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Hamas Nazis and the Americans who love them

by Mojambo ( 181 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Media, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians at December 20th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

The Knish reminds us that Hamas’s war with Israel is because Israel is not Islamic. They hate Israel because it is full of Jews and they do not hate Jews because of Israel (contrary to left-wing dogma)  but because they (Jews) are non Muslims.

by Daniel Greenfield

“For our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” the introduction to the Hamas Charterstates. That isn’t the right way to say it of course. It’s supposed to say Israelis or Zionists. That way there would be plausible deniability. That way Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen could look at it and believe that Hamas doesn’t mean them.

Not them. Not the good Jews who go to work every day at 620 8th Avenue in Renzo Piano’s modernist New York Times skyscraper. Certainly Hamas might have issues with the bad Jews, the ones who cling to the hills of the West Bank, who walk the length of their farms and vineyards with assault rifles on their backs, but not with the good Jews. The Jews so good that they’re hardly Jews at all.

But Hamas, that long branch of the Muslim Brotherhood reaching from Cairo to Gaza, does say Jews. Not a political identity, but a racial one. Still Roger Cohen and Thomas Friedman might protest that if Hamas has come to hate Jews, it is only because of Israel. The Anti-Zionist chicken gave birth to the Anti-Semitic egg.  Hamas however would beg to differ.

“Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims,” Article 28 of the Charter says, proving that the Anti-Zionist chicken hatches out of an Anti-Semitic egg.

Hamas, like all Islamists, does not seek to kill Jews because of Israel. It seeks to destroy Israel because it is filled with Jews. The Jews are not hated because of Muslim opposition to Israel. Israel is opposed because of the Muslim hatred of Jews. There is no deal to be made here. The trouble with Israel is not that it sits on a piece of land that someone wants. The trouble with Israel is the ethnic and religious composition of its people. The trouble with Israel is that it’s in the way of Islamic Armageddon.

“Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take,” Article 7 states. “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The (end) time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

During the last Gaza conflict, Al-Aqsa TV, Hamas’ own propaganda station, aired a music video that included the message, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah.” When two Al-Aqsa TV operatives were killed during the conflict, the New York Times’ David Carr penned a furious piece accusing Israel of “using war to target journalists.”  [……]

[……]

Human Rights Watch criticized Israel saying, “Civilian broadcasting facilities are not rendered legitimate military targets simply because they broadcast pro-Hamas or anti-Israel propaganda.” And what could be more civilian than a genocidal propaganda facility run by a terrorist organization that is then run by a worldwide terrorist organization whose members have included Osama bin Laden? I am speaking of course of the famously moderate Muslim Brotherhood.

The Nazis used to fund the Muslim Brotherhood.  [……] And the Third Reich at least didn’t get around to shipping warplanes to the Brotherhood the way that the Obama Administration has.

Hamas, we have been told often enough in Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Washington Post, is pragmatic. And when Obama got on the phone with Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader of Egypt, he reportedly admired Morsi’s pragmatism. After Hamas’ electoral victory, the head of the PLO Washington mission said that power would make Hamas pragmatic. That was in 2006.

But pragmatism to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood does not mean what it does on 620 8th Avenue. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were pragmatists. They told foreign diplomats one thing while building mountains of skulls at home. Hitler had a pragmatic program. He wanted to conquer major portions of the world and wipe out the Jews. This is rather close to the pragmatic program of the modern day Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah,” say the famously pragmatic journalists of Al Aqsa TV. When an organization like the Muslim Brotherhood announces that “Jihad is its path and death for the cause of Allah is its most sublime belief,” then its forms of worship will by their very nature be very bloody.  [……]

The religion of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is killing Jews. And the latest survey of the Palestinian Arab public shows that 87.8 percent of them, or 9 out of 10, support Hamas’ war against the Jews. How do you find common ground with people whose form of worship is killing you? There is only one way. By joining the war on their side.

Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are pragmatists. That means that they are willing to sit down and chat with New York Times reporters until it becomes expedient to chop their heads off. Being a pragmatic serial killer is all about this kind of divide and conquer triage; figuring out which of your victims to kill now and which of your victims to manipulate into seeing you as a moderate serial killer. A serial killer who can be reasoned with and counted on to keep the unreasonable serial killers in line.

Hamas’ American supporters have found their common ground with a genocidal terrorist organization by counting on that same pragmatism to keep them alive. That is how Cindy Sheehan can troop down to Gaza or Pakistan. It is why New York Times reporters in Gaza don’t meet the same fate as Daniel Pearl.

