CONTRARIAN COMMENTARY FOR FEBRUARY 7, 2007
OBAMA WEEK: PART ONE
WHY OBAMA IS WINNING AND AMERICA IS LOSING
AMERICA’S NEW PIED PIPER OF POLITICS
THE MAN FROM HYPE, NOT HOPE
(CHICAGO)(FEBRUARY 7, 2007) U. S. Senator Barack (“Barry O”) Obama wants to be President of the United States. Well, why not? Or as the TV pitchman used to say, “Whyyyyyy not!”
I don’t Bear Mr. Obama any ill will. As a slightly demented friend in New York used to say, “everyone has to have a scam.” And Obama’s scam is the presence of nothing at all except himself. Nothingness. He is the Camus candidate.
Cindy Richards, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, today provided a distillation of why Obama is succeeding. And why Barry O is bad for America. Cindy agonistes wrote “Why Obama won my internal battle.” She was fighting with herself over Barry O? Well, yes. And apparently she lost. Or at least America is losing.
I don’t mean to pick on Richards. After all, unlike Mrs. Obama, Ms. Richards is a vice president of nothing. She writes for a living. We can list her as “entertainer.” So why am I focusing on Richards? Because in her brief column she catalogs all of the ways that Barry has fooled us, and is fooling America.
It won’t be pretty when the bubble bursts.
When we see the man behind the curtain. When someday we realize it was all Hype, not Hope. Barry Obama is America’s latest pied piper of politics. With perfect pitch.
We usually count on people in a local community to know someone best. But now that the Chicago Bears have lost the Super Bowl and newspapers need to sell, sell, sell we can look forward to Obamamania. A media feeding frenzy over Kenyan-American Barack Obama. Only Chicago’s media, and Ms. Richards in particular, don’t know Barack Obama very well at all. Not well at all.
Richards lists ten (10) reasons why Obama should be president.
One: he is good at fund raising. Money talks, and the rest of us walk. OK. If you like to walk. But where is all of this money coming form? Rich people. Hollywood people. Business people. True to his huckster’s stance as an “outsider,” Obama is so far outside the system he’s inside out.
Two: he has a blank resume (see below for Obama’s lack of any professional accomplishments.) We used to elect distinguished Americans with identifiable achievements to the presidency, e.g. Dwight Eisenhower. It wasn’t a perfect process, but no one dared suggest that having done nothing was a basis to allow someone to ascend to an aeropagus where they could do something, namely damage.
Three: Obama is a “constitutional law scholar.” Well, presumably that can be verified. Has he written any authoritative law review articles? Tried any cases? Argued any appeals. Nope. Obama has done nothing but promote himself to the gullible as a “legal scholar.” He has fooled a lot of people, not he least of which includes the media.
Obama is a lawyer. Yes. If every “lawyer” is a scholar, then Obama is a scholar. But if merely being a lawyer does not make you a scholar then Barry Is just a mediocre lawyer with no legal accomplishments and a nonexistent legal resume. Absent his sweet talk and confused psyche he would be indistinguishable from the many other minority lawyers out there. A “scholar,” he isn’t. But he’s fooled Cindy. And triggered her “internal battle.”
Indeed, because Chicago has evolved into a community of very progressive racial relations, there is a plethora of highly competent, highly successful minority lawyers in Chicago. Men and women with real accomplishments in the law. None of them are named Obama. My own law school has produced some. And none of them is named Obama. When we allow Obama’s vacuous claims to legal “scholarship” to be accepted as truth we insult the very process of public debate over the qualifications of the person who will lead our nation in the future.
To be sure, years ago they used to write stories claiming Hillary Clinton was one of “America’s best lawyers.” And she wasn’t. Hillary, meet Barry.
Four: Obama has the “audacity to hope.” When hope is merely hype, and serves as a substitute for thought, hope is dangerous, not a reason to catapult someone into the White House. We need someone with the heft to lead, not the “hope” to accomplish something in the future that he has so far failed to accomplish in his entire adult life.
Five: Obama is “comfortable is a room full of steelworkers.” He won’t be comfortable with real workers when people realize what a classic and world class con artist he is. Obama "talks labor" but he has never accomplished anything significant for workers. He says he is for the poor folk, but only if he enriches himself in the process. He says he is against Wal-Mart, but then again few millionaires such as himself shop there.
