Canadian Cincinnatus

Obama’s past girlfriends

In a Politico story that made headlines on the Drudge Report, it was revealed that the ‘mysterious white girlfriend’ that Barack Obama mentioned in his autobiography (the first autobiography, not the second) was a composite of different characters. This doesn’t surprise me a bit, as Stanley Kurtz in Radical in Chief states that the names of many individuals in Dreams From My Father (particularly the political types) are pseudonyms. Hmm... I wonder why he would do that?

What did strike me was the following passage (emphasis added):

"During an interview in the Oval Office, Obama acknowledged that, while Genevieve was his New York girlfriend, the description in his memoir was a “compression” of girlfriends, including one who followed Genevieve [Cook] when he lived in Chicago," Maraniss writes in his new biography, an excerpt of which was published online today by Vanity Fair.

So, let me get this straight: in addition to all the vacations, all the golf games, non-stop fundraising and the continuous campaigning, as well as taking time out to pick the winners of college basketball games, President Obama has room in his schedule to reminisce about his old flames.

Good thing he doesn’t have a demanding job!

 

Obama’s elitist war on stay-at-home moms

At this point in the US Presidential campaign, the Team Obama strategy is coming into clear focus: create a series of divisive crises to drive a wedge between the proletariat masses and the governing elites. Many conservative commentators attributed this to Obama’s desire to avoid his own record. As the legal saying goes, if your case is strong on facts, argue the facts; if your case is strong on the law, argue the law; and if your case is strong on neither, attack the witnesses.

I think they are only partly right. Stanley Kurtz predicted in his book, Radical in Chief, that Obama would do this and his book appeared before the 2010 midterms. Kurtz based his prediction on the fact that this is the classic community organizer strategy and Barack Obama is a community organizer. This is what community organizers do; it’s straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. 

The contraception mandate (clearly designed to antagonize the Catholic Church), the Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh dustup, the Travyon Martin-George Zimmerman-O J Simpson fiasco and now the attack on Ann Romney because she is a stay-at-home mother are all media events that Team Obama has either manufactured, amplified or latched on to. Unfortunately for Obama, in driving a wedge between one group of Americans and another, he invariably ends up lumping himself with the minority.

The Hilary Rosen affair is very instructive. As many readers doubtlessly already know, last Wednesday, Obama surrogate Hilary Rosen opined on CNN that Ann Romney is out of touch with average America because she “has never worked a day in her life”. The Drudge Report promptly posted a picture of Mitt and Ann sitting with their brood five boys. How out of touch do you have to be to think it is a good idea to get an elitist Washington lawyer to criticize the institution of motherhood. Could you imagine Bill Clinton making such a mistake?

(Of course, to be fair, disavowals from key Team Obama players like David Axelrod came quickly. Still, who was the twit that green-lighted Rosen in the first place?)

This kind of mistake happens because Barack Obama is too self-unaware to appreciate his utter disconnect with mainstream America. It is not that he is a rich elitist like Mitt Romney. It is worse than that because I think the average American can identify with Romney’s life a lot easier than Obama’s. Obama’s life isn’t so much privileged, as it is weird. He has been a lifelong intellectual ideologue and therefore understands people only in terms of Marxist class-structure. In contrast, Bill Clinton understands people as they really are.

So keep at Barack! By the time you are finished with him, Mitt Romney will come across like the reincarnation of Tom Joad.

 

Controversial artist paints Obama burning the US Constitution

One would be forgiven for thinking believing that it is all but impossible for an artist to be a controversial these days. After all, we have Piss Christ, Artist’s Shit, Richard Serra’s portrait of George W Bush as Saturn Devouring His Son and Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 dadaist masterpiece: the Fountain.

But now we know what it takes for an artist to be truly controversial. So all you aspiring avant-garde controversialists gather round and listen: painting a realistic picture of President Obama in less than flattering light. I know, I know, even speaking such a thing is itself borderline-racism, so pass the smelling salts and get near the fainting couch when you take a gander at Jon McNaughton’s latest portrait of President Obama.

Personally, as an aficionado of the avant-garde, I prefer his Forgotten Man. At least, unlike Picasso, he doesn’t paint anybody with both eyes on the same side of the face. That is getting so passe.

 

Obama poster creator faces jail time because of his famous poster

Remember the famous “Hope” poster Obama used in his election campaign? The creator of that poster, Shepard Fairey, is currently facing jail time because of it. According to the New York Times:

The street artist Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama became an enduring symbol of his last presidential campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge stemming from his misconduct in trying to bolster claims in a lawsuit over which photograph had been used as a basis for the poster.

