DANIEL GREENFIELD: KING CON
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Let us suppose for a moment that Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage was a courageous step, rather than an admission of an opinion that everyone but a few dupes knew he already held. Now let’s allow that moment to pass, because if, as liberals say, it was the right thing to do, then why did he wait so long to do it?
No matter how many rainbow halos Newsweek sticks around his photoshopped head, there is no escaping the inescapable conclusion that Obama’s alternating opposition and support for two men holding hands in a Las Vegas chapel while an Elvis impersonator pronounces them man and man, has nothing to do with his ideals and everything to do with precise political calculations.
Liberal apologetics explain Obama’s decline as the woes of a naive idealistic lad, another Mr. Smith who spends too much stuttering and playing golf, to be able to properly explain to America why it needs to get in touch with its inner liberal child. But if Obama had been that fellow, he would have given his Adam and Steve speech a few days into his administration, not after a few years and some heckling from gay rights advocates.
Obama’s Dream Act is a creature from the same closet. Trade in the rainbow halo for a tricolor sombrero and give Latino voters something to chew on going into the election. There’s nothing idealistic about the maneuver. Much as liberals want their Josiah Bartlet, instead they’ve got David Hampton, who’s slick, smooth and completely unprincipled.
If legalizing illegals is the right thing to do, then like gay marriage, it was the right thing to have done years ago. Instead the timing testifies that it wasn’t the right to do for America. It was the right thing to do for Obama.
Obama deciding to carpet bomb American jobs would be bad enough, but what’s worse is that he did it in the service of his own needs. It’s grand scale policymaking whose only purpose is to get one man another four years doing a job that he isn’t very good at. And if a few hundred thousand Americans have to lose their jobs for him to get his back, that doesn’t bother him.
Liberals can defend a politician who comes out for gay marriage or legalizing aliens, but how do you defend a man who does these things not because he believes in them, but because they’re convenient for him at a given place and time. You can’t defend him as a deep thinker who doesn’t seem to know how to handle real world politics. And you certainly can’t defend him as a babe in the woods who just wants to make the country a better place. A man who does these things has only one agenda and all the liberal pieties come second to keeping his ass firmly in the Oval Office chair.
The unpleasant truth that Obama supporters have to face is that he isn’t losing because of anything that the Republicans have done. He isn’t losing because of FOX News or Rush Limbaugh. Those are reasons why Republicans are winning, but they’re not the reason why he’s losing.
Americans generally don’t hate him. What they hate is seeing their finances unravel while the only thing he has to offer them is another sonorous speech that tries to remix FDR, JFK and LBJ but only leaves them worried and scratching their heads.
Obama in 2008 was like Madoff in the 90’s. He had a good suit and an even better line. Mostly he made people feel like he was going places and if they hitched their wagon to his hybrid, they would go places too. But Obama in 2012 is more Madoff in 2008. The patter is still good, but nobody’s seeing any money and they’re starting to get worried. Suddenly the, “Let’s invest trillions in America” line sounds like the biggest scam in the world.
Every time Obama walks out to give another speech, what hundreds of millions of people hear is a drawn out, “Just trust me.” The check is in the mail. I sent it out last week. You want me to talk to Helen in accounting, I can do that. I’ll go talk to her right now. We’ll clear this thing right up. But I promise you’ll get your money. I just have to work a few things out. But it’s in the mail. Just trust me.
Liberals agonize that Obama isn’t communicating to the American people. But he is communicating, the problem is that he has nothing to communicate to them. Just another round of blaming everyone else while telling people that “the rich” have their money. And once people have listened to that, once they’ve sat through another 54 minutes of, “Some say that ______, but I say_______” what then?
Then you go back to the people who gave you money when you were just working your way up. The people you began ignoring once you got into the big leagues. But now you come right back to them and endorse gay marriage. No more “not defending” the Defense of Marriage Act, which happens to be law. No more “not enforcing” Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Now you’re committed.
Now you’ll openly endorse gay marriage, and stop enforcing whatever relevant laws remain, because what the hell, the white men care about that sort of thing are never going to vote for you anyway. But if they did, if you could get all those white men back, why you’d run out on your gay pride fundraiser and be over to Virginia or North Carolina in a minute, denying that you ever contemplated accepting Adam and Steve.
Any gay donors who don’t know that Obama is as reliably politically monogamous as David Bowie, will figure it out when he begins carving out a new territory in the dark hours of the election. Just as Latinos will figure out that a man who will deport them in the hopes of boosting employment numbers and then offer them a “Get Out of Deportation” card before the election, is about as likely to keep his word to them, as he is to Middle America.
Obama became popular whoring himself out to Chicago’s aging Socialists on an Anti-War platform. But before you could whistle, “Hail to the Chief”, he was in office and had his war on. Liberals who backed Obama over Hillary Clinton on his anti-war credentials, might just as easily have gone with John Edwards. They would have been screwed either way.
Now that Obama has done the gays and Latinos, look for him to go running back to the anti-warries to show them how many wars he’s ended. And just like gay marriage and the Dream Non-Act, he did it right in time for the election.
“Afghanistan? Taken care of. Gay marriage, done. Dream Act, done. We’ve got gay illegal alien soldiers getting married in empty cells in Guantanamo Bay. What more do you guys want from me?”
How about the truth? But that’s the one thing that Obama doesn’t give anyone. You can have made up stories about his agonizing quest to come to terms with being a half-black half-hippie space alien, but don’t ask him what he’s actually going to do a year from now or whom, if anyone, he’s loyal to. If you want a speech that invokes the Gettysburg Address and the time that his white grandmother said something racist, he can have that for you in 15 minutes or less. But don’t ask him why he violated every promise that he ever made, often more than once.
David Hampton conned money out of wealthy Hollywood liberals by pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son. Obama conned money out of them by pretending to be America’s son, the man who would finally reconcile their contradictory identities as Americans and as liberals by inspiring the country to be as liberal as it could be. Like David Hampton, Obama was lying to them.
Obama certainly tilted America leftward, but he didn’t do it through inspiration, he did it through deception. This was not an administration that created a new consensus, but one that functioned as its own closed door consensus that it occasionally stepped out to announce to the American People.
Not only didn’t Obama win the argument, but he lost the election. Congress snapped back to the right so fast that it might have been a rubber band on steroids. And this was to Obama’s advantage because it allowed him to spend the next two years blaming his own laziness, corruption and ineptitude on a Congress which had only tilted right because of him.
Most legends are about heroic deaths. The warrior who falls in defense of his cause. His nobility enshrined in defeat. That’s the story that liberals want to tell about Obama. A great man who was too good for us. Who fell in the electoral field because he was too honest, too decent and too right for us to acknowledge his virtues. But that’s not the story of Obama. It’s not even in the same fairy kingdom as his story.
Obama isn’t losing because he’s too good to cheat, too noble to mess with the political process, too decent to answer the evil Republicans in kind, too idealistic to turn the system to his advantage, or any of the ridiculous myths being spun to explain his fall. He is losing because he has done all these things and more, in the service of nothing but his own power.
Before Obama lied to America, he lied to the left. Before he cheated us, he cheated them. Now he comes to them with some pink underwear and a tricolor sombrero and the people he conned eagerly cheer for him, the way that investors cheered when despite all the investigations around him, he sent them a check.
“If it was all scam, why would he be sending us money? If it’s all a scam, why did he endorse gay marriage and illegal aliens?” That’s the mark’s question that hangs in the air and there is no answer. The question is already the answer. If you’re looking for proof that you haven’t been conned, it’s the best proof that the con has already happened.
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