Neo-Neocon (h/t American Digest):

You see, Obama doesn’t want to self-correct, because in his mind he’s not done a thing wrong. He’s not just saying it’s not his fault, he really believes it’s not his fault.

In fact, nothing bad is his fault. And everything good is to his credit.

We all are familiar with the word “narcissism.” It is a trait. But it also can be much more than that—a character disorder, a personality disorder. That doesn’t just mean there’s something wrong with a person’s character or personality, either. It means there is something more basic that’s out of whack. It means there’s a leitmotif that runs through the entire personality, something that is usually either unchangeable or very very difficult to change.

For Obama this theme is narcissism, which appears to permeate everything he does.

The mystery is that it would be a mystery to anyone at this point. And yet it appears to be. Hope dies hard, and the idea that Obama can change dies hard as well.

[NOTE: The narcissism problem was so severe with Obama that many people noticed it almost from the start. I was one of them; this post of mine, written in the summer of 2008, was already remarking on it. But I was hardly alone.]

No you’re right, you weren’t alone, I was in there too.

I think President-Elect Barack Obama might have OCPD. He’s fulfilled my one-bullet litmus test, anyhow: People come to him with complaints, and he responds by telling ‘em what to do. If he doesn’t have OCPD, he sure is a bossy little snot.

Not as good as the line about “nothing bad is His fault, everything good is to His credit.” That one’s got me thinking, He’s been in the public eye on the national stage for about eight years now. Are there any exceptions to either one of these? I can’t think of any.

In order to really understand what happened this last Tuesday, it is necessary to explore conservatism and liberalism in the United States: What those terms used to mean, what they mean now, what people understand these terms to mean, why they think that, what changed.

Quoting me, as I explored this previously:

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

This, I daresay, makes everything click into place. It has become an argument about definitions, with conservatives insisting on crisp, strong, clear definitions, and liberals resisting definitions. Strong definitions lead to good understanding, and good understanding — as we have just seen — leads to democrats losing elections.

A common misconception is that America’s conservatives are conservative, as in, unwilling to change; and that its liberals are liberals, as in, open to change. You don’t have to look at how self-professed conservatives and liberals really behave, to see the problem here. As Ludwig von Mises observed clear back in the 1940’s,

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

When’s the last time liberals had a truly new idea about how an economy should work? Been awhile, hasn’t it? Something about how, the system is rigged to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and we need a revolution to really turn things around? There’s a century of dust on that one. These aren’t literal “liberals,” these are people stuck in a time warp, in the vicinity of 1917.

What makes them liberal, and what makes conservatives conservative, is this act of defining things. There is defining things with precision, such that the definitions mean something and can be applied objectively, or else they don’t and cannot be; then, there is defining things strictly, conservatively, versus defining things over-broadly so that the very definition suffers and dissipates, as a battleground general would want an enemy to suffer and dissipate — liberally. Some of the most important words we use are words that can be defined conservatively, or liberally. “Marriage” can be defined conservatively or liberally, as we argue back and forth about whether these specimens around a periphery can or should qualify as legitimate representatives of the term. “Citizen” can be interpreted conservatively or liberally. Prosperity, constitutional, representation, entitled, right, governing, freedom, liberty…all these words, and many more, which are so important to these descriptions we have in mind of what our constitutional republic should be doing and how it should be functioning. They can be applied conservatively or liberally.

At the end of it, it is the conservatives — and Christians — who are moderate, sensible, middle-of-the-road people. Is it also the conservatives — and Christians — who place their faith in the human capacity for learning. Here’s how that works: Imagine a situation in which a human with verified & verifiable skill, applies his talents within a system. Outside the system, he knows that what he does works, but within it he encounters failure. He tries again, and again. After a few rounds of this it is clear there is a problem, and the problem has something to do with the contact between this particular individual and that particular system. There are three possibilities to be considered in explaining what’s going on.

And the first two of those three are: The person is good and the system is messed up; and, the system is working fine, it is the person who has all the problems. Those are extremist views, located at opposite endpoints of a spectrum. Which is not to say they are necessarily wrong. Both are possible. Liberals, being extremist by nature, favor one of these two depending on what the situation is. If the person is a minority or an illegal alien and the system is our economy, then the entire problem is due to the system being prejudiced against the person’s class. Of course if the person is Sarah Palin and the system is American politics, with its left-leaning journalists flying up to Alaska to move next door to her and spy on her, then the second possibility explains everything and she is the problem. The same explanation applies when a conservative college professor can’t get tenure, or a climate scientist is ostracized by his peers for his failure to support the global warming credo. The system is impeccable, its standards unquestionable, the individual is simply failing to meet them.

