Spengler on Obama
I haven’t commented on “Spengler’s” attack piece on Obama because I didn’t like it and I recently
criticized him very strongly and I didn’t want to sound as though I’m going after him too much. However, several readers have sent me the piece asking for my response, so here is an exchange I had about it two days ago, in which I diffidently express my usual slight quibbles.
Larry T. writes:
This is one of the nastiest anti-Obama pieces I’ve come across, by Spengler, via the Brussels Journal.
LA replies
Spengler is just unbearable. I stayed with the piece, as long as it focused on Obama, and then 3/4 of the way through, when any competent writer would be winding up to his conclusion, he starts going off into a whole bunch of new theories re Albion’s Seed and economics and some overcooked theory of American trauma, and the whole piece just went to hell.
Also, Spengler simply has unsound judgments. There are not enough facts about Ann Dunham to say she “hated” America. That kind of overstatement, which he repeats several times about her, greatly weakens his whole thesis. His argument about Obama’s motivations ends up not persuading because it’s so overcooked.
If Spengler would just scale down his intellectual ambitions in each piece and make a cogent argument instead of trying to impress us with how smart he is by attaching every one of his ideas to some grand theory, no matter how inappropriate it is to the subject at hand, he might become a readable writer.
The best thing in the column was the full quote of Michelle’s insulting put-down of Obama. I had never seen that whole quote. It’s pretty stunning. It shows that her anger is not just against America or whites, it is universal.
I ask, how can such a (apparently) nice and pleasant man get along with such a b***h on wheels as Michelle?
LA continues:
I repeat, it’s truly wrong, based on the evidence he presents, to say that Ann Dunham “hated” America, “despised” America. We just don’t know that that was true. She may have been more your typical blond female idealist space cadet who gravitates to nonwhite men.
Larry T. writes:
You’re right. The facts do not support the conclusions he reached.
Michelle Obama really is a piece of work. I’ve met women like her. No matter how impressive their personal, academic, financial and political accomplishments, they remain dissatisfied and resentful of the very system that enabled their high achievement. She was a black studies and sociology major at Princeton. HLS graduate. $300,000 a year job, million dollar home, etc., but still the aggrieved victim.
A couple of weeks ago on one of the talking head shows, the white talking head asked a black talking head if Obama is elected president, will black people give us a rest on racial grievances? Of course, he said “no”.
It’s always fun to listen to these Ivy League millionaires, who have truly won the lottery of life, bitching and moaning about the death of the American dream.
Keep up the great work.
LA replies:
Well, one argument of Spengler’s has me thinking. I said to you:
“I ask, how can such a (apparently) nice and pleasant man get along with such a b***h on wheels as Michelle?”
Spengler’s argument is that my premise is wrong, that Obama is not nice, that Michelle simply expresses out loud what Obama himself feels.
But I just don’t believe that. I don’t see the signs of suppressed anger and resentment in him. He seems a man comfortable with the world, other people, and himself. [LA comments (April 22, 2009): This was written a month before the revelation of Jeremiah Wright’s hate-filled preaching and Obama’s subsequent total lies concerning his knowledge of them, as well as his statements about his grandmother, revealed the darker Obama hidden behind the pleasant exterior.]
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James W. writes:
Spengler presents Obama, correctly I believe, as a fatherless man who can be best seen through his anti-American intellectual mother and her likeness in the person of his wife.
His male figures were his mother’s second husband, an Indonesian socialist, and later, her boyfriend and Obama’s mentor, an American communist. Inotherwords, this is the Manchurian Candidate.
Who, in November, will meet the Trojan Horse for the Presidency. Tocqueville prophesized that the day would come when we would derive consolaton from being supervised by thinking that we have chosen our supervisors.
At least many of us still are capable of understanding this is not a choice, and receive no consolation.
LA replies:
How about returning to the world of facts? We have no facts indicating any similarity of temperament between Obama’s mother and his wife. I have not seen any facts supporting the idea that Obama’s black Communist mentor during high school was his mother’s boyfriend. In fact it seems very unlikely, since Obama’s mother remained with her second husband in Indonesia while Barack returned to Hawii at age 10 in 1971 to ocntinue his schooling there. He lived with his grandparents from fifth grade through high school. Ann Dunham’s marriage with her second husband did not end until the late ’70s. So she was living in Indonesia with her husband at the time that Barack had the friendship with the Communist in Hawaii.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 27, 2008 12:13 PM | Send