The endgame for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is still that glorious genocidal apocalypse where every rock and tree will turn into a snitch. But they are willing to be pragmatists until they can get there. For the moment New York Times reporters are useful for covering up Hamas rocket launches from schools and hospitals. For the moment Human Rights Watch activists are good for faking a human rights crisis and allowing the terrorist group to rearm. For the moment America is good for some free money and even weapons.

For the moment the pragmatic serial killers will pick and choose which Jews they will commune with Allah by trying to murder. But moments pass quickly. And with enough F-16s, even pragmatically genocidal groups no longer need to be very pragmatic about their genocide at all.

Read the rest – Hamas Nazis and their American supporters

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Posted in Egypt, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Media, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians | 181 Comments »

Separated at birth: Obama and Morsi

by Mojambo ( 101 Comments › )
Filed under Egypt, Islam, Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood at December 6th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

Both Barack Obama and Mohammad Morsi are tyrants at heart who would rule by decree and fiat if they could (and Morsi is  actively trying right now). They are demagogues, charlatans, and as the Knish points out – Obama is a Progressive and Morsi is an Islamist and that “their approach to anyone outside that circle is limited to distinguishing between potential converts and useful idiots.”

by Daniel Greenfield

In Cairo, Morsi scribbles his decrees and in Washington DC, Obama scribbles his. There is an ocean between the two men, but there is a good deal that they have in common. Both are ideologues who piggybacked on public outrage over the national impact of international economic declines to climb to power and pursue their true agendas.

Without worries about the price of bread, the odds are good that Mubarak would be sitting in his old place and Morsi would be looking over the latest economic reports from the Brotherhood’s business networks and front groups. And without a sharp decline in American living standards, Mubarak would be receiving phone calls from President McCain urging him to democratize Egypt, while Obama would be rallying the troops at the latest SEIU event for taking back Congress.

Times of crisis are political hunting grounds for extremist groups whose ideologies would otherwise be unpalatable. Angry people are more willing to accept the previously unacceptable to shake up the system and punish those that they blame for their economic situation. They are in the long run, only punishing themselves, but the long run rarely wins elections. The short run however is the all-time ballot box winner.

But the problem with running on the old Bolshy platform of “Land, Bread and Peace” is that the people eventually expect you to deliver at least two of three. And ideologues are not interested in empowering people. They will hand out subsidized freebies to their supporters to win elections, but they won’t empower them economically, outside their network of subsidies, and peace is never on the table with folks who believe utopia is just a hundred years of war away.

There is a point midway between the cheering for hope and change, and the complete consolidation of power in the hands of a tyrannical system when the tyrant is vulnerable. That window is the one that opens when the people begin realizing that there is no land, bread or peace on the horizon. Their eyes haven’t opened, but their patience has run out.

Morsi has tried to cut the duration of the window as narrowly as possibly by moving quickly to consolidate his power, but that brought on a second crisis and a wave of popular protests. Triggering those protests prematurely may have been his plan, but that plan may have also backfired. The only way to tell will be retroactively.

Obama’s ObamaCare power grab was generally held to be premature, but even though the majority continues to oppose it, the man behind the program survived an election thanks to a hurricane and plenty of voter fraud. Morsi may similarly be able to survive his own power grab. An Islamist is, if nothing else, absolutely immune from the sort of human emotions that animate normal leaders.

The advantage of being an ideologue is that you simply do not care what infidels think and anyone who is not a member of your mental club is an infidel. Transnationalists, whether of the leftist or Islamist flavor, are men who live without a country. Their country is an imaginary global utopia, the infinite Reich of dreams, the Caliphate of their conspiracies and the World Revolution that can never be.

That disregard is what allows men like Obama and Morsi to survive the widespread hatred and contempt of a country, to sneeringly dismiss it, and get on with the program of taking it over. Bush and Mubarak could be hurt by how their own countrymen saw them. But Obama is not an American and Morsi is not an Egyptian. Obama is a Progressive and Morsi is an Islamist. Their approach to anyone outside that circle is limited to distinguishing between potential converts and useful idiots.

Bad leaders can be protested out of office. Ideologues can only be forced out of office. And that isn’t easy. Any movement with enough money, skills and leverage to take their man all the way to the top is not going to fold just because the streets are full of protesters or because legal action is being taken against them. [……..]

