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Wednesday Update

What we want to continue doing in some of these Wednesday Updates is begin to look at major events in the news in their larger historical context.... And maybe even how some things will be viewed in 50 years, 100 years or even 500 or 1000 years...

Subject: President Obama's First 100 Days...

(Wed., May 6, 2009)

(approx. 3325 words, 6 pp.)

This means, quite possibly, the question arises...

"I have no political ambitions after 'the war.' All I want to do is lead an army in combat." General George S. Patton (Eisenhower, my hero, could have easily said the same thing, I think.) "The messenger of the Covenant shall come suddenly to the Temple... He shall purify..."

We all wanted to see this historic "first black President" succeed (except Rush Limbaugh, perhaps, who felt Obama's "success" would be detrimental to America.). Unfortunately, there was very little chance that would happen given his "vision" for the world and America as outlined in The Audacity of Hope, and given his radical so-called "community organizer" past of Saul Alinsky, and his sitting under the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright for years on end, and given his very troubled childhood, which he himself describes in painful detail in his own words, yet again, in The Audacity of Hope. All of this portended nothing but tragedy for the first 100 days and even the first 4 years of this administration, and, tragically, that is what we have seen: an historically unprecedented level of disaster, never seen before in the history of our Republic and arguably in the history of mankind on earth...

So, it is "with a heavy heart" indeed a very "heavy heart" for America, and perhaps even the world that I write these words of analysis... (I have thought and prayed on this matter for days and weeks on end, hoping this hour would never come... I do not relish it, nor take it with a light heart, but some things simply must be done... in the course of human events...)

First and perhaps foremost: The non-stimulus political machine package..

Well, we have made it to the first 100 day mark of this Obama administration and are quickly approaching our own 100 day mark for a judgment on the now infamous "Stimulus package," which, in reality, appeared to be little more than a handing out of large amounts of money to special interest groups to build a massive and impregnable political machine, especially when coupled with the Omnibus Bill and mortgage bail out bill and the much larger than usual budget, etc. (See "Pizza and Politics" as well as "Time to get real?") Tragically it seems President Obama peaked on January 20th and has been rapidly going downhill from there?

Years ago the venerable Republican Senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, said of US government spending, "A billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money." In truth, we could for the Obama administration paraphrase that famous line and say, "A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you are talking about unreal money?!"

I am not an economist and I don't play one on TV, but these first 100 day economic policies and massive expenditures seem terribly ill-conceived to me for all sorts of reasons both politically and economically. It can be "smart," perhaps, to hand out money or special legislative favors to various interest groups, but in the end it can backfire on you, and it can backfire big time depending on how big the favors and financial sums are.

There is widely said to be at least 2 trillion dollars of money going out to people over and above normal expenditures and Social Security, and so forth. Pretty simple math here: This means that 40 million voters get about $50,000 for work or in direct grants and 80 million voters get virtually nothing but simply foot the bill. I have been checking my mail box every day for the last few months, but so far I have not gotten my check! Who gets the checks? Well, clearly, only the chosen, "select few"? However, if you are one of the 80 million who are not one of the "select few," you will probably be highly inclined to vote Republican for years to come?

I am not sure how to get on the list of "friends of Obama." In the Clinton administration there was the famous group of celebrities called the FOB, "friends of Bill," but in reality it had little or nothing to do with cash pay outs but with social prestige and standing, and so forth. If the Republican cannot win in 2010, 2012, 2016, etc., they should get out of politics! But it is much, much, much worse than that for Obama and the "enabling" and true-believer Democrats! The bottom-line here is the massive well-oiled (to say the least) political machine that Obama figured would secure power indefinitely into the future will in fact, it seems, be his undoing and that of the Democrats more generally?

In truth, no one put a gun in Obama's chest and said, "Write your autobiography, and then run for President." He did it of his own free will. The problem is that it is a general truth of life that what you see depends upon where you stand. The problem is Obama stands pretty much in the middle of the left between, say, the moderate left of Jimmy Carter and the radical left of Jeremiah Wright. This personal as well as academic background causes him to see things in something of a distorted perspective and causes him to say from very unusual things, which the Republicans could have, and probably should have, used against him in '08, but didn't.

Why does Barack Obama say unusual things in The Audacity of Hope? Because they are "normal" standing in the middle of the left, but in the bigger picture of history and American politics, they are troublesome, weird, unusual, and in fact frequently just outright false clichés of the left and even far left. Conservatives are not ready to play ball on this level, and that is one of the reasons they almost always lose, of course, but what I am going to say here is not really political or even racial, it is philosophical and ultimately spiritual since the spiritual is the well-spring from which all one's thinking comes on morality, culture, education, politics, law, and so forth.

