Lies we can believe in

By Daniel Greenfield

Civil disobedience is the act of breaking the law and defying the authorities to do anything about it. So is tyranny. The difference between the two lies in which side of the power equation the breaker is on. When the law is broken, two things happen. Either the law is upheld or the authorities back away from a confrontation and find some way to save face.

The ObamaCare process involved breaking a long list of rules and laws and then defying the ragged remnants of the system to do anything about it. At every turn the United States was unable to stop a rogue chief executive and his ruling party from trampling the law. When the case finally reached the Supreme Court, the leading judicial body in the land sidestepped a confrontation by redefining what the action was, rather than rule on the law. It was a classic case of the authorities saving face.

Civil disobedience balances moral absolutes against legal principles. The Supreme Court exists to serve as the final bastion of the law against runaway moral absolutes. But just as in its showdown with FDR, the Court blinked, and our court, unlike that court, didn’t even at least put up a good fight for the law before backing down. Obama didn’t even have to threaten to pack the court with justices. All he had to do was make it clear that he wasn’t going to follow the law, which forced the law to save face by following him instead.

The American chief executive has a great deal of power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes is a danger with few precedents. There have been conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi Arabia.

If he were to be impeached tomorrow, as some urge, he simply wouldn’t leave. I don’t know what he will do if he loses the election, simply because I don’t think he knows what he will do– I don’t think the prospect of losing has seriously entered his mind. If he loses it will be a pitched battle between Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama on one shoulder telling him to stay and Joe Biden and whatever unfortunate soul is Chief-of-Staff at that point acting as the voices of reason telling him that it’s over.

Even absolute monarchs make concessions to something outside themselves, to religion or tradition, but Obama never has. History, religion and tradition are nothing but lines that he drops into speeches in praise of himself. The American flag and the Constitution are trophies that he uses as backdrops, the same way that he uses greek columns– these aren’t things that mean anything to him. They’re decorations for the sets playing the eternal movie of him.

Obama is not a politician. Politicians learn to compromise. They learn that they can’t always get their way. Obama has never learned that lesson. He always gets his way. Or he did until 2010. No one has ever told him “No” and made it stick. There is no weight of life experience that tells him what to do when this happens.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Obama was never in the military. Unlike all of them, he never held anything resembling a real job that required him to do anything but show up and make speeches. Children are natural tyrants. Take a child throwing a tantrum off the playground, give him every privilege in life, leave out any real challenges, keep telling him that he’s special for 50 years and he will be an actual tyrant.

No one ever thought that a man with the emotional maturity of a child, with no life experience and no principles, would occupy the White House, surrounded by sycophants and worshiped by a press that acts as an extension of the White House Press Office. It took an extensive breakdown among multiple institutions and the national culture for that to happen, and the inability to assert the rule of law is a further symptom of that breakdown.

No one is fooled, unless to some degree they want to be fooled. To believe a lie, you have to want to believe it, and that means that at some level, you know that it is a lie.

Obama was elected because we, Democrats and quite a few Republicans, wanted to be saved from ourselves. We wanted to be saved from our policies, our debates and our guilt. In a time of crisis, we weren’t looking for a reliable experienced professional to do the job, if we had been, McCain, for all his flaws, would have won by a landslide.

The man we picked had no experience and no skills beyond his surface charm. He was irresponsible and that was why the country chose him. His irresponsibility made our irresponsibility look good..Even his racist associations were a plus, they made voters feel better about their own prejudices. Every wrong, ugly, stupid and irresponsible thing that he did only made him more appealing to the people who voted for him.

Every now and then people like to get drunk. When things are a complete mess, that’s when the temptation to open the bottle and pour it down the hatch comes. Things were a complete mess in 2008 and the country got stinking drunk. It decided to be completely irresponsible and feeling sorry for itself, it elected someone who wouldn’t have been qualified for any position in his own Cabinet.

Since then the country has sobered up. It thinks that Obama is doing a bad job, but it doesn’t know how to tell him that he was only a one-night stand. He seems like such a nice guy and it would hurt his feelings to tell him why he was really elected. It wasn’t because anyone, besides zombie liberals, thought that he knew what he was doing. It was because he seemed like a cheerful bright spot in a dour time and everyone felt sorry about slavery and segregation.

The problem is that Obama won’t leave. 2010 was a sharp hint. Any halfway competent politician would have caught it and changed direction. But Obama refuses to understand hints. He refuses to understand the unspoken message because that gives him power. The power of the rude is in their rudeness. The rudeness is a challenge to anyone with manners to match him equally or shut up and take it. Some Republicans, like Joe Wilson, have matched him rudeness for rudeness, many more, like Justice Roberts, have chosen to take it instead.

