Why I Don't Like Obama

He's a sore picker.

Both he and Michelle are sore pickers.

Sore pickers have a negative, nasty view of life and they advertise it in their way of being, the way they behave and the things they say. When you see them, unless you need their words as affirmation for your own worldview, you want to get away from them. From a robust standard of life, they are poison. Everything thing they touch gets diseased, withers and dies. When they arrive on the scene, they tell you the world stinks and then they proceed to make it stink more. That is the nature of a sore picker.

The primary orientation of a sore picker to life is that of a victim. Michelle illustrated this recently when she went to Copenhagen to hawk Chicago to host the Olympics. She told the world how big a sacrifice the whole affair was and well, the beneficiary of this huge sacrifice should be the children. She wore the finest clothing and took her own jet from Washington to Copenhagen. Never mind, life sucked.

The time I remember Obama's sore picking being so incongruous and inappropriate was during the campaign when he spoke at a fund-raiser in Hollywood. He was among some very wealthy people, people like, if not, Barbara Streisand, Michael Moore - those kind of people. Obama took the microphone and began talking about all the people who have no home, have no future. He talked about broken legs, sclerotic livers, broken families, hunger and such. He never talked about how well he and the guests had done to earn their money, the money he sought to transfer from their pocket to his. He never put them in touch with all the reasons they would feel generous and want to give. Instead, he brought out his bag of sores and showed them to everyone like they were the main attraction. He used guilt as a motivator not excellence. This is an essential distinction of the sore picker. Anyone in the room with a shred of self-esteem would have ordered a double shot, pure alcohol - no water, no ice.

With a sore picker at the helm of state, America is doomed. A sore picker cannot see a beautiful sunrise, a promising talent or a good idea. It's not their orientation. Further, objective success is not their goal. Their goal is to pick at a sore until it becomes inflamed and won't heal. It always has to be available to show the world as their reason for who they are and what they do.

Blaming others is a primary strategy for anything that needs to be a problem and catapulted to emergency status. Blame Bush, blame Limbaugh, blame Wall Street, blame Insurance Companies, blame Big Pharma, blame Banks, blame Fox, blame Beck, blame Rich People, blame Greed, blame Selfishness, blame Torture, blame anything that can be used to have us react from emotion. Point the finger at others and despicable behavior. Why? Because we must be victims at all costs. That finger can never, NEVER be pointed at oneself. What we are seeing is very juvenile, responsibility-shirking behavior sitting in the chair of the most powerful position on the planet.

When Obama goes out of the country he always takes the mic and apologizes for America. Translation: Get the sores out of the bag and parade them before the world. He doesn't put them in context, he doesn't do anything but leave the world and us with our sores on parade. Nice guy, Obama. (Can you imagine how much you would hate your dad or mom if every time they met a stranger they told them about all your faults? And then apologized to them when they didn't even owe them an apology? Jeez!)

I remember during the campaign when I was researching Barack Obama, coming across his success in getting a law passed in Illinois that prevented policemen from going into black neighborhoods and stopping kids to find out what was going on. It was an anti-profiling law. Apparently the police patrolling their neighborhood was a sore and some people wanted it stopped. So, they stopped it.

Guess what happened? Crime went up and the neighborhood ended up worse off. In fact a few weeks ago - right when Michelle, Barack and Oprah went to Copenhagen, we saw a video of thugs beating a recent high school graduate to death with a railroad tie. This happened in a neighborhood in Barack's former district where crime is on the rise. He applied his talents and got police stopped from doing their work.

For your information, police do not go into neighborhoods just to harass people. They go into neighborhoods where there is crime in order to make known their presence in order that the potential criminals see that it is not likely to go well if they do their crime. The fact that the neighborhood is black, latino, Asian or white is not the point. Only Barack Obama would focus on a non-essential and pick it into a sore. This is the kind of man he is.

When Rahm Emanuel says that a crisis cannot go to waste, what he is saying is "Hey, we got a sore here. Look, it's already inflamed. People are in pain. Let's use this sore to get the money, the control, the influence we want." Pick, pick, pick.

When Michelle told us how she didn't like America until her husband was running for office and extending his sore-picker vision for America, it seemed incongruous. Here was a woman who was reared in south Chicago, got into a top-flight university, Princeton, and was succeeding according to what we would normally call high standards. From college she went back to Chicago and worked for a well-known law firm. When Barrack started running for office, she got better jobs and higher salaries. Still, she was a victim. She still carries this same being and is now America's First Lady. "C'mon, Michelle, give it up." She is a walking contradiction and living proof that a sore picker is never happy, can never really win, can never really succeed and be satisfied. Sore pickers are only happy when they are ensconsed and comfortable in their misery and suffering. A sore picker's soul is nothing more than an inflamed sore with no prospect of ever being healed.