Six: Obama’s not “tainted” by the Iraq War. In the sense that Obama did not vote for the Iraq fiasco, she’s right. But in the reality that Obama’s recent statements are worthy Kerryisms (“I voted for before I voted against) Obama has been in a vicious bidding war with John Edwards and Hillary Clinton to see who can seem more inflated with their anti-Iraq flatulence. In 2009 hype/hope will have to confront reality/substance. In Iraq. But by then Barry O will probably be onto some new and nebulous cause. As the Chicago Tribune quotes his wife, Obama’s a dreamer, not a detail man. Everyone has to have a scam.
Seven: His heart is in the right place. Puhlllze.
Eight: “He’s got religion.” Obama is a worthy successor to Chicago’s late religious huckster “Billy Sunday.” Only in the atheistic Democratic party of 2007 could Obama be deemed “religious.” But oh he can sell. Truly, he deserves a revival tent, not a white house.
Nine: Obama doesn’t want to impose “his religion” on “us.” That’s because there is no religion. Hype vs. hope.
Ten: He can win. He can’t. Or, as Abraham Lincoln once said, (he of the venue where Obama will announce his candidacy this Saturday) “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
And there you have it. Someone who has been entrusted with a column in a major metropolitan daily says she has struggled with herself over Barry O, only to be confused, confounded and ultimately convinced by one of the great hucksters in American political history that he is “right” to be president.
There is an expression for wasted wealth, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” I don’t know what the comparable expression for nations is, maybe “Empire to emptiness” in three generations.” But whatever the term is, we are headed there. Good luck with your “internal struggles,” Cindy. If indeed Obama wins, we will all be struggling. To survive.
First the Democrats produced “the Man From Hope.” We all know how he ended up. With a cigar in his hand. Now they are offering us the “Man With Hope.” “Close. But no cigar.”
Thursday: MR. & MRS. OBAMA: PROFITEERING FROM POVERTY
Friday: IS OBAMA A “CHRISTIAN?”
Saturday: BARACK (BARRY) OBAMA: A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE.
------------------------------------------
Chicago-based Internet journalist, broadcaster and critic Andy Martin is the Executive Editor and publisher of ContrarianCommentary.com. © Copyright by Andy Martin 2007. Martin covers national and world politics with forty years of personal experience. Columns also posted at politicalgateway.com; ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; contrariancommentary.wordpress.com. Comments? E-mail: AndyMart20@aol.com. Media contact: (866) 706-2639.
OBAMA WEEK: PART ONE
WHY OBAMA IS WINNING AND AMERICA IS LOSING
AMERICA’S NEW PIED PIPER OF POLITICS
THE MAN FROM HYPE, NOT HOPE
(CHICAGO)(FEBRUARY 7, 2007) U. S. Senator Barack (“Barry O”) Obama wants to be President of the United States. Well, why not? Or as the TV pitchman used to say, “Whyyyyyy not!”
I don’t Bear Mr. Obama any ill will. As a slightly demented friend in New York used to say, “everyone has to have a scam.” And Obama’s scam is the presence of nothing at all except himself. Nothingness. He is the Camus candidate.
Cindy Richards, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, today provided a distillation of why Obama is succeeding. And why Barry O is bad for America. Cindy agonistes wrote “Why Obama won my internal battle.” She was fighting with herself over Barry O? Well, yes. And apparently she lost. Or at least America is losing.
I don’t mean to pick on Richards. After all, unlike Mrs. Obama, Ms. Richards is a vice president of nothing. She writes for a living. We can list her as “entertainer.” So why am I focusing on Richards? Because in her brief column she catalogs all of the ways that Barry has fooled us, and is fooling America.
It won’t be pretty when the bubble bursts.
When we see the man behind the curtain. When someday we realize it was all Hype, not Hope. Barry Obama is America’s latest pied piper of politics. With perfect pitch.
We usually count on people in a local community to know someone best. But now that the Chicago Bears have lost the Super Bowl and newspapers need to sell, sell, sell we can look forward to Obamamania. A media feeding frenzy over Kenyan-American Barack Obama. Only Chicago’s media, and Ms. Richards in particular, don’t know Barack Obama very well at all. Not well at all.
Richards lists ten (10) reasons why Obama should be president.
One: he is good at fund raising. Money talks, and the rest of us walk. OK. If you like to walk. But where is all of this money coming form? Rich people. Hollywood people. Business people. True to his huckster’s stance as an “outsider,” Obama is so far outside the system he’s inside out.
Two: he has a blank resume (see below for Obama’s lack of any professional accomplishments.) We used to elect distinguished Americans with identifiable achievements to the presidency, e.g. Dwight Eisenhower. It wasn’t a perfect process, but no one dared suggest that having done nothing was a basis to allow someone to ascend to an aeropagus where they could do something, namely damage.
