Sunday, April 18, 2010

Seduced and Abandoned by Obama

The American people are angry. According to Bill Clinton, they are also troubled. In his view, their dissent and dissatisfaction with the Obama administration reflects an underlying mental health issue.

Many American citizens are protesting and demonstrating across the country. More mildly than those patriotic Americans who protested the Bush administration, who questioned its legitimacy, and who called for the assassination of President Bush.

As you might recall Bill Clinton had nothing to say about anti-Bush and anti-war protests. He did not say that their violent images and boundless anger was stoking fires that might well explode in terrorism. If anyone had suggested that anti-Bush protesters were giving aid and comfort to the enemy, Bill Clinton would have exploded in outrage at the McCarthyite tactic.

Bill Clinton has been laying his own special guilt trip on the American people. He is trying to make them feel that if they are angry at Barack Obama, the problem is theirs, not his.

Surely, we can offer some alternative explanations.

Some have suggested that the American people are suffering buyer's remorse. After all, a goodly number of the independents who form the basis of the Tea Party voted for Obama eighteen months ago. And the Jewish voters who have started expressing serious doubts about whether they want to re-elect him gave him a great majority of their votes to Obama. I would add the Wall Street bankers, another group that supported Obama with time and money, but who also, in their public pronouncements assured the rest of the country that it could trust Obama. Do they still feel as fond for Obama? How long will it take before they discover that they too were duped?

Think of how it must feel to be a Goldman Sachs banker, someone who raised a ton of money for Obama and who allowed his good name and good reputation to legitimate Obama's candidacy, when he discovers that Obama wants to build his political base at the expense of Wall Street bankers.

Now Goldman Sachs has been charged with civil fraud, and John Paulson has been named as an unindicted participant in the fraud. Since Goldman Sachs is the most successful investment bank and John Paulson has run the most successful hedge fund in recent years, the two of them represent two of the pillars of Wall Street. If Goldman's reputation is going down the drain, and if Paulson's success looks less like genius and more like manipulation, the reputations of everyone else on the Street will suffer.

Being rich and successful is one thing. Everyone is for it. But once the world starts to suspect that your riches were ill-gotten, that you cheated your way to the top, that you gamed the system... well then, the loss of reputation is far worse than any financial loss.

Of course, all of these people who are fast losing their reputations supported Barack Obama. Didn't these financial geniuses know that Obama was going to declare class warfare against Wall Street? Why didn't they see it coming? The same applies to many other groups that signed on to the cult of Obama.

You can call it buyer's remorse if you like, but it is probably more accurate to say that these people were seduced and abandoned. They find themselves on their own special walk of shame, and they do not yet understand how they got there. If they are angry, it is not because they are, as Bill Clinton suggested, uncomfortable with an African-American president. All things considered, that is the least of their worries.

If they are angry, you have to believe that they have a right to be angry. As long as they are also angry and disappointed in themselves. If they are troubled, not just about their reputations but about the country's future, they certainly have a right to that too. They may not be dressed up in colonial garb on the public square, and they are not walking around carrying witty signs, but they surely understand why people have been drawn to the Tea Party. Perhaps they even understand it better than Bill Clinton.

The president they see is not the president they thought they were voting for. Not by a long shot. But given their superior intelligence and abilities, they are not going to be receiving any sympathy for allowing themselves to be duped. They are certainly not going to receive any gifts of empathy for having helped dupe the rest of the country. I wonder if Bill Clinton feels their pain.

We do feel some pathos for the young people voted for Obama in large numbers. They are suffering for having allowed Jon Stewart to tell them how to vote. They are now unemployed in very large numbers... their unemployment is close to 20%. We all feel some sympathy for them, because Obama, in two years, has pretty much spent all of their future earnings.

I am not so sure that buyer's remorse is the best explanation. When we arrive at the last group of disgruntled former, and perhaps even present, Obama supporters, we discover another reason.

One more group that is similarly angry at Obama merits even less sympathy than Wall Street bankers. That group is the White House press corps.

If this story does not bring you a flicker of joy, then your heart is truly made of stone. Anyway, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, Ed Chen, described the current mood of his colleagues: "... in my 10 plus years at the White House, rarely have I sensed such a level of anger, which is wide and deep, among members over White House practices and attitude toward the press." Via Instapundit, link here.

Perhaps they should call Bill Clinton and ask him to explain why their anger reveals their unconscious racism! For my part I prefer Instapundit's way of summarizing their grievance: "You said you'd respect me in the morning!."

No one is going to feel any sympathy for the White House press corps, because they were, effectively, an important part of the Obama campaign. If large numbers of Americans feel that they were seduced by Obama they rightly blame the press for having conspired to defraud them of their judgment and their votes.

Aside from Obama campaign staff, no one worked longer and harder to paint a false and fawning picture of the junior senator from Illinois. The only difference was that the campaign staff was doing its job; the media was sacrificing its integrity on the altar of its love for Obama.

As Instapundit suggests, seduction and respect are like oil and water. They do not mix. Yield to the siren song of seduction, and your seducer, after he finishes using you, will toss you aside with a thinly disguised sneer of contempt.

No one respects you for allowing yourself to be used. No one respects you for allowing yourself to be tricked. The person who respects you the least is the one who tricked you, the one who used you. He, above all others, knows that his show is a sham and a scam. You do not earn his respect for failing to see through it.

If the mainstream media is being treated with contempt, it has surely earned it. No one feels sorry for the White House correspondents.

As the Obama White House treats them worse than did the Bush White House, after all they have done for Obama, after all that they sacrificed for him, then they are surely getting their just deserts.

Now this is a kind of social justice we can all applaud.

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