Mr. Fairey, 42, sued The Associated Press in 2009 after it contended he had infringed on the copyright of one of its photographs in creating the poster. Mr.

Fairey had claimed in his suit that he had used a different photograph of Mr. Obama, but later admitted that he had been mistaken and had tried to conceal his mistake, by destroying documents and fabricating others.

The Telegraph elaborated:

Fairey “went to extreme lengths to obtain an unfair and illegal advantage in his civil litigation, creating fake documents and destroying others in an effort to subvert the civil discovery process,” US Attorney Bharara Bharara said in a statement.

To cover up his false complaint, Fairey created multiple false and fraudulent documents attempting to show that he had used the photograph of Obama and Clooney, and tried to delete electronically stored documents that demonstrated that he had used the tightly cropped image, Mr Bharara said.

The Daily Caller comments:

Note that this possible jail time isn’t for creating the poster, but for lying to the court in a lawsuit he filed.

Not only is the story behind the Hope and Change poster a fitting metaphor for the Obama administration in general, but it is also a good example of what happens when objective standards of beauty are removed from the arts: artists mutate from talented craftsmen to brazen self-promoters.

 

P.S. An observation: AP made a stink about the copyright of their photograph being violated only after Obama was safely elected. I wonder if they would have extended the same courtesy to John McCain if his campaign had been as inept? Hmmm…

How to squelch Obama’s pulpit socialism

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast. At that event, Obama opined that the teachings of Jesus justify many of his soak-the-rich policies.  For instance, he said:

"But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that, for unto whom much is given, much shall be required."

"It's not just about strengthening alliances or promoting democratic values or projecting American leadership around the world, although it does all those things and it will make us safer and more secure," it's also about the biblical call to care for the least of these, for the poor, for those at the margins of our society; to answer the responsibility we're given in Proverbs to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute."

He went on to explain how his understanding of Christianity guided him into banning the practice of denying health insurance for pre-existing conditions, as well as to support Dodd-Frank and set up the Consumer Protection Agency.

The way to counter this kind of thing is to ask him, so who did you learn this interpretation of Christianity from - the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? And if not from him, then where? What other church, besides Rev. Wright’s Trinity United – that you belonged to for almost 20 years - have you been a been a member of?

By explicitly mixing religion with politics, President Obama has also provided a great excuse for rerunning attack ads depicting Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” sermon. Hey, if you want to inject religion into the Presidential debate, we are happy to cooperate.

Or we would be, if the GOP weren’t the stupid party.

 

George Will: “Conservatives should rejoice” over Occupy Wall Street movement

In a perceptive article, George Will makes the following point about the ultimate consequences of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

“Conservatives should rejoice and wish for it long life, abundant publicity and sufficient organization to endorse congressional candidates deemed worthy.”

“From 1965 through 1968, the left found its voice and style in consciousness-raising demonstrations and disruptions. In November 1968, the nation, its consciousness raised, elected Richard Nixon President and gave 56.9 percent of the popular vote to Nixon or George Wallace. Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections.”

Will makes many interesting points in this article so please go and read the whole thing, but it seems to me that this is his most important point: the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is a gross political miscalculation by the left.

Many commentators on the left note that OWS is the left’s equivalent of the Tea Party, clearly assuming that, as the Tea Party propelled the GOP to midterm victory in November 2010, OWS may similarly propel the Democrats to victory next November. As George Will pointed out, this hope is completely misplaced.

They are wrong because the Tea Parties, contrary to the vicious MSM demonization campaign, are infused with middle class sensibilities. The Tea Partiers were orderly, polite and cleaned up after themselves. Their ranks are composed of working people, or the recently unemployed who only want honest work. In contrast, the OWS is composed of anarchists, communists and other extremists who revel in violent confrontation and clearly enjoy subverting public order with activities like illegally occupying public spaces for extended periods. Ordinary nonpolitical people can sympathize with Tea Partiers but recoil in horror at the ostentatious radicalism on display at the OWC ‘sit-ins’. I think the average nonpolitical American has the same sentiments about OWC that boxer Joe Louis had about the Third Reich when he publicly told Adolph Hitler, “there is nothing wrong with America that you can fix.”

If you don’t believe me - or George Will - or Joe Louis - then perhaps you should reread Saul Alinsky. He made the same point in Rules for Radicals. He thought the long hair, the flag burning and dirty clothes were about the worst things the left did to themselves. Right away they drove a wedge between themselves and The People. No wonder they lost, Alinsky concluded. 

