Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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.

4 comments:

Bobby V said...

Notice that in their world all sores are caused by the healthy.

Principlex said...

The Post-Gracious President
Whenever he must make a difficult decision, Mr. Obama complains it's Bush's fault.

(This from the Wall Street Journal of Oct 27, 2009. Obama has no class, is another way of saying the same thing and is another reason why I don't like him. This article will appear in two (2) comments.)

Nine months after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, his most adamant critics must concede he's delivered on "change." And we see it in our first post-gracious presidency.

The most visible manifestations of the new ungraciousness are the repeated digs the president and his senior staffers continue to make against George W. Bush. Recently, the administration has given us two fresh examples. The first is about Afghanistan, the other about the economy.

On Afghanistan, Mr. Obama's chief of staff went on CNN's "State of the Union" earlier this month to discuss the presidential decision on Afghanistan that everyone is waiting for. "It's clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that's adrift," said Rahm Emanuel. "That we're beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years." Translation: If we screw up Afghanistan, blame Mr. Bush.

The other came from Mr. Obama himself, speaking at various Democratic fund-raisers last week. "I don't mind cleaning up the mess that some other folks made," the president said. "That's what I signed up to do. But while I'm there mopping the floor, I don't want somebody standing there saying, 'You're not mopping fast enough.'"

This is a frequent Obama complaint. The logic is clear if curious: While it's OK to blame Mr. Bush for spending too much, it's not OK to point out that Mr. Obama is already well on track to spend much more.

Far from one-off asides, Mr. Obama's jabs at his predecessor have been a common feature of his speeches, fund-raisers and the like. They seem especially to pop up whenever Mr. Obama discovers some decision he must make is not as easy as he'd thought. And they date back to the first moments of his presidency.

After a perfunctory thank you to Mr. Bush, a newly sworn-in President Obama declared that Americans had gathered for his inaugural "because we have chosen hope over fear," that his administration would "restore science to its rightful place," and that he would never allow America to "give [our ideals] up for expedience's sake." In other words, President Bush had chosen fear over hope, was being "expedient" rather than defending the nation, and had chosen religious fundamentalism over science when making decisions in areas such as embryonic stem-cell research.

Principlex said...

The Post-Gracious President (Part 2)

In his first trip overseas, Mr. Obama continued the Bush bash. In France, he declared that in recent years "there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." In answer to a question he underscored the point, suggesting that European solidarity over 9/11 was lost when America allowed itself to be "sidetracked by Iraq."

In May, when it became obvious that his administration would not make good on his promise to close Guantanamo by this coming January, he explained it this way in a speech on national security. "We're cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess . . . [T]he problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility, the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place."

In August, he returned to the theme that while he can criticize his predecessor, it's unfair to criticize him. "I expect to be held responsible for these issues because I'm the president. But I don't want the folks who created the mess . . . to do a lot of talking. I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess."

Nor is it only a matter of rhetoric. In September 1993, Bill Clinton invited his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, to the White House to help promote the North American Free Trade Agreement to a divided Congress. In contrast, when Mr. Obama announced our withdrawal from Iraq in February at Camp Lejeune, N.C.—an honorable withdrawal Mr. Bush's surge helped make possible—the president limited himself to a quick "courtesy call." Mr. Bush was neither present nor mentioned at what might have been a healing moment on a divisive war.

Policy differences, of course, are fair game for sharp debate, and in the end history will apportion the credit and blame due Mr. Bush. By any measure, however, Mr. Obama's ongoing snipes against a predecessor who is no longer involved in setting policy are extraordinary. They are more extraordinary still issuing from a president who campaigned on a promise to transcend the political divisions of the past.

Barack Obama may believe that his incessant whining about all the challenges his predecessor left him lets America know how tough he has it. The danger to his presidency is that it can sound awfully like "I'm not up to the job."

(I think it is a shame for the country that a man who could really have it all and have the people genuinely love him and respect him has squandered it because he is so stingy. In my opinion, he has a mind the size of a pea and the sensitivity to feel a pea through twenty mattresses no matter how many people want him to win. There will be no great Barack Obama when this is all over. More likely our experience will be that of a "pestering teenager" that insisted on spending more time with us (via media) than we get to spend with our families or friends. We will be damn happy to be rid him and let things quiet down. SCB)

(After seeing a self-possessed, gracious Michelle on Jay Leno the other night, I'm thinking she may turn out to be the one that people will actually like. Let me get clear, I'm talking about 'like', not agreement. I doubt that I would ever agree with Michelle's politics. In my opinion, both she and Barack are "human-hatingly" evil in their politics, a politics that can only create a nasty and brutish world where all the "entitlement people" are constantly screaming their demands and working to take their neighbor's property because it's only fair. And that is with all the high-blown rhetoric notwithstanding - which I believe none of. SCB)

Principlex said...

The thing that irritates me so about Obama is that he is not the president of all the people. He's divisive and not fair. Consequently, I don't want him fussing over anything about this country. It's too precious for him to be sullying it, and his divisiveness and partisanship is disgusting. He's emphasized it over and over.

Further he is out of touch with what is important. He acts like some high school jerk who plays around and then remembers that he has an important function to attend to. But it's only a function. It's never who he is. He acted this way the first time he said something about the Ft. Hood massacre. He was giving shout-outs and farting around with some other function. That function may have been important, but as important as massacre on a US Military Base which all people in the country relate to?

Another thing that is so missing is leadership. He cannot draw a line and have things work. Rather he maintains things unresolved and as he does so, people get more and more irritated. It's crazy and yet he refuses to do it. While he angles for political mileage, he squanders whatever he could gain by clever manipulation by missing the whole point. Be a leader, for Christ's sake!

To me it is just sad and mostly an embarrassment that the people of the United States have to go through this. For what? It's so hard to take when you know you are great to be treated like a second class outfit. It doesn't suit me at all and I really dislike Obama for being the way he has been being.

Further I think he is so deep into his agenda and so directed by and coddled by the people around him that he will never wake-up. He's a bubble-boy. I think he must be destined to be a loser.

Too bad too. With the right relationship to this country and he not have been so needy, he could have been loved and all that he desired would have fallen into his lap. As it is, it is being removed, inch by inch, piece by piece.