Along comes the Christian conservative, to point out: Humans, as capable as they may be of doing good, are fundamentally flawed. We are all sons of Adam, who ate of the apple. The performer is a flawed human, and the system is a construct created by flawed humans. When they come into contact with one another, we should expect failure as a result. It is the sensible default premise. And, we should expect it a few times.

But this doesn’t mean the failure is everlasting, because humans have intellect and they are capable of good. God commanded Noah to load the Ark with animals, who are innocent, and with humans who are not so innocent. He did not say “Load it up with the animals and then get your worthless ass out of there because you’re part of what’s being rebooted away.” That means there is hope. That also means there is the burden of expectation.

And, mistakes will be made. By us. But, we’ll learn. Not evolve to some state of perfection, in which we always get it right the first time. That ship has sailed, we ate of the apple. We’ll just try to get better, succeed sometimes, fail other times, and hopefully eventually learn something. We must be capable of doing this or else we would not be here.

So this bad-performer, eventually, will use his intellect and start performing within the system, better. The two flawed things will learn to get along — if they want to get along. That is the third, centrist, most reasonable and most likely explanation for this early frustration and early failure.

Of course, for that to happen, this skilled but bad-performer is going to have to pay attention to what does & does not work, and make sensible decisions about it. Liberals aren’t capable of doing this, at least, not with liberalism; not so long as they remain liberals. Remember, they’ve been practicing the same economic model since at least 1917. There have been many opportunities since 1917 for them to learn that it isn’t working. It’s not that they’re lacking the ability to learn, the problem is that they aren’t using it. If they were using it then they wouldn’t be believing what they do believe, and they wouldn’t be liberals.

Leon H. Wolf writes in FrontPage:

Republicans ran this year on very little of substance. Their brand ID is still very underwater with the American public. There is no program right now that the American public is clamoring for the Republicans to undertake with one exception: they hate what President Obama is doing and they want Republicans to stop it. Exit poll after exit poll last night showed that the single most important thing in the minds of the voters this year was the looming shadow of death Obama cast on all his Democrat allies.

If voters really wanted people who would work closely with Obama and other Democrats to “get things done,” they would have just voted for more Democrats. After all, virtually every elected Democrat has “worked with” Obama (in the sense of doing exactly everything he asked) for the last six solid years. Say what you want about the information level of the average voter, but absolutely no one was confused into thinking that they were replacing a Democrat with a Republican in the hopes that the Republican would be more friendly to the Democrat agenda.

The American People deserve some means by which they can send in a “stop” signal, if that is the signal they want to send…

…and they just sent it.

Chosen.

Image swiped from American Digest.

I see democrats and their apparatchiks are hard at work spreading a meme of “the clear message from the American People is that both sides need to work together.” Such a silly thing to say. I suppose there’s difficulty in the psychological layer somewhere, interpreting a “clear message” that you suck and you have to get the hell off the stage.

Now can we start up some real investigations into what went on with Lois Lerner’s e-mails and the IRS’ treatment of the Tea Party groups? Just look at the pattern…

2008: Obama fever!

2010: The democrats get a shellacking because of disenchantment with Obama’s policies.

2012: ?????? Mystery force gets Obama re-elected ?????

2014: The democrats get a shellacking…again.

It looks a lot more like a natural learning process, than a back-and-forth shaking of something, like a Shake Weight or a can of spray paint. At least, it looks like that without the aberration of 2012. Putting 2012 back in, it looks more like the Shake Weight exercise — but, the electorate doesn’t move that way. It hasn’t. When has it? EVER?

Shenanigans were goin’ down. It is almost a certainty. And even if it is not the case, the priority should be to get this checked. The government taking control over the process by which it receives its “consent of the governed,” is a grave scenario indeed, probably the shortest path to tyranny and enslavement available to us.

What really got defeated last night, exactly? It wasn’t about party labels. Republicans will wear out their welcome, in two years, or four, or six. Maybe twenty. But, it’ll happen. For now, the public is clearly disenchanted with something, and it isn’t political parties whose names begin with the letter “D”. It isn’t presidents with dark skin.

I think they’re tired of seeing their so-called “leaders” completely lose their shit when someone outside the beltway happens to make a buck. I think what the public voted in, was the idea that when the economy is on the mend, we’ll know it when people, REAL people, outside the political class, start to do well. When THEY are the ones who find themselves with more options, more power, more liberty, more influence over their own lives.

