Why the alien-in-chief is not a nice man

(Note: this entry was originally posted July 22. Several comments have just been added, and because of the recent flurry of entries and comments about Obama’s bad intentions toward America, I’m updating the entry to the top of the main page.)

. A friend became exercised when I had a sneering reaction to the statement, “Obama is a decent person.” My friend retorted, “But doesn’t he at least mean well? Are you saying he consciously means harm?”

My reply is: read the opening of Richard Lowry’s latest column:

When Barack Obama pilfered Martin Luther King Jr.’s line about the “fierce urgency of now,” he wasn’t kidding. The line has come to define his presidency. His legislative strategy moves in two gears—heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program.

In my view, a person who is so reckless with America’s well being as this person is, is not a decent person who means well. He is someone who stands outside America, as something foreign and meaningless to himself, and who is trying to mess it up as quickly as he can, because his main purpose is to change America completely and irreversibly from its past, and he doesn’t care how much he harms America in order to accomplish that. He doesn’t care about America any more than an invading alien in a 1950s horror movie cares about planet earth. That’s why I’m unable to assent to the proposition, “But he’s personally decent and affable, isn’t he?” That’s like saying that if someone has a nice face and manner, he’s a nice person, even though his pleasant, handsome face is a mask underneath which is concealed the devouring snout of a reptile from another planet.

Here is the entire Lowry column:

An Ideologue in a Hurry
When the work product is indefensible, deliberation is dangerous.

By Richard Lowry

When Barack Obama pilfered Martin Luther King Jr.’s line about the “fierce urgency of now,” he wasn’t kidding. The line has come to define his presidency. His legislative strategy moves in two gears—heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program.

The stimulus partly drives the rush on health care. The program was so ill-considered and so festooned with irrelevant liberal priorities as the price of hustling it through Congress that it becomes more of a drag for Obama every day. So health care has to be rushed through before Obama pays the full price for the failure of his previous rush job. Haste—and waste—makes for more haste.

Obama cultivated an image of cool during the campaign. Unrattled. Deliberate. Cerebral to a fault. Who knew he’d be in a panic to remake one-sixth of the economy by the first week of August of his first year in office?

Normally, the larger and more complicated a bill is, the longer Congress takes to consider it. With the stimulus and cap-and-trade, Obama and the Democrats upended this rule of thumb by passing byzantine, 1,000-page bills that no one had the time to read. When the work product is indefensible, deliberation is dangerous.

There’s a touch of the guilty conscience about Obama’s terrible rush. As if he knows he was elected as a moderate-sounding deficit hawk last year, and if he’s going to pass an ambitious left-wing program, he must do it before the opposition builds.

Why else the mad dash? Obama noted in an interview with ABC News the other day that his health program won’t be phased in until 2013. That’s four years from now. The problem that Obama describes of rising health-care costs bankrupting the government is also a long-term issue, one that needn’t be addressed in pell-mell fashion over the next two weeks.

But the longer Obama’s health-care program marinates in the sun, the worse it smells. Obama’s signature line that anyone who likes his current coverage gets to keep it has been shown to be untrue in recent weeks. His rationale of passing a $1 trillion program to reduce costs is undermined every time the Congressional Budget Office analyzes a real Democratic proposal. No wonder Obama wants to close down the debate before his rating on health care—down to 49 percent in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll—drops any farther.

Ramming through legislation without any assurance that it will work doesn’t seem pragmatic or farsighted. But for Obama’s purposes, it is. His goal is nothing short of an ideological reorientation of American government. Putting in place the structures to achieve this change in the power and role of government is more important than how precisely it is accomplished.

The stimulus might not do much to stimulate the economy during the recession, but its massive spending creates a new baseline for all future spending. The cap-and-trade bill might not reduce carbon emissions during the next decade, but it creates a mechanism for exerting government control over a huge swath of the economy. Obamacare might not work as advertised, but it will tip more people into government care and create the predicate for rationing and price controls.

Barack Obama is an ideologue in a hurry. He wants to put American government on a radically different path. And he wants to Do It Now.

[end of Lowry column]

- end of initial entry -

Charles T. writes:

I have had many acquaintances say the same thing about Jimmy Carter; i.e., he is a decent man even though they may not lilke his politics. I used to agree partially. However, the more I know about the man, the more I vehemently disagree.

Whether a person consciously means harm or not matters little to me. If his actions are going to seriously harm me or my family, then he is a dangerous person—regardless of motive.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It can also be paved with intentionally bad intentions.

LA replies:

Charles is correct, of course. But the question raised by my friend was: regardless of Obama’s bad policies, isn’t he a decent person who means well? And my answer is that when a leader shows, at best, a wildly reckless disregard for the country’s well being, or, at worst, a deliberate intention to harm the country, so as to change it into a different country, I cannot regard him as a decent person who means well, on any level.

A reader writes:

Obama has a likable manner. Maybe that disguises inner evil. Perhaps one day the mask will fall and he will start hissing like Satan in Paradise Lost.

July 23

Shyla L. writes:

Re Obama as a “decent” man, C.S. Lewis said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may Sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”

We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence. St. Catherine of Sienna

Josh C. writes:

As a friend of mine is college used to say, Hitler “meant well.” He was looking out for what he viewed as the best interests of the German people. Of course my friend wasn’t serious, it was his canned response to anyone who said, “But he meant well” in defense of an action that went array.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

LA replies:

But this is lumping liberals with Hitler. Who consciosly saught to destroy the order of the world.

Hmm….

LL (a female reader) writes:

No fundamentally decent person could have so many abhorrent personal associations—not the least of them being that hulking beady-eyed Cro-Mag she-male he chose to marry. And his casual arrogance and dismissiveness (calling the grandmother who raised him a “typical white person,” cheap shots at Sarah Palin and others) isn’t very becoming, either.

LA replies:

Absolutely The reply to anyone who insists on Obama’s personal decency, is to point to his truly scary spouse. Would a good man choose as his life partner this female Frankenstein’s monster? Obviously she represents his own dark side.

I really like the way LL combines two sides of Michelle’s physicality with the phrase, “…hulking beady eyed…” On one hand there is her oversizedness, her masculine, body-builder’s shoulders; on the other side there is her small beady eyes deep set in her harsh facial bone structure.

Which is not to say that she is always scary and ugly. At times she had a pleasant, even attractive look. But it never seems to last for more than a few moments, and then you see the Frankenstein’s monster again.

She’s a monster because she hates the white world while living within it and now living at the summit of it. So there is a fundamental antagonism and malignancy that she conveys. She expresses in her person the racial/civilizational animus that Obama carries within himself but conceals through his calm and affable persona. She outwardly represents his inner, malign self. That’s why their marriage, which at times seems so odd and mysterious,—“Why is this nice, pleasant guy married to this extremely unpleasant woman?”—works so well. The answer to the question is that he is not a nice guy. He too is a monster, though with a fair front.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2009 01:15 AM | Send