There's A Word For Political Messiahnism

Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the two de facto finalists for the honor of being the next president of the United States, had a debate the other night.  I can't say as to exactly why.  Their number of on-stage encounters must be in the two-dozen range by now.  I don't know what either of them could have said by now that they hadn't said numerous times before.  It's difficult to believe that the Rubicon of public disinterest and tuning out amongst even the most rabid fever swamper hasn't been crossed months ago.

Or maybe the novelty is having just the two of them together, without all the extraneous riffraff to get in the way.  If so, more's the pity for the Empress.

I've maintained ever since Mr. Bill waddled off to Harlem seven years ago that his overbearing Bolshevik barracuda of a wife will be the next president of the United States.  I was moderately surprised that she didn't run in 2004, as I think with the Clinton Machine's corrupt resources, and the absence of John Kerry's bumbling incompetence and endlessly lampoonable hauteur, the rabidity of the BDS-crazed Donk base would have been enough to send George W. Bush into one-term retirement right alongside Pappy.  But if there's one thing we've learned about Mrs. Clinton, it's that she only likes sure things.  She was, in essence, handed the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's New York senate seat on a gift-wrapped platter.  And given the pathetic array of losers, boors, and palookas arrayed against her as the 2008 cycle fired up, there was absolutely no reason to suppose that the Democrat presidential nomination, and the presidency itself, would be any different.

For the record, I still believe Mrs. Clinton will be the Donk nominee.  It will be a no-DQ wrestling match rather than a coronation, but her Machine's iron-fisted grip on the Party apparatus will prove the decisive factor.

For her sake, it had better be, because if left to her own devices, you get debacles like this one:

Leave aside the gaping charisma gap for a moment, and ponder the trademark Clintonoid hypocrisy of Madame Hillary taking ANYBODY else to task for employing a remotely questionable campaign tactic.  Compared to some of the capers her campaign has pulled this cycle (from going after something to do with Obama's kindergarten years - I can't even remember what it was, now - to suing a union in Nevada to try and suppress the black vote in that state's Donk caucuses), quoting speech passages from one of his own campaign co-chairs at the urging of that co-chair doesn't seem all that skullduggerous.

But that's just ordinary single-level hypocrisy.  What makes it truly worthy of a Clinton is the fact, as Admiral Ed points out, that there's nothing, um, original about her candidacy's premise, either:

It's a good line, but she's the wrong messenger. Hillary has spent the last year campaigning as the re-run of the Clinton administration, claiming all of the experience from those eight years while taking none of the responsibility for its failures. If anyone is the Xerox candidate, it's Hillary.

It's one thing to "plaigerize" with permission; it's quite another to lift an entire presidency and claim it as your own, even if you were the power behind the big, green curtain.

If the Clinton card, as it were, has finally been played out, then Obama will be as big a walk-over for the Donk nomination as he will be in November.  Game, set, match.

That is a problem.  Because, you see, there are quite a few similarities between Our Mr. Hussein and the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton.  Both had a ton of charisma.  Both used soaring, uplifting rhetoric to champion authoritarian, destructive, despicable policies.  Both made women swoon.  Both had that peculiar effect on their audiences of somehow deactivating the part of listeners' brains that hosts critical thinking capability.

And both have evil spousal alter egos that provide harrowing insight into the nefarious plans their husbands have for the country.

Michelle Obama may or may not have presidential ambitions of her own and may or may not seek to ride B.O. to get to them.  But in a recent speech at UCLA, she painted a very candid, and disquieting, picture of the sort of "mission" the Dalai Obama plans to bring to the White House:

In 2008, we are still a nation that is too divided. We live in isolation, and because of that isolation, we fear one another. We don't know our neighbors, we don't talk, we believe our pain is our own. We don't realize that the struggles and challenges of all of us are the same. We are too isolated. And we are still a nation that is still too cynical. We look at it as "them" and "they" as opposed to "us". We don't engage because we are still too cynical. ...