In order to do philosophy, one must have some historical perspective, and this is probably even more true for doing contemporary philosophy. Jimmy Carter in Our Endangered Values and John Danforth in Faith and Politics are not great philosophers, but simply representative writers of the (theologically) apostate, white liberal mainline church, and how this spiritual position relates to moral theory, culture, education, politics, law, etc. However Carter and Danforth are not as leftist as Obama, who has been highly influenced by the far left, but, on the other hand, Obama is not as leftist and downright nutty as the Marxist (in everything but name) John Dewey, the white, highly influential American educator of the early 20th century. Dewey had no use for American history and neither did the radicals of the 1960s, as is well known, but Obama to his credit is not that radical.

Obama says in his book (pp. 114-117) that he is torn between the America founders and, in essence, black liberation theology, or one could say, I think fairly, between George Washington and Jeremiah Wright, and he stays up to midnight, late into the night, etc., trying to determine which of the two is most correct, and in the end he cannot decide and does not want to chose sides between George Washington and Jeremiah Wright. However, Dewey and the radicals of the 1960s had no such midnight ponderings! For Dewey and the radicals of the 1960s no such midnight ponderings would be necessary! It would be Wright all the way! Obama is not that nutty, clearly?

However, Obama says he does not need to ponder whether jurists such as Scalia or Clarence Thomas may have at least some redeeming characteristics, as George Washington does, because clearly they do not. But, of course, this is standard leftist thinking today, so Obama is clearly in the mainstream of leftist thinking today, just as he says he is. The problem here, of course, is do we really want someone in the White House who cannot decide (in essence) between George Washington and Jeremiah Wright? Or so teaching our children? I don’t think so! I would definitely think not, but I am just an old fuddy-duddy (that is, one who is old-fashioned, unimaginative and concerned about trifles).

What does all of this have to do with the first 100 days? The answer is everything. You might say the Washington vs. Wright controversy is just the proverbial "tip of the iceberg." The tip of the iceberg is not simply Washington vs. Wright but all the outlandish, ill-conceived, unsubstantiated leftist ideas, observations, and opinions Obama throws out, time and again, when talking about history, American history, foreign policy, domestic policy, etc. The real substance of the iceberg of anyone's thought is the (wellspring) spirituality underlying it.

Washington and the founders traditionally were seen to represent the substance or foundation of the American vision, flowing from an underlying Christian wellspring spirituality or religion, and when that particular wellspring is gone (as it is for Obama), one is almost inevitably going to wind up with all kinds of non-traditional (virtually anti-American) leftist revisionist history (that you think is normal) and with ill-conceived policy positions (that you think are brilliant) because all of one's faulty thinking on history, the founders, and policy stems from the wellspring of one's spirituality ("religion"), which for Obama is a radical multicultural (that is, postmodern) humanism (that is, atheism).

Further, all the misguided, ill-conceived, unprecedented, and even at times outrageous things he has said or done in the first 100 days are actually suggested or just flat stated in his own book, no less! They should hardly be a surprise? But Obama's thoughts and actions are mostly a product of his largely radical leftist education, of which he is a tragic victim, in my opinion, and, hence, Obama’s self-perceived moral superiority to conservative, traditional American values.

To be fair to Obama and his book and his disastrous first 100 days, in many ways, he is honest and forthright because, clearly, he thinks he is brilliant and visionary in not jumping on the far left racial Marxist bandwagon of Jeremiah Wright but wanting to keep some of the greatness of a Washington or a Lincoln for his "citizen of the world," "spread the wealth around" vision for America and, ultimately, the whole world! (God help us!)

As far as Lincoln goes, Obama cannot decide if he is a merely "politically expedient" man of "moral cowardice" or a great man of American history in preserving the Union and freeing the slaves, and so forth.  He says it is this last way he likes to think of Lincoln, though there is much "distressing" history on Lincoln to the contrary. (Really?) However, it has been my observation in life that one should be very careful when getting on one's moral high horse (in such matters), which Obama seems to have a propensity for doing, for when one falls off, it is a very long way to the ground, and the landing can be quite catastrophic?

It is, again, my view that The Audacity of Hope was a gold mine that the RNC foolishly did not take advantage of in '08, but that is no doubt due to my philosophical bent in analyzing such works. It is my opinion after reading long sections of the book that it may need more psychoanalysis than philosophical analysis, but I am not going to go there. (I will leave that to Rush and his propensity for such things.) I want to stick with the philosophical content of what Obama said of his own free-will about himself, no less, and how it clearly foreshadows his historically unprecedented disastrous first 100 days.

There are patterns in his analysis of his "citizen of the world," "spread the wealth around" vision for America and, ultimately, the whole world that are reflected in Washington vs. Wright dilemma, and his almost cliched leftist historical revisionism, when he is not simply just getting the facts wrong, and, hence, creating false dichotomies and divisions, which he is prone to do both in the book and in general, of course, as many have pointed out. (He does, at times, have very valid criticism of conservatives, but I will save those to the end of this writing when it is time to ask, "Where to from here?" in this great historical drama and tragedy.)

