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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on July 24, 2009, 08:04:02 AM
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The Obama cult
Jul 23rd 2009
The Economist
If Barack Obama disappoints his supporters, they will have only themselves to blame
IN JANUARY 2007 Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, said he was running for president to revive “our national soul”. He was not alone in taking an expansive view of presidential responsibilities. With the exception of Ron Paul, all the serious candidates waxed grandiloquent about their aims. John McCain said he modelled himself on Teddy Roosevelt, a man who “nourished the soul of a great nation”. Hillary Clinton lamented that America had no goals, and offered to supply some. And let us not forget the man they all sought to replace, George Bush, who promised, among other things, to “rid the world of evil”. Appalled by such hubris, a libertarian scholar called Gene Healy wrote “The Cult of the Presidency”, a book decrying the unrealistic expectations Americans have of their presidents. The book was written while Barack Obama’s career was still on the launch pad, yet it describes with uncanny prescience the atmosphere that allowed him to soar.
Mr Obama has inspired more passionate devotion than any modern American politician. People scream and faint at his rallies. Some wear T-shirts proclaiming him “The One” and noting that “Jesus was a community organiser”. An editor at Newsweek described him as “above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.” He sets foreign hearts fluttering, too. A Pew poll published this week finds that 93% of Germans expect him to do the right thing in world affairs. Only 14% thought that about Mr Bush.
Perhaps Mr Obama inwardly cringes at the personality cult that surrounds him. But he has hardly discouraged it. As a campaigner, he promised to “change the world”, to “transform this country” and even (in front of a church full of evangelicals) to “create a Kingdom right here on earth”. As president, he keeps adding details to this ambitious wish-list. He vows to create millions of jobs, to cure cancer and to seek a world without nuclear weapons. On July 20th he promised something big (a complete overhaul of the health-care system), something improbable (to make America’s college-graduation rate the highest in the world by 2020) and something no politician could plausibly accomplish (to make maths and science “cool again”).
The Founding Fathers intended a more modest role for the president: to defend the country when attacked, to enforce the law, to uphold the constitution—and that was about it. But over time, the office has grown. In 1956 Clinton Rossiter, a political scientist, wrote that Americans wanted their president to make the country rich, to take the lead on domestic policy, to respond to floods, tornadoes and rail strikes, to act as the nation’s moral spokesman and to lead the free world. The occupant of the Oval Office had to be “a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen and father of the multitudes,” he said.
The public mood has grown more cynical since then; Watergate showed that presidents can be villains. But Americans still want their commander-in-chief to take command. It is pointless for a modern president to plead that some things, such as the business cycle, are beyond his control. So several have sought dubious powers to meet the public’s unreasonable expectations. Sometimes people notice, as when Mr Bush claimed limitless leeway to tap phones and detain suspected terrorists. But sometimes they don’t. For example, Mr Bush was blamed for the debacle of Hurricane Katrina, although responding to natural disasters is largely a local responsibility. So he pushed Congress to pass a law allowing the president to use the army to restore order after a future natural disaster, an epidemic, or under “other condition”, a startling expansion of federal power.
Mr Obama promised to roll back Mr Bush’s imperial presidency. But has he? Having slammed his predecessor for issuing “signing statements” dismissing parts of laws he had just signed, he is now doing the same thing. He vowed to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, but this week put off for another six months any decision as to what to do with the inmates. Meanwhile, he has embraced Mrs Clinton’s curious notion that the president should be “commander-in-chief of our economy”, by propping up banks, firing executives, backing car warranties and so forth. Mr Healy reckons that Mr Obama is “as dedicated to enhancing federal power as any president in 50 years.”
The perils of over-promising
Nonsense, say his supporters. Taking over banks and car companies was a temporary measure to tackle a crisis. When the danger recedes, Mr Obama will pull back. The restructuring of General Motors, for example, is comfortably ahead of schedule. And far from lording it over Congress, the president has if anything abdicated too much responsibility to it.
These are all fair points. But Mr Healy’s warnings are still worth heeding. Mr Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy—energy and health care—so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them. Perhaps he is hurrying to get the job done before his polls weaken any further. In six months, his approval rating has fallen from 63% to 56% while his disapproval rating has nearly doubled, from 20% to 39%. Independent voters are having second thoughts. And his policies are less popular than he is. Support for his health-care reforms has slipped from 57% to 49% since April.
All presidential candidates promise more than they can possibly deliver. This sets them up for failure. But because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and “possibly the least popular of the modern era”. It is up to Mr Obama to prove him wrong.
