Monday, August 13, 2012

This'n'That; August Thirteenth #1; The Amateur

I NEVER Buy A Book With obama on The Cover 
    But, while grocery shopping at the local "B.J.'s" I normally stop at their book display.  I'd heard about this book for some time, but had never seen it; had never even considered buying it.  Then I read the introduction, which I'll quote for you here:
Introduction:  The Dark Side of obama
"Every man is a moon and has a [dark] side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it."--Mark Twain
This is a reporter's book.
    During the past year and a half, I have interviewed nearly two hundred people, both inside and outside the White House.  Many of these people have known barack obama for more than twenty years--from his earliest days in Chicago.  Some of them were positive about obama, others were negative, but the stories they told had a remarkable consistency.
    Bound in dozens of four-inch-thick three-ring notebooks, my transcribed notes run for almost a thousand pages and tell the story of a man who is at bottom temperamentally unsuited to be the chief executive and commander in chief of the United States of America.  Here in these interviews we come face to face with something new in American politics--The Amateur--a president who is inept in the arts of management and governance, who doesn't learn from his mistakes, and who therefore repeats policies that make our economy less robust and our nation less safe.  We discover a man who blames all his problems on those whom he disagrees ("Washington," "Republicans," "the media"), who discards old friends and supporters when they are no longer useful (democrats, African-Americans, Jews), and who is so thin-skinned that he constantly complains about what people say and write about him.  We come to know a strange kind of politician, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of politics, but who clings to the narcissistic life of the presidency.
    This portrait of obama is radically at odds with the image of a centrist, pragmatic, post-partisan leader that his political handlers have tried to create.  And it is a far cry from the obama most Americans remember from four years ago.  Many of the people I interviewed, including Republicans who voted against him, wondered what had happened to that obama--the young, articulate African-American senator who burst upon the political scene by presenting himself as a new kind of politician, a peacemaker, a mediator, and conciliator who promised to heal the rift between red and blue America?
Where did he vanish?
Did he ever exist?
Was he a figment of his own imagination, or of our imagination--or of both?
How did he turn out to be the most divisive president in recent American history?
Will Americans finally come to recognize the dark side of barack obama in the presidential election of 2012?
    These are some of the critical questions I set out to answer in this book.  My job as a reporter was complicated by the fact that obama and his advisers have gone to elaborate lengths to hide his dark side.  However, I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.  As you will see in the pages that follow, I chose to launch my investigation in Chicago, where obama first donned his disguise as an ideological wolf in sheep's clothing.
    "Ever since I've known him, obama has had delusions of grandeur and a preoccupation with his place in history," one of his oldest Chicago acquaintances told me.
"He is afflicted with megalomania.  How else can you explain the chutzpah of an obscure community organizer who began writing his autobiography before he was thirty years old--and before he had any accomplishments to write about?" 
And how else can you explain the chutzpah of a first-term United States senator, who believed he was qualified for the most difficult job in the world--the presidency--even though he had never held a real job in his life?
     "You can explain it with any number of words:  arrogance, conceit, egotism, vanity, hubris," this person continued.
"But whatever word you choose, it spells the same thing--disaster for the country he leads."
    obama's supporters claim that he has been falsely charged with a being a leftwing ideologue.  But based on my reporting, I concluded that obama is actually in revolt against the values of the society he was elected to lead.  Which is why he has refused to embrace American exceptionalsim--the idea that Americans are a special people with a special destiny--and why he has railed at the capitalist system, demonized the wealthy, and embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement.
    Of course, obama doesn't see things that way.  And therein lies the challenge for conservatives.  As Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, points out "barack obama may be lousy president.... but he's a very good campaigner."  He is determined to get reelected and go down in history books as a transformative president who turned America into a European-style democratic-socialist welfare state.
    Shortly after obama entered the White House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned him, "Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression."
    To which obama boasted, "That's not enough for me."
It may finally have become too much for the rest of us.
    Whew!  Finally!!  Someone who appears to 'tell it like it is!!!'  As I said before, I've always shied away from buying any publication with 'obama' on the cover; this time I'm hoping I won't be disappointed.
    Hopefully from-time-to-time, I'll publish some quotes as I read the book.
Til Nex'Time....

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