Obama is famous for saying that we have two options to fix the economic mess we are in. In so many words he has said, "Do nothing or do my plan"! Well, Mr. President, maybe there is another option, like, "Do another plan"? Just a thought. Similarly, in analyzing American foreign policy after World War II (p.335), Obama says there were isolationists who wanted to disengage from the world stage after that war (and "accommodate" Stalin), and there were those who wanted to invade the Soviet Union, and in the end we wisely chose a middle course of action. As many things he says, this is simply not true, in my opinion, though it, on the surface, sounds so profound, which is common for much of his analysis of things.

Who wanted to disengage and, say, bring the troops home from Europe after World War II? Not any major person I have ever heard of. Who wanted to invade the Soviet Union? Again, not any major person I have ever heard of (except, supposedly, the nutty George Patton in the movie anyway). The point here is that this is not leftist revisionist history, but faulty thinking in the guise of profundity and of "Obama vision." However, Obama does do leftist revisionist history on the Cold War, and racial revisionist history on the Civil War, and both together on American history and foreign policy in general over the last 50 to 200 years. This is almost inevitable, in my opinion, given his leftist/ Marxist and radical racial/ Jeremiah Wright background.

There is a standard leftist, generally Marxist, template of America and her history and even of world history, and again Obama does not want to jump on board with it outright; but having said that his having been so influenced by it from his own mother (he says) and from academia, it colors all of his analysis of America and of American history and ultimately of world history, and so almost inevitably, time and again, this template comes to dominate his thinking and his historical, political, economic, religious, social, and cultural analysis of America and the world. On the Cold War he says something specifically of his presidential predecessors Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, no less, that is weird, and I think overtly not true, but almost a commonplace idea (in my experience) among the far left and something, implicitly (as usual) that his administration will, supposedly, rise above morally, as it were, from now on in America history.

He says of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, page 339, "Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would all find their judgment clouded by fear that they would be tagged as 'soft on communism'." A classic anti-America, unsubstantiated, sweeping generalization of the left, if ever there was one? But it is pretty typical of the book. I, personally, am always very careful to speak of other people's mental state of "fear" or "judgment", especially when there is no evidence offered to support one's claim. Obama then claims that American political opponents to these presidents were subject to "techniques of secrecy, snooping, and misinformation." That is, again, not true, in my opinion, but yet another myth of the far left. (And it also tends to explain his Ring Wing Extremist Report?)

In any case, there were people who were watched in those Cold War days, as I understand it, but they were, roughly speaking, those people who felt Soviet Russia had liberated Eastern Europe after World War II, and not oppressed it. These were the very few Americans who wanted to "accommodate" Stalin as a great leader, and leftist dictator, and so forth. Similarly, as a historical fact, let us never forget Obama's cherished far left, not America's traditional liberal left, felt the North Koreans as well as the North Vietnamese were "the good guys" in those two actual military conflicts.

Those two conflicts were generally led by "liberal" Democrats, no less, that is, Truman and Johnson. But, Obama, of course, puts both Kennedy and Johnson (let alone Eisenhower) in his anti-Marxist American cabal! So, what's new? I personally think, given his own "my struggle," autobiography that Obama sees himself as leading by example, with his superior (moral) vision and understanding, of course. And this is why he openly embraces far left anti-American dictators when other merely liberal presidents have refused to do so. It will do us little good, no doubt, but, hopefully, it may not hurt anything?

The person that Obama most reminds me of in history is Dick Gregory, a very likable, idealistic, but ultimately pretty crazy black historical revisionist. (I used to read his books in my youth.) In Obama's mind, rightly or wrongly, people who are sympathetic to Marxist dictators are helping the cause of world peace and improving America's image in the world. This explains his trip south of the border to the Americas Conference, etc.

America has her many flaws in terms of capitalism, ideology, racism, sexism, homophobia, economic exploitation, etc., etc., the usual far left's list. And Marxist dictatorships as well as Muslim extremist regimes also have their flaws, and we all need to acknowledge our great flaws in order to come together, and he is without question attempting to lead by example, thinking a new multicultural, humanist, "citizen of the world" consciousness is about to sweep the planet, and, of course, he is leading the way, he says as a visionary and "unbending idealist", in confessing on the world stage what he sees to be Americas many sins over the last 200 years before he has arrived to deliver us, etc., etc.

I personally find this so bizarre in its rational construction that I cannot comment on it. In fact, Obama is so far out in front of us with his extraordinary leadership that one commentator has said of this that Obama has left all the rest of us mere mortals behind in a cloud of dust that is so great that we cannot see or appreciate where he is leading us because he is so far out in front of us. Now that is leadership! However, many people think, rightly or wrongly, (with Warren Buffet) that Obama's leadership is actually more "over the cliff," not just economically, but socially, morally, culturally, politically, legally, and even historically on the larger world stage. But to analyze this question we will have to wait for Part 2 of this Wednesday Update miniseries, "With a Heavy Heart," coming Wednesday, May 13, 2009....