Economist.com/blogs/lexington
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He will be considered worse than Carter by the end of the year.
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Obama gas station in Columbia raising eyebrows
Posted: May 16, 2011 7:53 PM EDT
By: Brandi Cummings - bio | email
COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - A gas station on Columbia's North Main Street has been renamed and redecorated after President Obama.
Two gas stations sit at the corner of Columbia's North Main Street and Prescott Road, the El Cheapo and another station with a new name -- Obama.
"I see more people come in excited with the name," said owner Sam Alhanik, who got the idea from a friend who created an Obama Gas Station in Michigan.
Alhanik has only owned this station for two months. Although born in Yemen, he says he supports America's president. "It's the first president of black people," he said. "It's our president. We like him."
He says he's seen a boom in business since changing the name, one that has sparked quite the competition with the station across the street. Before our interview, the price at the Obama station was $3.59 for a gallon of regular. The price at El Cheapo $3.54.
When we mentioned the difference during our interview, Alhanik's cousin lowered the price to $3.53. Just seconds later, the price at the El Cheapo fell too.
"That's the business," said Alhanik. "I don't want to lose everything. It's a competition."
One that's great for frequent customers like Larry Nelson, who says his stops here more often because of the president's picture. "I feel like it does support him by coming here," said Nelson.
Alhanik spent $4,000 to change the name and the look. "I think it's a good marketing tool," said Chiquita Burton, who owns Salon 5710 on North Main.
Burton says the gas station name change has prompted discussions in her hair salon, but she does not like the idea. "A lot of people think that it's morally and ethically wrong to have the president beside beer, wine and cigarettes," she said. "That's portraying an image to society and also to the children here."
Copyright 2011 WIS. All rights reserved.
http://www.live5news.com/story/14656814/is-this-photo-real
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Disgusting. Typical 95% er.
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August 10, 2011
Sorry, Guys, There Are No More Kings
By David Harsanyi
The romance is gone. But don't worry. It's not him; it's you.
It turns out we are the ones who failed Him. We weren't prepared for a mega-dosage of awesomeness. We were too dimwitted to grasp the decency of central planning. And the insistence of troublemakers to engage in debate and vote, in fact, is the most serious threat to this nation's future.
In a recent New York Times piece, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and a Democratic strategist, wrote that the American public had been "desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led." Do Americans really have some innate autocratic tendency that makes them desperately seek out a half-term senator "wherever" he may lead?
Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, recently echoed Westen's authoritarian sentiment in a Daily Beast piece, titled "Obama Is Too Good for Us," wherein he disparaged a system that allows mere simpletons to transfer their free market absurdity to Washington through elections. Similarly, Jacob Weisberg of Slate wrote that because of "intellectual primitives" on the right, "compromise is dead" and "there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed."
"Reasonableness," you'll remember, is shoving a wholly partisan, Byzantine restructuring of the health care system through Congress in the midst of an economic downturn. But chipping a few billion off a $3.7 trillion budget in exchange for raising the debt ceiling is an act of irrationality that has, apparently, sucked the very soul from the American project.
The sight of a crumbling Cult of Obama -- and with it the end of the progressive presidency -- has many on the left so frustrated that they simply dismiss the very idea of ideological debate. To challenge the morality and rationality of Obamanomics only means you're bought, too stupid to know any better or, most likely, both. A slack-jawed hostage-taking saboteur.
Armed with this unearned intellectual and ethical superiority, it is not surprising to hear someone like John Kerry reprimand the media for even covering conservative viewpoints. It is predictable that the Senate would "investigate" a private entity like Standard & Poor's for giving an opinion on American debt that conflicted with its own. (Remember when not listening to the Dixie Chicks was a "chilling of free speech"?)
Obama himself blamed the volatile stock market on the "prolonged debate over the debt ceiling ... where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip." So it's not the job-killing policy or another $4 trillion of debt in two years that's problematic; it's the insistence of elected officials to represent their constituents that's really killing America.
Following the lead of the Environmental Protection Agency, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently used this imagined "dysfunction" as an excuse to try to unilaterally implement comprehensive education "reform" by bypassing law and using a waiver system. Why? "Right now," Duncan explained, "Congress is pretty dysfunctional. They're not getting stuff done."
Hate to break the news to you, Arne; for many Americans, stopping this administration from "getting stuff done" is getting stuff done.
The Founding Fathers rightly feared that the purer the democracy the more susceptible voters would be to the emotion of the moment and the demagogues who take advantage of it. Needless to say, we are democratic enough to get the politicians we deserve.
