How Weird is the Obama Campaign?
Yeah, as weird as the above video. This piece of repulsive tripe is the work of the advertising agency, believe it or not, that came up with the Got Milk? ad campaign. Go here to the Daily Caller for the details. Obama is losing this election primarily because of the lousy economy, but it doesn’t help him that a fair number of his more ardent supporters are so disconnected from reality that they think having kids sing about what a lousy future they will have under President Romney, and blaming their parents for it, will help Obama. The normal reaction of course is to view this as a creepy attempt to enlist kids in the political battles of their parents and to feel sorry for the kids being used as pawns. This video is of course merely the flip side of the video below when Obama was running the first time:
The whole Obama phenomenon has always had a very unhealthy cultlike atmosphere about it. Assuming that he goes down to defeat on November 6, it will be a salutary rejection of a truly foreboding development on the American political scene. Besides, the last time kids were used in this way by a major political party in the West, the production values were much better:
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Jonestown.
If Obama wins, then he will turn this nation into something like North Korea. The man worships no one but himself.
The first two video’s remind me so much of Hitler’s youth army that is reflected in the last video. There was a web article earler this week that the first group of ‘youth army’ trained under HLS/FEMA graduates and ready to respond to their call to arms.
This is from just one article: “One set of images made available by Rense.com shows trailer after trailer carrying these new DHS and FEMA armored fighting vehicles, complete with machine gun slots. They’re labeled with the usual backward American flag and the title, ‘Homeland Security’. Below that and the DHS logo, it also reads, ‘Immigration & Customs Enforcement’. Joining those markings, the black vehicles with white lettering also display ‘POLICE/RESCUE’ on one side and ‘Special Response Team’ on the other.”
http://www.infowars.com/homeland-security-graduates-first-corps-of-obamas-brown-shirts-homeland-youth/
Along with the fact that the president set up a ‘hot line’ for people to call/email and tell on their neighbors if they spoke out against him was/is the electronic ‘brown shirts’.
If Obama wins, then he will turn this nation into something like North Korea. The man worships no one but himself.
Take a pill.
What kind of pill, Art Deco?
After six years of very creepy weirdness from the Obama ” Team”, I have maxed out. My wife and I had our chance to respond yesterday at the polls, I hope that this miscreant is on the way home.
I will put it in explicit terms if you insist.
1. Mr. McClarey makes a joke comparing wretched campaign commercials to a fictional scene from late Weimar. Fair enough.
2. You follow up with an apparently perfectly serious statement averring that Obama aims to erect the most wretched totalitarianism.
The man is suffused with his own vanity conjoined to a weird sort of apathy. He apparently chows down lock, stock, and barrel on Democratic partisans’ somewhat fanciful version of the history of the last 80 years and without a doubt his camp followers will always advance the interest of various core constituencies in the Democratic Party (e.g. the leave-no-social-worker behind approach to welfare policy). In other words, he is a willing agent for the usual collection of pretentious rent-seekers. He is not an aspirant Kim Il Sung. He is quite bad enough as he is. Stop making a godforsaken fool of yourself.
I stand by what I said, Art Deco. I am not going to take a pill, other than required medication from my physician for my heart condition and diabetes and leg injury. Furthermore, I shall not take any pill other than that. Indeed, I see little difference between a Chicago gangster who murders unborn babies and sanctifies homosexual filth, and the godless and diabolical regime of any of the communist dictators, past or present, except in degree only. I am not insane. I am not a God-foresaken fool. I see what the demonic Democrats are trying to do, and I shall therefore maintain plenty of ammunition for my mini-14 not to initiate force, but to soberly and sanely defend myself should the need – Heaven forbid – arise.
Dial it back Paul.
No dial back for the guy who called me a God foresaken fool?
The guy who produced this describes himself as a “lapsed Republican.” Now I know we’re always being told by the media that the GOP needs to be a bigger tent…but, if Romney happens to lose, let’s hope it doesn’t get THAT big.
i sincerely hope if this happens that the GOP doesn’t get, let’s call it “Huntsmanized,” because I do not want to see a 2016 candidate running who has complete contempt for the Republican base, no discernibly conservative positions, and won’t win enough swing-state moderates/liberals to make up for the loss in base support. i honestly feel like Romney, despite his rep as Mr. Moderate, has to win this one to prevent a leftward GOP turn. perhaps I am being too pessimistic though.
No dial back for the guy who called me a God foresaken fool?
