House of Eratosthenes

The Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, starts with an excerpt from Peggy Noonan. In which Noonan notes President Obama’s “logical inconsistency of his argument.” Then she takes the discussion down a slightly different, more scrutinizing direction:

Beyond these inconsistencies of thought, we see this grousing, put-upon ~~president~~ prince who will not negotiate with anyone (because no one’s ideas are as correct as his) and who is annoyed that his subjects won’t just do as they’re bid.

Well, the grousings are an Obama standard that no one in the press likes to call him on, but beyond that is this conceit that Obama and only Obama is ever dealing with anyone in good faith; everyone else is devious and letting him down:

Two days later, unveiling his gun-control plan at a White House event, it wasn’t only Republicans in Congress who lie: “There will be pundits and politicians and special-interest lobbyists publicly warning of a tyrannical all-out assault on liberty, not because that’s true but because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves. And behind the scenes, they’ll do everything they can to block any common-sense reform and make sure nothing changes whatsoever.”

No one has good faith but him. No one is sincere but him. Doesn’t this get boring, even to him?”

This is the narrative for the next four years: the president as visionary and victim. Obama will attempt to utterly solidify that image on his inaugural day when he takes the oath of office, while using not one but two bibles — because if a little symbolism is good, a little more is better.

The point of the bibles is not their content but their character. One belonged to Abraham Lincoln, the great Emancipator. The other belonged to The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, the great Civil Rights leader. Both were visionaries and victims. The message of this startlingly illiberal president, whose second terms appears geared toward the narrowing of our rights, is: “I’m one of these guys; I am their standardbearer and their culmination, the third person of the trinity of American freedom.”

Whoo boy. We’re in for quite a ride on that ego. Obama may well be a visionary of sorts — he is certainly a cunning campaigner who effective lays waste to his opposition while he pursues his intent to “fundamentally changes” America — but a president operating with the full-on assistance of an unquestioning and complicit press, one that has become more of a Ministry of Information than anything else, is hardly a victim, except perhaps of his own personal demons.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

This is rather frightening, at least to me. It prognosticates a future that is entirely believable, or at least cannot be rejected out of hand, after reconstructing a recent past that gels with my recollection a bit too well for my own comfort.

I recall that first televised debate in which Governor Romney “beat” President Obama. Wow, what a thrashing. Obama just stood there looking sullen, taking body blows, and it was so lopsided that someone started to wonder if it wasn’t some sort of strategy at work, as in: Ooh, look at that poor black skinny kid being treated so badly by the rich white guy. And then some among us who had heard this theory had to say…NO…that’s just crazy talk. This was a righteous beat-down and it looked like one. And if that is the plan, what a stupid plan. Well, given the outcome, evidently not. I’ve had to gradually come around to the idea that 1) this was a plan, it was executed well, and it was a good plan, so good that Obama might owe His second term to it; and 2) many among us were entirely blindsided by it because — this is important — the plan was concocted, and exercised, in an entirely different world from the one in which we live.

It is a dimensional rift, like something out of an old Outer Limits episode. The worlds are so far apart, that two inhabitants, one from each, may be standing right next to each other and neither would know.

It’s an Architects and Medicators thing. The Medicators, being in a state of constantly self-medicating, are preoccupied with feeling over thought and are therefore susceptible to feelings of jealousy. They are “Occupy[ing] Wall Street” in some way, each day, from crib to crypt. They like to think of this as rooting for the underdog, but it is a treacherously short pathway of travel from that laudable motive, to rooting for suspicious organizations & people for no reason in the world other than that they are thought to be the underdog. With the result being, yeah, someone completely smacked down the opposition at that first televised debate, to such a degree that they managed to determine the outcome of the race. But we know now that the victor was not Governor Romney. Obama picked up votes. Sympathy votes. Enough to win.

If Scalia is right, this was merely a prelude for what’s to come.

Well, such memes are like the “indestructible” rock under the water. You stand there and watch the water come down on it, it looks like nothing’s changing; but leave it alone for awhile, it’ll be slowly washed away. That is, if the water flows. Thus it is with “blame Bush.” We used to hear Obama blaming the results of His bad management and bad policies on “the last eight years” or “the previous decade,” more-or-less all the time. To those of us who recognize blame as a battle-cry of bad management, when we continue to hear Him do it some more, it seems like there’s been no slow-down at all, because we recognize it for what it is. But the constant heckling and criticizing have had an effect, His strategists have been compelled to use other techniques at their disposal. His antagonists have successfully elevated the cost in deploying the weapon, and they’ve had to ransacks the stockpile in search of another. There is a lesson here, for the skilled and perceptive general who wins a war after losing some battles.

It says something awful about President Obama that this was necessary in the first place. But the Medicators don’t see that, and they are His true constituency. For them, blaming is just as good as accomplishing something. They’re all about the drama.

Please, for the love of God, heckle the bejeezus out of this “I’m a victim” thing. I don’t think I can stand four solid years of it. Aw, crap, I think He’s got me doing it.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

The second greatest, for my money, was convincing people in the majority — sometimes the overwhelming majority, whose opinions are so unremarkable they’re often called “conventional wisdom” — that they are some kind of beleaguered minority. Lone, courageous truth-tellers crying in the wilderness.

A good example is the recent tempest in a teapot over the movie Zero Dark Thirty. Apparently it’s pretty good, or at least Academy Award nomination-worthy (not always the same thing, of course), but the scuttlebutt has it that the director was denied a nomination because she portrayed “enhanced interrogation” as ethically murky. As in, maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, the intel obtained from it wasn’t all that useful, etc., and maybe not worth the damage to our moral and national honor.

You know, kinda how it works in real life.

Anyway, the left went ballistic. How dare this woman portray waterboarding — or, at least, waterboarding done under Booooooooossssshhh! — as anything but a horrible, unmitigated evil? And then they patted themselves on the back long and loud for their moral courage.

As you say, we on the right can’t really understand this. For “I’ve got serious reservations about torture” to be some kind of brave moral stand, the entire country would have to be lined up behind the idea of waterboarding suspects for sport. Which is a position exactly nobody holds.

It’s weird. It’s as if their emotional switch has only two positions, “off” and “hysterical.” But since hysteria can’t sustain itself without an appropriate…. or semi-appropriate…. or even quasi-appropriate object, they’ll sure as hell find one, even if they have to make it up on the spot. The gibbering hysteria comes first. They get an actual rush off it; it’s the high that makes virtue junkies.*

*in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, I’m guessing (I haven’t seen it) that the proximate cause of the hysteria was something like “we’ve developed info over the last ten years that allowed us to find bin Laden.” As in, the bulk of it was collected during the eeevil Boooosh years. As in, Obama didn’t simply point out the safe house location Himself, after meditating on Truth and Righteousness.
- Severian | 01/19/2013 @ 06:36

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“…As Visionary and Victim”Saturday, January 19th, 2013

“…As Visionary and Victim”
Saturday, January 19th, 2013