Three: Obama is a “constitutional law scholar.” Well, presumably that can be verified. Has he written any authoritative law review articles? Tried any cases? Argued any appeals. Nope. Obama has done nothing but promote himself to the gullible as a “legal scholar.” He has fooled a lot of people, not he least of which includes the media.
Obama is a lawyer. Yes. If every “lawyer” is a scholar, then Obama is a scholar. But if merely being a lawyer does not make you a scholar then Barry Is just a mediocre lawyer with no legal accomplishments and a nonexistent legal resume. Absent his sweet talk and confused psyche he would be indistinguishable from the many other minority lawyers out there. A “scholar,” he isn’t. But he’s fooled Cindy. And triggered her “internal battle.”
Indeed, because Chicago has evolved into a community of very progressive racial relations, there is a plethora of highly competent, highly successful minority lawyers in Chicago. Men and women with real accomplishments in the law. None of them are named Obama. My own law school has produced some. And none of them is named Obama. When we allow Obama’s vacuous claims to legal “scholarship” to be accepted as truth we insult the very process of public debate over the qualifications of the person who will lead our nation in the future.
To be sure, years ago they used to write stories claiming Hillary Clinton was one of “America’s best lawyers.” And she wasn’t. Hillary, meet Barry.
Four: Obama has the “audacity to hope.” When hope is merely hype, and serves as a substitute for thought, hope is dangerous, not a reason to catapult someone into the White House. We need someone with the heft to lead, not the “hope” to accomplish something in the future that he has so far failed to accomplish in his entire adult life.
Five: Obama is “comfortable is a room full of steelworkers.” He won’t be comfortable with real workers when people realize what a classic and world class con artist he is. Obama "talks labor" but he has never accomplished anything significant for workers. He says he is for the poor folk, but only if he enriches himself in the process. He says he is against Wal-Mart, but then again few millionaires such as himself shop there.
Six: Obama’s not “tainted” by the Iraq War. In the sense that Obama did not vote for the Iraq fiasco, she’s right. But in the reality that Obama’s recent statements are worthy Kerryisms (“I voted for before I voted against) Obama has been in a vicious bidding war with John Edwards and Hillary Clinton to see who can seem more inflated with their anti-Iraq flatulence. In 2009 hype/hope will have to confront reality/substance. In Iraq. But by then Barry O will probably be onto some new and nebulous cause. As the Chicago Tribune quotes his wife, Obama’s a dreamer, not a detail man. Everyone has to have a scam.
Seven: His heart is in the right place. Puhlllze.
Eight: “He’s got religion.” Obama is a worthy successor to Chicago’s late religious huckster “Billy Sunday.” Only in the atheistic Democratic party of 2007 could Obama be deemed “religious.” But oh he can sell. Truly, he deserves a revival tent, not a white house.
Nine: Obama doesn’t want to impose “his religion” on “us.” That’s because there is no religion. Hype vs. hope.
Ten: He can win. He can’t. Or, as Abraham Lincoln once said, (he of the venue where Obama will announce his candidacy this Saturday) “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
And there you have it. Someone who has been entrusted with a column in a major metropolitan daily says she has struggled with herself over Barry O, only to be confused, confounded and ultimately convinced by one of the great hucksters in American political history that he is “right” to be president.
There is an expression for wasted wealth, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” I don’t know what the comparable expression for nations is, maybe “Empire to emptiness” in three generations.” But whatever the term is, we are headed there. Good luck with your “internal struggles,” Cindy. If indeed Obama wins, we will all be struggling. To survive.
First the Democrats produced “the Man From Hope.” We all know how he ended up. With a cigar in his hand. Now they are offering us the “Man With Hope.” “Close. But no cigar.”
Thursday: MR. & MRS. OBAMA: PROFITEERING FROM POVERTY
Friday: IS OBAMA A “CHRISTIAN?”
Saturday: BARACK (BARRY) OBAMA: A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE.
------------------------------------------
Chicago-based Internet journalist, broadcaster and critic Andy Martin is the Executive Editor and publisher of ContrarianCommentary.com. © Copyright by Andy Martin 2007. Martin covers national and world politics with forty years of personal experience. Columns also posted at politicalgateway.com; ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; contrariancommentary.wordpress.com. Comments? E-mail: AndyMart20@aol.com. Media contact: (866) 706-2639.
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