Agree wholeheartedly [well, mostly] with Thomas Sowell - and I've been saying a version of this since 2008 when I declared Obama's support of and promise to fight and win his so called good war in Afghanistan an absolute lie he needed to tell in order to look presidential [he knew he couldn't simply be known as the guy who opposed the Iraq war] and enable his defeat of Hillary - in my opinion once president he'd do only what he had to do to make it look like he was keeping his primary promise and protect his political capital but had little desire to fight a war that was of no interest to him and did not serve his agenda of shrinking America as a global power - I believed this because having taken the measure of the man I had concluded he was a consummate and committed dissembler when it came to promoting his interests and also because there was clearly nothing in his ideological past to suggest he put much stock in the winning of such wars or in the value of American power - indeed, the philosophical underpinnings of the leftist intellectual swamp he crawled out of strongly suggested he was much more likely to see the American military as nothing more that a grotesque manifestation of white privilege employed in the service of evil capitalists. The hamfisted way he tried to turn Bergdahl into a hero in order to serve his political needs was surely an expression either of his contempt for the values that define the US military or an utterly abject lack of understanding thereof.
So I agree with Sowell that those who claim 'incompetence' in explaining the awfulness of the Obama presidency are missing the point - not that incompetence doesn't play a part because the man is quite clearly an inept chief executive - but such trivial stuff as management doesn't matter to him - it's all about ideology and exploiting his deified persona, celebrity status and favored standing with the indentured media in order to push the country as far left as possible by whatever means possible, legal or otherwise - like a true socialist ideologue Obama believes that the end absolutely justifies the means that the fevered conceit of his imagination has so constructed and the end he and his swooning catamites seek here is a vision of America that most Americans would not much appreciate if they could see it, which they can't because as Sowell says we're being driven to the edge of ruin by frivolity.
[I would expand on that viz how Obama gets away with this: one, true, the electorate is at fault for being either stupid, naive, uninterested, uninvolved or ideologically predisposed to make vain and quite superficial assumptions about things - and I'm not at all sure what to do about that because it's a problem that plagues all democracies; two, as said before, Obama is a superb liar with zero qualms about spewing bullshit in order to serve an agenda; three and the key to all this as far as I'm concerned, the media enables Obama by either agreeing more or less with the agenda and thus becoming co-conspirators or by being blinded by the ignorant, near childish sentimentality of thinking him as the first black president trumps all other considerations; and finally, the failure of conservatives to nominate people who have the wherewithal to mitigate the noxious effects of this media bias - simply complaining about it does nothing for you - you have to put forward candidates who have the attributes required to beat it down and this the GOP consistently fails to do - indeed, so convinced am I of the ruinous effects of media bias and the way it subverts the legitimacy of a democracy that I've got to the point of seriously joking or joking with all seriousness that my only requirement for the 2016 GOP nominee is that they have the ability to go on The Daily Show and not only hold their own against Stewart, both from an ideological and entertainment value point of view, but also come away looking the clear winner - any candidate who can pull that off would be telling me they've got the media chops required to win. In short, it's all about defeating, if not wholly at least to a significant degree, the off putting caricature of conservatism that the liberal media has spent years now crafting - no easy task, but vital I think]
[on the plus side though - a plus built out of a huge negative so not really a plus I guess - searching for a silver lining the prospect is definitely out there that the Obama presidency is now going so badly that even an indulgent press can no longer manage the heavy lifting of saving the narrative - unfortunately that doesn't mean for one second that they won't all snap right back into line when it's Hillary's turn - one can already imagine the spin: Obama's problem was lack of executive experience, but Hillary's got that... sort of... anyway, just look at her as being Bill's third term...]
So I agree with Sowell that those who claim 'incompetence' in explaining the awfulness of the Obama presidency are missing the point - not that incompetence doesn't play a part because the man is quite clearly an inept chief executive - but such trivial stuff as management doesn't matter to him - it's all about ideology and exploiting his deified persona, celebrity status and favored standing with the indentured media in order to push the country as far left as possible by whatever means possible, legal or otherwise - like a true socialist ideologue Obama believes that the end absolutely justifies the means that the fevered conceit of his imagination has so constructed and the end he and his swooning catamites seek here is a vision of America that most Americans would not much appreciate if they could see it, which they can't because as Sowell says we're being driven to the edge of ruin by frivolity.
[I would expand on that viz how Obama gets away with this: one, true, the electorate is at fault for being either stupid, naive, uninterested, uninvolved or ideologically predisposed to make vain and quite superficial assumptions about things - and I'm not at all sure what to do about that because it's a problem that plagues all democracies; two, as said before, Obama is a superb liar with zero qualms about spewing bullshit in order to serve an agenda; three and the key to all this as far as I'm concerned, the media enables Obama by either agreeing more or less with the agenda and thus becoming co-conspirators or by being blinded by the ignorant, near childish sentimentality of thinking him as the first black president trumps all other considerations; and finally, the failure of conservatives to nominate people who have the wherewithal to mitigate the noxious effects of this media bias - simply complaining about it does nothing for you - you have to put forward candidates who have the attributes required to beat it down and this the GOP consistently fails to do - indeed, so convinced am I of the ruinous effects of media bias and the way it subverts the legitimacy of a democracy that I've got to the point of seriously joking or joking with all seriousness that my only requirement for the 2016 GOP nominee is that they have the ability to go on The Daily Show and not only hold their own against Stewart, both from an ideological and entertainment value point of view, but also come away looking the clear winner - any candidate who can pull that off would be telling me they've got the media chops required to win. In short, it's all about defeating, if not wholly at least to a significant degree, the off putting caricature of conservatism that the liberal media has spent years now crafting - no easy task, but vital I think]
[on the plus side though - a plus built out of a huge negative so not really a plus I guess - searching for a silver lining the prospect is definitely out there that the Obama presidency is now going so badly that even an indulgent press can no longer manage the heavy lifting of saving the narrative - unfortunately that doesn't mean for one second that they won't all snap right back into line when it's Hillary's turn - one can already imagine the spin: Obama's problem was lack of executive experience, but Hillary's got that... sort of... anyway, just look at her as being Bill's third term...]
