Elites Should Blame Selves, Not Obama, for Believing His Messianic Pretensions
Have you noticed among the Obama-supporting elite a desperate agony upon realizing that he is not quite the messiah he made himself out to be and as which they willingly embraced him?
Many leftists are disgusted with Obama for supposedly betraying the cause on a number of issues, which tells us how irredeemably liberal they are. But their sense of betrayal runs deeper than ideology.
It's not just their belief that he's abandoned them on numerous policy issues. It's also their belated discovery that he's not superman.
So we're witnessing a number of liberal and conservative elites scapegoating Obama for their own foolishness in deifying him. I say "scapegoating" because no one has a reasonable right to rely on another person's self-portrayal as messianic. If they bought into his claims to personal transcendence, then they are more culpable than he is, and their anger is transferred hostility, redirected from themselves to the now-exposed mortal.
The elites' investing of supernatural hope in Obama was a product of their worldview, which diminishes, perhaps even erases, God's role and looks to man for salvation. Their subsequent deflation was inevitable because no mere human being is transcendent.
My assessment gains further credibility when you consider that some of these former Obama disciples are still torn, not quite willing to let go just yet of their fantastical expectations — their faith. So in their essays, we can detect both resentment and a sense of residual hope that Obama will return to his godlike state. At once they berate him for betraying them in his holding himself out as almost otherworldly and yet plea for him to return to this very same resplendent glory that they now ambivalently reject.
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift reminisces about Obama's halcyon days — his period as a consummate presidential campaigner — when he would overcome each difficult challenge by rising to the occasion. "He came through the crucible each time because he realized he would otherwise lose." Clift observes that the left-wing MoveOn.org is running ads "calling on the president to 'be the president we fought to elect.'" She says, "The rest of us (non-Republicans) are craving the leadership we know he's capable of, and time is running out."
The New York Times' Frank Rich attributes "the baffling Obama presidency" to a form of Stockholm syndrome, whereby "the hostage will start concentrating on his captors' 'good side' and develop psychological characteristics to please them — 'dependency; lack of initiative; and an inability to act, decide or think.'" "Obama," Rich argues, "has seemingly surrendered his once-considerable abilities to act, decide or think." Rich says that Obama is neither the naive centrist the left is making him out to be nor the socialist conservatives claim he is. "The real problem is that he's so indistinct no one across the entire political spectrum knows who he is."
Obama should have broken out of his Stockholm chains and stood "firm on what matters to him and to the country rather than forever attempting to turn non-argumentative reasonableness into its own virtuous reward."
Put aside Rich's distorted perspective in thinking that Republicans have been the aggressors in their relationship with Obama or that he has been conciliatory rather than the bully he's actually been. What's more noteworthy is his disgust with Obama for not being the super-liberal, super-aggressive, super-decisive, super-competent chief executive he and his ilk believed he would be. Rich seems to believe less than some others in Obama's potential redemption.
Michael Lerner writes that liberals "believe it is critical to get Obama to become the candidate whom most Americans believed they elected in 2008." He recommends a primary challenge from the left, which "would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate."
The New York Times' David Brooks, who has sometimes been mistaken for a conservative, begs Obama to make yet another speech (this time on tax reform) and to reclaim the greatness the Brooks "intellectuals" projected upon him. "If Obama moved vigorously on this sort of tax reform, starting at the State of the Union, he would vindicate my description of him, which would be nice." I suppose he means the one in which he lusted after the crease in Obama's pants.
These examples and many others show the pure folly in so many having invested so much in a man about whom we knew so little and what we did know was troubling.
The elites' uniform disenchantment with Obama says much more about them than it does him, namely that they are hopelessly lost in the intoxication of their intellectual elitism and the mire of their crippling worldview and that they didn't have a clue about Obama when they formed their little cult and still don't as they stumble upon, kicking and screaming, his abundant failings.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His new book, "Crimes Against Liberty," was No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction for its first two weeks. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his website at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Comments
Obama was doomed from the
Submitted by MidAmerica on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 12:01pm.
Obama was doomed from the start. The Liberals are in total denial of the fact that what they want obama to do is impossible for any person to do..... make socialism work. They thought obama would succeed where Stalin and Mao failed.
Socialist policies have failed every last time they have been tried. Good grief! can't liberals read and comprehend? Russia and China pushed as hard as any government could to make socialism a viable concept. They killed millions of people trying to prove that somehow someway it was a superior social order. But they failed.
Liberals/socialists/communists are the most blinded by ideology group of people we have to deal with. Even the Islamic terrorists are more rational than they are.
WOW at least when something
Submitted by ninerdog on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 12:21pm.
