Andrew Malcolm, IBD:
Seventy-five months into his perpetual campaign to transform America into something else, Barack Obama is still talking about all that’s wrong with the country he’s spent almost $2 billion of other people’s money to lead.
You might think by now the unhappy warrior would be capable of touting some progress in his annual string of commencement addresses to inattentive audiences sitting in hot sun.
But, No. Obama feels forced to talk about how things are decaying, and not just those rusting bridges. How politically dysfunctional and divided is the capitol city he vowed to fix way back what now seems an eternity ago. How the country really needs to be so much better to live up to his expectations.
Obama’s telepromptered rhetoric is still steeped in the combative, corrective, community organizer language of radically changing the nation that he didn’t grow up in and that scores of millions of citizens are really pretty happy with, even as they acknowledge collective national faults to work on as generations have before.
“People who love their country can change it for the better,” the president informed a partially-filled stadium of Ohio State enthusiasts on Sunday. (Scroll down for a full C-SPAN video.) They thought they’d come to celebrate what they or a loved one had just accomplished in academe.
They got brief celebratory commencement political yada-yada about this being an important day in their own lives. But with Obama there’s always an undercurrent of unhappiness and discontent, of dissatisfaction with whatever anyone has just accomplished. NBA, NCAA, NASCAR champs yes, that’s OK.
That’s never enough, however. Don’t go feeling too good. You didn’t build that yourself. You really have to do something else, help somebody else, build something else. As if everyone grew up fatherless and must spend an entire futile life proving something.
Was Obama celebrating the late nights of university study to earn this degree? The lessons learned, minds expanded? The friendships formed into lifelong bonds? Of course, not.
He’s got to talk about “all the times you’ve been let down, or frustrated at the hand that you’ve been dealt.” Like what–attending a state school instead of the private ones he went to?
Seriously? This Democrat is peddling victim-hood to new college graduates? That awful raw deal they’re enduring graduating from a world-renowned university on the brink of bountiful lives in the freest land in the history of the planet? Dear God, please help them live through this terrible time of trial and tribulation!
Or how about this Obama claim?
“Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves,” Obama declared dishonestly, “as you’ve studied and worked and served to become good citizens, the fact is that all too often the institutions that give structure to our society have, at times, betrayed your trust.”
No, he wasn’t talking about a major party leader betraying all the promises he made in 2007-08 about balancing the budget, cutting the deficit, closing Guantanamo, bringing Washington together.
He wasn’t blaming Wall Street capitalists for donating so much of their profits to his campaigns. He was blaming them for trying to make so much money without regard to others. If you can imagine such a thing in a competitive free society.
Two other ominous Obama observations that are, predictably, the fault of others:
“I think it’s fair to say our democracy isn’t working as well as we know it can. It could do better….
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works.”
According to Obama, the United States of America that he sees in all of his expensive excursions aboard Air Force One for one or two photo ops per week is not much interested in patriotism or citizenship. […]
“We don’t always talk about this idea much these days — citizenship — let alone celebrate it,” bemoaned the man, who as a new candidate didn’t bother with the tedious hand-over-the-heart thing during the National Anthem.
“Sometimes, we see (citizenship) as a virtue from another time, a distant past, one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition above all else; a society awash in instant technology that empowers us to leverage our skills and talents like never before, but just as easily allows us to retreat from the world. And the result is that we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share as one American family.”
Can you believe this bunkum? What “larger bonds” have you noticed disappearing from America, not counting the fiscal discipline thrown under Obama’s armored bus?
A troubled nation that “celebrates individual ambition above all else”? Like, say, a mixed race freshman senator out of the nation’s most crooked political machine convincing himself that he should be the first black president of the United States? And enough voters buying his promises to put him and his Chicago cronies there? Tawdry, presumptuous individual ambition like that?
That’s some tough stuff, Mr Malcolm. But in fairness, Obama wasn’t all down on America. He did say, for instance, that once we rid ourselves of our gauche individualistic ambitions and work together as a great collective, with government as both our steward and our rock, we can accomplish truly great communal things, largely because unlike, say, sexism, homophobia, racism, nativism, predatory capitalism, big oil, big pharma, big insurance, big banking, and the unsavory income disparity driven by special interests and the rich, tyranny isn’t lurking ’round the bend — in fact, the very idea is absurd, a teabagger fiction, people having voted to put into power very special, very smart people to run things very effectively and efficiently through cagey backroom negotiations and gangs of this and that, or through unelected bureaucracies serving the whims of the Executive branch, creating regulations with the force of law, just as the framers intended! — and anybody who tells you otherwise is one of those shady, dangerous rightwing fringe extremists threatening, through his or her hater grumblings, to become organized and violent and ready to engage in heinous acts of domestic terrorism in the names of his guns and his religion and his non-inclusive, non-multiculturalist, homophobic values.
— Which, see? There is so much right with America, too! Mainly Obama and those who follow him! So congrats on that.
Now. Go out there and do something productive with your lives, graduates! Like for instance, turning them over to the state for the betterment of all!
Fairness. Yes.
Like, with the two pan balance scale — a libra.
Which shows up in deliberate.
Not “liberate”, as to make “free”.
But to weigh. For fairness. Honestly. Openly. Considering what must be weighed.
Odd thing about that ObaZma guy. One must always look carefully to see where his thumbs are.
Progressive Utopias are always just around the corner. A bit more tweaking and we’ll get even closer.
