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Monday, October 13, 2008
Trojan Horse
Pssst.
The name that should be on the tip of your tongue is Johnson.
GETTING YOU READY. A lot of pundits and commentators on both sides have been groping for appropriate historical analogies to put the coming Obama presidency in context. I'm the only one who's sussed it out correctly. So pay attention.
On the left, the favorites have been JFK's Camelot and Lincoln, meaning the second Lincoln term we never got because of John Wilkes Booth, in which all the amimus of the Civil War would presumably have been soothed away by the kind of oratory we remember from the Gettysburg Address and The Great Emancipator's Second Inaugural Address.
On the optimistic right, the most popular (and delusional) comparison has been to the disastrous one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose rigid naivete paved the way for the Reagan Revolution.
On the pessimistic right, there has also been abundant resort to Carter analogies, but their emphasis is less on the brevity of Carter's tenure in office than on the longevity of his catastrophic legacy -- legitimization of Islamic fascism, negotiation with terrorists, appeasement of openly declared enemies, sabotage of the U.S. military, self-destructive energy policies, wrong-headed economic measures, and a holier-than-thou relationship between the executive branch and ordinary Americans who would rather be Americans than global citizens. A very few on the libertarian right (e.g., Glen Beck) have reached all the way back to 1860 for a better parallel, positing that our union faces as grave a crisis as the Civil War itself, one that threatens to shatter our national unity forever.
All these analogies are wrong. Nobody but a bare majority of voters on one particular Tuesday in November 1976 ever liked Carter, let alone loved, admired him, and saw him as some kind of messiah. To the extent they approved him at all, it was because they imagined him humble, which he wasn't, and they swiftly came to despise him. Obama's following approaches cult status. He is the kind of political figure who can do absolutely everything wrong, fail at every task to which he puts his hand, and still retain the devotion of those who have projected onto him their wildest utopian fantasies. That's the only way he could have survived a candidacy which has made so many missteps and changes of position that the man literally has no fixed points left on the public record other than his party affiliation. Carter was a man (don't know what he is now, besides contemptible). Obama is a symbol. He has enormously greater latitude for screwing up than Little Jimmy ever did. The optimistic right fears him too little. So does the pessimistic right. We'll get to the Civil War later.
The Dems aren't in much better shape. Obama has none of JFK's wit and common touch, and he is 180 degrees opposite JFK's muscular foreign policy. (Michelle and Jackie might as well be from different planets.) In fact, the only things Obama and JFK have in common are a cool presence on camera, a perfect figure for clothes (tautology?), and striking inexperience in any executive capacity. Obama does have a couple of attributes in common with Lincoln. Both are nominally sons of Illinois, though both were born and raised elsewhere. And the second term of Lincoln is as purely imaginary as the massed expectations of an Obama presidency. Since his self-serving and lavishly praised speech on race, already virtually gone from the public record, the Obama faithful have been promising us a Lincoln. What we're going to get is a Johnson.
No, not Lyndon Johnson. Andrew Johnson. The father of post-Civil War Reconstruction. That's right. The most appropriate year of comparison is nothing in the twentieth century and it's not 1860, either. Lincoln was no pacifist or appeaser. He fought the Civil War tooth and nail, and he helped make it the most ferociously savage war yet fought, so much so that the term "Total War" was coined to describe its excesses. We remember his speeches not because they were the highpoint of his presidency, but because they are reminders of his strength as a moral decisionmaker. If he'd been more like Obama, we wouldn't remember him at all.
Obama is a post-Lincoln kind of guy, a pure politician in a time of pure politics. That's why the year that fits best is 1865, when a second, less violent but more pernicious war began, this one against all those who had opposed the powers Lincoln' reelection had given the upper hand over a defeated enemy.
I'm NOT arguing the historical pros and cons of Reconstruction as it unfolded in the nineteenth century here. I'm aware that the historical debate still rages over whether it lasted too long or not long enough. I'm just saying that it's the closest equivalent to where we are right now. Whatever its perceived merits afer the fact, Reconstruction began as an attempt to punish and humiliate the South, even unto ruination. Its direct effects included the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the subsequent adoption of Jim Crow laws and their innumerable dreadful consequences, as well as the impoverishment of the former Confederate states into the late twentieth century. Reconstruction as it was administered -- regardless of its motives -- was the American equivalent of the Versailles Treaty that followed World War I and helped bring about World War II.
