I can’t say I’m surprised to read this by David Solway this morning:
And like so many others among the deluded, I was originally highly impressed by Barack Obama.
When I first heard about Obama as a rising star in the Democratic Party, a man so refreshingly different from his predecessors and contemporaries, I was intensely curious and quite favorably disposed toward the youngish, African-American legislator and author. And when I gleaned from my local newspaper that he might harbor aspirations to the White House, I found myself very much in his corner, one of his many Canadian fans. He had an effect similar to the new car smell, appropriately called “outgassing” in the trade, which is often irresistible to prospective buyers.
Naturally, I wished to learn as much as I could about the man who represented an unprecedented phenomenon on the American political scene. I soon discovered that very little of substance was known about this rara avis and so began a disciplined search for more information. Within months I had accumulated a towering stack of articles, commentaries, editorials, and diverse kinds of documentary materials, much of this stuff mere unfocused adulation and adjectival irrelevance but many of these items of a distinctly troubling nature. His autobiographies notwithstanding, I was soon caught in the grip of a profound paradox. It seemed the more I knew, the less I knew. But this “less” was more than enough to convince me, by the time he had won the Democratic nomination, that Obama was everything he presumably was not.
I’m so glad I’m not an intellectual!
Me? I got an instant B.S. vibe from Obama during his Big Speech at the DNC. Then Sean Hannity (thanklessly) exposed his ties to Rev. Wright, while in an ingenious move, Hugh Hewitt simply played the entire audiobook version of Obama’s Dreams of My Father (read by Barack himself) on his radio show.
On the subject of smells: I don’t need to keep sniffing the milk to see if it’s sour. But you do if you’re of a particularly generation and milieu.
Jews — be they liberal or conservative — felt obliged to give Obama a chance, solely because he is (half) black (although they don’t usually won’t admit it.)
For the cynical, his election would, they thought, FINALLY put an end to black whining (which so often presents as anti-Semitism); the more idealistic shoehorned Obama into their Sydney Poitier “magic negro” fantasy mold.
It’s a shame that conservative Jews are heavily invested in the romantic 1960s Civil Rights narrative (not to mention the “Ellis Island” one.)
It will take two generations to thoroughly erase all this self-congratulatory nostalgia, because Boomers have brainwashed the next generation in the finer points of Kennedy/King worship, through the educational system and Hollywood.
Hell, I know a “brand name” Jewish conservative who still insists FDR ended the Great Depression!
If you’re a story-telling people, stirring narratives are important, sometimes more so than self-evident facts and common sense.
Now comes Kurtz, who once showed great intelligence in his analyses of demands for same-sex marriage, to tell us the same thing, by way of explaining “Obama’s” Wisconsin putsch. But unlike Krauthammer, Kurtz has even wasted a book on “Obama.”
The fundamental precept of Black Liberation Theology, to which “Obama” has been an adherent for over 20 years, is to “destroy the white enemy.”
Is that so hard to understand? (…)
The funny thing is, when people call these mooks “pundits,” they’re screwing up, and getting it right. They mean it as a compliment, but they shouldn’t. A “pundit” is a Hindu priest, a man of above-average intelligence, relative to his ethnic group, whose job is to snow Indian Hindus through ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Today’s neocon “pundits,” though their dialect of mumbo-jumbo has a more modern, educated sound, are running the same scam.
My wife’s family is Hindu, and thus I’ve known several pundits in Trinidad. One, who has since passed on to his next life, even gave me a pundit’s outfit. Another, following my mother-in-law’s death in 2006, asserted that he had said something to speed along her death, out of mercy…
Naturally, I can’t help but point out that “mook” is a made up insult that’s become a real one…
(In my hometown, they would have thought Mean Streets was a documentary except they didn’t know what a documentary was…)