America in the 1950s briefly woke up to the fact that any measure had to be taken to keep the Reds away from power… or there would be no America left. Egyptians understood this about the Muslim Brotherhood all along and took many of those measures, until we forced Egypt to dismantle its defenses, as we dismantled our own. Obama and Morsi are the consequences of that unilateral disarmament.

Obama and Morsi are not individuals, they are the representatives of political movements that have spent the better part of a century clambering to power. Their brushes with the law have made them cunning and their rise to power after so long have fed their sense of historical destiny. To them these are more than momentary political triumphs, but the culmination of history. They do not see ballot boxes, but the inevitable march of progress and prophecy that must be fulfilled by any means necessary.

It is not surprising that Obama and Morsi, two men who hail from the same continent and a related cultural milieu, have gotten along so well with one another. Their interests do not precisely align, but they can appreciate a colleague working in the same field of revolution. But the mutual friendship may prove to be more harmful to Morsi than to Obama.

[……..]

The same window that prevents Morsi from exerting total control over the country, also prevents him from making a complete break with America. Morsi needed Obama to bail out the Egyptian economy and now Obama is dragging Morsi down. Positive views of America fell to 19 percent in Egypt in 2012 making Anti-Americanism into a viable proposition. Not that it ever wasn’t.

[……..]

Americans weren’t ready for a reversal after four years. Will Egyptians be ready to cast down Morsi after a much shorter period?

Obama’s work has taken longer and gone slower because there is much more of it to do. America started out at a higher point than Egypt and it will take it a while to hit bottom. Morsi has less to dismantle and is working against lower expectations in a country where freedom is a slogan, not a tangible experience.

The 21st Century has been surprisingly good to Islamists and leftists. The fall of the Soviet Union opened a power vacuum that the Islamists filled and allowed the left to sell its agenda in a world where the gulag was no longer a relevant term. Of the two groups the leftists have a shorter future, at least in areas that fall under Islamist control, but their Islamist alliances have also given them a new lease on life.

Every utopian dream sooner or later ends in a nightmare

The leftists have taught class warfare to the Islamists and the Islamists have revived the left’s critiques of foreign policy as imperialism by providing them with a global identity group that fills the hole left behind by the end of the Cold War. It is not surprising then to see Obama and Morsi working so well together… or following the same path.

Transnationalist movements are predatory. They strike at a weak period in a nation’s history with the aim of tearing apart the country. But a country so weak and dissolute as to remain under the dominion of transnationalist movements is also too corrupted to be very much use. The Communists could never make much of Russia or China. It took a transition to capitalism to do that. And the only thing that transnationalists will be able to make of America or Egypt is to harness both countries for the sheer manpower and the leftover weapons.

Obama, Morsi and the forces behind them have power, but they have no future. Their reign can only end in one of two ways. Either the country becomes vigorous enough to cast them off and rebuild, or it will not, and the Islamists and the leftists will go down into the darkness with it. Every utopian dream sooner or later ends in a nightmare. The question is whether it will be a nightmare only for the leftist and Islamist movements or for the countries that they take over.

Read the rest – Obama and Morsi:  Separated at Birth

 

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Posted in Egypt, Islam, Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood | 101 Comments »

Currently American foreign policy can be summed up as “Please don’t kill us”

by Mojambo ( 104 Comments › )
Filed under History at November 30th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

It is too bad that Americans pay little attention to foreign affairs and when they do it is only because we are being reactive to attacks.

by Daniel Greenfield

The United States of America has a State Department, it has row after row of people who speak badly every language from Arabic to Swahili badly, and it has rich donors who take on the task of acting as ambassadors to some foreign country every four to eight years. There are think-tanks, actual tanks and institutes dedicated to turning out papers on foreign policy. And despite all this, or perhaps because of all this, the country still has no foreign policy.

 

 

Americans are by nature isolationist. American leaders, since Woodrow Wilson dumped ashes from his pipe on the Oval Office carpets and dumped America into the international game of empires, are bent on getting involved in world politics. Unfortunately everything they know about world politics comes from the back of cereal boxes. And yes that includes our current precious genius who comes to us from eating dog and living the life of a privileged member of Indonesia’s upper classes, but knows almost as little about the world outside Chicago, as he does about economics.

The big problem with American foreign policy is that there isn’t one. Our current foreign policy can be boiled down to three words. “Don’t Hate Us.” The current administration has introduced an innovative fourth word. “Please.”