The people who got thrown out live on a sort of Opposite Planet. They think an economy is doing better when it is more heavily taxed. Even though the verb “tax” means “to make onerous and rigorous demands on” and the adjective “taxing” means “onerous, wearing” and “requiring a lot of effort/energy.” They monologue away about people who trespass into our country “work[ing] hard and follow[ing] the law” — right after the trespassers got done trespassing. They think human activity is endangering the planet and therefore we need to curb that human activity to ensure our continuing survival; and the first step toward doing that is to make the government much, much bigger. They think we’re more “free” and upholding the values enshrined in the Constitution, when we busy ourselves with throwing people in jail for observing their own religious beliefs.

Last night was about voting for reality. And against Möbius strips with their silly twists and turns. It was a vote that affirmed things are what they really are.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, writing in USA Today, looks more deeply into the race-relations implications of that silly video. “Silly” is a charitable description; the whole problem with it is that it becomes a dysfunctional mess the minute a well-intentioned observer asks the seemingly innocent question, “So what is to be done about this?”

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the history of controlling minority men’s intersexual behavior in this country is closely intertwined with the history of lynching. Those who choose to get involved in this field need to be aware of that history, lest they unintentionally make things worse.

Certainly, based on this video, the call by some feminists to make “street harassment” illegal would have the effect of subjecting more minority males — already over-represented in the criminal justice system — to arrests, and to a criminal record that might haunt them for years in the employment market, producing more of what criminologists call the “disconnected.” The victims of this effect, ironically, would include the minority women and children who often depend on these men for support. People are beginning to appreciate the pernicious role of the drug war in this regard; why add to the problem?

Why? Because white women are more deserving of the coveted mantle of oppressed-privileged-victim than blacks and Latinos.

Also, women are so weak that they just can’t survive unless they’re made separate and above-it-all. From the Prospect.Org link:

I’ve lived in many different neighborhoods in New York and now live in D.C., where I regularly run along city streets, and I’ve heard the full range of talk from men. The fact of it — and the fact that being shouted at by men is not a possibility but a certainty — is inherently hostile and all seems designed, unconsciously or not, to make me feel not as though these men want to talk to me but that they have a right to.

From watching the video, one becomes aware of an uneasy truth: Too many people who see something wrong with some of the behavior see something wrong with all of it. This creates a problem in the definitions: If everything qualifies, then nothing does. Yes, saying “Hello” does cross the line. The activists won’t stop short of a new taboo, criminally enforced, that a man may not address a woman until she speaks first.

That is practically the definition of a caste system. And that’s the real issue here. Leftists, far from being all about equality, are all about castes. They’re all about special social privileges for identified classes. The real story here is that we have a “lefties feeding on their own” moment because, once again, they’re in conflict with their own kind about which privileged class should enjoy the most exalted privileges.

Alexander Green.

Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times ombudsman, writes that [Paul] Krugman has “the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing, and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”

When the inevitable blowback arrives, Krugman is ready.

In his blog, he has referred to his intellectual adversaries – many of whom hold honors as great or greater than his own – as a “mendacious idiot,” “knave,” “poseur,” “whiner,” “troll,” “dope,” “fool” or “cockroach.”
:
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will — who sparred regularly with Krugman on ABC’s This Week — once noted, “If certainty were oil, Paul would be Saudi Arabia.”

Krugman, of course, is a highly educated guy with a trophy room full of awards. But in his blog he talks down to those who challenge his views, insisting they are not just in error but “too knavish, stupid or sociopathic to understand.”

You might see a disturbing trend here…

Via Kate at Small Dead Animals.

I myself had a beatdown to deliver to the whole “science” of economics, particularly the economists like Krugman who find something beneficial in the stewardship of the current presidential administration, in the e-mails:

Economics could very well be the most-abused among all the sciences. One could credibly argue it isn’t a science at all, since scientific findings are supposed to be reproducible and with economics, there is always some dizzying array of tiny variables, the precise combination of which could never be duplicated.

What does economics study, if not results in the aftermath of some event? If you start with economics, and strip away the behavior of the market — behavior, as in the purely scientific terminology, response to stimulus — is there anything legitimate left?

Given that, how could it not be fair to approach each professional studying economics, and ask him straight up: “Do you like Obama?” And if the answer is in the affirmative — okay, alright, that’s it. You’re fired. No reason to listen to you.

Fair’s fair, I should make note of this. The woman who is allegedly still married to our 42nd President, and may very well become our 45th, attempted to promulgate a very silly thing a little while ago, and I paid some attention to that…

Don’t let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs…they always say that…Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs…

Cornered on this, and realizing there was no way to put lipstick on the proverbial pig, she sought to clarify her remarks:

Here’s what Mrs. Clinton said Friday: “Don’t let anybody tell you that, uh, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”

And here’s what she said yesterday: “Let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades: Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in an America where workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out—not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.”

