The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
The Emperor's New Clothes, revisited
James Lewis counts the ways that Barack Obama channels Hans Christian Andersen:
Read it all... and be sure and follow the links.
What I want to know is, how did Hans Christian Andersen know about Barack Obama more than a century ago? Because Obama is straight out of Andersen's classic fairly tale, The Emperor's New Clothes. Old Hans Christian, who lived in Denmark from 1805 to 1875, had Obama's number down pat. All he needed was a good grasp of human nature.
Nothing has changed. Pretentious frauds still parade down the boulevards of Copenhagen and Washington, D.C., and only little kids notice their nakedness. Nobody dares to snicker, for fear of being called a bad name. (You know the bad name everybody is afraid of being called today.)
But there's no there there. Not a single, solitary rag of clothing. Barack Obama has the least amount of relevant experience of any major party candidate in the last hundred years. He just makes it up as he goes along, with sublime arrogance. If he wanted to be interviewed for President of General Electric they wouldn't give him the time of day; but President of the United States? No problem! Obama is a total stage prop, a media fiction, a complete unknown, a rolling stone.
The Emperor is seduced by his own grandiosity; whenever he blows another elementary fact about the world, his staff just gives him a quick heads-up to tell him what to say next. He's like a bad actor who flubs his lines every single time, just expecting the others to give him his cues. And the ink-stained wretches of the media always give him a pass. Their editors would give them hell if they said anything bad.
Just one little example. On May 19 Senator Obama proclaimed Iran to be just "a tiny country." That's a tiny country with seventy million people, half of it covered with mountains that you can tunnel under for your nuclear hidey holes. A half-million men in the army plus the fanatical martyrs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a domestic terror apparatus to keep the people down, a growing nuclear and missile program, enough oil to finance it all, a strategic position at the head and the tiny choke-point of the Persian Gulf, a long, long imperial tradition, and an Islamofascist suicide ideology, thanks to Jimmy Carter's good friend Ayatollah Khomeini. The regime of this tiny country had a habit of sending hundreds of young boys to blow up mine fields with their bodies, wearing green plastic "Keys to Paradise" around their necks. It controls the "Shiite Crescent" from Lebanon to the Gulf using its powerful alliance with Syria and Hezb'allah, supplied by our good friends the Russians and Chinese.
The regime has a habit of blowing up American soldiers in Iraq with state-of-the-art shaped-charge explosives. Iran has performed high-altitude missile tests that could only be used to set off a nuclear EMP explosion, designed to cripple any modern nation by zapping its electrical and communication grids. It's just a "tiny threat," said Obama --- until his staff told him that wasn't quite right, and he quickly changed his tune.
If George W. Bush had ever been this blind, the media would have torn him into bloody shreds by now. We've seen them trying for eight years.
But the Emperor is protected from hard questions; when he blunders into them he just "uhs," "ahs," and stammers and stumbles. The media give him two or three guesses before he has to settle on his firm convictions -- for that day -- and then he flips again as soon as he feels like it.
This is sheer, open incompetence. Even Bill Clinton is saying it. He's right. Hell, half of the Democratic Party apparatus knows it. They aren't fooled. They're just hoping the rest of us stay fooled.
Read it all... and be sure and follow the links.