Can our candidate stand up, face the American people, and tell the truth about Barack Obama?
Can we win if our candidate says hard, true things about Barack Obama?
Can we win if we don’t say these true things about Obama? That one is not rhetorical. Of course not. We lose before we start if we accept battle within our opponent’s distorted construct of media reality.
We must say the true things we know about Barack Obama, or our arguments make no sense.
Barack Obama is a lying socialist. The evidence is so overwhelming that it is only the iron grip on the thought propagation apparatus by those not-yet-retired fucking hippies and their ideological drones in the younger generations that pushes that reality out of the bounds of civilized discourse, and brands those who decline to lie about what Barack Obama really is as being a little nuts.
That is the charge, right? No sane person can believe that Barack Obama is a lying socialist.
Stanley Kurtz laid out a water-tight case on Obma’s socialism long ago; Barack Obama has spent his entire life, his family life, and purposefully in his teenage and adult years, surrounded by, hanging out and working with marxists and socialists and black liberation theologists and anti-colonialists. He is either a socialist, or he is the world’s worst real life troll.
His socialism is evident by his policies at home. Government by presidential and bureaucratic edict. A permanent reduction in the labor force, a permanent increase in the dependency group, a huge jump in the rate of baseline growth in the budget, a tremendous push towards the tipping point, effective nationalization of 1/6th of the economy, stopping real American energy development while diverting billions for unicorn methane plants, and massive payoffs with your money, and debt placed on your children’s backs, to all elements of the Team: the public employee unions, the private unions, the ACORNs and Planned Parenthoods and NRDCs and the climate controllers and the venture socialists and the crony capitalists and tax farmers of every stripe.
His socialism is evident by his policies abroad. Abandoning Iraq after the brilliantly planned and magnificently executed Surge and initial transition. Afghanistan. Refusing the generals their needs at the git-go, giving them half a loaf, and then pulling the rug out, by deed and word. Letting the Islamic Brotherhood take Egypt from a mostly-not-belligerent-to-Israel Arab ally of America. Libya cowed by the mere thought of Bush swinging America’s cock? Can’t have that, get that weak old man out of there and let’s see what happens with a new failed state, with lots of weapons and oil. A real, active enemy of America under a deadly assault by his own people yearning to be free? Fuck those people, Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon is not tenable without Assad in Syria. Leave him be. The Iranians enriching uranium on their way to a nuclear bomb and the coming of the 12th imam? We think Israel will attack Iran sometme this spring. Just sayin’.
His socialism is evident in his own words. He told us he wanted to share the wealth. He told us America was no more exceptional than Greece. She told us she had never as an adult been proud of America. He told us he wanted to fundamentally transform America.
And the lying. How many ridiculous, blatant, bald-faced lies would the administration have to tell for you to believe that their words have only an incidental relationship with the truth? The reality is that they lie on a scale and scope and with a brazen audacity beyond compare to any previous presidential candidate, much less previous president. The entire Progressive movement is fundamentally one Big Lie, because it is based around the reality that the Prog leadership is much, much more radical than the masses they claim to represent. The Progs believe the people need a vanguard to lead them to what’s good for them, and if the only way to organize them is to claim to be worried about asbestos, so be it.
Barack Obama is a lying socialist, and if our candidate can’t make that case and win, we lose.
I wrote this Wednesday night, planning to come back Thursday and fill in all of the links. And then, the horrendous, unbearable loss. I don’t know what I am going to do yet, but I do know that this is my last anonymous post.
Romney cannot afford to tell the truth about President Obama, because Mitt is cut from the same cloth. Mitt couldn’t stand to have a mirror that shows anything other than his perfectly coiffed hair and the impressive crease of his trousers.
Trying to make the case that he’s a socialist is infinitely less useful than showing how incompetent he is.
Except he’s not incompetent. Based upon his administration’s accomplishements and by his own light, he’s the fourth most consequential president in American history, ranking up there with Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ in terms of consequential transformation.
He’s not wrong.
