Our Incredibly Shrinking President

(Today I would like to register a rename for this article. It should read, "Our Incredibly Shrunken President." It's clear to me that Obama has never had a stature that he could shrink. He's been operating from the premises he's operating from now for a long, long time. He is stricken with the incredible facility to be Alinksy incarnate. I think he is a monster, my category for his character. Allowing Louisiana, to the tune of blocking efforts to save her shores and her industry and then suing Arizona when the Federal Government's role is to protect her borders, is beyond the pale. This man, to me, is on the order of all the heartless dictators the world has known and I don't see how he can do anything except get worse. His work to keep America in a perpetual Jerry Springer drama as a way of life has me write him off as a misguided, evil human being. It's definitely unfortunate for us that he has so much power to wield, and I hope we get him out of office before he develops paranoia to a degree whereby he feels justified to act even more irrationally. He's definitely animating the forces to vote him out of office. July 6, 2010)
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Yesterday was a new low for President Obama. We are now witnessing the "chickens coming home to roost" on a host of his bad premises. This happened yesterday in his remarks about the oil spill.

First, and I think the most despicable, happened when he used his daughter to create an appeal to his listeners' emotions. He said his daughter said to him, "Plug the hole, daddy." That was theater, nothing more. However, it was revealing because he threw his daughter under the bus and ran over her privacy all in service of his "any means necessary" modus operandi premise. Because this statement came off as inauthentic, his use of his daughter opened her to public "use" in service of political points and who knows what else.

This morning on the Glenn Beck show, who, by the way, I'm liking more all the time (see next paragraph), he had a segment where his associate played the daughter, asking her "daddy, the President", all kinds of questions and offering her observations about the world. Obama opened his daughter to this. We can now look forward to a "do as I say, not as I do" upbraiding of Beck. I suppose this megalomaniac will attempt to ban free speech rather than apologize to his daughter and stop using her as pawn in his political power games.

Today I ran across this quote of Obama's about 9/11: "The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity." Yet, when it came to using his daughter as a pawn in his games, he forgot all of this and used her anyway. Obama is the disconnect that he names in his 9/11 remarks.

(About Beck: Beck is doing such investigative and historically integrative work. The last couple days he has been showing how the structure of the Progressive Administration of the "evil" (his description and one I agree with) Woodrow Wilson was picked up by FDR and now picked up by Obama, albeit using different particular forms for the same basic purposes in the latter two cases. Also, I give Beck a big medal of courage for the "teaching" he is doing. Really great. He's one of the amazing media people of our time. And my accolades are in spite of his ultimate grounding in God [faith] rather than in nature [facts] when he gets to the roots of his conceptual structure.)

The second thing O did was tell us his experience in his own bathroom, looking morning and night in the mirror at his constantly worried face. I was listening to his remarks for the facts I could learn about what is going on and what his plans are in relation to it. Instead I get this trip to his bathroom. (Faulty premise: The personal trumps our common values.)

Talk about whiplash. I wondered: "Where has this man's mind gone?" It is gone, I'm sure of that. He's not capable of knowing what is on purpose and what is not, and where his listeners are, and so he's now trying to enroll us that he, after all, is worrying about this problem. Sorry. Doesn't fly, Barack. We expect that. That would be normal and not mentionable.

(Makes you wonder if he had to say that. Is it because he isn't worrying about it? Or is he worrying that people who mean something to him are getting upset with him? Or maybe he really likes the oil spill and wants to use it to kill energy production in all traditional forms through taxation and regulation. I don't know, but his behavior raises such questions - especially when he is going off to Chicago over the weekend, playing golf, and generally living life as he always does - I'm sure justifying, all the while, that this current trouble requires getting away to clear his head. Actually I think he is doing that because he suffers from victim's disease - "I'm entitled." (Faulty premise: I'm somehow not constrained by the morality that mere mortals are constrained by.)

One thing I do know. THIS MAN IS NOT COUNT-ON-ABLE! He will never be there when the country needs him. Frankly, I think he's committing disloyalty to our country, our home, on a grand scale - treason - and he needs to be called to account as soon as possible.

The last thing he did was address people accusing him of not getting on the problem and causing a solution. He's been railing against BP and big oil, capitalist, and the all of it. So in his fear, he runs for the high ground only to see that it's not solid. (Faulty premise: Words is all that matter. Deeds and the meaning of words count for nothing.)

His answer is to declare that he and his Administration have been in charge of this matter from the first hours of its happening. So, if he's responsible, he owns it - all of it. So all the vituperation to BP and anyone trying to get the problem fixed is now useless by him when uttered in public. After all, it is only Barack being pissed at himself since he is the owner of it all. Woops!

