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| Obama's Jobs Hole | You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet |
The Content of Obama's Character
by Christopher Chantrill
January 22, 2010 at 11:15 am
ON THE HOLIDAY celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday we celebrate also the first year of America’s first black president, Barack Obama.
It’s telling that 47 years ago, when Reverend King made his great speech on the Washington Mall, he did not say that he had a dream that one day, an African American would become president. King’s vision on August 28, 1963 was less ambitious:
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Even so, Barack Obama was elected president based on the color of his skin. African Americans on the night of November 4, 2008 wept with joy because one of their own had become president, against all that they had been told and feared about a racist America. Liberals rejoiced because of the “first,” that America had answered the question: Was it ready for a black president?
Some Americans voted for Barack Obama for non-racial reasons. Independents and disgruntled Republicans were voting against the mistakes and the corruption of the Bush era.
Now that Obama is president he is no longer being judged by the color of his skin. Now the vast majority of Americans will judge him on the content of his character. It is his character, of course, that is the great unknown, as Charles Krauthammer has written:
Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect.
But word is starting to dribble out. Reports Hugh Hewitt on the latest campaign page-turner, Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilmann:
The portrait of the president is really an effort in poison-pen pointillism, where hundreds and hundreds of razor sharp paragraphs combine to create a deeply disquieting picture of the new president. President Obama is presented as insecure and needy of reassurance (p. 25), self-important, cynical and megalomaniacal (pp 30-31), petulant and spoiled (p. 111), touchy and vain (p. 112), hypocritical (p. 119), overweening (p. 184) and deceptive (p. 120.)
Another disquieting note is the overarching theme of Obama’s first year of governance, the determination to govern against the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, that government gains its just powers from the consent of the governed. The American people do not consent to the $787 billion stimulus. They do not consent to the cap-and-trade bill. They do not consent to the federalization of health care.
The comparison to the character and governance of President George W. Bush is telling. We knew, before we elected him to be president, a lot about his character: his fight against business failure and alcoholism. His character was confirmed in the challenges of his presidency when President Bush submitted to a political immolation in his second term as the price of getting the war on terror right.
The awful chasm opening before us today after the first year of Obama is the realization that we have no knowledge of President Obama’s character. If President Bush was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, President Obama has been spoon-fed royal jelly by the worker bees in the liberal hive all his adult life. Even now, we know of no occasion in a charmed life when Barack Obama has risen above the shibboleths and routine thuggeries of political faction.
Yet President Obama is called to lead the nation out of a nasty recession provoked by his party’s compulsive manipulation of the credit system, a history that reaches from the $400 billion losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all the way back to Andrew Jackson’s war with the Second United States Bank.
In the year ahead, as unemployment stays high and as isolated desertions in the Democratic ranks metastasize into headlong routs of whole battalions, President Obama will face challenges that test every fiber of his being. Sensing his insecurity and need for reassurance, cunning men and women will suggest ways of using his political power to get back in the game. Will he sacrifice his party and his presidency and do the right thing, or will he sacrifice the American people on the altar of political expediency?
I fear the answer to that question.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
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What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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