It’s a long way from a century ago when American leaders still had no foreign policy, besides warning European countries to stay out of their hemisphere, but had begun to think that being involved in the affairs of other countries was a prerequisite for global good citizenship.

Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for trying to get the Russians and Japanese to end a disastrous war in which the Japanese had the suicide determination and the Russians had the machine guns, but barely broke even.

Roosevelt, like many of his successors, had no true foreign policy beyond articulating American greatness on the world stage. But the deeper those successors involved themselves in international politics, the more they came to see American greatness as the obstacle, not the point. The more the United States became involved in organizing global alliances to hold back one threat or another, the more that same national greatness began to be seen as an obstacle to maximizing those alliances.

Manifest destiny

A hundred years ago, American presidents thought that their country should be a world power because of the manifest destiny of its national greatness. A century later they were minimizing that national greatness to preserve world power status.

Roosevelt’s “Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead” became “Let’s Pull Together” and “Don’t Hate Us” during the Cold War. And today the motto, in a world where a whole lot of people want to do it, is, “Please Don’t Kill Us.”

[……..]

CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) through outreach to Muslims

CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) through outreach to Muslims is our foreign policy and like global warming and gay rights, it encompasses every single area of our government, to the absurd extent that NASA’s top priority under the dog-eater-in-chief was designated as improving Muslim self-esteem. NASA’s former priority of boosting American self-esteem was no longer appropriate because that would just make people hate us even more and make us act in such a way that they would hate us.

Americans and American leaders now both want the same thing. To be left alone. But American leaders remain convinced that the best way to be left alone is to appease those who might want to attack their country by minimizing national power and contributing more lunch money to their international cause of free lunches.

America is often accused of bullying other nations, but our policies are not those of a bully, they are those of his victim cowering in the corner with broken glasses and smeared tears, one hand extended with his crumpled up lunch money inside. Our lunch money total comes into the many billions, but as our bullies and their advocates remind us, we’re rich enough to be able to afford it.

The kid in the corner has been bullied enough that his only policy is avoiding another incident. That is our foreign policy, driven by CVE or Here’s Some More Halal Lunch Money, finding ways of getting the bullies to leave us alone. Even the more militant elements of our military campaign are defensive, ripe with ways to convince the bullies to leave us alone, using drones to minimize civilian casualties and nation building exercises to turn our bullies into friendly peaceloving countries.

Reactive foreign policies are a recipe for defeat, but America has never had any foreign policy beyond progressive world citizenship and coalition building against global threats. And that has made American into the world’s social worker and the world’s policeman for so long that it has hardly any sense of what it might want for itself, as a country.

[……..]

The United States has been suckered into playing the same game as Israel. The impossible game of winning wars without alienating anyone. And that game is played by not winning wars and being more hated than if they had won all those wars. If we are forced to fight because we are hated, then the only way to avoid fighting is not be hated which means fighting just enough to survive, but not enough to earn us any more than the minimum amount of hate balanced against the minimum amount of survival. And if we win, maybe they’ll leave us alone. If they don’t, we’ll fight back even less.

Cold War, Islamic terrorism

During the Cold War the United States sacrificed its economy, its trade balance and its manufacturing sector to score coalition points and contain Communism. With Communism defeated and capitalism thriving in Russia and China, the United States is now stripping away civil liberties to counter Islamic terrorism. But that doesn’t just mean strip searches in airports, it means outlawing anything that offends Muslims. And if we survive that, and the Muslim world becomes a mecca of free speech, then we’ll have won yet another Pyrrhic victory at our own expense.

Countering external threats is a legitimate foreign policy interest, but it cannot be the only interest. That way leads to a purely reactive foreign policy and down the garden path to Stockholm Syndrome politics that accept responsibility for the actions of an aggressor to maintain the illusion of control over his actions. Our leaders, the ones who eat dogs and the ones who just pose for photos with them, are already there. If we reach European critical velocity, then we’ll be there as an entire nation, not just members of our chattering and spending classes.

America needs a foreign policy that is bigger than its defensive needs but smaller than progressive ambitions of global citizenship. It is a foreign policy that cannot be defensive or altruistic, but that actually resurrects the long buried question of American interests, rather than American obligations or needs. And to get there, the country’s policymakers have to get in touch with their 19th Century selves and stop asking what America is obligated to do for the world or what it desperately needs from the world, but what it would like to do with the world.

