October 25, 2008
What are they thinking?
Please take a few minutes and read Mark Levin's impassioned warning to his fellow American. He believes -- as do I -- that this nation stands on the brink of a terrible mistake, one rooted in anger, class envy, a cult of personality, and based on nothing approximating a calm, cool, clear-headed study of the merits of the candidates.
I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong.
Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.
There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me.
The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world.
I dare say, this is ominous stuff.
Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources.
The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny.
And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism.
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But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization.
Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new ... It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government.
Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created.
Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals.
If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class).
And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.
Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.
The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.
The changes that Obama seeks to impose on us are indeed fundamental and, contrary to the claims of the Candide-like chorus that waves away the dangers, anything but temporary. I believe that this is not an opportunity to give a well-meaning political novice a chance to tinker around the edges of our nation's machinery, but rather a wholesale home makeover, entrusted to an unlicensed contractor who happens to have an instinctual and deep-seated dislike for the very structure he's tasked with improving.
I remain hopeful that voters will look at the ballot in the privacy of the voting booth and decide that the vastly more experienced -- if also immeasurably less charismatic -- and politically and philosophically incoherent John McCain is nonetheless a safer choice than the untested, unvetted, unquestioned and underreported on Obama.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 25, 2008 10:35 PM
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Comments
Mr. Levin should take this sure defeat as a lesson of history. When you govern irresponsibly the people will sweep you from office with a swift kick in the pants. People are less afraid of speculation about how bad the other guys is when they "know" how bad you are.
George Bush has treated the military like his personal SWAT team. Here's the problem with Iraq - Bush sent the SWAT team into the wrong house. After kicking in the front door we find no weapons of mass destruction and no support of terrorists. Oh wait a second, now we learn that it was the bad guy next door in Iran who actually IS building the nuclear weapons. We are out of money and out of troops so we'll just use sanctions against those bad guys in Iran - something doves like Obama preferred for Iraq in the first place! If you step away from partisanship for just a moment can you see how completely insane this must seem to the average guy on the street?
If our very lives truly hang in the brink over Sadaam Hussein or the Iranians having weapons of mass destruction then why aren't we attacking Iran despite our mistake in Iraq?
The Republican party is about to learn big time what the country thinks of its overall decision to cheerlead for George Bush. While Bush spends 10 billion a month to liberate a country that has no concept of Democratic rule, people at home see the economy collapsing around them.
You can't persuade people to believe theoretical labels of what Obama is supposed to be when they have concrete memories of "weapons of mass destruction", "Your doing a great job browney," Harriet Meyers, and oh, by the way, ladies and gentlemen we need 700 billion dollars immediately with no strings attached or the economy will implode.
Any Republican who can't see that their side completely screwed up their reign of power is prone to make similar mistakes again.
Republicans need some self-reflection. Ronald Reagan never would have invaded Iraq. He was a true conservative who only believed in using American military power if it was in the national interests of the United States. The Republican party has been hijacked by neo-cons, they are neither conservative nor liberal. They are big government interventionists who sdesire to remake the world in the image of the United States. Just as we don't want Islam, Muslims may not want our form of government. Neo cons don't get this. They can't understand why others don't look at the world just as they do. The American people are done paying for neo-con folly, learn this or watch the Democrats hold power and divest you of your money, your guns and other things that are more important to you than the freedom of the great Iraqi people.
Posted by: Big Skeptic at October 26, 2008 08:39 AM
You may be right in your assessments of the failure of the Bush administration, Big Skeptic. However, everybody - and I mean everybody, was sure Saddam had WMDs and had been shouting about them for years. But I digress.
What Stein was hinting at, and was detailed by the Wall Street Journal, is the impending Democrat supermajority. Imagine this if you will. A filibuster proof Democratic Senate, a strong Democratic majority congress, enough to prevent any Republican opposition on nearly all legislation, and an Obama administration. Now, throw in one of Biden's predicted "tests" for Obama, and you've got a potential recipe for some type of extra-constitutional "emergency powers". Just like the ones given to Hitler after the Reichstag fire in 1933. The only safeguard of our constitutionally protected rights is the Supreme Court. Is any one scared now? The makeup of the court right now is shakey. This is not hyperbole, or some fevered conspiracy theory. This is a potential repeat of that moment in history.
Posted by: sonarman at October 26, 2008 04:23 PM
Obama and the Third Reich. Now there is a comparison that seems a little far fetched. American government is designed to allow nothing more than incremental change. Just as the Republicans were or will be booted by setting their compass on a course of foolishness, Obama will be thrown out on his ear if he goes too radical. You can expect to see more limited gun rights and higher taxes but any comparison to Nazi Germany is pure political science fiction.
Posted by: Big Skeptic at October 26, 2008 08:56 PM