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Journal smittyoneeach's Journal: Let Chaos Be Perfectly Clear 24

Journal by smittyoneeach
Thoughtful outing by Victor Davis Hanson

Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obamaâ(TM)s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.
By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously â" not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe â" Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

Read the whole well-linked thing.
If the United States learns nothing else from the Obama experience, it must be that, while you can take a mediocre chap and turn him into a triumph of style over substance, the side effects are spectacularly bad.
Come to think of it, W. was a mediocre chap, too.
How does a society breed statesmen in the Postmodern era?

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Let Chaos Be Perfectly Clear More

Let Chaos Be Perfectly Clear

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  • The president is an actor. He reads his script and follows directions, if he wants a comfortable retirement. Why do you obsess on the personality? Whose script are you reading, aside from your regular right wing sites there? It's damn near copy pasta, without the sauce.

    • The better Presidents are leaders. To the extent they've a script, it's the founding documents.
      If the meaning here escapes you, that says more of you than the meaning.

      • The only meaning you illustrate are the fantasies of grade school textbook propaganda. Not that it separates you from the herd or anything. As in nature itself, being in the middle of it is still your safest bet, This is the gloom and doom I must accept, and I do, but you cling to a facade. Corporate bylaws have replaced your *piece of paper* a long time ago, and those are the scripts of your so-called "leaders".

        • This is the gloom and doom I must accept, and I do, but you cling to a facade.

          Always with the H8. . .

          • What H8? Where? You're fantasizing again...

            • Gotta H8 on liberty, and call it a 'façade'.
              Would I could communicate to you that, past this H8, there is liberty.

              • Your concepts of liberty are too selective to be taken as such, to paraphrase, you use it as a punchline, especially when you see other people's liberties as "hedonism", another one of those code words. So yes, it is a facade. I'm trying to exterminate privilege. That is liberty, implicitly and explicitly.

                • What privilege, exactly, have I asserted over you?
                  I see much high-mindedness in your arguments, but it always seems to reveal itself a smokescreen.
                  Hedonism is a code word, true. For 'hedonism'. Sometimes I may indulge in humor, and play at unclarity. Regret confusion.

                  • Who would you rather be fucking your teen daughter?
                    Obama, Bush, Reagan or Kennedy?

                    • Had I a teen daughter, and having raised her in the fear of the Lord, I should hope she's united in proper marriage with a Christian man, enjoying the optimal human experience morally, mentally, and physically, and begetting her a passel of children to raise likewise.
                      Having moved off the optimal, it really doesn't matter whom she shags.

                    • If someone is in fear of God, they didn't really "get" the Christian message.

                      "But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions."

                      "I cannot exclude the possibility that God would save all men at the Judgment."
                      -- Karl Barth

                    • Talking past each other here. "Fear" in this context refers to def #4 [reference.com].
                    • And I can agree with Barth from the standpoint of "I ain't God, and He'll have His way at judgement."
                      But I don't think the Bible as written supports any Universalism. Beware.
                    • We're all entitled to our own interpretations.
                      But we none of us escape that final heartbeat.

            • What H8?

              There was no hate. It's part of the right-wing "rules for radicals" that certain accusations must be made.

              Look for the keywords: "Hate" and "chaos" and my favorite, "demonic".

              If you take a few minutes and look for most overheated words in any given National Review or Weekly Standard article, you will find that the same words appear, sometimes changing weekly. Vocabulary lists come down from the Koch-funded think tanks and get distributed downward. Then to the Blaze, and the Michele Malkin pages,

              • Southern conservatism employing Southern Strategy. Cultural "purity" and "stability" are paramount. All skepticism and questioning of authority (code word here, "postmodernism") is teh evil. Appealing to base instincts will always prevail. They (the grunts, not the leadership) *use*, without really understanding, the same psychology that they so vehemently disparage as pseudoscience. These people are more bio-centric than they can ever consciously realize, and they are as "human" as a hippopotamus. The char

      • By that script, we haven't had a President *on script* in my lifetime, and the Tea Party Republicans during this shutdown are coming closest to what needs to happen when you have a President who thinks he is an Emperor.

        • By that script, we haven't had a President *on script* in my lifetime...

          Nor in anybody else's. Fact is, that script is impossible to follow without it turning into a "suicide pact". They have been busting that rock since Washington and Adams. Now it's just *dust in the wind, dude*. Send the ashes to Buckingham Palace.

        • I think Reagan, flaws and all, qualifies.
          Further, I think that the ruin of Carter, as echoed in the ruin of W/Obama, will be echoed with another actual leader.
          Ted Cruz, for example, and Rand Paul: name the last Democrat to say something on the Senate floor that motivated anyone.
          One could broaden the scope to include BHO himself at the 2004 DNC to include some excitement from the Left, but that underscores my point.

          • Reagan was as imperial as Carter. The only difference is each President has been worse than the last- as if they have to outdo each other, And Barack Obama is the worst of all [catholicvote.org]. But those are just symptoms, the problem is inherent in a series of Presidents who think that Congress should just be a bunch of sycophants.

            • I suppose there's some basis for this, given that Reagan didn't pressure Congress to repeal the Community Reinvestment Act.
              As I've argued elsewhere, it all went wrong with Wilson, and, until we fully disseminate WHY that's true, we're going to maintain this ruinous course.

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