The risk of relying on “incompetence” alone is that it plays into his narrative. Hey, it’s not our fault! The only mistake we made was in not realizing how truly fucked-up the mess Bush left us! We’re doing the best we can and it’s getting better.
Now, if you want to argue “deliberate” or “designed” incompetence, because shouting Socialist! Marxist! Commie! Pinko! etc. causes peole to tune out. Well, that’s different.
I don’t know what to say to that Ernst. I pretty much refuse to write long comments on blogs, but anything less than that in response would just sound dismissive.
Blessed is he who has something better to do on a Saturday than write long blog comments for no one to read.
It occurs to me also that the danger to us of running on “he’s an incompetent boob!” is that you wind up empowring the people who want to more or less do the same things, only smarter —like Mitt Romney.
The easiest way to be Not Obama is to be better at being Obama than Obama.
Administratively speaking of course.
Is that another way of answering motionview’s question Ernst and Abe? That is, in a twofold sense, that yes, we can tell the truth here amongst ourselves to the extent we can winkle it out, and no, we can’t simply tell the truth in public because it’s both too complex for an over-simple summation and the public won’t sit still long enough to hear it? (This however, may be a condition of the nature of truth in general, as opposed to a condition of the truth of Barack Obama as such.)
What is the truth? Who is it for, the Elect or the Demos?
How you answer those determines how you answer motionview.
If unitary, then the bounds of the universe in which the truth lays determines how we would answer, whether answering motionview or answering ourselves, is I think, how that goes. Which is why it is more complex a matter than to be simply determined in a narrow political setting. Or, to say it another way, what is claimed as truth in any narrow political setting cannot, by definition, be anything like the truth.
You all are more more learned than I, but sometimes I think you over think these things. JeffG has long stated that we should not let other determine our intent. Perhaps simply stating what is will suffice. Let the chips fall where they may. We, as a people, hopefully will make the right choice. If we can not or will not defend our liberty then we do not have the right to claim it as ours.
Bravo TRHein, well said.
I kinda meant more like what is the truth about Barak Obama (or any number of questions or problems of concern to We the People) and do we trust in the people as The People enough to tell them what we think and leave it up to them to reach the right conclusion.
Because clearly the Democrats and half of the Republican party believe we can’t handle the truth!
” . . . do we trust in the people as The People enough to tell them what we think and leave it up to them to reach the right conclusion.”
Don’t we simply take this condition as a given (whether it has anything to do with the truth [I don’t happen to think it does, as such. And that TRHein is correct when saying “If we cannot or will not defend our liberty then we do not have the right to claim it as ours.” but that this statement doesn’t explicitly entail anything like the truth either. That is, some form of deception or coercion may be equally effective in defense.] or not)? I mean, we only have to look: Barack Obama is President of the United States! Right conclusion! Right?
(By the way Ernst, it has only slowly dawned on me this morning that what I’m getting and didn’t exactly put my finger on when I began holding forth, is contained in Socrates’ Apology, as enacted.)
Ernst – you and many others here talk above me. That is not your fault as much as it is that I do not have the proper education to follow all of your thoughts. I am a simple man, a nuckledragger in the very sense of the work. It is not that “we can’t handle the truth!” as much as it is we don’t want to handle the truth. Sadly, I see it in my child, I hear it in her words and I do my best to set things right with her. It is all of us, regardless of polical offiliation, that need to reteach what has not been taught to our children. God willing, there is enough time. Again it is up to us as a people to determine if what we truely want is liberty.
or *word* as it where.
Abe I think that has us arguing from a position where we know something we are saying is not true – Obama is not a socialist – by telling a second lie – Obama is incompetent – and that is a losing hand.
Obama is incompetent? The projected persona is brilliance at everything – Harvard law, half-court hooks, being interviewed and simultaneously catching a fly alive, flowery over-blown rhetoric, and the capstone – Dreams. Obama as incompetent is dissonant with the meme that has and will have been absorbed by the low info voters that decide elections. That meme will be driven home by the media element of the Team over the next year, while any Conservative or Republican will be replaced by a cave-man cartoon, in the news and more importantly in the ridicule media.
