Monday, September 10, 2018

Obamamania Ad Nauseum

Charles Blow has added to the media hagiography with a column enthusiastically titled "Obama's Back!"

Month after lonely and harrowing month, establishment pundits like Blow have been "howling in the wind" and hoping against hope that the former president would finally step up to the mound as a closer/relief pitcher for #Resistance, Inc. What the gosh darn heck took you so long to reappear, as the liberal class turned its lonely eyes to you? Woo woo woo?

Well, the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind:
We have been howling into the wind so long that people dubbed our extreme objection to this deeply immoral and unscrupulous man Trump Derangement Syndrome. But, in fact, the new Bob Woodward book and the Op-Ed in this newspaper by an anonymous administration official prove us right. The fact is that most Americans now believe that Trump’s relationship to the Russian hacking and the hush money payments to women who say they had affairs with him are unethical or flat-out illegal.
 And regarding Obama's laundry list of complaints about Trump: 
He could have read similar words in a thousand essays written since Trump was elected.
But, for me, I deeply appreciate his words for another reason: He is loosening Trump’s stranglehold on the news.
There is only so much time in a news day, only so many column inches in a newspaper, only so much prominent real estate on a website. Up to this point Trump has dominated the news by overwhelming it, and no one has had the weight to challenge that dominance. Obama has that weight. Just by speaking he’s altering the diet of the news people consume.
 So there are a couple points which I didn't bring up in my previous post critiquing Obama's speech. His re-animation was a trifecta of a propaganda campaign, coordinated with the Woodward book and the anonymous New York Times op-ed. A lagging Obama even mixed my sports metaphors. He finally brought up the rear and crossed the finish line in hopes of Dems crossing that "most important election evah in our entire lifetimes" finish line in November.

Plus, as far as Blow is concerned, it's not the ex-president's words that count as much as his legendary existence. Blow condemns both himself and the corporate media class when he says that nobody else has had the strength to challenge the Trump saturation of news. Especially not the news people.

My published response (it was awarded a golden "Times Pick" for the sole reason that it fell into their "variety of views" ideal. In other words, it was an extreme outlier among nearly a thousand other comments ranging from O-gasmic to O-bsequious.)....
The recent gushing over Barack Obama as our born-again savior is deja vu all over again. I don't care if it's Obama, or Trump, or Hillary, or Bernie: the expectation that there's this one politician out there who can make it all better is unhealthy and antithetical to democracy.

Get past Obama's awesome delivery and comedic timing, and read the speech. He started out with the Founders and civil rights leaders, touting them as inspirations for people to go marching. Not so much to display our citizenship via teachers' strikes, sit-ins and boycotts, and other disruptions to the ruling order. We are simply to vote for Democrats in the mid-terms.

Obama is directly attacking Trump because it's that magical time that comes just once every
two and four years and our votes become the sum of our civic duties. As much as he lauded candidates running on "new" ideas like Medicare for All, he didn't, as some of the hype has it, actually endorse single payer health care himself. As a matter of fact, his list of 80 endorsements includes no progressive challengers to Democratic incumbents.

 Of course the most amazing part of Obama's speech was that it rendered Trump temporarily comatose.

Meanwhile, whose fault is it that Trump controls the news? It's not just his. The media chooses to parse all his inane tweets and televise all his rallies. Because it's cheap, it's easy, and it engenders lots of outraged, lucrative clicks.

There's a lot more to fear in America than just Trump.
My heretical remarks opened the floodgates of outrage from the liberal Times commentariat. I'd reprint them, only they were so derisory that the moderators removed the worst of them, along with my own insulting replies. But they fit the usual mold: How dare you, a lowly ignoramus, insult the greatest president of our lifetimes? Medicare for All is impossible! Stop being such a purist! You took a cynicism bath. You're such a picky eater. What are your expert credentials and sources for your misinformation? You are destroying party unity!

In other words, ask not what the Democratic Party can do for you, because asking for nice things and demanding justice will make their privileged heads explode. 
 
 Surprisingly enough, nobody called me a deplorable closet Trumpie, but give 'em time.

9 comments:

  1. someday, a larger than life bronze of
    O will stand amid the silent rubble
    once known as Chicago

    upon the pedestal, this inscription: I
    was a really good bullshitter; look
    upon my words, ye hopeful, and despair

    the statue's serene tranquility will
    find favor as a resting place
    for weary pigeons

    deposits of their humble tribute will grace
    his likeness until extinction keeps them too
    from producing ordure as ornament

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  2. Perfect, Jay!

    Your vision may well become a reality, given that the $500 million Obama Center has run into a snag and groundbreaking will not take place this year as originally planned. Seems they were cutting down a bunch of trees in the park before approval, plus the neighborhood is resisting gentrification, plus Rahm is not running for re-election despite a hefty war chest. Even he knows how loathed he is.

