The Content of His Character
Well, the American people decided to elect an empty suit.
One might try to take some comfort from the thought that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a day when Americans were judge by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin has been realized.
But that is not what happened on Election Day.
For those who got their news from the 'elite' print media or the alphabet networks, the content of Barack Obama's character remained a complete unknown. He was elected not for the content of his character, but for the contentlessness of his rhetoric: soothing nostrums about "change" and "hope" mingled with earnestly delivered, vacuously platitudinous appeals to vanity: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." For the contentlessness of his rhetoric, a sort of political Rorschach test onto which the inattentive voter projected his or her own hopes and dreams or imaginings of 'not Bush', and for the color of his skin.
To the extent that race had a role, the election of Barack Obama represents not the triumph of the Christian humanism of Dr. King, but of a transvaluation of values applied to the old template of white racism. Instead of 'white good, non-white bad', it was simply 'white bad, non-white good', an embrace by a portion of the electorate of the sort of pap sold by multiculturalist academicians with their twisted redefinition of racism under which all whites and only whites are 'racists'.
At least I hope that is how we can read the election. For if not, then a significant part of the electorate has judged that it is a sign of good character to vote "present" on contentious issues rather than taking a stand on one side or the other; that it is a sign of good character to win elections by litigation and leaks that disqualify one's opponents; that it is a sign of good character to collude with a shady political-machine fund-raiser and slum-lord to acquire one's home at below market cost; that it is a sign of good character to support infanticide then lie about it afterward; that it is a sign of good character to hide one's educational records behind the shield of privacy law; that it is a sign of good character to be the first major party candidate for the Presidency or Vice Presidency in the past quarter century not to release detailed medical records; that it is a sign of good character to twist words in a lawyerly way to deny that one "worked for" an organization that one represented as legal council, provided training seminars for, and for a subsidiary of which one actually worked for pay, simply because one didn't get a paycheck drawn directly on the organization's payroll account; that it is a sign of good character to first declare that one could not disown one's pastor of 20 years, then within the month to disown him; that it is a sign of good character, to characterize a man one worked with on a multi-million dollar project as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," when asked about one's association with him. If Barack Obama was elected for the content of his character, then America is lost, and with it Western Civilization.
Fortunately for the future of our country and our civilization, I do not believe that Obama voters by and large were even aware of the signs that suggest the suave, well-spoken junior Senator from Illinois, now our President-Elect, was of less-than-stirling character. Unfortunately for that future, the reason was the death of American journalism: every story that might have revealed Obama's character was spiked; attempts by the McCain campaign or 527 organizations to reveal it by the application of Euripides' dictum, "Every man is like the company he is wont to keep," evoked no journalistic zeal to uncover the true story or depth of Obama's contact with unsavory persons--Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, Rezko, Giannoulias, Davis, . . . but was instead briefly sneered at as 'guilt by association'.
As a result, America has a President-Elect who advocates economic policies that combine Herbert Hoover's folly of raising taxes and imposing protectionist measures in an economic downturn with calls for New-Deal-style 'civilian [fill-in-the-blank] corps' of the sort that arguably delayed the real recovery from the Great Depression by diverting labor from the private sector into 'make work' projects; a President-Elect whose foreign policy naivite combines a denial of the threat posed by radical Islam, with a complete incomprehension of Frederick the Great's dictum that "Diplomacy without arms is like a musical score without instruments"; a President-Elect whose contempt for our Constitution can be heard in his 2001 lament that the Warren Court did not find a way to subvert it in the cause of redistribution of wealth; a President-Elect who seems intent on hobbling the American economy by treating carbon dioxide as a 'pollutant' even as it becomes obvious that anthropogenic global warming is a specious theory, even at the cost of bankrupting the coal industry that provides the U.S. with half of its electricity and most of its energy not derived from imported oil.
The conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke said that "Liberalism is Communism sold by the drink."
By the end of the next four years, America may have quite a hangover.
