Obama, Occidental playboy

I'm sure this interview of Dr. John Drew who speaks about knowing Obama in their college days has already been seen by many. But I thought it worth linking because it is both insightful on the nature of the man who became President and it does little to resolve the question that grips many on the anti-Obama side of the political spectrum: Who is this guy? Is he just a particularly successful street hustler, or a committed socialist with a well-planned agenda to transform America? Those of us who have noted Obama's limited intellectual skills cannot discount the latter possibility because socialism is, above all else, the doctrine of those with an incompetent grasp of human realities. In other words, the question can't be resolved because the two popular positions are not entirely mutually exclusive (no matter how grand one's "theory", or one's hustle, one cannot transform America from on high; one can only destroy it as Tom Bertonneau notes a few posts below). In any case, Drew provides ammunition for those who hold my contention that Obama is only in the most superficial sense a Black man or African-American. While his early college days are by no means definitive of the man who would go on to New York and Chicago and Michelle, it's interesting that he then had few friends in the African-American community and culture but was much more the man of the radical feminists, Marxist internationalists, and wealthy foreign students/sugar daddies. In other words, Obama had more in common with many a secular Jew than your average African-American.

Breitbart.tv » The B-Cast Interview: Was Obama a Committed Marxist in College? - Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod.

Should we call ourselves "conservatives", or those who seek the "authenticity of openness to transcendence", a.k.a. "openness to existence"?

Dag, who has recently taken to reading Eric Voegelin, likes to remind me that Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, does not mention Voegelin, though the influence is clearly there, because Goldberg's editor told him that if he went on about Voegelin, no one would read the book. Too difficult, the cautious man implied. I think Dag means to counsel me, but maybe also laugh with me, should I ever hope of attracting more readers to the blog.

Anyway, this is a commercial instinct we can't afford to follow. As Thomas Bertonneau notes in his latest Brussels Journal essay on Voegelin, there is a vocabulary developed by Voegelin - in his discussion of modern Gnosticism - that is particularly suited to discussing the political pathologies of our times. This is another rich piece from Professor Bertonneau, but one thing I will point out here is its discussion of Voegelin's caution to his friends not to call him a "conservative", a title he feared for its assertion of some false equivalence with the low religious world view of the "liberals":

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.
[...]
When we examine the present scene in the United States, we discover just this conceit in the rhetoric of the sitting Democrat-dominated federal government. Vehement commitment to “progress” (“change we can believe in,” as Obama’s electoral slogan put it) differs hardly at all, perhaps only in a few small degrees, from vehement commitment to “permanent revolution,” quite as Leon Trotsky understood when he revived [Charles] Comte’s coinage in his new Bolshevik context. Voegelin writes: “The radical revolutionary must make the revolution into a permanent condition… for as soon as a plateau of stabilization is permitted, the revolution is over.”

Before continuing with Bertonneau, I'll just point out that another way of saying this may be that what today goes by the name of "liberalism" is not itself a complete or satisfactory religion to the degree it cannot articulate a coherent, transcendent, purpose; rather it is, as Bertonneau say, a vehemently apocalyptic religion that relies on introducing ever-more alien and destructive ideas into Western society as a way of asserting its superiority according to the key doctrine of "tolerance", the supposed guarantor of liberalism's moral superiority. As Bertonneau says, "liberalism" is really an agenda of destruction. But, he argues, this should not give license to those of us opposed to modern "liberalism" to call ourselves conservative, as if there were a neat symmetry between the two:

if those who stand in opposition to the radicals were not adequately described as conservatives, as Voegelin strongly implies is the case, how then would one describe them? Or how, in this connection, is one to describe the current “Red-Blue” division in American politics?

Voegelin’s answer to such questions involves his identification of the radical-revolutionary mentality with Gnosticism, that is, with baroque, reality-denying doctrines, sprung from acute anxiety about existence, that bespeak the cause in the fashion of an unquestionable Koranic pronouncement, deviation from which constitutes a punishable offense. (Think: political correctness.) The opposite of Leftwing doctrinaire-ism, as we might call it, is not, however, some antithetical second doctrinaire-ism, equally baroque and locked in Manichaean agon with the first; it is what, in Voegelin’s discourse of the 1950s and 60s, goes by the name, among variants, of openness to existence. The Montreal lecture, “In Search of the Ground,” later appearing as an essay, offers one of the clearest expressions in Voegelin’s massive authorship of this concept.

An element in existence to which the mature individual maintains his “openness” is the cumulus of historic “differentiations in consciousness,” Voegelin’s term from Order and History. The phrase is not obscure: it refers to the fact that the prevailing knowledge of the world in any given cultural continuum – that of the West, for example – sometimes deepens and becomes richer through an individual insight; a “Leap in Being” can happen, as in Western thought when it jumped from mythic to philosophic ideas of existence.

But, Bertonneau argues, these leaps in being are rare events, historically, and do not justify the "progressive" ideology.

what else, pray tell, is revealed in the assumption, lying at the basis of all radical political action, that a society, which also possesses a nature and is limited in its malleability by that nature, can be changed? This is not to assert that there is no discernible history of social development or that any given society continues to exist only insofar as it refuses to permit any internal alteration whatsoever. People tend, however, to exaggerate the extent of change.

I would argue, for example, that the abolition of slavery in the United States, while it abruptly and positively altered the condition of the ex-slaves, altered the larger society hardly at all, since only a tiny minority had ever owned human chattels; nor later on did the repeal of “Jim Crow” make much of a difference for the larger society even though it altered social conditions somewhat for American blacks in Democrat-dominated regions of the nation where anti-black feeling ran high.

In a slightly different way, Voegelin cites the case of Utah, when it petitioned for admission to the Union. The Union stipulated its condition: Membership in the federal polity or polygamy, one or the other for the Mormons, not both. The larger society would not assimilate change of that sort or the precedent it would set.

The limits of change for any society are much smaller than liberal or radical or Gnostic zeal ever admits. To be reconcilable with the society, such change as occurs must reflect a spontaneous consensus, because coercive change, as I have already argued, is tantamount only to annihilation. In the Eighth Century BC, Hellenic society was happy with the symbolism of the “intra-cosmic gods” and the world they implied; by the Fourth Century AD, Mediterranean humanity, by a long-gestating like-mindedness, found the old “intra-cosmic gods” no longer convincing or meaningful and began to reorient itself, either through Alexandrian Judaism and its offshoots, or through Neo-Platonism, or through Gospel Christianity to the later-emerging transcendent Divinity.