So Mrs. Clinton thinks “Don’t let anybody tell you X” is shorthand for “X.” And they used to say she was a good secretary.

Silly me, here I was taking what she said at face value. Obviously she meant the opposite. I should’ve known.

“They didn’t expect it to destroy everything else…”

From Kotaku, by way of Linkiest.

…and ironically, the one part of it they are unable to handle, is the part after which they are supposed to have been named. That thing where we all get together and contribute our interests and our preferences, where we all take part in deciding, the “democracy.” Commentator Robert Mitchell opines over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging:

The Democrats are unable to handle Civilization. They are tribals, and as such, the answers must come from the Chief. You have come up with an answer, but are not the Chief, so you must be challenging him, and must be destroyed, for the safety of the tribe, or you must become the Chief…

Pack animals, in other words. Wild dogs. Rats, maybe.

Blogger friend Phil contributed the following excerpt from the current issue of Imprimus, commentary from William Voegeli, Sr. Editor of Claremont Review of Books:

All conservatives are painfully aware that liberal activists and publicists have successfully weaponized compassion. “I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” Last year President Obama said, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough — I want your kids to do well also.” Empathetic kindness is “what binds us together, and…how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”

Well, if liberalism is the politics of kindness, it follows that its adversary, conservatism, is the politics of cruelty, greed, and callousness. Liberals have never been reluctant to connect those dots. In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt said, “Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” In 1984 the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, “Tip” O’Neill, called President Reagan an “evil” man “who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations…He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.” A 2013 Paul Krugman column accused conservatives of taking “positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.” They were, he wrote, “infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness…If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick.”

Small-d democratic politics is Darwinian: Arguments and rhetoric that work — that impress voters and intimidate opponents—are used again and again. Those that prove ineffective are discarded. If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits. The fact that liberals are, if anything, increasingly disposed to frame the basic political choice before the nation in these terms suggests that conservatives have not presented an adequate response.

Can’t agree with that last part. I’ve seen too many liberals, as they watch their own arguments utterly and ultimately dismantled and ground into dust under the hard boot-heel of reality, double-down as opposed to retreating. Whether the refudiation fits on a bumper sticker or not, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Anyone can recite, by now, “no global warming in eighteen years.”

The problem is, I think, discussing a group of people as if it’s an individual. The criticism of conservatives therefore becomes a tautology; it’s always true, no matter what, and so it proves nothing but it can’t be credibly opposed either. Somewhere there’s a conservative who’s cold-hearted and cruel, isn’t there? At least just one?

“A democrat is a fella who’s so nice he’ll give you the shirt off someone else’s back.” Anyone can recite that, too. People did, once. And, this realization did keep democrats out of the halls of power. At least the Senate and the White House, about half the time. The difference between then and now is not that people have forgotten this, but that for the last few years the feeling has set in that there’s something right about this, that if the other guy has a shirt in the first place, he must have swiped it from some fourth party.

So where do we go from here? Voegeli continues:

Given that liberals are people who: 1) have built a welfare state that is now the biggest thing government does in America; and 2) want to regard themselves and be regarded by others as compassionate empathizers determined to alleviate suffering, it should follow that nothing would preoccupy them more than making sure the welfare state machine is functioning at maximum efficiency. When it isn’t, after all, the sacred mission of alleviating preventable suffering is inevitably degraded.

In fact, however, liberals do not seem all that concerned about whether the machine they’ve built, and want to keep expanding, is running well. For inflation-adjusted, per capita federal welfare state spending to increase by 254 percent from 1977 to 2013, without a correspondingly dramatic reduction in poverty, and for liberals to react to this phenomenon by taking the position that our welfare state’s only real defect is that it is insufficiently generous, rather than insufficiently effective, suggests a basic problem.

The basic problem is that liberals, far from representing the feelings of human compassion when the basics of life become rare luxuries, actually represent the opposite: The Weltanschauung that enshrouds humanity as a natural consequence of abundance. The feeling that the cupboards are going to be full for awhile, there are no natural predators, and a functional tethering to reality has become optional.

The thing that therefore has to be done is for each individual to demonstrate to the collective, his worthiness for receiving his due allocation from the common store. Don’t ostracize me; ostracize that other guy instead.

In this way and so many others, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not, they are the opposite of what they claim to be. As Ludwig Von Mises put it,

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.