A Head of Stare who refuses to follow the law is engaging in rudeness squared, but Obama is doing what the left has always done. The left refused manners and mores, it trashed the culture, threw out its morals, defied the law with acts of civil disobedience and once in office refused to accept any limitations on their power. And most of the time it won. It stared down the society, the police and the politicians, defied their rules and took their rulemaking powers for its own.

The power of the left lies in challenging the lies that society tells itself and creating the illusion of credibility and sincerity through that challenge. It succeeds when its enemies lack faith in their own ideas, their own policies and their own values. The more abrasively it challenges norms, the more it refuses to follow any rules but its own, the more credibility it gains as a liberation movement.

Obama is the apotheosis of the left’s project, a brat nurtured on self-esteem, weaned on white guilt, educated to play with words and rewarded for staged confrontations with equally staged surrenders. All these qualities have shaped him into the entitled monster that he is, squatting in the Oval Office and grinning from the covers of a hundred magazines, determined to always win the only way he knows how, by ignoring the rules of the game.

If you have ever encountered someone genuinely worthless yet successful, it was almost certainly a man or woman who refused to take “No” for an answer. That can be a useful quality in some fields, but it’s also a perfect way for people with no useful skills to get what they want out of life. These are the people who don’t get fired or denied promotions because it would cause too many problems, who get discounts they aren’t entitled to, because they keep demanding them, who use determination and confrontation as substitutes for knowledge, ability and competence– who become a success story purely based on their enormous sense of entitlement and complete lack of shame.

Today such a man occupies the highest office in the land and rules accordingly. What the left once practiced as civil disobedience has become tyranny. Under Obama, the country is turning lawless because its chief executive is lawless. But Obama’s rise to power is a symptom of deep-rooted problems in the country. They cannot be fixed just by voting him out of office, because there are other Obamas out there.

Obama’s rise to power is a mirror of the national problems that got him there. All the things wrong with him are reflected, to some extent, in the men and women who voted for him. It could not be otherwise. His lawlessness is a symptom of an existing lawlessness. His contempt for values and morals, for tradition and history, for the nation itself, is a symptom of the contempt that the left has fed over the years until it has become a poison in the national bloodstream.

To truly defeat Obama, we have to be able to defeat those negative traits as well. To understand what gave someone like him power over so many people. It is not enough to just remove him from office, because unless we understand the corruption that made his rise possible, he, or someone like him, will rise again.

July 3, 2012 | 12 Comments »

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12 Comments / 12 Comments

  1. @ Laura:

    Good points. You’re absolutely right. Whatever happened to “do your own thing”? At least the liberal left in the 60?s and 70?s were about freedom even if they took it to extremes. Now they are totalitarian. They want to tell us how to eat, what to drive or preferably for them, that we not have cars at all, and so on.

    When I think of the liberal left, I think of two words. “Involuntary Euthanasia”.

  2. @ Laura:
    @ rongrand:

    rongrand says:

    July 4, 2012 at 5:19 pm

    We can make the necessary correction at the November election.

    We need everyone to get out and vote.

    Your freedom and liberty depends on it.

    We need to save the Republic.

    Romney’s first item of business will be to repeal the obamacare and then it’s all about damage control.

    Get rid of the Dept of Education, the EPA and a number of worthless government agencies

    no truer words were ever spoken or written. We must also rid ourselves of child welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, aid to the infirm and all the other needless social welfare schemes. We must increase the taxes on the middle and low income earners and at the same time lower the average corporate taxes to provide incentives for growth and business development.

    Increase tuition and stop molycoddling of those deemed poor. Let them learn to fend for themselves.
    Hashem looks with favor to those who are strong, self sufficient and without physical and mental flaws,

  3. We can make the necessary correction at the November election.

    We need everyone to get out and vote.

    Your freedom and liberty depends on it.

    We need to save the Republic.

    Romney’s first item of business will be to repeal the obamacare and then it’s all about damage control.

    Get rid of the Dept of Education, the EPA and a number of worthless government agencies.

    Can’t do any of this if you sit home and not vote.

    Remember your vote does count and don’t let anyone tell you different.

    If you don’t think so, ask any of your liberal democrat friends, they will tell you even the deceased vote.

  4. @ BlandOatmeal:

    That’s a fair statement. It amazes me, how the “Hippie Generation” of Lefties has embraced Big Brother. I used to run with the hippies, and thought they were for personal freedom and against Big Government; but as they’ve aged, I see they’ve become the worst coven of old hags and crotchety old men you ever did see — the kind who used to steal kids’ baseballs when they landed in their yards, and call the police when they played in the alley. Now they are in positions of power, trying to micromanage every aspect of our lives and enhance ever more their exclusive positions. The “Flower People”, it turns out, were nothing but kudzu all along. That’s a real shocker to me.

    Good points. You’re absolutely right. Whatever happened to “do your own thing”? At least the liberal left in the 60’s and 70’s were about freedom even if they took it to extremes. Now they are totalitarian. They want to tell us how to eat, what to drive or preferably for them, that we not have cars at all, and so on.