As country custom and as household ritual and as semi-comic superstition, the “intra-cosmic gods” lived on and they survive, attenuated in their potency, even to this day. As the image of divinity, wistfully, they perished, a new image replacing them that offered to its recipients a richer understanding of existence. That image, representing the discovery of a new depth in reality, has stood in place in the West for two thousand years.

It follows that sensible people should behave with extraordinary circumspection where it concerns cavalier, wishful, or resentful programs of “change” because, as Voegelin so poignantly shows in his essays, radical “change” based on passions is definitely not the “progress” that it claims itself to be: It is not the “Leap in Being” but the frightened, dangerous opposite – a lapse into primitive thinking and myth.

Opposition to “change” for the sake of change, and to “change” as goalless indefinite regress, which is what the vaunted “progress” really is, will likely take the name of Conservatism, the very label that Voegelin wanted not to descend on him as the sign of his political identity. Voegelin knew that words, like ideas, have consequences. Under this admonition, a number of cautionary remarks can be made about the word “Conservatism” and what it implies. For one thing, as soon as one posits Conservatism, one has created an inevitable verbal artifact – Conservatism versus Liberalism – that is structurally Manichaean. This should give us pause. Manichaean, dualistic structures are a characteristic Gnostic appurtenance, which philosophers should avoid.

I recall here my earlier argument that the opposition to ideological doctrine cannot be another ideological doctrine, for that would be ideological rivalry without meaning rather than engagement in debate for the sake of truth. It would be other than the dignified quest, as, to use Voegelin’s essay-title, “In Search of the Ground.”

What the organized Right-leaning opposition to the Party of Destruction does is, finally, more important than what it calls itself even though words have meanings and usages signify something. I am encouraged, slightly, by the way in which spontaneous demonstrations of popular ire against overweening big-government schemes – like “bailouts” and socialized medical insurance – have surprised and actually checked the dictatorial bullying of the Obama regime. When an amateur journalist-reporter, FOX News Channel’s Glenn Beck, publicized the curriculum vitae and words of Obama adviser Van Jones, a nutty Marxist-racialist, it led to the first departure-under-outside-pressure of an Obama appointee. It is a sign of the times that actual investigative reporting is now done by someone like Beck, who previously was little other than a radio-comedian whose main shtick consisted in making prank telephone calls to predictably dimwitted people in a recurring feature called “Jeopretardy.”

Far from being offended, currently one of the most offensive words in the political jargon, by the silently mouthed “That is not true” – uttered by Supreme Court Justice Alito when President Obama gratuitously insulted the court during his State of the Union Address – I take heart in it because Obama’s disrespect was rooted in a falsehood and Robert’s quiet but visible contradiction was rooted in truth. There should be a good deal more clear articulation of the fact that the deconstructors of society have doctrines, false doctrines galore, and that we, by contrast, have an interest in truth, to the objectivity of which we remain open.

Cultic doctrines kill freedom; they demand its immolation in the sacrificial flames of their causes. Truth and free will – truth and freedom – by contrast require and nourish one another. We must vigorously remind our friends and neighbors of these facts.

By coincidence, Gil Bailie has just posted a couple of quotations that provide another way of articulating this kind of argument. Under the heading, "More on the real counter culture", Bailie first quotes Philip Rieff:

Here we now see, with startling clarity, how little our established political distinctions between left and right, conservative and radical, revolutionary and reactionary, matter nowadays. Rather, any remaking of political distinctions will have to ask, first, whether there is in fact a discipline of inwardness, a mobilization for fresh renunciations of instinct; or whether there is only the discipline of outwardness, a mobilizing for fresh satisfactions of instinct. Such a distinction will divide contemporary men and movements more accurately; then we shall find fashionable liberals and fascists on the same side, where they really belong.

And then he quotes Hans Urs von Balthasar:

The road to authenticity demands the renunciation of immediacy -- that is, it demands ascesis. No great life can reach maturity without ‘great sacrifice’.

And finally, if you are not yet clear on what is being attacked in this post, and you want a concrete example, take a look at Barry Rubin's latest on the "education" his son is receiving:

The teacher told the fourth grade class in the midst of the greatest snow storm in Washington DC history: "Just because it's snowing doesn't mean that there isn't global warming. All scientists agree that there's global warming."

My son raised his hand and said: "That's impossible. Not all scientists agree."

"Ok," said the teacher, "I meant to say that the majority of scientists agree."

Is there man-made global warming? I have no idea whatsoever, lacking the expertise to make such a judgment. But I do know this isn't the way to teach kids about the scientific method. Rather, it is the way to train them always to yield to peer pressure, that dreaded syndrome supposed to lead young people to drugs, alcohol, and smoking. Or, as summed up comically by the character Yossarian in Catch-22, "Just because everyone thinks that way how could I think anything different?"

Indeed, the teacher didn't have to say anything at all, since no child had claimed the heavy snowfall was proof that there was no global warming. They had already spent around three full sessions pounding home the idea that there wasn't any question that global warming is a huge problem on which trillions of dollars must be spent. Presumably, the class was convinced already.

Rather, the attitude evined is that they must be made to believe in this and even the possibility of any doubt existing had to be squelched. And to ensure this the teacher told a lie, which was only retracted because there was one student there who had the knowledge and courage to question it.

This kind of "everyone agrees" argument is the stuff of indoctrination, not learning. The teacher could have spoken about how data is collected, experiments are made, hypotheses are questioned, and out of that debate--if it goes on long enough and all the facts line up--comes a consensus truth which is itself subject to further testing and constant examination.

But that isn't how most schools teach today. Rather they say--in an approach sounding like the worst "progressive" stereotype of a traditional "America is always right" old school system--This is the truth. Everyone says so. Shut up and believe it.

Indeed, there is nothing "liberal" about modern liberalism; so perhaps we should question those who would take up the mantle of conservatism.

Betrayed

Guess who just came to Chicago, a figure of world historical importance, and was almost completely ignored by the old-school media?


Barry Rubin points to the cold truth the decadent Gnostic elites don't want to see:

...All this brings us to Lech Walesa, revered leader of Poland’s struggle against both Soviet and Communist tyranny. He has now taken the unprecedented step of going to Illinois to endorse a Republican candidate for governor there. The candidate is a Polish-American but still this is an amazing thing for Walesa to do. It is a signal of how truly upset he is and he is far from being alone.