Actually, we've been a "nation-divided" for going on 232 years, if by "divided" one means "not everybody agrees."  Our republican (small "r") system exists to work out those differences politically and peacefully rather than through endless revolutions and "insurgencies", which lead to autocracies and dictatorships rather than democracy.  Perhaps Mrs. Obama needs to take a remedial American history course and pay particular attention to the section on the Civil War.  THAT was TRUE "division."  That of 2008 is just politics. 

Americans are not in debt because they live frivolously but because someone got sick. Even with insurance, the deductibles and the premiums are so high that people are still putting medications and treatments on credit cards. And they can't get out from under. I could go on and on, but this is how we're living, people, in 2008.

And things have gotten progressively worse throughout my lifetime, through Democratic and Republican administrations, it hasn't gotten better for regular folks. ....

Standard dishonest left-wing boilerplate.  One could argue that Senator Obama is plaigerizing Opie Edwards by proxy.  In reality Americans' standard of living at every level has gone relentlessly upward, and if the spiraling cost of health care is attributable to anything, it is the massive government interventions in the health care delivery system that have been imposed already.  In any market, once price is no longer the arbiter between supply and demand - and that is precisely the effect of "third-party payment," whether through insurance carriers or government diktat - demand skyrockets beyond any possibility of providers to meet it, and the cost soars right along with it.

But I don't get the impression that Mrs. Obama is a staunch supporter of Medicare privatization or medical savings accounts, do you?

Or even what used to be called "Americanism":

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another -- that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

Mrs. Obama confuses "democracy" with "communitarianism" - or its condensed form....communism.  And, indeed, in Marxist theory a communist state is a perfect "democracy" in which everybody is provided for (by the state) according to their need (as defined by the state) and everybody is utilized (by the state - i.e. "good jobs at good wages") according to their abilities (as defined by the state).  The only thing missing from her depiction of Obaman America is the phrase, "or else".

The soul-fixing reference is the tip off.  It is perfectly in the Leninist tradition for proselytizers of an atheistic dogma to employ metaphysical terminology in its promulgation.  That Michelle Obama - and, implicitly, her husband - do not understand a, well, blessed thing about spirituality is established by the political context in which in which she proclaims "Barack's" intention to tinker with our metaphorical hearts.  Behold, Barack Hussein Obama, what Jesus Christ should have been, come to clean up the mess He and His Republican/Christian Right flunkies left behind - whether we want it or not.

Lest you get the idea that is interpretory hyperbole, let's get to Mrs. Obama's peroration:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. [emphases added]

B.O. will FORCE us to work?  Doesn't that sound like the Democrats' depiction of welfare reform?  Or, to my historically-educated ears, collectivization?  Do we get a choice in what work we pursue?  Or where we pursue it?

He will DEMAND submission to and conformity with his policies?  And NEVER ALLOW us to dissent or disagree?  Who the hell does Michelle Obama think her husband is?  Hillary Clinton?

Both Admiral Morrissey and J-Ger call this rhetoric "creepy".  The latter goes on to, quite reasonably, ask:

Isn't this describing an authoritarian presidency way beyond anything George W. Bush has done or proposed?  Do the powers of the presidency really encompass everything Michelle says Obama wants and plans to do? Based on this rhetoric, isn't he actually running for messiah?

Actually, no, he isn't.  It may sound like it, but that's just the artifice.  What Obama really seeks, if his wife's indiscrete flacking is any indication, is precisely what Hillary Clinton seeks: a Hugh Chavez/Fidel Castro-style Marxist-Leninist state in place of the Constitutional Federal Republic America has been since its founding.  Or as close as politically possible to it.

And Barack Obama will be its "president-for-life".  Or "general secretary" or "premier" or whatever the hell title he comes up with for himself once firmly entrenched in power beyond the ability of anything short of a....revolution to get rid of him.

That highlights the one apparent difference between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama: the former was a leftist, but when it came down to the cause versus looking out for #1, Sick Willie chose the latter.  B.O. is a true believer.  And the most frightening aspect of all is that American voters appear ready to accept him, and the dark vision his spousal ideologist proclaims.

Hyperbole?  I'm just reading what she said.  That's one aspect of "silly season" Our Mr. Hussein can't chuckle his way out of.