That the Alinskyite, Barack Obama, does not see this and instead appears to welcome the coming of the OWC movement is a testament to the fact that he has completely lost whatever political touch that he once had in 2008. 

 

President Obama wanted to apologize to Japan for Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the Japanese government wouldn’t let him

Wikileaks, the gift that keeps on giving: According to Investor’s Business Daily:

“Another stop on the tour was in Japan, where Obama in November 2009 bowed to the emperor, something no American president had ever done. It could have been worse if plans to visit Nagasaki and Hiroshima to apologize for winning the war with the atom bombs had come to pass.

A heretofore secret cable dated Sept. 3, 2009, was recently released by WikiLeaks. Sent to Secretary of State Clinton, it reported Japan's Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka telling U.S. Ambassador John Roos that "the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a 'nonstarter.'"

The Japanese feared the apology would be exploited by anti-nuclear groups and those opposed to the defensive alliance between Japan and the U.S.”

While I normally refrain from bandying disparaging terms like ‘idiot’ around when describing important political leaders, I think Rand Simberg was entirely appropriate when he titled his column “Just In Case You Didn’t Think That The President Is An Idiot”. The fact that his apology was nixed by its intended recipient is the crowning folly: impotence and diplomatic incompetence on top of decadent self-hatred. 

January, 2013 can’t come soon enough.

 

Cool is dead

     

 

I have always thought that the term ‘cool’, bandied about endlessly, is a bogus concept. To the extent that the word has a legitimate meaning at all, it is used as a synonym for ‘good’. Basically, it is used by the media to control the spending habits of teenagers and to make aging baby boomers feel ‘hip’ (another bogus word). For this reason, it is my practice to never use the term in speech, except sarcastically.

I therefore very much appreciated Roger L Simon’s essay on the death of ‘cool’:

“In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.

This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.

And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.”

I have long believed that the defining difference between conservatives and liberals today is that liberals are conservatives who want to be revolutionaries while conservatives are revolutionaries who want to be conservatives. I also believe that, deep down, people like Barack Obama and Toronto’s former mayor David Miller understand that: that they are now the establishment - The Man. Wearing torn, designer jeans to affect a faux-proletariat look while contemplating (80 year old) avant garde art only partially consoles them.

Unfortunately for them, no matter what they do or wear, they are no longer cool - and it eats them up.

Obama might pull out

Yesterday, Bill Clinton’s strategist, Dick Morris wrote an article speculating that President Obama’s name might not even be on the ballot in 2012 because he might withdraw it.

“As bad news piles up for the Democrats, I asked a top Democratic strategist if it were possible that President Obama might ‘pull a Lyndon Johnson’ and soberly face the cameras, telling America that he has decided that the demands of partisan politics are interfering with his efforts to right our economy and that he has decided to withdraw to devote full time to our recovery. His answer: ‘Yes. It’s possible. If things continue as they are and have not turned around by January, it is certainly possible.’”

This echoes what I said in a Feb 2010 column on this blog:

“Interestingly enough, I think there is a fourth option that neither President Obama nor Charles Krauthammer have considered, that Obama might be a one-term president because his name will not be on the ballot again. It has struck me that besides his left-wing idealism, another core theme running through his personality is a delicate narcissism. When he ran for President, he was a blank slate and, as Chairman Mao once put it, “on a blank sheet of paper the most beautiful poems can be written.” And so it was. Everybody wrote their own beautiful poem on the bank slate called candidate Obama. In this way he became the Messiah, the One. If nothing else, the election campaign of 2008 was a great ego pump. But who will he be in 2012? Not a blank slate. No, instead of offering vague platitudes, he will have to defend the messy details of his record as President. Does Obama want that role? Or more to the point, is he any good at it? Bill Clinton could bob and weave and let the water run down his back like a duck, but can Obama do that? I don’t think so. He certainly hasn’t shown any skill at this. I think he might take the easy way out - declare victory as a good one-term President and ignominiously depart the scene.”

One of the things I based my assessment of was the possibility of a second recession coming up in 2012 caused by Obama’s anti-business policies and, even more importantly, by the stagflation induced by ‘Helicopter Ben’ Bernanke’s printing press.

Fortunately and unfortunately, respectively, I may be right on both counts.

 

The White House: how to properly commemorate 9/11

As can be expected, the tone of the White House’s instructions is condescending, lecturing, focused on President Obama and concerned that Americans are appropriately even-handed.

Who is so pompous as to feel the need to issue instructions on how to commemorate a day of national mourning? Just lead the damn commemoration ceremony and be properly solemn, modest and reverent while doing it!