  5. The direction that the U.S. economy is moving in, or not moving, suggests to me that he will not be reelected in November.

  6. At every turn the United States was unable to stop a rogue chief executive and his ruling party from trampling the law.

    That’s a fair statement. It amazes me, how the “Hippie Generation” of Lefties has embraced Big Brother. I used to run with the hippies, and thought they were for personal freedom and against Big Government; but as they’ve aged, I see they’ve become the worst coven of old hags and crotchety old men you ever did see — the kind who used to steal kids’ baseballs when they landed in their yards, and call the police when they played in the alley. Now they are in positions of power, trying to micromanage every aspect of our lives and enhance ever more their exclusive positions. The “Flower People”, it turns out, were nothing but kudzu all along. That’s a real shocker to me.

    We are in the throes of a dictatorship which has already surpassed, in terms of power usurpation, any administration in history — including FDR’s. THE MAJORITY of the US economy is now directly controlled by the Federal government. China has been moving in the opposite direction, returning control to the private sector, and China has undergone an economic miracle as a result. Forrest Gump was right: “Stupid is, as stupid does”, and the Western economic powers are very, very stupid. Of course, there are a few “clever” fellows among them, like Ben Bernanke and Jamie Dimon, who are making money hand over fist while their country dies because of them. Their time will come, and they will prove to have been the stupidest of all.

    I don’t expect much civil disobedience from Conservatives in the US — They simply don’t do that sort of thing. It will probably come from the other side; and indeed, one might call Obama’s flaunting of the Constitution a form of “civil disobedience”.

  7. Stupid, brain dead Americans will never get it right. This fine article sums up matters to a T. Obama is merely a narcissistic reflection of the culture as a whole. To this culture, he doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. He fits right in, he’s like so many television actors who act bigger than life, do impossible things, and rob, cheat, and steal with complete impunity. It’s OK for this impostor to lie, his vapid speeches spoken with aid of Teleprompters merely act as props for this airhead. Listen to him for a minute or two and you realize he’s a nincompoop. As stupid as he is, his supporting cast of officials, czars, and other fools are his handpicked coterie of oafs who see him as but a meal ticket. Obama is talked about by his supporting cast, but most realize he’s a terrible president and a worse human. American will sink and die should this blithering maniac get another term.

  8. Irrespective of anything that can be said of the feckless presidency of Barack Hussein Obama Jr, he will remain in office for a second term unless his Republican challenger can unseat him. As of today, June 3, 2012, Obama leads Romney 47.0 – 44.4 in an average of the national polls, and he leads Romney 221-181 in the Electoral College votes. It requires 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Obama has only 49 votes to go. Romney needs 89. Unless these fundamental political calculi are reversed in the next four months, the United States of America will have four more years of Obama.

    What can any of you do about this in Israel? Next to nothing, except to try influencing American Jews to vote Republican at least for this national election. Lots of luck.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  9. I pray that we would be able to have the upcoming presidential election peacefully. Emotions are running high because of neglect of our own laws by BHO and his attorney general. Israel paid great price to get back one of her kidnapped soldiers. We are forbidden to know who is responsible for the death of one of the border patrol agents. What a shame! DOMA was ignored, although it is the law of the land, DADT was passed without taking into account the rights of the heteros who are in the majority. I do not think the chaplains and the majority of members of the US Armed Forces are ready to go with this decision. Proposition 8 was overturned by activist judges. People are losing hope not only in the Executive branch of the federal government but in the remaining two branches as well. The Supreme Court has rewritten the law from the bench by changing the Affordable Care Act which was based on penalty under Individual mandate into tax. The Solicitor General (Government lawyer) argued saying it is not a tax during the first day debate at the Supreme Court. On the second day, he argued for a possibility to treat it as a tax. Then majority of the justices including Chief Justice Robert treated it as a tax . What type of tax? Nobody knows.
    Telling to the American people that it was not a tax and then arguing in court as a tax simply is a deception. This angers many. This is the first time in American history that the some individuals are going to be taxed for non-activity. Some are saying there are additional 21 different taxes; death panels and possibility of health care rationing because of the shortage of doctors and highest insurance premiums (already there is a proof for this). It is time for all patriot Americans to vote in order to get rid of all incumbents who refuse to uphold the law of the land and demand term limits not only for congress but to the justices of the Supreme Court as well. Since judges are nominated by the US Congress, the best weapon the people have is to vote the dishonest and disloyal incumbents out and vote in those with integrity and intellectual capacity who would honor the US Constitution and carry out their legislative duties seriously in the best interest of the USA.
    The current US Administration is the least spiritually minded administrative in US history. US needs another spiritual awakening as corruption has spread to every levels of the government and the country like a virus.