The Lie of the Century - Not the Change We Sought
In Britain they have seen and thought about many things we Americans do not concern ourselves with, especially because they have been around a long time. Thus they are capable of distilling down what we colonists see as new and different into a repetition of the past, or at least they see through different lenses. Today Bartle Bull writes from England a masterful piece describing and putting into perspective what we are seeing from Obama and his attempt to govern by cult of personality. Like any tin pot dictator, he demands ever larger shares of the total economy whilst telling so many lies that it has been quite a while since he has told the truth on anything.But that is my American's understanding of what is happening. Bull gives a much more measured telling of the tale. Not to be missed, I will leave you with a bit from near the end of the piece:
A post-partisan centrist: it was the lie of the century. It did not matter that Obama’s opponent, John McCain, was one of the most bipartisan national leaders of the last 20 years or that Obama was the single most partisan Democrat in the US senate. It did not matter that upon declaring his run for the presidency after only 142 days in Washington, Obama was only months removed from a career in the infamously corrupt Chicago Democratic political machine. Through aspiration or guilt, the backstory of this grandson of a Kenyan goatherd flattered many Americans, who, presented with a visibly aged and handicapped alternative in McCain, knew exactly what Joe Biden had meant when he called Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Messianic scenarios are deeply symbiotic. They are based on a compact with the believer. Obama’s believer compact went like this: “You wash away my historic sins and I’ll wash away yours.”
Now the real Obama has stood up. The moderate and sustainable version of the Democratic party personified by Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, based on personal responsibility and low tax, high growth economics, is under the bus with Reverend Wright, Obama’s 20-year religious mentor. Ideology is back. Coming from the most radical presidential candidate in the history of either party, this is no surprise. But to practical Democrats in a politically moderate country that is still based on a philosophy of robust individual freedom, this revolutionary expansion of the federal government is very worrying. Obama’s seizure of so much money and so much decision making in such basic areas of everyday life implies too much debt, too much inefficiency and too much control for a corrupt and distant political class. This is not the change that we sought.