One might try to take some comfort from the thought that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a day when Americans were judge by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin has been realized.
But that is not what happened on Election Day.
For those who got their news from the 'elite' print media or the alphabet networks, the content of Barack Obama's character remained a complete unknown. He was elected not for the content of his character, but for the contentlessness of his rhetoric: soothing nostrums about "change" and "hope" mingled with earnestly delivered, vacuously platitudinous appeals to vanity: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." For the contentlessness of his rhetoric, a sort of political Rorschach test onto which the inattentive voter projected his or her own hopes and dreams or imaginings of 'not Bush', and for the color of his skin.
To the extent that race had a role, the election of Barack Obama represents not the triumph of the Christian humanism of Dr. King, but of a transvaluation of values applied to the old template of white racism. Instead of 'white good, non-white bad', it was simply 'white bad, non-white good', an embrace by a portion of the electorate of the sort of pap sold by multiculturalist academicians with their twisted redefinition of racism under which all whites and only whites are 'racists'.
At least I hope that is how we can read the election. For if not, then a significant part of the electorate has judged that it is a sign of good character to vote "present" on contentious issues rather than taking a stand on one side or the other; that it is a sign of good character to win elections by litigation and leaks that disqualify one's opponents; that it is a sign of good character to collude with a shady political-machine fund-raiser and slum-lord to acquire one's home at below market cost; that it is a sign of good character to support infanticide then lie about it afterward; that it is a sign of good character to hide one's educational records behind the shield of privacy law; that it is a sign of good character to be the first major party candidate for the Presidency or Vice Presidency in the past quarter century not to release detailed medical records; that it is a sign of good character to twist words in a lawyerly way to deny that one "worked for" an organization that one represented as legal council, provided training seminars for, and for a subsidiary of which one actually worked for pay, simply because one didn't get a paycheck drawn directly on the organization's payroll account; that it is a sign of good character to first declare that one could not disown one's pastor of 20 years, then within the month to disown him; that it is a sign of good character, to characterize a man one worked with on a multi-million dollar project as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," when asked about one's association with him. If Barack Obama was elected for the content of his character, then America is lost, and with it Western Civilization.
Fortunately for the future of our country and our civilization, I do not believe that Obama voters by and large were even aware of the signs that suggest the suave, well-spoken junior Senator from Illinois, now our President-Elect, was of less-than-stirling character. Unfortunately for that future, the reason was the death of American journalism: every story that might have revealed Obama's character was spiked; attempts by the McCain campaign or 527 organizations to reveal it by the application of Euripides' dictum, "Every man is like the company he is wont to keep," evoked no journalistic zeal to uncover the true story or depth of Obama's contact with unsavory persons--Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, Rezko, Giannoulias, Davis, . . . but was instead briefly sneered at as 'guilt by association'.
As a result, America has a President-Elect who advocates economic policies that combine Herbert Hoover's folly of raising taxes and imposing protectionist measures in an economic downturn with calls for New-Deal-style 'civilian [fill-in-the-blank] corps' of the sort that arguably delayed the real recovery from the Great Depression by diverting labor from the private sector into 'make work' projects; a President-Elect whose foreign policy naivite combines a denial of the threat posed by radical Islam, with a complete incomprehension of Frederick the Great's dictum that "Diplomacy without arms is like a musical score without instruments"; a President-Elect whose contempt for our Constitution can be heard in his 2001 lament that the Warren Court did not find a way to subvert it in the cause of redistribution of wealth; a President-Elect who seems intent on hobbling the American economy by treating carbon dioxide as a 'pollutant' even as it becomes obvious that anthropogenic global warming is a specious theory, even at the cost of bankrupting the coal industry that provides the U.S. with half of its electricity and most of its energy not derived from imported oil.
The conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke said that "Liberalism is Communism sold by the drink."
By the end of the next four years, America may have quite a hangover.
posted by DNY at
5:35 PM
0 Comments