During his visit, Walesa said:

"The US does not lead morally or politically anymore. The world has no leadership. The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations. That was the hope, that whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States. Today we lost that hope."

Why did Walesa say such a thing? Obviously, there is a general worry throughout many countries about the weakness of the Obama administration. But there’s more:

--Poland had gone out on a limb to accept American defensive missiles, nominally against Iran but really as a sign of U.S. commitment to protect Poland from Russia.

--Not only did the Obama administration change the plan (which is justifiable regarding the anti-Iran defenses argument but not the wider and real strategic purpose) but it did so without consulting the Polish government which was only informed at the last minute.

--The decision was announced on September 17, 2009, which everyone in Central Europe knew was the 60th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, followed by the annexation of eastern Poland to the USSR.

It was a triple slap in the face of Poland and every nation which regained independence from Soviet tyranny.

But that’s not all. Everyone but the Central Europeans seems to have forgotten an open letter sent to Obama last July by 22 top Central European figures, including 7 former prime ministers or presidents, and 9 former foreign or defense ministers begging him not to abandon them. Walesa was one of them.

The letter stated:

“We know from our own historical experience the difference between when the United States stood up for its liberal democratic values and when it did not. Our region suffered when the United States [accepted Soviet domination over it] And it benefited when the United States used its power to fight for principle.”

Six months later there has been no change. The Obama administration didn't even deign to respond to this distinguished group with a reassuring answer.

Not only is the Obama administration failing to stand up for liberal democratic values—and I mean here not just advocating democracy abroad but even more importantly supporting democratic friends and opposing expansionist dictatorships—but arguably it is not even standing up for U.S. interests.

Obama regency

Last night, after discussing the empty gestures of the State of the Union Address, Dag looked into the sky and cried, how can this go on for another three years?

I replied, maybe after the midterm elections the Democrats will try to save the party by surrounding Obama with the "counsel" of wise elders, a kind of regency...

Dag seemed instantly cheered by the thought and cried, I like it! But... regency isn't an American word, though it's appropriate for a man-child, a man with a limited grasp of reality.

I said, but if the Republic can have umpteen Czars, why not a Regent, or maybe an Obama Czar, a Presidency Czar?

Anyway, just out of curiosity, i today see that the number of Google hits for `Obama' and `regency' is currently 438 000 (and only 761 hits for the exact phrase "Obama regency"); among the top returns, it seems these are mostly pages that refer both to Obama and a certain hotel. Since there are only 17.8 million hits for the word `regency', Obama is associated with 2.5% of them. I'd say that's proof enough it's an American word; then again maybe not. Anyway, a purely sporting "pool" is now open: place your bets on how many such hits for pages combining the two words, Obama and regency, we will see in three years.

So the last of the loony Euro aristocrats have confirmed Obama's deification, giving him the Nobel peace prize just a little too soon

The confirmation of the deification is also its demise. Too much special pleading, especially when it comes before the great sacrifice, even destroys the authority of would-be gods. The Norwegian lady doth protest too much.

It's times like this when the desperate papering over of reality, like the last days of a Ponzi scheme, becomes obvious to even many diehard believers. The reality of human mimetic desire and conflict reasserts itself in brutal ways and it soon enough becomes clear that men who think one builds peace by destroying alliances and national cultures, abandoning the people to imperial pretensions, blaming everything on a scapegoat (the Burning Bush!), and standing down militarily in the face of some very real rivals - one a rather complete Other with a project to destroy the modern global economy - will have to face the new dawn. History waits for no one, however much we attempt to sacralize a dieing vision, and i think today we are seeing the last gasps of a certain phase in the ongoing Gnostic delusion about the nature of humanity. However, in crisis, opportunity exists for those who must rebuild themselves.

Great comments on how the Norwegians have really put Obama in the bind, at Belmont Club.

I am a little amused that yesterday I somehow "thought" to blog on Churchill's speech responding to the Munich agreement and Chamberlain's "peace in our times". How a propos. Everyone should read that speech from top to bottom for a refresher in the human capacity to believe in a fantasy, or just to give up in the face of hard human realities that entail inescapable conflict and the need to stand up - with others, bonded not just by will but by a shared, loved, reality - or give in. A few weeks ago, I half wrote another post anticipating this day. I didn't finish it so I may as well start cannibalizing it. It ended with a quote from Eric Voegelin that seems appropriate again. Voegelin illuminates the failure of the lonely, elitist, would-be-world-controller with a "Gnostic" will to seriously transform reality through force of personality and asking others just to sign on to "the dream". Writing during the Korean War, in The New Science of Politics (1952), criticizing the various "Gnostic" political religions that think they have achieved some rarefied insight, some systematic and controlling knowledge, some expertise, some insight into reality that mere wingnuts will never know, and that will allow an elect to imagine and shape the future, Voegelin already saw what we all should now know the "internationalist" dream of peace in a UN- and expert-mediated world has become:

The prehistory of the second World War raises the serious question whether the Gnostic dream has not corroded Western society so deeply that rational politics has become impossible, and war is the only instrument left for adjusting disturbances in the balance of existential forces.

The conduct of the war and its aftermath unfortunately are apt to confirm this fear rather than to assuage it. If a war has a purpose at all, it is the restoration of a balance of forces and not the aggravation of the disturbance; it is the reduction of the unbalancing excess of force, not the destruction of force to the point of creating a new unbalancing power vacuum. Instead the [American] Gnostic politicians have put the Soviet army on the Elbe, surrendered China to the Communists, at the same time demilitarized Germany and Japan, and in addition demobilized our own army. The facts are trite, and yet it is perhaps not sufficiently realized that never before in the history of mankind has a world power used a victory deliberately for the purpose of creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage. And again, as in previous contexts, it is necessary to warn that phenomena of this magnitude cannot be explained by ignorance and stupidity. These policies were pursued as a matter of principle, on the basis of Gnostic dream assumptions about the nature of man, about a mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order, about the possibility of establishing an international order in the abstract without relation to the structure of the field of existential forces, about armies being the cause of war and not the forces and constellations which build them. and set them in motion, etc. The enumerated series of actions, as well as the dream assumptions on which they are based, seem to show that the contact with reality is at least badly damaged and that the pathological substitution of the dream world is fairly effective.

