Americans still seem
willing to give a pass to the disaster in the White House.
by
David Solway
David Solway
December
13, 2013 - 11:27 pm
Let me
begin with a categorical statement that, given current events and recent
political history, can be easily defended: Barack Hussein Obama is a willful,
indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to
govern. Indeed, he would not be fit to govern Lower
Slobovia, let alone the United States of America. Obama is a historic
disaster of the first magnitude and, if not restrained, he will see to the
irrevocable decline of the country which foolishly elected him, leaving the
world on the brink of a conflict — or in the midst of one — whose repercussions
cannot be underestimated.
Accompanying
the undeniable havoc and damage that Obama is wreaking on his country and
equally on its allies — Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Poland, Czech Republic,
Israel, and possibly Taiwan — is the sense of helplessness that overcomes one
when writing or speaking about a rogue president and his destructive
administration. I feel this personally, having done my utmost in books, articles
and lectures, from 2008 to the present, to warn whomever might read or listen
that Obama represented a greater threat to the U.S. and the oddly named “free
world” than any of our most dedicated and belligerent enemies. Even prior to his
nomination as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, my distrust of this
man was proprioceptive. And after his Missouri address, I wondered why anyone
would want to “fundamentally transform” a country which, for all its flaws,
perched atop the pinnacle of success in comparison to any other
country.
Everything
Obama has done since then has only served to confirm
what was originally a deep suspicion and soon grew to become a complete
certainty. Dozens of meticulously researched books have been published to the
same effect. And yet very few people seemed to be paying attention. No less
disconcerting, those who argue that to criticize Obama is a sign of deep-dyed
racism are, of course, relying on slander and misappropriation of language to
protect their chosen standard bearer and his Marxist/progressivist/utopian
project.
What
will it take to convince the ersatz aristocracy of frivolous intellectuals and
brainless celebrities, partisan journalists, editors and academics, and an
indifferent or deluded laity that they are heading for a crisis that will change
our lives immeasurably for the worse? The evidence is beyond
dispute.
America
is drowning in a state of unredeemable debt — $17 trillion in actual debt and,
according to economic historian Niall Ferguson, in the vicinity of $200
trillion in unfunded liabilities, while one
in five households depends on food stamps. At the same time, it is printing
money like there’s no tomorrow — and there may not be — while subsidizing green
energy fiascos at enormous cost to the taxpayer ($90
billion in wasted stimulus funds, and counting). It finds itself in the
throes of a metastasizing race war, caused in no small degree by the president’s
rhetoric and behavior and fomented by his attorney general. It is a country
increasingly governed by executive fiat and
by an administration rocked by a near-endless gyre of political and ideological
scandals. It is a country whose federal government opposes voter ID, opening the
door to electoral corruption. It is a country that spies
on its own citizens, software corporations and web search engines, tries avowed
terrorists in civilian courts, allows its ambassador and his entourage to be
killed, without reprisal, and suffers its higher echelons to be riddled with
Muslim Brotherhood operatives, giving the impression of a College of
mujtahids. They are the advance cohort. “Today,” writes Larry Kelley in
his sobering book Lessons
from Fallen Civilizations, “millions of militant Muslims awake every
morning plotting the destruction of the US. Many are among us.” And there will
be more, if these
reports
of fast-tracking the citizenship applications of large numbers of Muslim
immigrants are reliable, as they appear to be.
It is a
country whose president purges its military — 197
senior officers, including nine commanding generals — as did Turkey’s
autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to ensure the continuity of his regime.
It is a country that refuses to defend its borders, even suing to keep them as
porous as possible. It is a country shifting precipitously to the Left, now
mired in the exorbitant socialist travesty of Obamacare built on an ascending
pyramid of lies and false
enrollment numbers — or in the words of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney
Patrick Frey at his Patterico
blog, “they’re not just lying about politics now. They’re lying about
data. They’re lying about everything. All the time. Constantly. It’s what you
have to do to prop up an unsustainable government. … You lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and
lie.”
It is a
country whose domestic agenda is predicated on the Marxist principle of
redistributive economics that amounts to stealing from the productive class to
maintain an ever-growing parasitical constituency. It is a country at war with
honest science, transmuting NASA into a
program for Muslim outreach and buying into the Gore/Hansen/Mann-inflated,
IPCC climate scam. It is a country that is retreating on every front and that has
lost the Middle East as well as the
respect of its adversaries. It is a country that betrays its allies and
endangers the world in the process, as in the phony, eagerly sought agreement
that allows a self-described genocidal and nuclearizing Iran to keep spinning
its centrifuges while profiting from relaxed sanctions. It is a country whose
administration has sold its loyal partner, Israel, down the Jordan
River.