[………]

A foreign policy is assertive. It seeks to gain things, rather than to minimize losing things. It is not as concerned with the feelings of the world, as it is with the feelings of its own citizens. To the question of what it wants, it does not answer with the time-honored response of Miss America contestants, to make the world a better place, but rather it answers to make America better, bigger, richer and stronger. That answer is not idealistic, it is realistic. It is how other countries expect us to think and it is how they react no matter how altruistic our policies may be.

American foreign policy needs goals and horizons to gain definition. It needs to want something more than a way to avert the next big explosion or to feed the hungry people of Warlordistan to have a foreign policy that is based on substance, rather than cobwebs of fears and dreams. It needs to stand not for a better world, but for a better, stronger and richer America.

Read the rest – America has no foreign policy

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Posted in History | 104 Comments »

The only thing sadder than a hipster is a wannabe hipster and that’s what Obama is now

by Mojambo ( 185 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Media, Politics at October 25th, 2012 - 2:00 pm

I love the Knish’s  prediction that Obama may wind up like Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard,  “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Obama Campaign, that strange 4-year marriage of Generation X hipsters, inner city bosses, suburban college educated boomers longing for racial healing, Big Green businessmen and shady Saudis, appears to be finally sinking beneath the waves. It isn’t going out in a blaze of glory, but with mumbles of trending topics.

Obama was always a petty man and his campaign has descended into pointless pettiness, into Team Big Bird, binders full of women and bayonets and horses. Like so much hipster culture, it exists so that the participants can entertain each other with something that no one else thinks is funny or clever. And that elitism is precisely the point. It’s the last resort of losers who hide from their lack of taste behind walls of exclusivity.

Abandoning mass appeal, Obama is getting back to his roots of entertaining upper middle class college kids with his ‘hipness’; both actual college kids and the overgrown middle aged variety that make up the professional class of the mediacracy who treat the rest of the country the way that they treated the natives on their Peace Corps assignments.

[…….]

For the Northeastern New York Times reader, Obama held out the promise of atonement for the country’s grave racial sins. For the San Francisco wind farm executive, he offered the prospect of a presidency that would be one long endless TED talk with plenty of subsidies for the cunning Greenvestor. And the college student would finally have a president who watched the same shows, listened to the same music and got the same jokes making him the perfect Resident Adviser for the country.

Obama wasn’t actually interesting, he just seemed interesting in a cursory sort of way

Two biographies and four years later those same people have learned that, like that party guest who mentions that he’s a nuclear physicist, a poet and an explorer of supernatural phenomena, Obama wasn’t actually interesting, he just seemed interesting in a cursory sort of way. Obama’s biography made him an interesting party guest, but not past a 5-minute chat, and it in no way qualified him to hold the country’ top job during an economic crisis and two wars.

Obama’s seriously intent tone, the one that signals you to pay attention, no longer works on even the faithful. Like Pavlov’s dogs, they have stopped coming once they realized that just because the bell rings doesn’t mean that dinner or a functional economy will be served. The weighty tone that he once used to deploy to great effect, borrowing the tricks of the preachers that he encountered in his huckstering days, has come to seem as empty as Oprah’s smile or Bill Clinton’s sincere head nod, just another of the tricks of hollow public personalities signifying nothing.

[……..]

Somewhere along the way, Obama became boring

Somewhere along the way, Obama became boring. He became that one man at a party that you don’t want to talk to because he will go on forever and all his chatter leads nowhere, because for all his conversational skills, he is capable of nothing but talk. And after talking to him for ten hours, you don’t know him any better than you did after ten minutes.

Voting for Obama was never the right choice objectively, but it was the right cultural choice, it was the trend, the impulse that everyone seemed to be following, the style that everyone was wearing and the book that everyone was reading. But trends like that don’t last. How many people will have Lady Gaga songs in their players or Fifty Shades of Grey on their bookshelves ten years from now? This too is the fate of the president of the trending topic, the commander-in-chief of the pet rock and the mood ring with his binders full of women and t-shirts with pictures of horses and bayonets on them. A joke that like Snakes on a Plane or All Your Base Are Belong To Us never gets old until 5 minutes later.