The reality – the Team is brilliant, he’s the leader of the Team. His self-grading of solid B+ is about right, if your goal is fundamental transformation.
Well done, mv!
Yes, we can tell the truth about Obama. Will people be willing to listen?
baracky is a stuttering clusterf**k of a miserable failure
sdferr – as JeffG has stated many times it is up to us to change the preception, to help “The People”to understand that they are being misguided. Since we can not take over the MSM we must do our best in providing information and conduits such as Jeff’s site to the people. We are not going to change anything by wringing our hands and wondering if there is a possibility that we can make a difference.
As Jeff has long pointed out, it is changing the minds and I believe it can be done. Whether it will be in time is an open question, one that I hope can be answered in the affirmative. I am trying with my immediate family. If you have any suggestions as to how I can broaden the audience I am open to those.
While it is interesting and I gain knowledge from reading what everyone posts here, going back to the beginings of where philosophers throughout the ages came up with the idea of our republic doesn’t help a knuckledragger as myself teach fundamental truths. Please do not take this as a slam on any of the posters here as that is not my intent. I wish I had half the brain pan you all have.
“We are not going to change anything by wringing our hands and wondering if there is a possibility that we can make a difference.”
Where though, does this question enter in? No one here, and certainly not I, would suggest anything like that, if that is what you’re thinking I intended. And if “going back” were of no use, then what on earth was Mark Levin intending to achieve by writing his newest polemic?
It occurs to me also that the danger to us of running on “he’s an incompetent boob!” …
“Incompetent” was shorthand for something infinitely more complex than that. But like I said, I have an aversion to toiling over long comments on blogs, and that goes double on weekends – especially when it involves what I do at work all week, every week. So I’ll leave to guys to to have your fun.
I think the Democrats are very adept at exploiting the not wanting to handle the truth. As for example when Barak Obama talks about making hard choices —most of which involve us choosing to make the “hard” choice of taking more of the earnings of our wealthier fellow citizens through higher taxes on the rich. That’s not a hard choice exactly.
The problem the Republicans have is that they’re afraid we can’t handle the truth because the Democrats are so good at exploiting the not wanting to handle the truth aspect. As again, when Obama talks about the “hard choice” of raising taxes on the rich, and calls it shared sacrifice. The truth is he’s concealing the vice of envy in the language of virtue. That’s not just a lie, it’s a damnable one.
Too many people on our side believe that a majority of us would rather believe the lie. So they have to soften and shade the truth, for fear of losing.
And in so doing, they lose anyways.
sdrerr – “And if “going back” were of no use,” And this is why I normally just lurk. I can not engage on the intellectual level that most of you regualar posters do. I am not trying to say that looking back on those writings doesn’t help or mean something. Simply it doesn’t help me to teach the civics that I was taught in grade school to my daughter now in college.
I am trying in the here and now to make a difference. I have not chosen some of the battles wisely and that unfortunately follows due to my lack of higher education. If I gave the impression that anyone here has given up that was not my intent. I do still think that there is much hand wringing going on but again who am I but one of the great unwashed who shouldn’t mingle with the educated.
My sincerest apologies. Is it a wonder that we are losing with much hand wringing.
TR, you belong just as anyone belongs. I mean ” . . . who am I but one of the great unwashed who shouldn’t mingle with the educated” does kinda look like handwringing, when we step back a bit. And besides, as is already in evidence today, you have much to contribute to our and everyone else’s benefit. Why would you deny us that by being silent? So, I urge you, don’t handwring! And don’t be selfish! Pipe up!
You’re doing just fine TR, I bore the hell out of people with my turgid prose and nobody understands what sdferr is saying half the time, what with all the subordinating dependent clauses and shit.
Let me put this contention in simpler, more dogmatic terms: Aristotle teaches that the political art par excellence is rhetoric. That there is no politics without it, so to speak. So, let’s say that rhetoric rules politics and the best rhetoric rules the lesser rhetoric in politics.