But debate is not dysfunction. Feel free to bemoan the fact that the American people are not automatons, but "getting stuff done" is not the charge of the Constitution. Neither is having a king, though sometimes you get the feeling that a lot of folks who believe in power as the wellspring of morality are really annoyed by that fact.
Copyright 2011, Creators
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New Model, Old Coalition
by Andrew Sabl
What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your door for no particular reason.
I thought of that joke when reading James’ recent comment alluding to his (excellent) post from 2008 about how Obama’s grassroots movement was like the New Model Army. In both cases the movement’s unprecedented breadth and power, once unleashed, was fearsome in battle—but one couldn’t ride that Army into power and expect anything less than revolution. As James put it: “What won’t be able to do is shelve his sweeping promises and govern from the technocratic, establishment centre like Bill Clinton. He will have to be a great reforming president or fail.”
I think this is half right, in the way the joke implies. Obama for America had the tone of a movement: it relied on faith- and hope-based rather than instrumentalist motivations, adopted the cadences of the Civil Rights movement (much against Obama’s own personal inclinations), built a pretty successful ethos of fellowship and organization for their own sakes, and yes, could be very moralistic. But while the movement’s tone expressed zealotry, its purpose had no trace of Puritan precision.
Obama for America wanted Change: a thorough repudiation of the policies of George W. Bush. And we lived by Hope, i.e. an irrational belief, which by self-fulfilling prophecy became rational, that we could through new communication techniques—not unlike the Puritans’ sermons, camp meetings, and pamphlets—defeat the formidable hierarchies of Charles Bush and Clinton, Laud Rove and Penn. But to what end? In hindsight, we can see that there were several competing Puritan agendas. To some of Obama’s supporters, purging the polity of Dubyan corruption meant, above all, ending wars and restoring civil liberties. To others, it meant ejecting the corporate money-changers from the political temple by freeing politics from lobbying and campaign money. To a third group (more numerous than many progressives realized), it meant what Obama very often said it meant: overcoming the bitter partisanship of the Bush years so that we could all seek common-sense solutions in measured tones. To a final group, the one most likely to listen to Obama’s policy proposals while discounting his rhetoric, it meant repudiating the politics of oligarchy and putting government back on the side of equal opportunity and social welfare.
The first group has been the most disappointed by Obama in office; the last, most impressed. (If Obama has turned out to be less of a populist than many of his supporters hoped, he’s also been much more of a classic New Deal/Great Society advocate of the welfare state.) But it is clear now, as it was not clear in 2008, that...
read rest of link here: http://www.samefacts.com/2011/08/politics-and-leadershi...
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A fine day of talking to yourself here?
Complete with little photoshopped pictures to boot?
Your life sucks. We get it.
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A fine day of talking to yourself here?
Complete with little photoshopped pictures to boot?
Your life sucks. We get it.
That photo above is not shopped.
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Sure it is not.
And you are not bumping a three year old thread to talk to yourself.
::)
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Sure it is not.
And you are not bumping a three year old thread to talk to yourself.
::)
I just bumped the thread on this. Take a look and STFU.
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Don't let me get in the way of chatting with the voices in your head.
Old ass thread bump = meltdown.
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The Cult of Obama
By Robin of Berkeley
It's a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone's eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman's heart shrinks after her husband's abandonment.
The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what's lost is irretrievable. It's like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.
I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.
And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal.
A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin's church is torched. Black Panthers intimidate voters.
An esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punches a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege. He has no history of violence. Why now?
Meanwhile, liberal leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden, incite attacks on political opponents by using incendiary language, such as "barbarians," "Nazis," "tea-baggers." Perhaps not coincidentally, flash mobs of blacks attack innocent whites all over the country; black youths injure or even kill non-whites in "knock 'em down" assaults.
In the past week or so, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus tells the Tea Party to go to hell, and the head of one of America's biggest unions incites union members to violence: "Let's take these son of a bitches out." When Barack Obama takes the stage to follow this incitement, he says he is "proud," and the following day his press spokesman refuses comment.
Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood -- why now?
It's Obama, of course.
Liberals will excoriate me for writing this. They'll insist that bad behavior is not Obama's fault. He's a man of peace.
But study the phenomenon of cults, and the dynamics are always the same. The leader can incite violence without ever getting his hands dirty. Obama is controlling the marionette of the masses.