Moreover, it should be noted that the unique phenomenon of a great power creating a power vacuum to its own disadvantage was accompanied by the equally unique phenomenon of military conclusion of a war without conclusion of peace treaties. This rather disturbing further phenomenon again cannot be explained by the baffling complexity of the problems that require settlement. It is again the dream obsession that makes it impossible for the representative of Gnostic societies to formulate policies which take into account the structure of reality. There can be no peace, because the dream cannot be translated into reality and reality has not yet broken the dream. No one, of course, can predict what nightmare of violence it will take to break the dream, and still less so what Western society will look like au bout de la nuit

Gnostic politics, thus, is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare. This system of chain wars can end only in one of two ways. Either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened.

I see this is a warning not just to the left-liberals Voegelin was directly criticizing, but also to a kind of "right-wing" reaction to them, one that has itself grown up in the Gnostic culture and is variously indebted to it, and that attends the rise of Obama with a mix of conspiracy paranoia, fear, over-done loathing, and a desire for a conflict that will reveal to those with eyes to see the truth of this reality that at present only a few keen seers can divine. But, as Voeglin argued, turning to conflict, without first attending to the totality of human and historical reality, turning to a desire for battle without seriously pursuing questions of how various kinds of "armies" are created, motivated, and supplied, is a sure-fire recipe not for the victory of an orderly reason, but for more destabilizing conflict.
(HT: Catfur)

Good line

David Warren:

This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern "liberal" mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.

Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.

There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.

A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.

Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

With an incredible rapidity, America's status as the world's pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.

And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the "new physics" of hope and change.

Lament for a nation

Harvard ethics

First, as this blog's contribution to keeping up the internet's record of notable events, let's have a look at two recent statements from Harvard University clerics. There is this much noted (in certain blog quarters) passage from a sermon of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, head of the Episcopal Divinity School:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion – there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember – abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

I want to thank all of you who protect this blessing – who do this work every day: the health care providers, doctors, nurses, technicians, receptionists, who put your lives on the line to care for others (you are heroes — in my eyes, you are saints); the escorts and the activists; the lobbyists and the clinic defenders; all of you. You’re engaged in holy work.

And then there is this little brouhaha about Harvard's Muslim chaplain sticking to Islamic orthodoxy:

Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser ’96 has recently come under fire for controversial statements in which he allegedly endorsed death as a punishment for Islamic apostates.

In a private e-mail to a student last week, Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.”

The e-mail was forwarded over Muslim student e-mail lists and later picked up by the blogosphere, sparking debate and, in many cases, criticism of Abdul-Basser from those who have interpreted his statement as supporting the execution of those who leave the Islamic religion.

Next, let's look at what they don't teach at Harvard. Here's the Rene Girard-inspired anthropology of Gil Bailie:

We are religious beings with religious hungers. Cultures which allow religious pluralism to degenerate into ideological secularism cease to foster sanctifying and civilizing forms of religious experience. In the absence of more edifying expressions, the hunger for transcendence grows desperate and eventually takes crude and primitive forms.

Since death is the one thing that cannot be fully secularized, those desperate for religious meaning eventually turn to death, as fallen humanity always has, siding with death against death, turning death into a cure for death, eluding death by exploiting its mystique and becoming its pious accomplices. In a post-religious world, both those who are desperate for meaning and those who have despaired of it will find in death an unspoken organizing principle. Whether fleeing from it or flirting with it, whether bound to it by fear or fascination, death eventually becomes the default preoccupation, the chief obsession, of those who come to regard it as the final, incontrovertible fact.

At the Resurrection, ‘the power of death’ was broken. Only by living in the light of that victory can we keep from slipping back into the old religious swamp out of which we were dredged at Easter. Post-Christian culture, bereft of religious vigor, is becoming such a swamp, a ‘culture of death.’ Threatened from without by a resurgence of pre-modern forms of sacred violence, it is inwardly imperiled by postmodern forms of nihilistic resignation, dickering with death – in a world ‘distracted from distraction by distraction,’ death being the only distraction weighty enough to distract. Naïve irreligious secularism is powerless to meet this challenge. Christianity is not.

One of the many fascinating things about our times is that we will get to see how once revered institutions of learning move on from their present dead ends. Will they try to mover further downhill and prove Bailie right, falling deeper into a death worship and thus, one assumes, eventually losing what's left of their ability to maintain public credibility (at least among those who are capable of maintaining our civilization) in the contests over truth and finance? Will Cambridge crumble? Will the schools turn back to respect for Christianity? Or will it be possible for them to embrace an anthropology (inspired by but not identical to Christian faith) and simulate the Judeo-Christian embrace of life, in an intellectual culture that remains secular, i.e. not dependent for its sacred charge on belief in God?

No doubt the answer to such questions depends on us. In the meantime, Catholic Georgetown University, or President B.H.Obama, cannot allow Obama's presence at Georgetown to be shared with, or subsumed by, a sign of the name of Jesus Christ.

Passover 2.0

Pharaoh threw the boys into the Nile; Obama, shooting sulphur into the upper atmosphere, may find his metier in transcending the "anti-science" (burned) Bush and realizing his own campaign claim: "“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”

Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming (via Belmont Club):

At first, [Obama science adviser] Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

"We're talking about all these issues in the White House," Holdren said. "There's a very vigorous process going on of discussing all the options for addressing the energy climate challenge."

Holdren said discussions include Cabinet officials and heads of sub-Cabinet level agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously. The National Academy of Sciences is making it the subject of the first workshop in its new climate challenges program for policymakers, scientists and the public. The British Parliament has also discussed the idea. At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.

It's easy enough to write all this off as some kind of insane ideology seeking massive control and power through various "scientific" pretensions to redeem a fallen humanity, as the people at Belmont Club are doing. While there is much to this argument when we are talking about the Obama crowd, more generally it's not simple, it seems to me. Once it becomes possible and unavoidable for man to influence global physical systems in measurably significant ways, as we are probably starting now to do; and once, as is inevitable, a science further develops to weigh risks and probabilities of various possible actions, will it be possible for humankind to just say "no", "no, we won't try to change conditions to avoid what may be present or foreseeable high risks and dangers (whether or not we are in any way responsible for the evolution of these threats to human life or ecological systems).

In other words, is it true that once you can, often you must, when life and death is in the balance? Even if one is maximally aware of the dangers of hubris (as I believe Obama and his people are not) is it not imaginable that some circumstance must in time arise with an imperative that demands we take some reasonable risk and try our best to influence climate or other geophysical systems? Is there an analogy to be made, for example, to our now common attempts to control ecological systems as we decide how much of a certain species of fish or game it is safe or a good idea to kill or consume, from the point of view of maintaining other species?