“The
United States is no longer a rational nation,” mourns
James Lewis. “Under Obama we are burning our traditional allies, and since
weakness brings aggression, Iran is now empowered, China is grabbing ocean
territory for shale deposits, and the worst offenders against women’s rights are
now elected to the UN Human Rights Commission.” It is hard to contend with his
summation.
All
this proceeds under the direction of a president who has sealed his vital
documents so that very little of crucial importance is known about him. Roger
Simon notes,
as many others have done, “that Obama’s academic records are perpetually
unavailable for a reason — and that reason is most likely that they reveal he
received financial preferences, scholarships and/or loans, as a foreign
student.” I have been arguing this thesis, and more, for several years about a
president who is essentially a cipher. Intentional lack of evidence
comprises evidence of its own that something is amiss. Further, if Obama was a
foreign student, it follows that his presidential legitimacy is in question. But
Simon is forgiving here, averring that he “would vote in a heartbeat for a
foreign born person if I thought he or she were the best candidate, assuming it
was all legal and public.…” Pace Simon, considering Article
2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution, how such a process
could be legal is distinctly moot.
Indeed,
all other reasons aside, to have conferred immense power on a public figure with
so meager a track record and so thin and discontinuous a résumé defies even the
most rudimentary logic. Who is this man who sits in the Oval Office? (As
PJM commenter “cfbleachers” correctly remarks in response to a previous article of mine,
“Obama has spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mask.”) And what is
his modus operandi? “Obama,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in Obama’s
America: Unmaking the American Dream, published just prior to the 2012
election, “is possessed of a certain low cunning that makes him politically
formidable. Obama’s skill…is to figure out what the American people want to
see and hear, and then give it to them, while doing
something entirely different.” By 2012 Obama’s lack of a paper trail, his
craftiness and his penchant for deceit should have been blatantly obvious to any
sensible and mature American voter, irrespective of class, race or
gender.
TV
personality Monica Crowley concurs. In a recent speech, she
spelled out what should have been plain for all to see: “We have a president
who…came out of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee
of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist
professors…who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky,
who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries
and domestic terrorists… who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical
anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about
the fundamental transformation of the nation…who waged war on entire news
organizations, Fox News, and who spent his first term slamming into place
radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine….What I’m describing here
is the classic tin-pot dictatorship. We never thought it could happen here, and
yet, here it is….Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the
beginning before he was even elected president, but now it’s starting to dawn on
more and more people what is really happening here.” She is right. Even for
those who were not “in this room,” there should have been little doubt that
Obama was a man without a discernible moral core, inspired by an anti-American
political philosophy and utterly devoid of presidential
heft.
But
American voters were ready to be taken in by a smooth-talking, shape-changing,
confidence-man, like the gullible “marks” in Melville’s
last novel about the exploits of an adroit charlatan, and to trust the image
rather than the substance (or absence of same). This is another way of saying
that America elected the results of Obama’s wholly predictable dogmatic
fecklessness. America elected not to be America anymore, to fundamentally
transform itself from a solvent, powerful, feared and respected nation into a
quasi-European basket case. America surrendered to reparation chromatics, as if
seeking absolution for a history that no one today is responsible for and that
Obama himself never experienced. Admittedly, Obama’s approval ratings have
plunged of late, but public opinion is notoriously volatile and will probably
rebound at some point. Liberal dogma and white guilt will see to that. One can
only hope it will assume the form of a dead cat bounce.
The
question remains. What will it take to awaken the tranquilized sector of the
public and shake the elite corps of complacent opinion-makers out of their blind
and factional torpor? How long before reality pre-empts fantasy? “The last five
years of the Obama administration,” writes
Russian émigré Alexander Markovsky, “have been like living on a volcano.” How
long before the lava starts to flow?
One
must hope that America will come to its collective senses before it is too late.
But I am afraid that it will take nothing less than a major catastrophe, a
fiscal implosion that takes the “food” out of food stamps, coupled with more
high-casualty terrorist attacks both abroad and on its own soil, leading to the
eruption of civil unrest and the possible impeachment of the most destructive
president in the entire pageant of American history — a sorcerer’s apprentice in
a house on fire or a Machiavellian schemer following a carefully contrived plan
— before America emerges from its devastating slumber. Assuming, of course, that
it ever does, or that a path to recovery will still be possible. For nothing is
guaranteed in a nation so divided as America is today.
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The
Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on
a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli
themes, Hear,
O Israel!, was released by Mantua Books. His latest book is The Boxthorn
Tree, published in December 2012.