughness prison and genuine privation impart.
That all said, the most murderous thugs in 20th-century history, at least on the Left, were all middle-class darlings who got their Rad.D. degrees at the Sorbonne or someplace, and then went out and killed a million people in the name of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary principles.
Many words that have little to do with my original statement.
Because he has a good dose of street thug in his makeup. He's actually probably exercising great restraint.
Obama is a mixed up mess of many influences that he has picked up along the way. And some of his most authentic influences are probably some that he hides. But the street thug is one of those influeces whether or not he actually lived that life.
Obama time and again has displayed the attitudes of a street thug. Anyone can assume the attitude of any group, or become a wannabe without having actually lived that life. To say that one has to have actually lived a particular life before they can mimic some of its attitudes and behaviors is nonsense.
You are doing something that is all too common around FR: ascribing meanings to someone else's posts that simply are not there so you can disagree.
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