If Obamamania is a cult, then Obama is the cult leader. Cult leaders routinely pull the strings of their followers. The most extreme example is Charles Manson. He rots in prison for murders he never committed. He didn't have to do the dirty work. His brainwashed charges did his bidding.
I'm not saying Obama is a Charles Manson. There are varying degrees of manipulation, from using sexy blondes to entice men to buy cars all the way to hypnotizing them to drink poisoned Kool Aid. But there's a common denominator in all mind-control: manipulating people through mind games.
As soon as Obama came on the scene, the programming began. His face was plastered everywhere, like Mao's. In his speeches, Obama lulled audiences with a melodious voice and feel-good phrases repeated over and over. And he began inciting people with his charming smile.
First, the vultures starting swooping down on Hillary. Obama chose not to call off the dogs.
Then thugs invaded caucuses. Again, silence.
Which led to vicious misogyny against Sarah Palin and threats on her life. From Obama: not a peep.
We even saw armed thugs at polling places. Ignored and not prosecuted by Obama's attorney general.
The moment Obama became president, he upped the signals. At the Grant Park rally celebrating his victory, the entire family eerily chose to wear black and red, colors associated with communism and black nationalism. Obama's first radio address was broadcast in the Arab world.
Obama returned Britain's gift of a Winston Churchill bust while embracing dictators. He gave a white police officer a dressing down for doing his job, in effect calling the officer a racist.
Obama's greatest magic trick? Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam, and that Obama himself is in constant peril.
Opposing health care means you oppose Obama. Oppose Obama and you are the enemy.
Thus, more and more people are finding themselves on the receiving end of a fist, figuratively or literally. After the White House released a directive for his followers to strike back hard, a frail, diabetic black man at a Town Hall was beaten up.
Even women can get slugged in the face. Obama signaled during the primary that women were fair game.
Obama and the left are making sure that there is an increasing number of persuadable people. By displacing workers, panicking business owners with draconian laws, and whipping up rage and paranoia, they amass more lackeys. And people go along with the programming because they know that, as with all cults, they'll be ostracized if they balk.
The American hard left knows how to create a cult because it is a cult, one with a violent history. The Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen, Black Muslims -- all nefarious cults.
And lesson number one of cults: group members must have their spirits broken. The young Weathermen, for instance, were required to participate in forced wickedness, such as animal abuse. Patty Hearst morphed into bank robber Tania after weeks of isolation, rape, and beatings by the SLA. Huey P. Newton sent his Black Panthers to the hospital or to the grave if they didn't practice total obedience.
Isn't the left doing the same thing to the masses today, albeit in a more clandestine manner? Aren't people's spirits being broken by the helplessness and horror of Obama's acting as our king, with little regard for the Constitution -- of beholding our economy in free-fall and the world exploding in flames?
So what's the endgame here?
The first goal is power. The left has an insatiable need to control every aspect of our lives.
But there's a deeper reason, one much more insidious.
The left wants to tear Americans down. Just as the Weatherman did to those naïve lost kids, they want to break our spirits. This goal of degradation is more crucial than their one-world government.
The progressives want to turn us into them, to make us feel as deprived and depraved and deadened. It's the only way that they can silence the roar of shame and self-loathing.
What they don't understand is this: it's not going to happen. There are too many of us who won't be hypnotized, who have a light in us that will not be extinguished.
We see right through them. We know who they are: the most piteous of human beings, and the most dangerous. Men without a country, orphans far from home. The forsaken and disowned.
They're "hungry ghosts," to use a Tibetan phrase: tormented beings who are starving to death from an inner void that they cannot fill, no matter how much they try.
Mother Teresa was once asked how she coped with serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She responded that what she saw in the cities of the United States was much more disturbing, because it was a "poverty of the spirit."
Poverty of the spirit. No truer words can be spoken of the progressive left. And they want nothing more than impoverishing your spirit as well..
[Editor's note: this is a revised and updated version of "Obama's Mind Games," which appeared in November 2009.]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/the_cult_of_obama.html
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Obama: Sin is what doesn't match 'my values'
SRN News.com ^ | March 2, 2012 | Michael Foust / Baptist Press
Posted on March 3, 2012 10:28:31 AM EST by Gritty
The one-hour interview by Cathleen Falsani was conducted when Obama was running for U.S. Senate (2004)...
Among Obama's most intriguing answers, he says he believes there are many paths to God. His answers on heaven and sin, though, have drawn the most discussion:
FALSANI: "Do you believe in heaven?"
OBAMA: "Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?"
FALSANI: "A place spiritually you go to after you die?"