When times are bad, people have a well-known escapist streak. During the Great Depression, lavish musicals were popular. After September 11, Zoolander topped the box office. Facing two wars and a failed economy, the American people followed their own escapist streak to a smooth talking trickster with a soothing bag of promises that were too good to be true. Who wanted to listen to McCain, a man who looked like a walking war injury and kept talking about sacrifice, when you could get big bags of free stuff from a man who offered a post-racial society as a free gift with every vote.

Americans escaped to Obama and now they’re escaping from Obama

Americans escaped to Obama and now they’re escaping from Obama. The vacation was already being cut short in 2012 and now it’s approaching its blackout date. Instead of taking Americans away from everything, Obama took everything away from them, and now they’re gearing up to take it all back and put him on a back shelf next to last summer’s beach reads and last decade’s pop hits.

Obama is over. And confronting his ‘overness’, that deadliest of fates for a hipster, he is crawling back to pander to his original audience, the graphic designers who put together posters of him on their free time; the celebrities who were eager to form his Jack Pack, to be his Joey Bishop or his Marylin Monroe; the musicians singing about him; the netroots bloggers cranking out their sensations of euphoric immediacy at being in his presence and the professional leftists cheering for him to take down the American Empire like Godzilla took down Tokyo.

[……..]

There’s no point to liking Obama anymore. Not when Obama is everywhere, more overexposed than Instagram, grinning from every corner, from every screen and magazine cover, selling out to get ahead and making the old faithfuls wonder if he ever stood for anything at all. Theirs is the sad burden of knowing that they will never have their own JFK who died, tragically and horrifyingly, before he could dive all the way into Vietnam, before stories of his carousing hit the papers forcing him to go on television and insist that he never had sex with any of those women.

Obama will not be immortalized by a Communist with a rifle. Instead he is doomed to be mortal, his hair turning white and his musical tastes turning worse. Any day now he will admit to a fondness for Kenny G and after that there will be no saving him from the dread ravages of time. And so he is over because the alternative to him being over is the tastemakers having to confront their own overness. Their own mortality.

If Obama were cannier than he seems, then he would embrace his own fakeness, becoming a self-constructed celebrity, glorifying in his own artificiality, until like Lady Gaga or Lana Del Rey and every third hip hop star with a pulse, his very fakeness would serve as proof of his inventiveness and his media savvy. Such an Obama would present a birth certificate showing that he was born in Kenya to challenge our notions of identity, admit to squandering all the country’s money for its own good and keep us entertained with his latest antics. It might not win him the election, but considering the example of Zoolander, it might, because then instead of being over, he would be a new escape all over again.

But Obama is determined to be a hipster to the very end, instead of embracing the shamelessness of his own media manipulations, he veers erratically between an insincere sincerity and the sneer of the spitefully superior. It’s the performance we saw in the third debate, the antics of every college kid you ever argued with, that combination of smugness and insecurity that marks the hipster as an impossible conversationalist.

The only thing sadder than a hipster is a wannabe hipster and that’s what Obama is now

The only thing sadder than a hipster is a wannabe hipster and that’s what Obama is now, a man in search of a meme, a one-man band in search of an artfully touching documentary about its travails in the wilds of Portland and a flat line in search of its trend.

Obama does not know how to govern. He does not know how to address the economy or war. The one thing he knows how to do is be popular. That is the one and only skill that he has cultivated in his life. And it is a good skill for a politician, but a politician whose only skill is popularity had better avoid taking responsibility for anything that might make him unpopular.

[……..]

The country doesn’t hate him, but it is tired of him. It wakes up every morning, remembers the time everyone got drunk and decided to vote for the cool black dude who talked a lot about hope, winces and then forgets about him all over again until it looks at the latest economic news. It’s over him and it wishes that he would show some dignity and walk away from a job that he isn’t qualified for on his own.

His fundraising emails walk the thin line between emotional blackmail and hysteria

Obama has gotten desperate. His fundraising emails walk the thin line between emotional blackmail and hysteria. Increasingly they read like Cousin Larry phoning for bail money from Tijuana. Shrilly needy they demand that we pay attention to him, that we love him, adore him and spend money on him. They are the missives of a man who cannot conceive of a life outside the spotlight, the vapid fear of a celebrity who cannot confront the real world and cannot understand why their public is walking away.

In the last stages of his career, Obama has become Norma Desmond, waving around a social media gun and shouting, “No one leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star.” But the country has left and what they leave behind is a star falling from the sky over Chicago .

Read the rest – A star falls over Chicago

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Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Elections 2012, Media, Politics | 185 Comments »

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