Slip of the tongue or revelation into Obama's mind?

I guess this story has been big news, but I just learned about it from a print copy of the Globe and Mail. There was a line break after the seventh word in the article:

Perhaps U.S. President Barack Obama should retire...

That had me really excited (as I thought maybe people are reading Thomas Sowell).

...his bowling shoes.

First, he was caught on tape throwing nothing but gutter balls on the presidential campaign trail. Now, he's lobbed a verbal gutter ball equating his poor performance in the White House bowling alley with that of a Special Olympian.

After a difficult week in Washington as tension rose over AIG bonuses, Mr. Obama attempted to yuk it up with comedian Jay Leno on The Tonight Show on Thursday, but ended up insulting mentally disabled people and causing quite an uproar.

The President told the late night talk show host that he'd been practising rolling the ball down the White House bowling alley, but wasn't too thrilled with his score of 129. Then he said: "It was like the Special Olympics, or something."

As much as Obama must take responsibility for his sense of humour, what are his handlers thinking putting him on a late-night comedy show, the first sitting President ever to go on such a show? Don't the handlers know that comedy requires a common set of values that allow you to laugh at a common understanding that is revealed as odd or paradoxical, and/or to laugh at a shared scapegoat? And don't they know that in the normal world the President must preserve his transcendence, his political capital, by always being careful to act as if he represents all Americans (and so humour in public is always a huge risk and rarely done)?

And in the PC world, the culture fundamental to the Democratic Party, you're not supposed to laugh either at the common understandings of the party line, or at a victim figure, unless the target is some duly-sanctioned "reactionary" like say Sarah Palin. In other words, even though it's not funny to laugh at the disabled, the mere assertion by Obama and those in the audience who laughed with him that "we" share a common understanding, any common understanding, let alone about watching the Special Olympics, is antithetical to all the moral and cultural relativism that the postmodern Democratic Party stands for. How dare "we" be invited to laugh when we are officially humourless except when a Christian redneck is in the room!?

Didn't the handlers see the risk that Obama, needing to crack a joke, might crack a joke of the kind that left-liberals and Democrats can only crack in the confidence of close friends, those to whom you can reveal what "we", in our gated communities and private schools, really think about the other within?

Making his way back on Air Force One to Washington from Burbank, Calif., Mr. Obama called the chairman of the Special Olympics to apologize.

"He said that he did not intend to humiliate Special Olympics athletes or people with intellectual disabilities. He was sincere and heartfelt," Timothy Shriver said in statement yesterday.

Still, Mr. Shriver described it as a teachable moment. "Words hurt and words matter," he said. "And using Special Olympics in a negative or derogatory context can be a humiliating put-down to people with special needs."

Mr. Shriver is the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, a global non-profit organization serving 200 million people with intellectual disabilities. He is also the nephew of Senator Edward Kennedy, who was among the early Democrats to endorse Mr. Obama's candidacy.

In the old days when a would-be leader was in trouble, he might try to take a time out, to gather his mind in quiet, to avoid the media. That Obama's handlers feel he must be constantly "out there", selling himself as "The One", constantly campaigning, is a sad sign of how little control they feel they have over the situation they are in. They are squandering their bank of Obama-is-sacred/transcendent credit, not unlike how they are squandering America's credit.

globeandmail.com: Slip of the tongue lands Obama in gutter. Note also the headline: would a Republican making this joke be granted a "slip of the tongue" by an MSM organ? It's unlikely, which is just why Obama probably can't really be forgiven by his own crowd for drawing attention to their own hypocrisy. Thus the Globe and Mail reporter, in a piece that is ostensibly strictly reporting, has to start her piece with some prescriptive humour: "Perhaps U.S. President Barack Obama should retire..."

What comes before reporting is protecting the party line. However, fool that I am, at first I read it straight.

Does Obama really hope?

Has a deep-rooted Western nihilism, only masquerading as hope and change, in a perhaps final delusion, found its president?

Belmont Club » Beginnings and endings

One of the tell-tales of a growing dysfunction within a system is the collapse of priorities. When small things begin to loom large and truly momentous events are regarded with a dispassionate, almost distinterested attention, it is often a sign that leadership culture has lost its way. The Week describes the strange narratives being emitted by the Obama administration: talking up fiscal packages that they know are ineffectual; making fatalistic references to Depression Era history and Happy Talk in place of real plans.
[...]
It almost seems like one of those movies where paratroopers are telling jokes before jumping into certain death; almost as if the main issues are foregone and so the conversation must turn to something else. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist caught the obsession with trivia in the midst of an existential crisis perfectly. When Fagin is sentenced to death, he can think of nothing but unimportant things on the brink of his own execution.
[...]
Dickens might almost be describing the Obama administration. Maybe BHO’s grand speeches aren’t really promises to save the world. Perhaps he’s really saying the precise opposite. Here the illusion ends. There is no cake, as one reader wrote to me, “the cake is a lie.” You know when a man really has hope because he’s full of fight; bursting with defiance. In Obama’s case, it is like watching a man go through the motions while the world prepares to go on, almost without him.
[...]
The British newspapers say the President can’t even fake an interest in foreign affairs. Maybe at the end of the rainbow, the one he’s been chasing all his life, was the thing that had been pursuing him.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

America, where art thou?

The greatest problem with Obama may be that he is more interested in a certain image of himself and of his politics than with many aspects of human reality out there in America and the world that he little knows yet hopes to move with endless campaign speeches. In the weeks he has been in office, wealth built up over generations of hard work is being destroyed with frightening speed, and Obama seems disconnected, not talking about how he is going to help instill confidence to help stem the flow in the markets but rather about how he is going to spend money the nation doesn't yet have to save the nation. And yet he shows little interest in insuring his "stimulus" or bailout spending will actually create economically productive industries that can continue in future without constant inflows of government debt-financed money. John Hawkins at Pajamas Media » Overcoming the Recession: An Interview with Thomas Sowell asks economist Sowell

JH: Now, we’ve heard people say that this is a uniquely bad economic situation — that it could be as bad as the Depression, etc. However, looking at GDP and job loss numbers, it doesn’t look as bad as, say, the recession in the early 80s. So how bad is this really and if you were advising the president, what would you tell him to do?

Thomas Sowell: Resign.