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  3. I am nearly 70 (Nov) & I have cancer. Ur blog is WONDERFUL. As I age (!) I find myself sick of the lies and u r quite fortunate that the Slimes has published ur response. I know folks that r happy just because O's skin is brown. He did nothing for 8 years and certainly the congress didn't help.

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  4. I remember when the corporate media labeled Bill Clinton 'The Great Orator', then the same for Obama. But if you give them a fair hearing, their teleprompter-enabled speeches come across as stilted and phony. The media has been promoting fakery for quite some time.

    The public can't know any different due to the corporate-owned commercial media and Koch-funded Public Broadcasting System controlling who gets the microphone and what is said and broadcast. The public has been hoodwinked and bamboozled into thinking great oration is Bill Clinton and and Barack Obama, not Cornel West or Chris Hedges who really can move people deeply. Who, other than Chris Matthews, got a thrill up their leg listening to Barack Obama?

    I don't have Karen's gifts, but I'd like to say that we all need to give voice to truth in any way we can and anywhere we can, even just in the grocery line if the opportunity presents itself. I salute Karen for expressing truth in this blog and to the commentariat at the NYT. Many may lash out and attack her, but they can't un-ring the bell. As the Gov't knows and fears, once a truth is heard or read, it enters the door of the mind, the fertile ground for seeds of truth to germinate over time. Those seeds need the rest of us watering and nourishing them with daylight. We all have a part to play.

    So keep up the good fight, Karen. Truth is like water - it penetrates even the hardest places eventually. Any blockage or impedance to truth by the corporate state only generates more pressure and power which will leak out elsewhere, such as on a million blogs and alternative news sites. 'Let a million flowers bloom' through the truth being repeated by all of us.

    I am confident that progress is quietly being made even though the media makes it appear otherwise. Remember what Gil Scott-Heron sang: The Truth Will Not Be Televised'.

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  5. Karen, before the Times "banned" my comments (not a paying customer...they finally discovered, or they didn't like my "slant") I used to incur the wrath of the typical Times commenter myself. How dare I speak the truth, as opposed to the orthodoxy.
    Happy to discover your blog. As you, I could hardly bare seeing Obama again, selling his particular brand of snake oil.

    With any luck, the left and right will pull and tug until we have a real wrent in our fabric, a real change - for the better, fingers crossed, but who knows - in the fabric of our society as it is currently configured.

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  6. Lady Obama will soon be gracing stadiums across the country promoting her new book 'Becoming' (the first woman President?) No quaint little bookstore tables for her!

    No word yet whether Lord Obama will be joining her, but what other reason could there be for holding these events at stadiums? Can The One resist a crowd to talk about Himself, I mean Michelle? It sounds like this tour could be the kickoff to a political campaign. Time and crowds will tell.

    The 'Keep Hope Alive' Tour - Lo, the Second Coming of Obama is near!

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  7. Oops, make that large corporate named/sponsored multi-purpose indoor arenas, not stadiums, i.e., Pepsi Center in Denver, United (Airlines) Center in Chicago, etc.

    Either way, no cozy places where they have to, I mean can, rub elbows with the 'folks'.

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  8. Michelle, ma belle.... Hey, great antennae, Comrade. Or is it the advantage of higher elevation in Montana?

    But wait! Yet another political dynasty? Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons. And now the Obamas? This never turns out well whether the clan's latest spawn wins or loses.

    But think of all the firsts in an Obama saga: never trash talk on or off mic (truly a lady), the first woman president (sorry Hill), the first black president (sorry Barack), first president spouse of a previous president (sorry Bill), first virgin to politics stepping directly into the highest office of the land (with a clean record), a First-Mother president (how many voters are mothers?), and––while we're dreaming––the first all-woman/LGBT cabinet.

    Four or eight years of that should exhaust identity politics and drive our attention back to the class war and, just maybe, the world's weather report.

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  9. Accusations of having deplorable, closeted (!) traitorous effect follow condemnations of being purist/spoiler, third-party advocate whose naïveté favors the perfect at the expense of the good. It is, of course, a false dichotomy, a Sophie's Choice of sorts, and the spoiler canard is becoming tedious to defeat.

    Note:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_either_with_us,_or_against_us

    In political communication, the phrase "you're either with us, or against us" and similar variations are used to depict situations as being polarized and to force witnesses, bystanders, or others unaligned with some form of pre-existing conflict to either become allies of the speaking party or lose favor. The implied consequence of not joining the team effort is to be deemed an enemy. An example is the statement of the former US President George W. Bush, who said after 9/11 at the launch of his anti-terrorism campaign in the form "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
    [1]Bush: 'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists' - 2001-09-21, Voice of America

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