Monday, October 3, 2016

Interesting audio has surfaced of Hillary talking at a private fundraiser and describing Bernie Sanders’ fans as delusional idealists looking for big govt hand outs of progressivey treats like free university etc etc – not her words exactly of course but that was gist of her remarks – false promises I think she called the Sanders rhetoric.

Interesting for two reasons. One, she’s of course right – but aside from that it’s reassuring to hear her talk in a somewhat reasonable and moderate way, encouraging one to imagine or legitimately hope that just maybe she won’t simply be a female version of Obama, flouting our constitutional order by leveraging a biased media to push forward an extremist agenda. Unfortunately, the other reason it’s interesting is because that hope is probably doomed since Hillary, fearful that a lack of enthusiasm from the far left is going to doom her, has adopted many of Sanders’ false promises.

In short, even if one manages to convince themselves that Hillary is apt to govern as a moderate, it won’t matter – the far left wields too much influence on the Democratic Party – moderation will not be tolerated. Add to this disturbing zealotry and how increasingly the media is morphing into the propaganda arm of that beast the frightening fact that Obama will soon be free of having to fake moderation as President and therefore will soon be stepping into his post White House role of being the chief spokesman for the progressive agenda – I believe Obama will be the most politically active ex-president ever and will exert a lot of influence accordingly. And so, even if Hillary is a more palatable choice than she currently seems and wants to for instance do something like scrap the awful Iran nuke deal, forget about it – Obama will summon his acolytes and the zealots will tear her apart. I mean, just look at what happened to Jimmy Fallon, the guy who used to slow dance the news with Obama – torn apart by the left just for having Trump on his show – and Trump isn’t even a conservative! That’s how out of control the left is and so even if one imagines there’s a moderate hiding away somewhere in the great pant-suited one, that person will never see the light of day.

The country’s in a bad place and desperately in need of a highly skilled leader capable, like Reagan, of doing the horse trading required of our republican system – that person’s nowhere to be found. I’d say the one who comes closest to it is probably Ryan but when you combine how out of control the left is and how media bias feeds that disease with what Trump has done to the GOP it’s hard to see a path to the presidency for someone like him. The system is designed to force compromise and bipartisanship on the elected – its goal is moderation - the country is moving in the exact opposite direction. It won’t end well.

I remember in 2008 being convinced, in opposition to almost everyone I knew or had a daily contact with, that Obama would be an awful president if he won – the opposition to my viewpoint was so monolithic and in many cases vituperative – can’t tally how many times it was insinuated I was racist - that I came to the point of hoping Obama would win so that I could be proven right. Bush’s egregious mistakes aside, mission accomplished there I think. Profoundly awful president. The reasons why I thought he’d prove awful varied, but the chief reason I think was the way the media was so in the tank for him – and not just in the tank, but in the tank for the most simplistic, most vacuous, most naïve of reasons – he was black – but not just black since Condelezza Rice would not have enjoyed such sycophancy – he was a black guy who spoke the left’s idealist nonsense with a perfect cadence – he didn’t sound black. He was the embodiment of the perfect world the left dreams of, a world that can only be created by their inclusive sentimentality. And that’s what you learned – the left has little to do with ideas, with objective analysis, with rationality applied to empirical evidence – it’s ultimately about sentiment, about emotion, about feelings – about a desire that the world be made to look like what they desperately need it to look like if their beliefs are to remain relevant. That is essentially the definition of idealism and essentially why Kant could never beat Hume in a debate – unless of course the debate was moderated by CNN.

What the media being in the tank for Obama told me was that he would be allowed to do whatever he wanted and this indulgence would enable bad thinking, bad ideas, bad policy and bad behavior – all evidenced by the Obama administration. Worse, mistakes would be overlooked, explained away in order to serve the ideological imperative, and therefore all the missteps that led to the mistakes would not be corrected, compounding the malaise. Again, that pretty much defines the Obama administration – its mistakes, which are many, are rationalized into a nebulous cloud that the average voter cannot penetrate.

In practical terms, compare to Bush – he had no choice but to address the mistakes of his Iraq invasion – I don’t wanna debate the invasion itself since, forgetting twenty twenty hind sight, legitimate arguments for and against can be mounted there – but the post invasion thinking was quite clearly flawed. Bush was forced to face the mistakes he made because the media attention thereof was relentless – thus the surge. Where has the same standard been applied to Obama? It hasn’t – his egregious mistakes involving Libya, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Russia, China, Israel just vanish into the media induced cloud and therefore the mistakes never have to be corrected – and therefore the thinking that engendered the mistakes can be reproduced – and it is. Obama still talks about his approach to Syria as if it was beautifully nuanced, foreign policy at its best – frightening thing is, I don’t think per his usual that he’s lying when he says that – I think the idiot actually believes it.


And that essentially defines the awfulness of Obama. And probably defines Trump – a president who is so awful yet so beloved by the media is bound to produce outrage I think amongst a great many people – the establishment is clearly unable to stop this awfulness therefore an establishment candidate is not going to have a lot of appeal – thus Trump. Which is why it doesn’t seem to matter that Trump is not fit to be president – people who support him feel the system is entirely fucked [they’re probably right] and therefore don’t care about such niceties – I think a media corrupted by bias is a very bad thing when it comes to democracy – the founding fathers clearly felt that way – I think what we’re seeing is a consequence of that corruption.