[...]
because he is determined to interfere in the market. How did we get out of the recession in the early 80s? Reagan did nothing. The economy adjusted and we’ve had 20 years of growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.
[...]
JH: Now, I’d like you to elaborate on something you wrote in National Review back in 2007:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Thomas Sowell: That’s true, unfortunately. I just noticed this morning that … I am getting more and more emails from people who are simply despairing. They are saying that we may have reached the point of no return. We have had dumbed down education for enough generations that people don’t even realize that it’s dumbed down education. We have propaganda against all the institutions of this society, literally from the elementary school to the universities. You can’t raise a whole generation of people who don’t know how to think but are taught to resent anything that they don’t understand, and expect that you are going to survive in the long run.

I though this was a good way of putting our real problem, the ethical problem that is, ultimately, the real driver of history including its economic phenomena. Americans and Canadians today are often taught to resent, and not to understand the economic or political systems of which they are part so that they might freely and humbly make a realistic contribution to renewing these systems. Survival demands not only personal self-understanding, but knowledge that personal self-understanding is empty if it is not distilled from a greater human self-understanding. If you don't know how human ethical systems are generated in history, you can't know much about anything, including yourself. And who today is educated to have a good grasp of history, perhaps the most difficult of intellectual disciplines?

This leads to my second observation on today's posts at Pajamas Media. In one - Pajamas Media » Could Americans’ Discontent Turn Violent? - there are over a 100 comments from people who seem to think violent civil unrest is quite likely in America in the near future. One commenter, MikeD offers some observations on the thread, including these:

7. This comment thread would never have happened at any other time during the last 100 years–whether there was an internet or not. That indicates a revolutionary change in thinking, if nothing else.

8. America and Americans today are very different than other peoples in other places in other times. Historical parallels from our own past, Europe or any other culture/time do not apply.

Now I think that's an interesting question for further discussion: is he really right that the current unrest is of a scope and scale that no real parallel can be found in the last 100 years of conservative anger at the rise of "progressive" government in America? As for his second point, that historical parallels do not apply, I think this may only be correct if the question is will, how or when will the present system fall apart. By the nature of history, that sort of question is indeed unpredictable and ultimately not worth investing a lot of time and energy in worrying about. If there is something that you can save, find a way to save it, but it can only really be saved over time if you have some way to reinvest it. Where historical parallels do apply is when you start investing time and energy in asking how the system can be renewed. People not educated in history and some kind of anthropological/religious/ethical self-understanding of how we humans make history, will have a very hard time finding the courage or knowledge for how to work themselves out of a mess.

Thomas Sowell has two quick answers for how to move forward, but these are questions on which we need all to do a lot more talking: in economics, let disrupted markets find their bottom without a constant government intervention that makes business and individual investment decisions about the real value of present assets and future economic prospects into a crap shoot dependent on knowing which way the political winds will be blowing through Obama's ears, the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. But having the patience and wisdom to let millions of people collectively make decisions through market interactions, instead of letting the wise man in Washington lead us, can only happen when and if there is a respect for individual and business freedom within the political sphere. While there is a lot of interaction back and forth between politics and economics, the bottom line, which becomes visible in crises like the present, is that ultimately the economic market is limited or framed by the political market, and not vice versa as dogmatic Marxists like to argue in giving an implicit license to politicians like Obama to take revenge on what they see as the usually ascendant economic forces, in the name of the people. But Obama is no David vs. Goliath. The people, or in other words, politics, with the violent potential to keep any market open or closed, are/is always ultimately sovereign as they always have been, at least in a latent or implicit state; pointing out the supremacy of politics over economics is only the starting point for hoping we can do something creative with a little self-knowledge about how the freest societies have been built up in the past and can hope to renew themselves and grow in future.

Such an observation should not be a license for political hubris at the top but a recognition that it is only the political and economic interactions and conversations of people far away from the centres of media attention that can ultimately determine whether a nation and economy gets up off its feet and finds it worthwhile working through massive problems again, or whether stagnation will grip the land and bring trouble into the streets. If Obama is only talking to those who resent the American system, he can really achieve nothing. Vague promises of change tied to interventionist policies premised on some reworking of the New Deal might get people collecting government pay cheques, until the ability of government to borrow or tax slowly diminishes those cheques (as the value of the government buck diminishes through inflation) but it cannot really get them working again in building what only free people learning from their own mistakes in pursuit of their own dreams and realities can do. Don't try to save the people from their mistakes. Don't let them starve or freeze, but make sure you leave room for the personal salvation that can only come, not from Daddy Obama promising to buy you a new tv or status symbol, but from actually learning what it means to belong to human history and the freedom that is implicit in the sharing of language, and hence politics. A president who talks but doesn't listen denies that freedom and denies reality in favor of some fantasy vision of a Gnostic leader, with special insight, redeeming a fallen world.

Studying habits in an age of ignorance

Mike of Then There was Light reports on Toronto's Israel Apartheid Week Event 1 - Preaching Hate to the Converted:

A complete irony that most people in the crowd are probably too thick to have realized is that the moderator of the event had no idea how to pronounce the word Apartheid - she kept pronouncing the th wrong. And this wasn’t an accent issue, she just genuinely had no idea how to pronounce it. It just goes to show you how much they really know about what Apartheid is. If you didn’t even take the time to learn how to pronounce the word, then isn’t it safe to assume that you never even took the time to learn what it is? Apartheid is completely misrepresented by these people, and it’s such a shame to the true victims of South African Apartheid.
[...]
And this brings me to the point I really want to make. The people involved in this movement are all on the fringe extreme left. This kind of talk is, I am sorry to say it, completely out of touch with reality. Who still refers to themselves in Marxian terms?

And I’m not just talking about the organizers and the speakers being on the fringe extreme left. That’s expected. The good news is that a quick analysis of the demographics of the entire crowd really speaks volumes for the so-called success and growth of this movement. The crowd was almost completely made up of two groups: muslim/arabs, and middle aged Caucasian ex-hippies.

As I commented at Mike's, however, we should not assume that the many who would not waste their time at such an event are immune to all the crazy talk about Israel as some kind of "apartheid" state. The scapegoating of Israel has clearly gone mainstream and is the agenda of many states, the media, academy, and NGOs, among others.

