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Historically Democrats hate the military but when it comes to fighting their wars against conservatives they embrace the military:
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Cashill diagnoses Obama and finds him shallow:
No, Virginia, Obama’s
Not Running the Show
Someone is pulling the strings in the Biden administration, but
it’s not the former president.
by JACK CASHILL
Now that the White House has turned into an
assisted living facility, people are naturally curious about which of the
patient-in-chief’s caretakers is actually running the country.
Unfortunately, the curious do not seem to
include the Big Media types in the position to find out. At least a few of
these journalists have intimate ties with the White House. It would seem,
however, that to maintain those ties, they have to pretend that President Joe
Biden is still compos mentis. He is clearly not.
Journalists on the outside are free to tell
the truth about Biden but are forced to speculate as to who at the White House
is backstage running the show. The tea leaf readers in my Twitter feed seem
convinced that, if anyone, it is former President Barack Obama. They are sure
their man is Marxist enough to have managed the party’s undeniable sharp turn
to the left.
I think otherwise. I have no more inside
knowledge than the next guy, but in preparation for my forthcoming book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply,
I have had to read not only Obama’s latest memoir, A Promised Land, but just about everything he
claims to have written or that has been written about him.
What I have learned is that like any gifted
sleight-of-hand artist, Obama has gotten his audience to focus on the wrong
object. Pundits have debated his ideology — Marxist, socialist, progressive,
pragmatist — and even his religion — Christian, Muslim, atheist — but they
rarely questioned his commitment.
Although clearly immersed in leftism since
childhood, even Marxism, he never left the shallow end of the pool. As
president, he proved so adept at breaking promises because he did not care
deeply enough to ensure those promises were realized. What mattered more was
that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the
right narrative.
Obama is not a serious man. Never was. To this
point, Obama’s best biographer, Pulitzer Prize–winning civil rights historian
David Garrow, titles his summary chapter on the Obama presidency, “The
President did not attend, as he was golfing.”
Serious progressives in the Democratic Party
have long thought of Obama as a dilettante. During his first term, for
instance, outspoken black professor Cornel West chided Obama relentlessly for
his half-hearted commitment to the leftist cause. Worried about losing face,
Obama confronted West at the National Urban League Convention In July 2010.
He came down to West’s seat and hissed within
earshot of others, “I’m not progressive? What kind of sh*t is this?” Obama’s
account of this well-documented confrontation would have made good reading. Too
bad he doesn’t share it in A Promised Land.
What Obama does share in his new memoir,
although no one seems to have noticed, is his unease with his party’s leftward
shift. In A Promised Land, there is not a single reference to
an American left wing, let alone a far-left wing. Nor do we hear of any
American socialists. For Obama “socialist” is an empty accusation leveled by
what he calls “the crazies,” as in, “I was also a secret Muslim socialist, a
Manchurian candidate,” or “[Joe the Plumber] had unmasked my secret, socialist
income-redistribution agenda.”
Obama even rejects the label “progressive” to
describe his political philosophy. He sees progressives as less extreme than
the “crazies,” but he imagines them the way President Kennedy imagined
“liberals;” uneasy allies at best, self-righteous prigs at worst. In A
Promised Land, they stand outside his inner circle prodding him unreflectively
to the left. He writes, for instance, of “progressives unhappy that we hadn’t
done more to remake the banks” and of progressives with their “impractical
demands.”
The label he seems most comfortable with is
“liberal,” but even this word makes him squirm. In the memoir, for instance, he
describes the people who attended a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser on his behalf
as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving West Coast liberals,” as if those latte
drinkers were a class apart. As Obama made comically clear in Iowa a year
earlier, they were not.
Said he on the campaign trail in response to
a question on rising grain prices, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and
see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of
money for this stuff.” At the time, there was not one Whole Foods
store in the entire state. Unfortunately, Arugula-gate does not make the
memoir. That’s a shame. It would have added some welcome humor.
The one label Obama does reject is “centrist,”
a label he identifies with the “triangulating, Davos-attending, Wall
Street-coddling, Washington-focused” presidency of Bill Clinton.
This uncertainty speaks to the question of who
Obama really is, a question he never quite addresses because he may not know
the answer.
After nearly two decades of national exposure,
Obama continues to remind us a little too much of Woody Allen’s Zelig, a
character Vincent Canby of the New York Times described as “so pathologically nil that,
over the years, he has developed the unconscious ability to transform himself,
physically and mentally, into the image of whatever strong personality he’s
with.”
As president, Obama’s bourgeois lifestyle and cool
demeanor made him all the more effective as a front man for a movement that had
grown increasingly strident, even punitive. As ex-president, he is simply
redundant. Although still willing to sell what he lacked the stomach to lead,
the Left no longer needs the service of a front man like Obama. They’ve got an
even more pliable one in the White House.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a
Failed Presidency, is widely available. His forthcoming
book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply,
is available for pre-order. See also www.cashill.com.
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St John's College offers some interesting programs:
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During the 2021 spring semester, community events on the
Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses will be online. Please note the
time zone for events. |
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The Mitchell Gallery is now open online. Exhibitions and
programs are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted. Links to
events will be posted on the website prior to the event. |
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The Plot Against America and Nemesis |
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Phillip Roth was one of the most renowned and influential
figures in modern American writing, described by the New Yok Times as a “prolific, protean,
and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th-century
literature.” In his alternate history novel The Plot Against America—recently adapted
into a miniseries by HBO—Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940 and
signs a pact with Hitler, forcing a Jewish family into a struggle against
rising anti-Semitism. In Nemesis, meanwhile,
Roth imagines a terrifying polio epidemic in his Newark neighborhood during
the summer of 1944. |
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Engage with “The Examined Life” as you continue your practice of
lifelong learning. Spend a week of your summer among fellow lovers of
intellectual inquiry examining great works that span fiction and nonfiction,
math and science, poetry and philosophy, as well as cinematic and performing
arts. Through prepared reading and shared seminar dialogue, we will shine a
light on our world and ourselves, illuminating fundamental reflections upon
what it means to be human. |
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Lectures are currently virtual. Access information will be
available on the website closer to the lecture date. Transcripts and audio of
lectures (when available) can be found in the SJC Digital Archives. |
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Annapolis |
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Santa
Fe |
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Due to ongoing pandemic conditions, the Summer 2021 Music on the
Hill series has been canceled. |
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It is with a heavy heart that we share this news. The
community’s support during this past summer’s virtual programming (made
necessary by the pandemic) and your shared optimism for the next opportunity
to gather safely, enjoying music and one another is and continues to be
invaluable. |
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