http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/overcoming-obamaddiction_653239.html?nopager=1
“It is important and urgent, Karpel writes, that those in the grip of Obamaddiction move past denial and stop blaming others, accept responsibility, and embrace alternatives. One suspects that he isn’t holding his breath. And, of course, the AA modeling is just the scaffolding. The book isn’t written so much to change behavior or minds—like the debates upon which the Romney campaign has now pinned its hopes. What Karpel has done—delightfully, given the gravity of the exercise—is explain how we arrived at a point where “we became hooked on a political cult that, blurring the distinction between government and religion, presented a politician as a messianic figure.”One Karpel has now memorably and conclusively made laughable.”
Five weeks to go until Election Day, and the Romney campaign says it is counting on the debates to change things. Leading one to wonder . . . what’s to debate? Mitt Romney is the challenger against an incumbent whose record of failure is long and nearly unblemished.
Barack Obama promised that if his stimulus plan were adopted, unemployment would be held at under 8 percent. The plan was adopted, and unemployment has been over 8 percent ever since. He promised to cut the deficit in half. The deficit rose and now comes in routinely at over a trillion dollars a year. He promised a new and sunnier day in relations between the United States and the Muslim world. Our ambassador to one Muslim nation was murdered by terrorists, and an official of another Muslim nation has put a bounty on the head of an American resident for producing a video that offends Islam. The renewable energy projects that we were told would provide “green jobs” have gone bankrupt, costing billions, while the price of gasoline has doubled. And on and on.
Meanwhile the president is holding his own in the polls while Romney struggles. One suspects that this isn’t a question of voters not understanding the candidates’ positions on the issues, and that a couple of debates are unlikely to clear up the confusion. This looks more like a refusal by a big part of the electorate to recognize reality. The question is . . . why?
The answer, according to Craig Karpel, is the same one that accounts for a lot of our contemporary miseries: namely, addiction.
“My name is Craig K., and I’m an Obamaholic,” he writes to open The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter. “Welcome to what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault—it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”
Karpel is, of course, having fun here. He has the kind of satirical gifts that legions who blog on these matters earnestly try to attain but which remain, forever, beyond their reach. Here, for instance, is Karpel on Al Gore:
. . . ever wandering from one five-star hotel to another, his humble mantle—mantle collection, actually—stitched together on self-effacing Savile Row, subsisting somehow on speaking fees of $175,000 per jeremiad, the extent of his renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh ascertainable from his continually expanding girth, warning evildoers (that would be you and me) that this earthly realm will soon be engulfed by “the-fire-next-time,” updated to “global warming,” re-updated to “climate change,” formerly known as “weather.”