Obama's mind is shot. There is no doubt about that. Our work is to maintain the grounding to be sure that we can see what is true and what is b--s---. True to a sociopath's nature, his job is to get us to think he is God and we don't know what we are talking about. Good luck. It's woolly out there.

A person, by the way, doesn't have to have a degree from Harvard or Columbia and in fact, one is likely better off if he doesn't have that. That's because these universities are notoriously intellectually corrupt, and in order to have power to produce results in the world depends on one's solidly grounded, conceptual structural. Then when some high blown guy comes along, one can hear where his assertions and underlying premises don't jive with the basics. Obama has no clue about this. Nada. He thinks we cling to our guns and our religion. Oh my.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend in this great country that still enjoys the bounty of the independent minds that have continued to create it.

In Defiance of the Law of Cause and Effect

How many times have we heard this same refrain? Act against your nature, people! Our President pretends that somehow, when people have a purpose and build their life on it, they won't chose to act consistent with that purpose - that they can be seduced into changing their purpose - or more like this, "because of me, my charm and my idealism, you will want to change". It garners no credit for anyone to believe (and hope) for such a magical "transformation." It isn't generous. It isn't intelligent. It's stupid. Why? Because it defies a law of nature.

What law? The Law of Cause and Effect!

Listening to John Allison III of BB&T fame,(a recorded speech I possess) he said it this way. The Law of Cause and Effect: Everything in nature has a nature and it acts consistent with its nature. Tigers are tigers, stones are stones and people are people.

So what is the nature of a person? At root, a person is consistent with his purpose. One cannot operate for a minute without a purpose of some kind. An idea that comes into one's conscious mind is the event which unites spirit with body, mental with physical to cause a result of some kind.

Suppose a person laid in bed until he had some idea that he wanted to get up. He can say all kinds of things to himself - like, "I've got to get up because I've got to go to work. Yah, no one should have to work and because I have to, life is hell. I'm consigned to the burden and drudgery of life" - in other words, he may consider himself completely at the effect of, a victim of life. Of course there are zillions of positive reasons for getting up too.

No matter, what had to happen - regardless of the reason - was that an idea had to pop into the person's head and that became his purpose for the next few minutes or hours or longer. Whether he's willing to be responsible for that is another matter in this discussion. One simply could not operate without a purpose - at even the most rudimentary level above the automatic functions that the body provides so long as it lives.

But, creating a purpose for which one lives his life is more than a momentary undertaking. That goes far beyond waiting until one is struck by an idea or a feeling. It is something that one can create in the largest sense and generated from one's loves and one's ideals for an eminently fulfilling life. Or it is something one can create from the unquestioned beliefs he got from his childhood - but to the same scope. It can provide motive for a moment, a month or a lifetime.

A purpose sets the aspect of one's personal nature - his character. And this doesn't change in the broadest sense. It is possible to change it, but not without a lot of serious self-examination and work extending oneself into new, uncharted areas of his life.


When any leader has gotten to where he is, by virtue of his purpose and by enrolling, willingly or unwillingly, millions of followers, and further, when his purpose is rooted in the soil of centuries, that person is not going to change. To pretend otherwise and enroll the American people on that idea is immensely, horrendously disingenuous. (It could only be done with such people who defer to faith as a valid mental action, be it in a specifically religious form or in a modern mystical form. Anyone who lives in and is oriented to the real, everyday world and is working to manifest their larger and long-range purposes and have some capacity to integrate ideas and the events of life, simply would not buy this idea. One has to revert to the "magical thinking" of childhood [a stage in an individual's development] in order to consider this a real possibility.)

And yet, this is the foreign policy of this Administration that we are asked to swallow.

The cartoonists are reacting. (I got these from Sultan Knish's blog.)

Obama the Petulant

Later, at a Democratic fund-raising speech in Manhattan, Obama was blistering in his criticism of Republicans who are poised to pick up seats against Democratic majorities in November elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

Obama said Republicans have "done their best to gum up the works" and said they generated much of the country's fiscal deficit that they now complain about.

"Their basic attitude has been, if Democrats lose, we win. After they drove the car in the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No. They can't drive. We don't want to have to go back in the ditch," he said.

It seems unbelievable that he would say something like this. This is a petulant 2 year old's behavior. He's not going to look good when it doesn't go his way and, guess what, it isn't his say as to who drives the car.

Obama lives in a victim's world where everything is personal and it is all about winning at all costs. When the Republicans go against him, it's personal - not that they don't agree with his ideas. Obama holds no principles - and by principles I mean holds a valid view of reality, a valid view of how the world works. He is truly a postmodern president and he thinks that what he says IS reality. Then he gets angry when people don't buy it. He thinks it is his fault that he has not said it enough times or that he hasn't said it in the right way to be clear enough. He cannot tap into people's listening. He doesn't get that concept. Instead, he shows everyone the fallacy of postmodern philosophy and his presidency will be the end of that philosophy as an influence.

