Lies We Can Believe In
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Civil disobedience is the act of breaking the law
and defying the authorities to do anything about it.
So is tyranny. The difference between the two lies
in which side of the power equation the breaker is
on. When the law is broken, two things happen.
Either the law is upheld or the authorities back
away from a confrontation and find some way to save
face.
The ObamaCare process involved breaking a long
list of rules and laws and then defying the ragged
remnants of the system to do anything about it. At
every turn the United States was unable to stop a
rogue chief executive and his ruling party from
trampling the law. When the case finally reached the
Supreme Court, the leading judicial body in the land
sidestepped a confrontation by redefining what the
action was, rather than rule on the law. It was a
classic case of the authorities saving face.
Civil disobedience balances moral absolutes against
legal principles. The Supreme Court exists to serve
as the final bastion of the law against runaway
moral absolutes. But, just as in its showdown with
FDR, the Court blinked, and our court, unlike that
court, didn't even at least put up a good fight for
the law before backing down. Obama didn't even have
to threaten to pack the court with justices. All he
had to do was make it clear that he wasn't going to
follow the law, which forced the law to save face by
following him instead.
The American chief executive has a great deal of
power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes
is a danger with few precedents. There have been
conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a
pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama
never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi
Arabia.
If he were to be impeached tomorrow, as some urge,
he simply wouldn't leave. I don't know what he will
do if he loses the election, simply because I don't
think he knows what he will do-- I don't think the
prospect of losing has seriously entered his mind.
If he loses it will be a pitched battle between
Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama on one shoulder
telling him to stay and Joe Biden and whatever
unfortunate soul is Chief-of-Staff at that point
acting as the voices of reason telling him that it's
over.
Even absolute monarchs make concessions to something
outside themselves, to religion or tradition, but
Obama never has. History, religion and tradition are
nothing but lines that he drops into speeches in
praise of himself. The American flag and the
Constitution are trophies that he uses as backdrops,
the same way that he uses Greek columns-- these
aren't things that mean anything to him. They're
decorations for the sets playing the eternal movie
of him.
Obama is not a politician. Politicians learn to
compromise. They learn that they can't always get
their way. Obama has never learned that lesson. He
always gets his way. Or he did until 2010. No one
has ever told him "No" and made it stick. There is
no weight of life experience that tells him what to
do when this happens.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Obama was never in
the military. Unlike all of them, he never held
anything resembling a real job that required him to
do anything but show up and make speeches. Children
are natural tyrants. Take a child throwing a tantrum
off the playground, give him every privilege in
life, leave out any real challenges, keep telling
him that he's special for 50 years and he will be an
actual tyrant.
No one ever thought that a man with the emotional
maturity of a child, with no life experience and no
principles, would occupy the White House, surrounded
by sycophants and worshiped by a press that acts as
an extension of the White House Press Office. It
took an extensive breakdown among multiple
institutions and the national culture for that to
happen, and the inability to assert the rule of law
is a further symptom of that breakdown.
No one is fooled, unless to some degree they want to
be fooled. To believe a lie, you have to want to
believe it, and that means that at some level, you
know that it is a lie.
Obama was elected because we, Democrats and quite a
few Republicans, wanted to be saved from ourselves.
We wanted to be saved from our policies, our debates
and our guilt. In a time of crisis, we weren't
looking for a reliable experienced professional to
do the job; if we had been, McCain, for all his
flaws, would have won by a landslide. We were
looking for someone who would lie to us and make us
feel better.
The man we picked had no experience and no skills
beyond his surface charm. He was irresponsible, and
that was why the country chose him. His
irresponsibility made our irresponsibility look
good. Even his racist associations were a plus, they
made voters feel better about their own prejudices.
Every wrong, ugly, stupid and irresponsible thing
that he did only made him more appealing to the
people who voted for him.
Every now and then people like to get drunk. When
things are a complete mess, that's when the
temptation to open the bottle and pour it down the
hatch comes. Things were a complete mess in 2008,
and the country got stinking drunk. It decided to be
completely irresponsible and, feeling sorry for
itself, it elected someone who wouldn't have been
qualified for any position in his own Cabinet.
Since then, the country has sobered up. It thinks
that Obama is doing a bad job, but it doesn't know
how to tell him that he was only a one-night stand.
He seems like such a nice guy, and it would hurt his
feelings to tell him why he was really elected. It
wasn't because anyone, besides zombie liberals,
thought that he knew what he was doing. It was
because he seemed like a cheerful bright spot in a
dour time and everyone felt sorry about slavery and
segregation.
The problem is that Obama won't leave. 2010 was a
sharp hint. Any halfway-competent politician would
have caught it and changed direction. But Obama
refuses to understand hints. He refuses to
understand the unspoken message because that gives
him power. The power of the rude is in their
rudeness. The rudeness is a challenge to anyone with
manners to match him equally or shut up and take it.
Some Republicans, like Joe Wilson, have matched him
rudeness for rudeness; many more, like Justice
Roberts, have chosen to take it instead.
A Head of State who refuses to follow the law is
engaging in rudeness squared, but Obama is doing
what the left has always done. The left rejected
manners and mores; it trashed the culture, threw out
its morals, defied the law with acts of civil
disobedience and, once in office refused to accept
any limitations on its power. And most of the time
it won. It stared down the society, the police and
the politicians, defied their rules and took their
rulemaking powers for its own.
The power of the left lies in challenging the lies
that society tells itself and creating the illusion
of credibility and sincerity through that challenge.
It succeeds when its enemies lack faith in their own
ideas, their own policies and their own values. The
more abrasively it challenges norms, the more it
refuses to follow any rules but its own, the more
credibility it gains as a liberation movement.
Obama is the apotheosis of the left's project, a
brat nurtured on self-esteem, weaned on white guilt,
educated to play with words and rewarded for staged
confrontations with equally staged surrenders. All
these qualities have shaped him into the entitled
monster that he is, squatting in the Oval Office and
grinning from the covers of a hundred magazines,
determined to always win the only way he knows how,
by ignoring the rules of the game.
If you have ever encountered someone genuinely
worthless yet successful, it was almost certainly a
man or woman who refused to take "No" for an answer.
That can be a useful quality in some fields, but
it's also a perfect way for people with no useful
skills to get what they want out of life. These are
the people who don't get fired or denied promotions
because it would cause too many problems, who get
discounts they aren't entitled to, because they keep
demanding them, who use determination and
confrontation as substitutes for knowledge, ability
and competence-- who become a success story purely
based on their enormous sense of entitlement and
complete lack of shame.
Today such a man occupies the highest office in
the land and rules accordingly. What the left once
practiced as civil disobedience has become tyranny.
Under Obama, the country is turning lawless because
its chief executive is lawless. But Obama's rise to
power is a symptom of deep-rooted problems in the
country. They cannot be fixed just by voting him out
of office, because there are other Obamas out there.
Obama's rise to power is a mirror of the national
problems that got him there. All the things wrong
with him are reflected, to some extent, in the men
and women who voted for him. It could not be
otherwise. His lawlessness is a symptom of an
existing lawlessness. His contempt for values and
morals, for tradition and history, for the nation
itself, is a symptom of the contempt that the left
has fed over the years until it has become a poison
in the national bloodstream.
To truly defeat Obama, we have to be able to defeat
those negative traits as well. To understand what
gave someone like him power over so many people. It
is not enough to just remove him from office,
because, unless we understand the corruption that
made his rise possible, he, or someone like him,
will rise again.