WOW at least when something doesn’t go right for the religious right they can say its Gods will and go with it as a trial of faith. Liberals just lose their minds and blame everything on their god… How selfish 4 year old child throwing a fit can ya get. The liberals are acting like this over a small repub victory. Nanny better get a budget pass ASAP or risk having the liberal base committing suicide over what the repubs are going to do.
It just hurts so much
Submitted by Model850 on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 12:43pm.
It just hurts so much to face the realization that your "god" has feet of clay. So much effort was spent by the media and the left propping up this guy that they never bothered to look at the facts:
Obama = Unqualified for executive position
Obama = Clueless as to how to actually lead instead of just bully his way through
Obama = Empty suit
When hope is an accelerant
Submitted by KC Mulville on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 3:01pm.
I recall the campaign in the summer of 2008. Obama struck me as a lightweight, but I'd watch media figures rave about his intelligence. And I was hardly alone. Many on this website, not to mention professional pundits from the right, scratched our heads in confusion over why the media glorified this guy.
We are the ones we've been looking for! Um ... what?
Now they're depressed that this guy is turning out to be ... guess what ... a lightweight. Who knew? Well, just about all of us, except for the acolytes of the media.
They elected a narcissist and they are surprised?
Submitted by drsamherman on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 9:24pm.
He cashiered his ideals the minute they became politically incovenient and no longer drew the sycophants and mindless yahooism from the left that he relied upon to keep up the ego-orgasm.
At least that is what a Freudian colleague of mine said, verbatim.
Libs will have to keep searching...
Submitted by Chris Norman on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 9:47pm.
"The rest of us (non-Republicans) are craving the leadership we know he's capable of, and time is running out." Good grief, even after they recognize that Obama is not the omnipotent god they built him up to be, they are still begging him to be that god. I don't get it, but I suppose the liberal faith is shaken but remains hopeful, against all evidence, that with just the right One, liberalism will finally work. They keep testing their ideas and we're the ones who suffer from their experiments.This is Dave's "I told you so" moment
Submitted by Dave. on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 10:27pm.
And I really do hate to say it, but dammit, I told you so.
In fact, I told everybody, even before the '08 election, that an Obama presidency was going to be an utter disaster for America, and I also asserted, in many different ways, that we would be damn lucky to survive it.
I got the reaction from my lib friends I expected.
What I didn't expect was the reaction I got from many of my conservative friends - even some right here at NB.
"Dave, no one man can destroy America," I kept hearing, along with, "Oh, it will be okay, as we'll just vote the repubes back in in 2010 and vote Obama out in 2012, and all will be right with the world."
Really?
I'm sorry, but this nation shot itself in the femoral artery back in November of '08, and has been rapidly hemorrhaging to death ever since. Last month, we managed to affix a band-aid to the wound (when what we really needed was a tourniquet), and that band-aid shrank considerably today when the GOP "leadership" in the house began naming RINOs to important chairmanship positions.
I'm sorry, but we did not send all those new repubs to the House to stand on the sidelines and cheer lustily whilst the party "leaders" slipped back between the sheets with the far-left.
No, we sent them there to stop Obama's blitzkrieg of a Marxist coup cold, and to begin reversing the damage that not only he has done, but much of what occurred long before the former community pisser-offer arrived on the scene.
The next congress will be seated on January 05, 2011. I truly hope that what happened today is not the hideous omen I think it might be.
If it is, whatever happens in the voting booths of Amerika come November of 2012 isn't going to mean all that much.
In fact, it will mean less than nothing.
-Dave
Vote for the American in November
Dave, I bow to your "I told
Submitted by Radical1979 on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 10:38pm.
Dave, I bow to your "I told you so". I knew Obama would be bad, but I didn't even imagine he'd be this bad. Until the first three months I thought it would awful, but really couldn't see them doing what they've done, what the American people have allowed them to do, without storming D.C.
By the time 2012 comes Fox News will be seriously impaired, and talk radio will be a wasteland of liberal lies.
I think Glen Beck is right. The future is very grim indeed.
Ditto
Submitted by jon_torlin on Thu, 12/09/2010 - 3:46pm.
Dave, I agree and had been saying the same thing and got the same kind of responses, almost verbatim to what you had.
It was all there laid out for anyone to see, even the parallelisms of Hitler were striking and yet people just plain flat ignored it at their peril back in 2007 when he first came out and got elected in 2008.
That peril is here now.
From here on out, I can't hope for the best, but I sure as hell can expect the worst and it might be just the icing on the cake.
-Jon
Dave~
Submitted by GG_NB on Wed, 12/08/2010 - 10:51pm.
You need the TOLD YA SO clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4sB7O97ro
"If not us, who? If not now, when?"
~Ronald Reagan