But then, Aristotle’s teacher Plato taught (what we can presume Plato learned from his teacher Socrates, in turn, and that Aristotle understood perfectly well), that rhetoric is a sham art [see Gorgias], an art fundamentally disinterested in the truth as such. Truth, that is, is not the concern or aim of rhetoric.
HUGE: Gingrich Tennessee Co-Chair Resigns and Endorses Rick Santorum
sdferr – Thanks for making me smile… the only person ever to call me TR was my father and that was a long time ago.
If it seems I am handwringing then perhaps it is because I am frustrated. I have many thoughts regarding the posts here however it is more often than not that one of the regular posters has stated those thoughts and done so more elequently that I could have. I am also frustrated that it seems I make headway in educating my daughter and my parents for that matter but then find I am again behind because of the narrative being pushed.
Ernst is correct in his comment regarding the narrative currently being pushed. I will continue the fight for truth though in honesty I wish it was at least a bit easier. But then nothing worth fighting for has ever been easy.
TRHein, I second Ernst, sdferr and LBascom.
Please keep posting.
“I will continue the fight for truth though in honesty I wish it was at least a bit easier. But then nothing worth fighting for has ever been easy.”
Our political fights, I want to say, are fights for the sake of the good (what has been devalued today in displacement for the gross term “values”), not for the sake of truth, and even in this (the fight for the good) not solely for the sake of the current good, the present good (though that is there too in the sense in which our politics fights to preserve what is good sometimes!), but also for the sake of the good in the future, which may be different from the good which is current (i.e., for the sake of change for the better).
One man’s rhetoric is another man’s demagoguery?
I hope all our lurkers realize they have plenty to contribute and there’s no need to be nervous.
I mean, hell, have you ever read some of my comments? I’ve probably written twenty dumb comments for every one a lurker might worry about submitting.
“One man’s rhetoric is another man’s demagoguery?”
heh.
If we look back again, we see that for Aristotle, ho demos is one thing in the political universe, hoi kaloikagathoi another. Both can be led, and both have a role to play.
sdferr – You got me… I hang my head in shame for it is true that values or moral values was what I was thinking about rather than truth.
It seems strange to think that I have the values my parents instilled in me and yet they seem to have changed course somewhere along the way. That my daughter is filled with nonsence is not so hard to understand given her current involvement in higher education though I am proud of many of her decisions. Unfortunately she sometimes doesn’t see the forest for the trees.
I am at a disadvantage for posting since there is a bit of a time difference and currently I am well past the point where I should have been sleeping but I will try to engage when I can.
I really do enjoy reading everyone’s responses though I don’t always understand them.
sdferr, what is “ho demos” and “hoi kaloikagathoi?” I suspect it refers to segments of society, but that’s just a WAG. Google wasn’t much help, either.
Just “the people” and “the [plural] gentlemen“, in rough translation Blake.
The pedagogue was the family slave who “led” — agoge — the children [paidea] (around by the hand) to school.
The demagogue is the rhetorician who leads the demos (around by the hand) to a p0litical conclusion.
I thought the people was hoi polloi, IE, when I pretend to know anything about Greek… it’s the gutter Greek of the hoi polloi.
It is, sort of, Lee (“hoi“, is just the plural definite article, where “ho” is the singular) .
In strict translation it just means “the [plural] many”, I guess in the sense of “the majority”. But then it gets transmuted rhetorically to the mob. The demos is more nearly connected to the land, or the place, than the number, like “countrymen”, so to speak.
Got it, thanks.
Well, shit, HR. I lurked here for years before piping up. I consider myself fairly well-educated, but certainly not on a par with some of the classically educated high-brows hanging out here. Best thing about this site is that it gives us a chance to compare notes, try out arguments and get some input from others. And a chance to occasionally throw some bullshit around.
Just in case I’ve left the impression that this quibble about whether truth can stand as an aim in politics is entirely off the wall, lemme say a couple of things more about it, and do that with a rhetorical question to begin:
Question: For what thing is truth the actual, primary aim?
Answer: Science. (Or philosophy, in the old old style.)