Further, his presidency will end the Democratic Party as we know it. An entire generation of Democrats will be thrown under the bus as the rank and file search for a new formulation of what a Democrat is. His presidency will be very hard on the Ivy League schools who willingly turn out graduates like Obama, graduates schooled in arcane philosophy and moral theory cut off from the nature of people and how they operate. And if Obama is any indication, the graduates are without a capacity to produce results that make a real and positive difference. They apparently are so inflated with their elite status that they are unable to hear people and their concerns.

Obama's presidency may make it hard for other blacks to get heard until they prove themselves in some way. Affirmative Action will have lost any luster it once had because Obama holding the highest office in the land has ended the matter of Affirmative Action's value. Blacks will have to measure up because there is going to be a new assertion of wanting results, not easing of one's conscious or some other beside-the-point purpose. (The collapse of the global warming cause is also part of this.) I think the media are going to take a big hit out of this presidency because they have been exposed as giving us little protection against this catastrophic leadership. They have also been caught up in postmodern madness.

Finally and most important, the government itself is going to take a huge hit. This could be anywhere from the people elected to the structure of the bureaucracy and its functions. It wouldn't surprise me to see pressure to reduce government salaries back to below private pay. There are going to be many changes. And many have been due to happen. The Obama presidency is the catalyst.

Crony Capitalism - The Mainstay of Our Fascist State

As Obama gobbles up entire sectors of business for his socialist/European-style state - which, incidentally, is getting a new hearing with Greece's collapse - he's engaging in crony capitalism full blast. The ordinary man will soon not have a chance, as it will be political pull at every level of society that will determine one's fate. Government meddling in the economy through regulation and controls/ownership of all and myriad kinds is THE PRESCRIPTION for a failed state as the state gets focused on the wrong kinds of activities. People have not seen it yet, but all of the European countries are failed states judged by the standard of the job that a state ought to do and is not doing. America was the first state put on a rational foundation such that it was possible for it to succeed. One thing wrong with it from a powerluster's point of view: There is no avenue via which to loot the citizenry.

At this point in America's history, it is a failure. Whether there is enough power left in the structure of the Constitution for us (the people) to assert ourselves to get back on the right track hangs in the balance.

Egoism: Happiness as the Purpose of One's Life

The Incredible Hypocrisy

The War on Freedom

Freedom is fundamental to every relationship. We have to be able to be ourselves as our nature as a human has us be in any relationship in order to survive. This is true on the interpersonal level and to a more removed degree in the political, the societal world. One cannot thrive except in a climate of freedom. This has been borne out by the extreme statist and totalitarian societies and by the organizations whose beliefs stifle people such that it brings many problems upon the individuals who belong to them. It's bad enough to manage one's own freedom let alone have unagreed to (and sometimes erroneously agreed to) constraints imposed from without.

At this point in history, freedom is under direct attack and so it behooves us to understand as much as we can about what is going on. Daniel Greenfield penned this on his blog today.

The War on Freedom
Posted: 03 May 2010 07:27 PM PDT

How do you take away the freedom of a free people without putting tanks on every street? You do it by transforming their culture. By turning the very idea of freedom into something ugly and shameful. A foul thing to be associated with extremists and other bad folk that good citizens are advised to avoid. The goal being to convince the people that their freedom is a thing they should be happy to give up, rather than having to forcibly take it away from them.


And so the political War on Freedom begins by rebranding freedom itself as selfish. In this new narrative freedom is a lie because there is no such thing as freedom in America. The very idea of freedom is an arrogant and privileged entitlement held by "rich white males" and used to oppress "people of color" and all the other officially designated minorities by the Commissars of Political Correctness. In place of the old fashioned idea of freedom, we have the far more "equitable" system of social justice with its myriad of organizations and departments all created to ensure that everyone does what they're supposed to, thinks what they're supposed to and has as many rights as they're supposed to.

As Orwell's 1984 accurately predicted, in Newspeak, Freedom becomes Slavery, and Slavery becomes Freedom.

As the new liberal narrative would have it, the only people who want the freedom to keep what they earn, write what they think, choose their own health care, elect their own leaders, read what they like and live lives apart from the great machinery of the state-- are the White Male Oppressors, (who are simultaneously ignorant clinging to their religion and their guns and yet at the same time are part of a privileged elite). Freedom is clearly a bad thing then. It's a symptom of selfishness. And selfish people are the oppressors, The greedy ones who don't want a welfare state, illegal aliens, impossibly priced products, inaccessible lifesaving medical procedures, recycling bins in every room of the house and all the other wonderful benefits of Socialism.