However, because the powerful are often backing the "apartheid" theme in today's representations of Israel, they leave themselves open to revelations that they are not in touch with reality. And that is an opportunity for those of us who want to renew our culture's commitment to a shared reality. Two recent blogs touch on this question of how we can now hope to do some creative work by reaching out to those who are starting already to see the failures of the Obama-led world view. See 1) Wretchard's latest at the Belmont Club:

The time for recriminations comes later. Kimball knows this and warns against the Tertullian heresy, which holds that one of the delights in heaven is watching the damned burn in hell. That’s wrong; even professional soldiers know better. They let defeated generals keep their swords. Right now the important thing is to realize we’re in a hole and to stop digging. Paradoxically, the apparent vindication of those who called for a closer look at the Lightworker will make it harder for those who voted for him to get up on national TV and eat crow. It’s just too humiliating. Although Cramer and even Matthews may get to the point where they substantively criticize Obama’s policies, they’ll dance around BHO for a while, because I don’t see them coming on the air in sackcloth and ashes. Nobody wants to say he was wrong in general, but they don’t mind admitting they were mistaken in particulars. For example, Martin Peretz has been on a campaign to attack Obama’s choice for chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, as a Saudi stooge. There should be no need to go further. That should be enough of a plank on which to build bridges.

If conservatives are astute they should be building mini-coalitions with Obama supporters who have seen the penny — the two million ton penny — drop. On them.

And for those willing to grapple with the discipline of Generative Anthropology, see Adam's latest at the GABlog:

the Democrats had a near-death experience between 2000-2006, when they were shut out of power at all levels of the federal government for what I assume was the first time since the founding of the party, they have never seen the Republican revolt against the New Deal State as legitimate, and they are determined not to go through all that again. The Global Intifada is in the ascendancy and normalcy is on the defensive–who knows, maybe on its last legs. Of course, it will all crash, but when and how can’t be predicted, nor can the precise shape and size of the pieces that will need to be picked up–much less who will be around with the capacity to start putting them back together. So why talk about it?

And so Adam turns instead to a discussion of habits, since we can discuss our habits in a much less contentious way than we can discuss more formal intellectual or political positions. And yet what are these positions but the distillation of our habits, which are in turn our inheritance from past models of human creativity, and which, in their interactions with other peoples' habits, will somehow lead us to create new models and norms in future when the failure of today's reigning ideologies becomes clear.

Discussing our habits in terms of those who accept risk, who are willing to go "first" in attempts to model some new reality, in contrast to those who go last in affirming a new communal norm and who then hold on most incessantly to this favored model of reality, Adam argues:

The first takes risks, but never everything he has except in an emergency, and certainly never what others have–the first needs his credibility so as to see the circulation of the sign through to the end. The last eschews risks, but this might take various forms: the discipline imposed by the poor parent–the unwavering insistence upon the exact imitation of the best models–upon the children who might, in a reasonably open environment, do better, initiate something of their own; or it might be a parasitic set of demands upon “society,” which, after all, is rich enough to support anyone. The most productive errors in an open society where rituals have been mostly replaced by habits (that’s another story, isn’t it?) are precisely those where the lasts make their bid for firstness, and get the model all wrong–thereby transforming it into new models. Meanwhile, the terror of error is reinforced by the alliance between those legatees of firstness who blame firstness for lastness and the worst habits of the last–both participants in this alliance collude in confirming for each other that their errors are nothing of the sort, but an arbitrary exclusion mechanism deployed by the firsts.

So, extricating ourselves from the conjoined and mutually reinforcing crises of the Global Intifada and the financial meltdown, and getting the process started without any expectation of help or good models from our mainstream institutions, involves creating sites of generative interaction between the habits of those who are first on the current scene and those who are last but would be first on some future one. The way to set these (or any) divergent sets of habit in productive interaction is to create assignments–minimal tasks and rules in following which the limits of each set of habits opens it to the other set. A good assignment generates productive errors around which we then gather so as to turn them into a sign. The best way to approach it is to establish a model, transcending both the first and the last, as absolute–our common starting point is then delineating its distinctiveness and establishing a “perimeter” distancing the model from criticism (resentment). We all–first and last alike–then commence to iterate that model, knowing we shall all err, and committing ourselves to the creation of new models out of that array of errors. The beauty of this approach is that we can all follow our own habits slavishly (a key ingredient of happiness) in perfectly good conscience because doing the same thing over and over again (iterating my own eccentric appopriation of the model) keeps making everything different–that is, generating new signs. Together we gather maxims–which I am coming to see as the highest form of thinking–from the process: maxims are translations of the interference of one set of habits with another into rules (both in the sense of discerning regularities and in the sense of obeying a series of imperatives) and are generative of new habits in turn–ultimately, what Charles Sanders Peirce called the “deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit.”

The Messiah has landed in Canada, but I'm still praying for Obama

J.L. Granatstein: It's all about Canada

What is striking, however, is that the public debate in the U.S., viciously partisan as it always is, ordinarily seems to hinge around great issues, around national interests. Americans know their nation has interests, and they can and do discuss how best to achieve them.

That does not seem to be the case in Canada.

None of our political parties talk of national interests, not even the Bloc Québécois, which purports to advance what it imagines to be Quebec's national interests. (We'll fight them on the Plains of Abraham or in the Elysée!)

No party even thinks of national interests. Programs always take priority, and special interests inevitably prevail. This is not healthy, and Canadians, especially Canadian leaders, need to face up to the reality that Canada's most important long-term needs are not being considered seriously.


And those realities?

We are not a great power and we will not become one. We cannot pretend any longer that we are even a moral superpower. We are a First World nation-state that makes its living by trading with the United States.

We truly cannot play any longer at petulant, childish anti-Americanism, something that seems even more foolish with Mr. Obama in office.

We are protected by Washington now and will be in the future (in the U.S. interest, not because we are such pleasant fellows), and we must stop our strong tendency to yearn for blue beret peacekeeping as the automatic and only role for our military. Simply because the U.S. goes to war does not mean the Americans are wrong. They sometimes are, but they might also be correct, and our government needs to shape our course carefully.

Those who see only American decline may be right, but they are far more likely to be wrong. What needs to be said loudly and clearly is that, if the U.S. falls into the pit, we will be one of the nations dragged down with it. It will take decades to diversify our trade, our economy and our security will be in serious jeopardy, and Canada will be forced to assume vast new financial burdens to re-establish its economic welfare and military security.

We had better pray for Mr. Obama to get America's act together – in our own national interests.

President as extortionist?

I'm still praying for Obama, but for how long can Americans put up with a president who, instead of injecting some optimism, and/or sense of discipline, into the economy, is actively talking it down? What is he afraid of? Is he simply afraid that his "porkulus" bill to "stimulate" the economy through a trillion or so dollars of spending on leftist bureaucracies and unionized businesses might not pass without major changes? Or is his desire even more sinister? What is the narrative he is trying to create for future use with talk like this?

