Posted on 09/08/2009 6:58:31 AM PDT by RobinMasters
Once upon a time, a fresh new politician, Barack Obama — black, young, eloquent, and hip — soared with rhetoric about hope and change. The people were mesmerized. What a contrast with the tongue-tied outgoing president, George W. Bush, and his unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan!
Presidential Candidate Obama sensed their ecstasy, and so he made two great promises: 1. Whatever Bush was, he would not be, and 2. despite the right-wing slander about his former intimacy with Bill Ayers, the Reverend Wright, Father Pfleger, Rashid Khalidi, and all his other old Chicago radical friends, Obama would be a centrist, a cooler version of Bill Clinton. There were to be no more red/blue state divides. The most partisan politician in the Senate promised a new era of bipartisanship. He who had profited from identity politics would suddenly be beyond race.
The people were considering voting for this unknown, fresh, hope-and-change candidate — a decision made easier after the financial meltdown of mid-September 2008. They decided then that they wanted a new-frontier moderate, a JFK for the 21st century, who would put competence and style over ideology — and clean up the financial mess left by Wall Street and the greedy Republicans.
Obama also promised that he would craft a foreign policy from the bipartisan center, while making us liked abroad once more. During the campaign, to reassure the doubtful, he name-dropped at length Republicans with whom he would consult: old centrist pros like Dick Lugar and Bob Gates, as well as four-star generals.
(Excerpt) Read more at article.nationalreview.com ...
bump
Resident (Pres_ent) Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., or Barry Soetoro, or Mr Michelle Robinson, or Sock-Puppet, supposedly the son of an out-of-control teenager and a Kenyan exchange student, has surpassed himself in double-talk, instanteous reversals, and outright mendacity, and seems intent on gaining some sort of ascendency to rank up there with supernatural dieties.
All in all, a fine cautionary tale.
Except it is not yet over.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index:
Just a partial list. Much more at the link: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index
VDH expresses eloquently what I will say crudely: Barack Hussein Obama is a venal pile of shat.
Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out. Links:
FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index NRO archive: http://author.nationalreview.com/?q=MjI1MQ== Pajamasmedia: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/ His website: http://victorhanson.com/
Dang I wish I could write like that guy.
Now that he is president, events and reality are conspiring to reveal his true character. As Krauthammer said (video link), the Van Jones affair revealed Obama and his closest advisers for what they are...radicals, racists, kooks!
The Lamentations of the Elite [Victor Davis Hanson]
Van Jones in his final communiqué says, "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide." I have not watched the now supposedly infamous Beck exposures, but I am curious what exactly constitutes a “vicious smear campaign.” Did Jones or did not Jones in public and in interviews compare the president of the United States to a crack-cocaine addict, assert that white people are polluting the ghetto, that only white students commit mass murders in the public schools, that Republicans are a**holes, and sign a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration’s purported role in causing 9/11?
The Jones mess brings up a larger issue. Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last ninth months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard-law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming invective episode. Harvard-law educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by comparing her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel who had serially dodged his tax obligations claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.
What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect bias or ill-treatment in their past or present circumstances, but rather remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes, as exemplified by their career successes.
The roots of all this scapegoating were in the campaign, not just with the mansion/golf-course living Reverend Wright, the president’s mentor and pastor, slurring his country and its various constituencies, but also with Obama’s own stereotyping of Pennsylvania voters, once the election there did not go his way. Worse still, we are only in month nine of this new age of Obama — with more than three years to go in his first term — and the country is already tired of the blame-gaming and whining, when officials like Rangel and Jones start to defame others for their own lack of ethics and judgment. This is all very unfortunate, but I predict it will only intensify given the example at the top, and sadly probably result in a polarization that we have not seen in generations.
Right. It’s incredible how many people believed his mantra. Unreal.
But people got what they voted for.
Ayersism [Victor Davis Hanson]
As Hugo Chavez continues to shut down the media and silence critics, Oliver Stone—who would never be allowed, if he were a Venezuelan filmmaker, to direct as he does in the states—praises Chavez's coerced socialism.
Michael Moore, known for hard-nosed distribution and profit-making, announces, again like Stone in conjunction with hyping a profit-making movie, that capitalism (for others) is dead.
Van Jones, solidly middle class and Yale-educated, among other things, pontificated about revolution, an apartheid America, redistributing wealth, a—hole Republicans and George Bush's involvement in 9/11, in between jetting between conferences, espousing his green jobs promotion that hyped book sales and his own career.
What is strange about all this chic-radicalism is how would-be revolutionaries that wish to dismantle America as we know it and/or emulate failed systems abroad, always do so from comfort, security, affluence, and freedom of choice unique to America and Europe, suggesting that radical politics and those who agitate for them are sort of a fashion statement, aimed to resonate among particular elite leftist audiences and to bring dividends from them, but not to be taken too seriously as guides in their own lives.
Take the teleprompters away, and it becomes clear that he's as dumb as a bag of rocks.
All I can say is what have you done America!!
“The media, Hollywood, and the intelligentsia agreed, and thus Code Pink, Michael Moore, and a screaming Al Gore either quieted down or dropped out the news.”
Their tirades were ALWAYS directed at GW Bush.
Code Pink could have cared less about the soldiers in the field and Al Gore got wealthy peddling the global warming nonsense.
Dr. H has an eloquence and depth that is unmatched in my opinion. The line he closes with perfectly summarizes the situation we find ourselves in with our POTUS.
“Once upon a time the people deluded themselves into thinking a suave extremist was to be their nuts-and-bolts centrist. Now they don’t know whether to be mad at him or themselves — or both.”
Spot on the money in one tidy package, VDH. I'm bookmarking this to copy, paste & send to all the disaffected & demoralized Obama voters I know & to file it myself for future use when they waiver in their disgust for both him & themselves.
When have they not been about being chic, cool, hipsters that trade in cultural platitudes. They never are about cultivating their ideology while cutting sugarcane with the proletariat, with the unwashed peasants. These are spoiled mama's boys out to make a name for themselves as the new Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs for our times — book writing for the coffeehouse Starbuck revolution.
Get your unmolested, free range, green coffee beans here with every new book about the evils of Capitalism and Bush. Do the right thing America. Be cool.
If you have a ping list for Victor Davis Hansen, please add me to it.
Thanks
A friend pointed something out to me that was enlightening. He stated, “I got news for you, BO is not a great politician.” It took a minute for that to sink in.
A “great politician” (by today’s standards) pees on your foot and convinces you that it’s raining and you should be thankful it’s just a shoe.
His point was that he is so smug that he cannot fathom the American people would pay enough attention to realize that his hidden agenda is masked in a delivery of nonsense. In fact, the American people are not only rejecting his cover story and agenda for a radical agenda but they are also wising up to “what else” we should be looking to get snookered on. When liberals are screaming that he is not doing enough and the rest of the country is throwing up road blocks, the “politician” has failed to convince either group that he has their best interests as his primary agenda, let alone that of the nation.
He could no longer sell a rubber raft to a shipwreck victim for free. The question will always be, and should be, “what’s in it for you?”
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