People who want to be free are no longer Americans. Certainly not Constitutionalists. Instead paradoxically they're the new parasites, the people who refuse to be cogs in the great machine of socialism. The selfish Kulaks who hoard their wheat. The businessmen who make too much money. The hardworking housewife who won't pay double for a "Green" labeled product. These are the worms in the apple of the socialist state. The people who refuse to contribute to what the government and the alliance of unions, left wing front groups and media pundits labels as the Public Good.

The USSR began by portraying independent small farmers as greedy monsters who were responsible for the people starving, because they refused to give up their land and join collective farms. Collective farms whose workers had nothing, could not even travel without a permit and had to steal the food they grew in order to survive. And so war was declared on the independent farmer. Millions were shot, deported or imprisoned in labor camps. However by eliminating the independent farmer, the Communists also eliminated Russian agriculture. The collective farms were an abysmal failure. Within a generation, Russia was stuck importing wheat from the independent farmers of its worst enemy, the United States of America.

By declaring war on American small business, liberals are about to repeat the Soviet experiment in the United States. The decline of the US economy is closely tied to the war on small business. To the replacement of the businessman with the speculator, the inflation of the dollar, the destruction of the manufacturing sector and the transformation of the US into a service and sales economy, not that fundamentally different from the rest of the Third World.

But the left's war on the small businessman is about more than just seizing wealth in order to finance their own operations. That of course is a large part of it. The left has always believed that it must live off the land. And from the French Revolution to their modern day grandchildren, the Communists and Nazis, they have always know that wealth distribution is needed to be able to live off the land. But what they never understood is that their idea of government as a robber baron practices a multi-generational form of economic destruction that there is no full recovery from. It is possible to replace lost gold and silver. But replacing an economic niche when you have wiped out the people who used to fill it, and culturally blotted it out, can be next to impossible.

Yet that is exactly what the left wants to accomplish. Its goal has always been the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the people who are living proof that hard work and economic aspiration leads to social mobility and political freedoms. These the left considers banal, selfish and rotten. Their existence a subversion of the left's own revolutionary ideology. Because they have achieved freedom through work, rather than ideology. Because they believe that those who work should be the masters of government, rather than properly qualified university graduates who have spent five years penning screeds about the unfairness of having to work for a living. And so like the Kulaks, they must go.

The destruction of the economy is not part of the collateral damage from liberalism's uncontrollable spending or nanny stateism. It is the whole point.

The Founding Fathers understood that economic freedom was also political freedom. That is why the Boston Tea Party played such a key role in the race toward political independence and self-government. Liberal revisionist historians typically deride the American Revolution as a Middle Class revolution. Which of course was exactly the point. Distance and opportunity had made political aspirations possible in America. But economic opportunity had made them meaningful. Thus the difference between the revolt in Haiti and the one in the 13 colonies. Much as Israel's independence differed from the independence gained by so many other former British colonies in that part of the world.

One cannot have political independence without economic independence on the national level and on the individual level. Where economic independence is compromised, political independence soon follows. And the decline of individual liberties in America can be directly traced to its split between socialism and corporatism, two seeming opposites drawn together by inertia to form one great economic black hole. A situation that the last few years of bailouts and toobigtofails, useless regulatory bodies and political power grabs should have amply demonstrated for anyone.

The War on Freedom therefore is geared toward portraying freedom as selfish and greedy. As a dangerous anachronism out of place in the modern day socialist country. There is no such thing as freedom, they will say. Only privilege. The idea that you could believe what you wished, say what you wished, elect your own leaders and make your own economic decisions, was all part of the arrogance of the entitled. But now there will be people who will distribute that privilege equally to all, within the parameters of the public good. The public good in their eyes being indivisible from their own good, and that of the system of redistribution that they oversee. And that is how tyranny begins, and freedom dies.

Freedom, real freedom, isn't perfect. It is the freedom to make one's own mistakes, rather than having the state make everyone's mistakes for them. At the same time. Freedom is not a selfish thing that obstructs the public good, it is the public good. Because the public good is best served by individual freedom, not by a collective yoked together in the same of an impossible ideal. The tyranny of the collective has never created its heaven on earth, but it has instead produced no shortage of hells. It is left to the individual to pursue his happiness, and in the process helps others find theirs. The collective has never changed the world for the better. Only individuals have.

Liberalism insists that freedom is a shameful thing. A rebellion against their idea of the public good. Their War on Freedom is in truth a war on the individual. And it is one that we must win, if freedom is to prevail.