Friday, January 11, 2008

The Hammer on Obama

Obamamessiah seems to be sweeping the ranks of Democrats. Take Ezra Klein's piece from last week:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspir. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
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But, very rarely, it's experienced as a call to create something better, bigger, grander, and more just than the world we have. When that happens, as it did with Robert F. Kennedy, the inspired remember those moments for the rest of their lives.


Obama is "triumph of word over flesh"? What the hell does that mean? With all the changy-changeness Obama is going to bring us, and what with creating bigger, better grander somethings ... isn't anyone bothered by the lack of a substantive argument? I've heard Obamazombies talk and it's creepy. Here's one of my favs:

This new option is embedded in the image of Obama whose appeal is in the fact that he is not exactly white,not exactly black, not exactly Muslim, not exactly an extremist, not exactly a politician in his basic projection but a go-between that can be accepted by all the world and all the many factions in the USA, where over 100 languages are spoken.
AS the Los Angeles Times opined nearly 50 years ago: America is now so diverse in its population, the question now is: CAN ONE MAN BE PRESIDENT OF ALL THE PEOPLE.Obama’s image projects a shadow of hope that he just might be the man to do it better than any of the others, especially the Clinton’s.
Obama does not provoke the ideologies of any group. He is the image of the future of BROWN America.


Ummmm, mKay. Now, back to reality and reason ....

And, who better than Charles Krauthhammer in NRO:

It's not just that NBC admitted that “it's hard to stay objective covering this guy.” Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming. Or that Obama’s media acolytes wax poetic that his soaring rhetoric and personal biography will abolish the ideological divide of the 1960s — as if the division between left and right, between free markets and the welfare state, between unilateralism and internationalism, between social libertarianism and moral traditionalism are residues of Sergeant Pepper and the March on Washington. The baby boomers in their endless solipsism now think they invented left and right — the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies that dates back to the seating arrangements of the Estates-General in 1789.

The freest of all passes to Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy — the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat.

He doesn’t even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy. When the Gang of 14, seven Republican and seven Democratic senators, agreed to restore order and a modicum of bipartisanship to the judicial selection process, Obama refused to join lest he anger the liberal base.

Special interests? Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.


Obama is running on some touchy-feely platform of "change" without explaining how he's gonna do it. Trick is, he's not. There is a reason there is "divisiveness" between the two political parties: BECAUSE THEY DON'T AGREE WITH EACH OTHER. Disagreement is good. It's healthy. It's Democracy. I know I'm not gonna give in and support socialist policies, and I would hope my elected officials won't either. If they do, I'll do what I can to vote them out of office. The nuts and bolts of Obama is that he is simply very, very liberal; has no real plan for "change", and is a politician like every other politician. If you want to vote for him because he's liberal - I'm fine with that. But don't vote because he's gonna change stuff.

Because, he's not.