I have a great many shabby lapses, but I have not yet suggested you were a fool in essence or a fool in remarking on any aspect of this world, nature, or social relations other than in your assessment of certain topical questions of domestic politics.
The Democratic Party is a vehicle for the material interests of the general run of (non-uniformed) public employees, of the educational apparat (especially higher education), of the helping professions (especially social workers), of a large slice of the bar, the bulk of the media, and a more modest slice of the financial sector. It also acts in various ways to advance the capacity of these groups to define the terms of public discourse. These sectors harass and extract rents from everyone else in society.
Obama shows no evidence of much interest in or knowledge of social theory of any description, of history, or of any empirical social research programme. Maybe he has it, but you sure never see it. He is often called a Marxist, but it is doubtful he knows Marxism from marmalade. A good wager about the man is that he has moved through one social circle and then another and absorbed the groupthink therein.
He picks up no real skills. As a lecturer at the University of Chicago, he taught disposable courses some law students refer to as “___ & the Law”, where legal instruction collides with cut-rate sociology; he published no papers in academic journals; by some accounts he served on no faculty committees and his evaluations from students declined monotonically throughout his tenure. He serves in state and federal legislatures for more than a decade, but has identifiable expertise in no area of public policy and (again by some accounts) the Speaker of the House of Representatives considered his utterances a species of muzak.
This man is dangerous only because the times we live in require someone skilled at the helm and he is vacationing in Vegas and filling in his bloody NCAA brackets. He is not an aspirant totalitarian. The subcultures from which he has arisen are crooked and pretentious, not brutal.
Precisely Art. It would be comforting in some ways to view Obama as some sort of diabolical genius figure, because then his defeat would automatically right much that is wrong with this country. However, he is not. He is a fairly typical liberal politician who has spent his entire adult life in politics. The policies he has pursued represent common wisdom in the Democrat party which has gone ever further to the left over the past few decades. The truly disturbing feature of the Obama presidency is how many Democrats are in complete denial of just how great a disaster his presidency has been.
which has gone ever further to the left over the past few decades.
A quibble. In the Democratic Party, advocacy on certain questions of social policy has grown more gross and bizarre with time. In other respects, not so much. The functional pacifism that was modal during the years running from 1973 to 1991 is now a minority taste of modest significance (and more intense on the palaeodweeb right). Michael Dukakis’ views on criminal justice are also atypical. The Obama crew found bureaucratic subterfuge and press-assisted lying necessary to promote welfare policies advocated openly and quite vehemently 25 years ago.
“The Obama crew found bureaucratic subterfuge and press-assisted lying necessary to promote welfare policies advocated openly and quite vehemently 25 years ago.”
I would disagree with that Art. I think Clinton’s agreement to welfare reform was a bump in the road for the Democrats and their overall adherence to an ever-growing entitlement state has never been greater. The Obama administration has demonstrated how weak the moderate Blue Dog Democrats are in the modern Democrat Party. Many of them were defeated in 2010 and more will be defeated next week, in addition to a fair number of retirements. I doubt if the Democrat party has ever been further to the Left in almost all aspects than they are today. Once a Republican is president we will see the Democrats embrace functional pacifism again swiftly enough.
“It would be comforting in some ways to view Obama as some sort of diabolical genius figure, because then his defeat would automatically right much that is wrong with this country. However, he is not.”
I agree with that statement. Obama’s defeat, while essential, is no panacea. Yet I do think that Obama is diabolical in his actions and in his policies and programs, though no genius. Anyone who goes out of his way to promote the infanticide of the unborn, the sanctification of the filth of homosexual sodomy, and all the other perversions and wickedness that go along with such things is diabolical. It is not that Obama is a daibolical genius, but that Satan who inspires the current policies and programs is a diabolical genius. And yes, even more than ever we have to remember Jesus’ words to Pontius Pilate that His Kingdom is not of this world. An election of Romney over Obama can’t bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth, but it sure can slow the advance of diabolical liberalism, yet only if we keep tight watch over him whom Donald has called the Weathervane.
So yes, I am very cantankerous and I utter loathe and despise what Liberalism in general and Obama in particular has done to this nation. The solution, as always, is personal repentance and conversion. However, that doesn’t detract one iota from people like Obama, Biden, Kerry, Pelosi, et al., being the little anti-christs that St. John talks about in his first epistle.
