Obama

Obama as Dean

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Obama thinks of himself as a college administrator, and America as a kind of giant campus. So says Victor Davis Hanson:

…we, the American people, are seen by Obama as a sort of Ivy League campus, with him as an untouchable dean. So we get the multicultural bromides, the constant groupthink, and the reinvention of the self that we see so often among a professional class of administrator in universities (we used to get their memos daily and they read like an Obama teleprompted speech)…On an elite university campus what you have constructed yourself into always matters more than what you have done. An accent mark here, a hyphenated name there is always worth a book or two. There is no bipartisanship or indeed any political opposition on campuses; if the Academic Senate weighs in on national issues to “voice concern,” the ensuing margin of vote is usually along the lines of Saddam’s old lopsided referenda.

In other words, Obama assumed as dean he would talk one way, do another, and was confident he could “contextualize” and “construct” a differing narrative—to anyone foolish enough who questioned the inconsistency.

Actually, I think Obama views the vast majority of Americans not as either students or as professors, but as “staff”…people whose function is to serve the institution but are not really a part of it and who are destined to remain permanantly low on the status ladder.

Quote of the Day

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From a comment by “Whiskey” in a thread at Belmont Club:

But clearly, the elites must be purged from all institutions and life. The attitudes of Obama or Goldman Sachs (screw the customer, because you are powerful) even when shown to be long-term bad, continue in the attitudes described by Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker.
 
How can the elites be purged?
 
Fear and terror. Not by anything violent and illegal, not only is that course counter productive but middle class people are neither violent nor criminal — it is why they are middle class in the first place.
 
The elites have a great weakness. A hideous one. They and particularly the media cover for each other so much that all their dirty secrets are not even hidden. They are out in the open for anyone to see. John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Blago, Mayor Tony Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsome, John Ensign, Dennis Hastert, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and the rest all had their scandals widely known. EVERYONE in the elite knew about them, and never uttered them publicly. The people involved did not try to hide it.
 
What we need is an army of Luke Fords. Bloggers, who have some traffic, no ambition for politics, who don’t mind personal attacks, publishing the ugly, sordid, nasty, and often illegal details of the lives of political, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic elite. Plus their friends, families, and supporters. Simply being around, soaking up the open secrets, and publishing their ugly details, would be enough to push a purging frenzy. Particularly if one could jigger the job as being motivated by insider enemies. For example, unflattering and true details about Rahm Emmanuel being ascribed to people around Bill Clinton. To use a hypothetical. Elite infighting is another weakness.
 
The strength of the people is that they don’t make good Alinsky targets. Joe the Plumber is just a guy. So too, Luke Ford, or Mickey Kaus, or anyone else. It is the logical culmination of asymmetric political warfare.

Read the whole thing.

Paul Revere’s Ride, April 18, 1775

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paul revere

… For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

God bless America.

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Images, Analogies, and Cooties

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In a comment, Mishu linked to “The Lie of a Liberal Arts Education.” Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom, tells us after a political cartoon was posted at his site, an old teacher e-mailed him, requesting that his name be struck from the list of Goldstein’s teachers. That we are responsible for those who have studied under us would make neither my raft of old teachers very happy nor me about many of my students. (Jonathan’s need to fix my comma splices, for instance, must make one of them spin in his grave.)

I’d seen the comment (for the usual reason, groggy in the morning and late at night, I check out Instapundit). And I’d remembered it clearly, since it brought home the adolescent and enforced homogeneity of academic thinking but also because the cartoon was especially memorable, disturbing the way political cartoons can be. The visual and analogous are powerful weapons. The Muslims realize that – and we should, too. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we follow the actions of either the Jihadists or the average college faculty. When I went back later to show it to my husband, the cartoon was linked but no longer at the top of the page. It provokes, but it has a certain rightness. I found it and my husband was repelled. He felt it was in bad taste. His explanation for that gut reaction was not a defense of Obama nor of the content or the process of Healthcare legislation as would any sentient being, he sees those as pretty bad. Nor did he see it as racist indeed, worrying about that label would make any criticism difficult.

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Obama Rubs Our Faces In It

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“We proved that this government, a government of the people and by the people, still works for the people.”

That’s what Obama said after House Democrats passed his health scheme. It’s a revealing remark. The Democratic leadership ignored broad public opposition to pass this extremely consequential bill on a bare majority by a combination of dishonest rhetoric, bribery, scummy parliamentary maneuvers and sheer willfulness. Then the President had the nerve to abuse Lincoln’s great words to tell us — most of whom opposed the bill, as he well knows — that he and his colleagues did it at our direction (“of the people and by the people”) and for our benefit. I interpret his words, a characteristic inversion of the truth, as a direct insult to his political opponents, who on this issue are now the majority of the country. He knows that we know he is lying and he doesn’t care, because he thinks he can get away with it. And he appears to enjoy it. This is not someone who can be trusted with power.