So much is wrong with America: its president, its vice president, its secretaries of state, treasury and defense and its attorney general; its House and Senate leadership; its Chief Justice and most of the others on the Supreme Court; its
Fourth Estatefifth column…For starters…
Odd thing about that ObaZma guy. One must always look carefully to see where his thumbs are.
Mostly up his ass, and his mind on his next vacation.
We can do this together, folks. Collective action. All for one, and one for all.
I get teary just thinking about it.
There’s a transcript here.
Right, because the jackass in the White House can’t do anything about how the government works. No, that’s going to take a group of newly minted unemployed folks.
And those lobbyists and lawmakers? They’ve got nothing to do with the awesome government! Which can’t do anything without the Class of 2013.
How does a guy who makes no sense whatsoever get the “brilliant orator” rep?
…sed libera nos a malo.
“Irregular order” is now the SOP and with the MSM’s good PR and a few more years it will come to be (if it hasn’t already) the expected and presumed “regular order.”
The progressive’s devolving evolution into a feudal oligarchy with them, of course, firmly ensconced in a positions which shall evermore be dribbled down the ever lesser family line.
Well, sure you do, having seen firsthand what a progressive utopia the collective has made of Detroit. Who wouldn’t?
“The progressive’s devolving evolution into a feudal oligarchy with them, of course, firmly ensconced”
It didn’t work out that way any of the other hundred or so times, but they think this time it’s going to be different. The more fool them. They might want to whip out a Ouija board and have a chat with the “intellectuals” who wound up being reeducated in the Cultural Revolution, or the ones whose skulls wound up in pyramids in Cambodia, or perhaps Leon “Ice Ax Man” Trotsky.
Oh, transcript here. Oops.
Funny, here I thought it was individualism that was seen as a relic from a long-forgotten age. But then, I also thought that citizenship was about supporting and protecting your family, friends, and neighbors without turning to a distant bureaucrat to keep you like some sort of pet, so perhaps my understanding of these nuanced terms is a bit faulty.
From the transcript: But (citizenship is) out there, all the time, every day — especially when we need it most. Just look at the past year. When a hurricane struck our mightiest city, and a factory exploded in a small town in Texas, we saw citizenship.
Did a hurricane hit Houston when I wasn’t looking?
You sick, vicious little motherfucker. The system left to us by the Founders didn’t leave us the tools “to do big, important things together.” They left us a system by which assholes like Obama wouldn’t be given the power to fuck up the tools we already possessed, tools like free association and free trade.
One does not need Washington in order to educate one’s children. In fact, Washington generally fucks it up. One does not need Washington to care for the sick or the poor or the old; in fact, Washington generally fucks it up. To characterize our founding documents as a means by which to allow Washington to assume every power properly understood at the time as belongs to individuals and their local communities and churches is to grievously pervert those documents and the ideals contained in them, in order to use them to promote precisely those actions they were intended to prevent.
Fuck you, Mister President. If we want to accomplish great things together, we’ll form one of those corporations you hate so much (except when they’re giving you money) and get the job done without holding a gun to anybody’s head and forcing them to chip in. And when we’ve successfully accomplished our goals, we may choose to pour some of our “evil” profits into our communities, without the endless fraud, abuse, red tape, and shackles that come with any money begged from Washington.
You want our new graduates to diminish their individual ambitions only because you’re afraid that those ambitions might detract from your own grand designs. Because free, talented people pursuing their own dreams are not as useful to you as dependent, despondent people granting you ever-increasing power in exchange for whatever crumbs you see fit to throw their way.
On their graduation day, you seek to turn these graduates into another army of your mindless, hopeless minions, and you use our founding ideals to do it. Fuck. You.
“When a hurricane struck our mightiest city”
It’s pretty clear from that statement alone that Bumblefuck isn’t planning to move back to Chicago.
You’re holding yourself back again, Squid. I can tell.
Same way he gets the “likeable” and “good man” reps. From his sycophants and the lickspittle media.
. . . to conquer fascism and disease . . .
Disease? Not so much.
But what a triumph of progressivism to claim to conquer fascism from without while re-establishing it from within. Suckers.
Edwards was right, there really are two America’s.
There’s the America that just wants to be left alone in peace to live its life and raise its family, minding its own business.
And then there’s the America that won’t leave the other America alone, because minding the other America’s business is its business.
We’re a nation divided against itself. Again. And with the same prospect: to become all the one, or the other.
What Squid said.
To Oz?
To Oz!
I’m going to report Ernst for apostrophe abuse.
Ach! Himmel!
Gesundheit.
one of those shady, dangerous rightwing fringe extremists threatening, through his or her hater grumblings, to become organized and violent and ready to engage in heinous acts of domestic terrorism in the names of his guns and his religion and his non-inclusive, non-multiculturalist, homophobic values.
We’re already committing heinous acts of hoarding and prepping, after all…
I’ve been on vacation, cranky. Give me some time to get back up to speed.
Geez Squid, it’s people like you what cause unrest.
It’s only because I see the violence inherent in the system, steph.
I don’t know, but there might be a conflict of interest formenting violence whilst advertising pitchforks and whatnot. Just saying.
You should be praising me for not supporting the gun bans. Because when guns are outlawed, pitchforks and torches will be the next best thing!
Don’t forget cudgels. Your ensemble is not complete without one.
We could start the law firm of Pierce, Burns and Bludgeon.
Hey!
You people quit with that funny stuff. This place has been reported as uncool and extreme so get with the program already ;^)