I would disagree with that Art. I think Clinton’s agreement to welfare reform was a bump in the road for the Democrats and their overall adherence to an ever-growing entitlement state has never been greater.
In scale, not in scope. The scale is driven by demographic changes and by deformations of particular economic sectors (medical care and higher education) due to poorly-structured subsidies. There are quite a number of economic nostrums bruited about within the Democratic Party ca. 1971 and ca. 1984 that they cannot openly promote or have abandoned. Among them:
1. Ralph Nader’s consumers’ democracy (indeed, any approach to economic life congruent with Mr. Nader’s misunderstandings).
2. “Welfare rights”
3. Rent control and public housing (bar in New York City)
4. “Comparable worth” (i.e. extending the federal government’s GS scale to private employers but jiggering with it to curry favor with professional feminists).
Beyond that you have “industrial policy”. I suspect the comedy serial that is the Obama energy department may persuade careerist Democratic pols to put that one to bed.
Art, as usual you bring insightful perspective to the conversation. While I think the Dems’ “adherence” to an ever-growing entitlement state (including your listed nostrums) continues unabated, they certainly have ceased their advocacy of them. Other than religious liberty and abortion, the key issue for me going forward is the avoidance of health care nationalization. We need to move away from an insurance-oriented system to one whose insurance component is tailored to the purpose of insurance — i.e., the sharing and distribution of catastrophic risks. Under this assumption I’m even fine with a state level mandate to address the free rider / pre-existing condition problem. But universalizing our bloated and inefficient insurance-based model is a step toward service that will simultaneously degrade and get more expensive.
I’m going to ignore the first video because I can’t process the mindlessness of it. The last video needs no discussion.
The middle one interests me though…
Let us assume for a moment that it really is something that happened at a “neighbor’s” house and not a compensated performance. That’s some pretty wacked stuff.
Dinner at our house lasts about an hour and my wife and I talk about appropriate adult things at the table so-as-to invite our kids into the conversation. Politics comes up repeatedly and our kids certainly know our views. We try to answer their questions as fully, and fairly, as possible. We have many relatives who have drunk deeply from the Left’s well of insanity and our kids know that there are opposing views from people whom we admire and trust, that these issues are far more complicated than we present them to be.
I don’t remember ever hearing about an indoctrination event like this from friends or family, however far Left or Right. Does this really happen? Probably not.
If this is, then, merely a compensated political stunt, whom is it supposed to inspire? Only someone utterly out of touch with reality would find it inspiring and they are already committed. It certainly wouldn’t inspire any uncommitted voters to vote for the President. What is the point then?
“What is the point then?”
A religious ceremony. The pleased and proud reaction of the adults, presumably parents of the kids, put me in mind of the reaction of parents after their kids have had their first communion. I don’t think this was a compensated political stunt. I think it was an act of faith by the adults involved, and I find that fairly disturbing.
If not compensated, it is scary indeed.
What do you mean by “the reaction of parents after their kids have had their first communion”? Are you referring to the extremes to which people take the parties and gift giving?
No, just the regular pride and pleasure of seeing your kids taking a step on the path of the religion that you follow. For quite a few folks on the far Left of our political spectrum, politics is very much a substitute religion.
I missed the connection. Sorry about that.
At some core level, political loyalties are weird. Any measure of critical thinking presents ample evidence that one’s political affiliations are greatly flawed. Presumably they are less flawed than the opposite views or one would switch allegiances. Nonetheless, we often behave as though it is an all-or-nothing game.
I suppose it has always been thus. Since I’m home waiting out the storm, I watched the Military History Channel’s War of 1812. This connects to the present discussion because the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democrats created an all or nothing affiliation right at the outset of our Republic.
Perhaps the learned Dr. Zummo can explore subject more fully for I am not qualified to lay out the history in an intelligible way but my impression is that the factionalism that Washington warned about was as strong then as today. My impression is that this was so in Britain then as well.
What is it about us that we set aside what we know – that our side has its own deep-rooted flaws and that the opposing side has its own deep-rooted strengths – in favor of a damning determination on the other and a virtual free pass on our own?
I think for most conservatives politics is more of an annoyance than a religion. Most conservative initiatives tend to be an attempt to have government stop doing something, at least domestically, rather than to implement some vast new government program. Conservatives simply lack the faith in government to make life better that many Leftists have as an all consuming passion, contra most evidence.
Unintentional truth is always the best:
“When we look around
The place is all dumbed down
And the long term’s kind of a drag”
Go figure.