Just as the War between the North and South ended at Appomatox, the state of Total War between the Left and Right which has raged since George W. Bush's election in 2000 will end with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. He has presented himself as a trans-racial unifier, a post-partisan healer who is able and determined to bring a divided country back together. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Obama is a one-man Trojan Horse, an apparent peace offering filled with implacable instruments of vengeance. Nothing could be clearer than that the Democrats and all their allies hate their Republican and conservative opposition. They will not be content with electoral victory. They need annihilation. And in Obama, they have the exact right man for the job. That's why they tossed Hillary (and their few thousand diehard feminists) to the wolves and with her Bill Clinton, the moderate Democrat who showed them how to govern from the comparatively safe center. There's absolutely nothing safe about Obama. That's why they preferred him. After Bush, they were no longer interested in governing. They wanted revenge.
Barack Obama was raised by a Marxist mother as a mixed-race, stateless anomaly, in an isolated colonial acquisition of the United States, sent abroad for education in Third-World nations that had themselves experienced the brunt of European colonialism, and then released for a power elite education into exclusively urban locales within the continental United States. He knows nothing of life in the 48 states that don't contain one of the four most populous cities and precious little of life outside those cities. His major acts as an independent adult were to form alliances with a racist black nationalist preacher tied to Louis Ferrakhan, join the inveterately corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine, intimidate his electoral opponents into quitting the race before election day, and ally himself with a radical sixties political terrorist for the purpose of funnelling money to 1) educational programs designed to radicalize minority students and 2) a renegade national organization in the business of promoting minority voter fraud and minority access to fraudulent mortgage contracts. This is not a trans-racial second-term Lincoln stand-in. It is far and away the most left-wing political personage who has ever been nominated by a major party to run for the presidency of the United States.
His unexamined candidacy has also demonstrated the lengths (and lows) to which he is willing to go. His internet-based campaign finance "bundling" operation has devised ways of receiving foreign moneys, even from places like Iran, which cannot be called to account. He has succeeded in demonizing all who question his negligible qualifications and dubious political partners as racists. He has been ruthless in using left-wing tactics to suppress and/or libel specific accusers and accusations, including mass phone and email attacks undertaken by his own campaign managers -- and ambiguously sponsored groups whose more extreme statements can be disavowed if necessary. He has been such a chameleon on public policy matters, thanks to his quasi-messianic rhetoric and mass-media appeal, that he cannot be pinned to any specific position he has taken, since it will probably change tomorrow without being detected or challenged. He has become so much a symbol that being a cipher no longer matters.
Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans play directly into his hands. Democrats are willing to endure the costs of the Reconstruction he will wreak on the nation because it will hurt Republicans more than Democrats. If his vengeance should prove to be race-based, so much the better for them. They are on the side of the angels in this, they believe, and their sense of poetic justice is nourished by the lies they have continuously told themselves about the nature of their red-state antagonists. Even the most cynical of them seem unaware that the underhanded tactics they connive in might also be used, one day soon, against them too. If race relations should be set back a hundred years by what is done in the name of punishing conservatives, eradicating racism and other forms of "hate," and redistributing the wealth of a greedy capitalist system, they figure they'll still have a seat at the table where the spoils are shared. But there is no honor among thieves -- or pirates. They know it but keep forgetting that they're not necessarily the smartest pirates on the open sea. Bad news for them. Worse news for everyone else.
So the man who has, apparently, convinced a majority of us that he is the only one capable of bringing us all together is, in reality, the one who has the best possible training in eliminating all his -- and his sponsors' -- political enemies. He will have the full support of a veto-proof Congress as he sets about the task of denying free speech (on "hate" grounds) to his enemies, facilitating the socialization of not only the healthcare system but also the nation's financial system, and gradually, suborning both the U.S. Constitution and national sovereignty to authoritarian international systems like the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Court.
But John McCain is self-righteous about informing his terrified supporters that they needn't fear an Obama presidency, because "he's a decent man." Which does more than any Obama attack to defeat McCain, because it proves him the worst kind of fool. No wonder high-profile conservatives are scrambling for cover. It won't be pretty when the Obama DOJ starts investigating Sarah Palin for malfeasance in office as Governor of Alaska. (Tina Fey will no doubt be happy to help with funny funny skits...)
Four years of this will not be undone by any congressional electoral rebellion. Obama's legacy will make Carter's look like the first attempts of an amateur graffiti vandal. In this respect, he is no tyro. He has been raised for this purpose as single-mindedly as Sarah Conner's son was raised to fight the conspiracies of SkyNet.
What's
really waiting in their horse's belly?
How now will you defend Troy?