(I read the stories of White House galas - parties - which happen often. For a sore picker, what must these parties be like? They cannot be joyous. I guess they are momentary escapes - rather like the escapes that heroine users seek. A life built on pain and suffering can only have momentary escapes from pain and suffering.)

Examples of the mentality of this Administration are everywhere. They happen every day, practically every moment of every day. Barack, Michelle, Rahm, Gibbs, Axelrod, Jarrett, Dunn, the Czars,and even the non-White House Democrats such as Pelosi and Reid are all promulgating, propagating this world view. I want to throw up.

The apotheosis of a sore picker is Mother Teresa. I blogged about her yesterday. She worshiped poverty, sickness, disease and dying so much that she dedicated her life to living in the midst of such sores. Her monuments are her institutions for the dying destitute of Calcutta. She loved to not do anything to prevent suffering because she thought that suffering was what made heaven so delicious. Millions of dollars piled up in her coffers, but she didn't use them to provide air conditioning for some physical comfort for the uncomfortable or drugs to ease the pain of the terminally ill. She was a miserable failure of a human being who wrote and told her Vatican counselors that her 50 years of bereftness was hard to bear. Her prescription for herself and for all those to whom she ministered was not to find ways to cure the disease or ease the pain and make life better, but to forgive. Find someone - yourself, your parents, your boss, even God himself, someone - to forgive. That is the way to be at peace and heal the soul. She did that for a lifetime and died of soul pain - bereftness.

(I want to say that I think it is appropriate for people who see a need to care for the indigent and sick at the end of their lives and are called to minister at this often deeply intimate part of life to do so. But, the reason for it cannot be death, sickness and suffering as some kind of passage to the hereafter . Rather it is because it is part of life, the end of life. Life is better for the dying souls as well as the rest of us to know that it is possible to take care of the end of one's life in a way that is reverent of life. I think that all of this kind of thing should be done by private means and never by government force. I don't see much reverence for life if the government comes with a gun to take people's money to provide for the indigent and the dying or health care for the sick, for that matter.)

It is no mistake that Anita Dunn pointed out that her favorite philosophers are Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa. Mao loved pain and death so much that he liked to watch people as he ordered them filleted before him.* Mother Teresa loved pain and death so much that she dedicated her life housing the permanently pained and dying, extolling their suffering as their access to the hereafter and her access to people's pocketbooks and proof that her life was worthwhile.

This orientation to life is sick - profoundly sick.

Life is a process of maintaining life - for as long as one is willing to do that. Sores are bumps in the road of living. They are not the focus for the living. Living and being able to continue living is the focus for the living. Yes, sores have to be dealt with, but if one gets oriented to them such that the sores themselves become one's reason for living and the way one gets attention in the world, that is evidence that one's orientation is off. For an American President and his First Lady to deck themselves out in sores is about as foul a display as could be had.

And that is what we have running our country. Anyone who has the victim mentality is not going to see another possibility and be transformed so long as Obama and company, the leader in this worldview, is of this mentality. A victim mentality always is at the effect of something or someone. It focuses on that and builds a life around it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the black caucus, religious ministers of all races parade pain and suffering as an attraction. They live off this and propagate it. This is a big trap for anyone who has tendencies in this direction and for this nation.

This is not to say that Pollyanna positivism is the good. It isn't. It's just as inauthentic and ineffective as is the sore picker orientation. What is needed is an objective orientation to reality, a respect for facts and ideas which produce real results. The last thing we need is a war against reality which is what we now have going on.

Freedom provides abundance and peace. Government control provides scarcity and lots of fighting. We have a President and his administration that hate freedom and love government control. They want to nudge us, overthrow us, order us, rob us - you name it - all in service of their sores and any sores that they can get the public to pick up on.

Notice that they love collectivism. Collectivism is another escape. "The solution to your pain," they say, "is to see yourself as a piece of the group and forget your pitiful little self. Volunteer. Participate in something - anything. Serve, serve, serve. A life of service is the answer. Become selfless, just like Mother Teresa. Forget yourself, you selfish little ant of a man." That is the Obama and Michelle prescription.

For America to get itself on the right track, we have to give up sore picking, leave it behind. It's no orientation to life if you want to live, produce and seek happiness. It's now time for America to turn 180 degrees, face life and do what it takes to have a successful and happy future.

*Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.