But politics and science aren’t things alike at all. Rhetoric, for instance, is generally taken to have no role in science (or very little role to whatever extent it may have a role), and is instantly suspect wherever it may appear to take a role (see only Anthropogenic Global Warming, as a for instance). Science too, unlike politics, will necessarily be thought to be the same for one and all human beings, whether the one is a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Jew. Particularly modern physical science, which is tethered to mathematics like stink is tethered to shite. And for what human being is 2 + 2 = 5?
Politics, on the other hand? Where warfare, coercion, secrecy and double-dealing necessarily enter in?
Another rhetorical question, to simplify matters:
Question: For which political theory is science the guiding principle?
Answer: Progressivism, or positivism, however we term it.
Which, if the thesis that truth is not the aim of politics has any validity at all, points directly at why it is that progressivism is so offensive to human beings in the first place. The progressives have made an error of design, taking something unfit to be a principle as a principle. And it only gets worse from there.
The aim of politics is power. Which is kind of a truth in of itself.
Less power than the good, I think. Power is useful toward establishing the good, but if it misses it? Not so useful.
How about if I substitute ‘advantage’ for ‘power’?
I’m uncertain which way to go with that Lee. I mean, it seems like advantage will be qualified or modified in some way or other by the good in the end anyhow.
If we take a concrete example, like Syria, for instance, to look at in political terms, would that help us work out the meaning of advantage with a view to its application to politics as a whole?
with syria its all about power. ax the eye doctor?
No, no, no, no, no. If you have something to say and you can say it sensibly, for God’s sake, say it. Higher educations, as has been documented here repeatedly, is overrated and sometimes poisonous.
OUTLAWS are generally not academics.
This is a marvelous piece of work, motionview. Chock full of truth.
“With Syria it’s all about power.”
Right, which is why I picked it. The doctor cannot make the discontent go away, nor really, though it is abated for the moment in Iran, can the Mullahs who have repressed the Iranian people. At the first chance, the Iranians will once again move to control their own lives and be rid of the control of the Mullahs.
So though Assad and the Mullahs have power in abundance relative to their people, (for whom the politics are conducted, or so say Assad and the Mullahs to their people — lying in other words, paying lip service to the actual aims of politics — while never admitting that their tyranny is solely in their own narrower interests), the people understand the point of politics in a better way, as aiming at their own good for reals, as we say, and not for sham, and therefore conducting themselves with a view to obtaining that control, even at the cost of their own lives in many instances. And one element among many of the goods they seek is the freedom to choose their own motions, their going to and fro, to choose their own manner of dress, their own time and place of assembly, their own manner of worship of a deity or deities, or not, and so on. Liberty, plain and simple.
TRHein, I think everyone has the ability to contribute to the collective intelligence at work on this blog. Some learned what they know in school , some learned on their own. Everyone has had a unique life experience, which means a given person has encountered things the rest of us have not.
Do not be afraid to contribute, and do not think you don’t have anything to contribute, because you do. And don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s said in the comments. I don’t, and I’ve been reading here for about ten years.
@sdferr, I think I’m missing something here as a scientist who’s also a classical liberal, because–as I laid out on another thread–I find progressivism to be aggressively antiscientific in how it approaches the problems it says it wants to solve. (It’s also not particularly interested in truth, either.)
Although I think I get where you’re going from the Hayek speech, I’m not quite there yet.
Pellegri, sorry for the late reply, as I’ve only just happened back into this thread now (looking for something else and not finding it!) and discover your question by accident. Still, it’s a good question, and I think deserves an answer.
Here’s the thing: the progressivism or positivism I’m referring to upthread is the progressivism founded by such as Condorcet or positivism founded by Comte. They were quite clear about their principles, which I think I’ve accurately characterized.
As to modern day progressivism or positivism — contemporary progressivism in the hands of living dummies — you’re quite right, they’re lost. They haven’t a clue what their antecedents are (for the most part, not to say perfectly to a man or woman), nor as far as I can tell, even what science would be or be about. But there we are.