Obama Warns of 'Irreversible' Crisis: The Associated Press

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) - Making his case in the most dire terms, President Barack Obama said that if Congress does not quickly pass an economic stimulus package, the nation will slip into a crisis so deep that "we may be unable to reverse" it.

"We can't afford to wait. We can't wait to see and hope for the best," Obama said in Elkhart, Ind., a community reeling in job losses during the recession that has defined his young presidency. "We can't posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us in into this mess in the first place."

Thomas Sowell recognizes where Obama can save the people money

One might think that after spending many tens of millions on his fairy-tale inauguration, at a time of great economic losses, Obama will be looking for ways to cut government costs. Thomas Sowell recognizes one redundancy:

Secret service agents may have been concerned (or appalled) when the Obamas got out of their limousine and started walking in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. But anyone who might have tried to harm them would probably have been torn limb from limb by the crowd before anyone could have gotten there to arrest him.

However, this observation might put in doubt Sowell's best wishes for a renewal of normalcy:

Inevitably, much is being made of the fact that Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States.

He is indeed the first "African American" President, unlike the millions of other black Americans whose ancestors were here longer than millions of white Americans. By the time that there was a United States of America, most black Americans had never seen Africa and neither had their grandparents.
[...]
No doubt the race-hustling industry will continue, and no doubt their chief victims will be blacks, especially young blacks, who buy the paralyzing picture of victimhood and the counterproductive resentments which sap energies that could be better used to improve their own lives.

Now that we have the first black President of the United States, maybe we can move ahead to the time when we can forget about "the first" whatever to do what. There is too much serious work to do to spend more time on that.

But what we all need to recognize is that yesterday was a profoundly religious event for millions or billions of people who need a political religion because they often have no other (nor any secular anthropology) of great attraction to help them through the existential trials of human life. Obama's paradoxical fate is that he will only achieve greatness as a worldly president by transcending the dogmas of his own cultic religion, by recognizing and negotiating worldly realities with an eye to recognizing the possible road to greater shared freedoms - which entails (intelligent but still difficult) political risks and people's hard work - and not by focussing on his supporters' hopes that he is some kind of racial saviour. Real political innovators are likely to be scapegoated to some significant degree (blamed for "deepening" the "crises" that make change necessary and hence possible); historians will recognize this in the case of Iraq, if it turns out that after the horror a new page has been turned there, one on which Obama finds his place.

Change I can believe in...

At first, the cynical, no-good side of me was thinking Barack Obama might have been building Hillary Clinton up for another humiliation as a rejected job seeker. But it looks pretty final now that she will become Secretary of State. Maybe Ms. Clinton can do a better job than was evidenced by the President Clinton's foreign policy team failings in places like Rwanda and al Qaeda land. But I am inclined to equate Obama's idea of creating a "team of rivals... that would be modeled after that of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War" with a desire to have ready scapegoats at hand.

I guess a lot of people will be fighting to have their agenda on President Obama's desk; one wonders how much will actually get done. I do not yet have an idea of a man with his own clear sense of direction. But then I always figured "the One we've been waiting for" wasn't the Messiah. Too bad for the Kos kids.
Clinton to accept top diplomat job

UPDATE: Obama Doesn't Call It "Change.Gov" For Nothing!

All of a sudden, without fanfare or explanation, the official website for President-elect Barack Obama has changed its mandatory hopes for kids in school and citizens of all ages.

In our post Serving Obama, we quoted the vaguely worded plan outlined at the Obama campaign's post-campaign website for requiring community service:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.

Now, after a day or so of internet furor, the plan has been changed:

Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by setting a goal that all middle school and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year and by developing a plan so that all college students who conduct 100 hours of community service receive a universal and fully refundable tax credit ensuring that the first $4,000 of their college education is completely free.

Is Obama going to be this easy to push around, or was the original plan merely a hasty and poorly-worded post? Having made my share of those over the years, I can sympathize!

It's going to be an interesting four years...

[Hat tip to Truepeers for alerting me of the update, and Hot Air for the details..]

Update On Teacher Ridiculing Children In Class For Not Supporting Obama

Wow, that was quick..! The superintendent of the school that employs the teacher that we blogged about last night, has himself now seen the eyebrow-raising indoctrination and intimidation being passed off as neutral political commentary under his watch, and has issued a YouTube video of his own, explaining his response to this discovery:



Here it is, as a written statement:

I was shocked when I saw the clip of an interaction between a Cumberland County Schools teacher and her students as posted on YouTube. While neutral discussion of the political process is appropriate, at no time, particularly with elementary students, should a teacher infuse his/her political views into the discussion. Most disconcerting was the military slant that made its way into this discussion. We are a military community, serving over 15,000 military students and their families. We value the sacrifices, not only of the military parents but also those of their families.

We believe that military children are our children, military spouses are many of our employees, and military service men and women are our heroes. We proudly serve our military children and have received national awards for our support of military families.

I was particularly disturbed to see the uncomfortable position in which our children were placed due to the inappropriate actions of one of our teachers. Please be assured that the actions exhibited in this video are not consistent with the vision of the CCS. Moreover, the actions of one teacher do not represent the 7000 employees in our organization.

Once the video was brought to my attention, I immediately launched an investigation. Personnel laws prevent me from releasing information regarding individual employees and personnel action taken. I can assure you that upon completion of the investigation, I will take appropriate action.

Dr. William Harrison
CCS' Superintendent

Here's the now-famous video of how North Carolina kids were being taught about the 2008 Presidential Election campaign:

Serving Obama

From President-Elect Barack Obama's official website, an announcement of how our American neighbors are going to be made to spend their free time:

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

Hope and Change!

[Hat tip Gateway Pundit]

(To be fair, this other page says that "service" will be demanded only from high school and college students. So why say "citizens of all ages"..? And what's to be the definition of "community service"..?)

Meanwhile, an appaling glimpse into American education: a scandinavian documentary presents a North Carolina elementary school teacher so enamored with Barack Obama that she sees nothing wrong with how she treats the handful of pro-McCain children in her classroom, particularly the little girl with a parent serving in the military:



What else is going on in American classrooms, that we don't get to see..?

[Hat tip: Blackfive]

Obama's Army

"We cannot continue to only rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."



(Full speech here)

Please, America, vote against Obama.