OBAMA: "What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing. When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I've been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they're kind people and that they're honest people, and they're curious people, that's a little piece of heaven."
FALSANI: "Do you believe in sin?"
OBAMA: "Yes."
FALSANI: "What is sin?"
OBAMA: "Being out of alignment with my values."
FALSANI: "What happens if you have sin in your life?"
OBAMA: "I think it's the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I'm true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward; when I'm not true to it, it's its own punishment."
Obama said he is a Christian but that he also draws beliefs from other religions.
(Excerpt) Read more at srnnews.townhall.com ...
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333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts
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Lake Democratic Party head removes Obama flag veterans termed 'desecration'
Orlando Sentinel ^ | March 13, 2012 | Ludmilla Lelis
AVARES — The Lake County Democratic Party removed an American flag depicting an image of President Barack Obama at its headquarters this afternoon after several veterans complained.
"That's a complete desecration of the American flag," local veteran Donald Van Beck said.
The controversial flag had been flying under an American flag on the same flag pole. It has an image of Obama in the blue section where the stars are normally located. A similar flag was available for sale on eBay for $12.95.
Today, half a dozen veterans arrived at the party headquarters in Tavares and Van Beck asked party chair Nancy Hurlbert to take down the flag.
She responded that she would research the matter and wouldn't take it down immediately, prompting Van Beck to say that he would take it down. However, Hulbert said they would be trespassing on private property.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
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333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts
^^^^
this
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out of about 50 threads on this 1st page, over 30 are 3333.....
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The Cult of Obama
Sultan Knish ^ | Sunday, June 24, 2012 | Daniel Greenfield
Posted on Monday, June 25, 2012 10:11:21 AM by expat1000
The Corporate Cult evolved in the United States as a hybrid of the sales force of the corporation and the religious devotion of the cult. This type of entity might be a cult like Scientology, which used the aggressive and organized sales tactics and marketing campaigns of a corporation, or it could be a corporation like Apple, whose employees earn little, but feel a sense of satisfaction at being part of a meaningful entity.
The Obama Campaign is a fantastic marketing machine. It is constantly discovering new ways to sell things to people. But the problem is that it has no actual product. A company that goes corporate cult uses some of the tactics of a cult to inflate the value of its product. But a cult has no product except the sense of satisfaction that comes from being in the cult. The only things it sells are images of its leader, emblazoned everywhere, his books, speeches and photos, and these are used as tokens of membership in the cult.
In retrospect, the Cult of Obama had much in common with other cults. Like them it recruited young volunteers on campus. Its recruitment materials leaned heavily on books by its beloved leader. It promised them that a new age was coming and that they could be a big part of bringing it about. And its vector of introduction to older viewers was through a woman who has been accused of promoting cults on her popular television show.
Strip away the politics, forget the push and pull of the election issues, wipe the polar identities of the parties from your minds and take a fresh look at the 2008 campaign. Then compare the pitch to any of the major cults in the seventies and eighties. There really isn't all that much of a difference. They're all "Transformative" movements that promise to solve society's problems by using new insights to create a wave of change that begins with "us".
Even the political angle isn't new. Jim Jones and his murderous child-abusing cult started out as community organizers for California Democrats, and leading politicians, including saintly hero Harvey Milk, covered for his crimes until the whole thing got too big and Jones got too crazy. Long before Obama, Lyndon LaRouche went the campus cult route and if you are morbidly curious, you can find videos where "LaRouche Youth", who have broken ties with their families and friends, shout insane slogans while their glazed eyes stare fixedly into the camera.
The pitch is "Transformative" but it isn't the world that is being transformed, only the participants, and the method of transformation is constant labor and omnipresent awareness of the program. That is where the Cult of Obama's retention efforts fell through. Successful cults maintain control over a core cadre and use them to expand their base, but projects like Americorps did not come close to meeting those goals.
The corporate part of the Corporate Cult deals with adversity by redoubling the sales pitch. If sales fall, it finds more things to sell. The Obama Campaign is insanely intensifying its sales efforts, without understanding that its sales are falling because the value of the brand is failing. Many cult survivors dropped out during a similar phase when the cult supervisors pressured them to increase sales and recruitment, even as the cult was no longer relevant. When the history of this campaign is written, we will likely discover that the people on the inside were being just as ruthlessly pressured to achieve impossible goals to compensate for the failings of their candidate.
When businesses hysterically deluge you with offerings for their product, it's a sign of fear. Obama's campaign rolling out invitations to dinner with him and suggestions that you use your wedding to raise money for him stinks of that same fear. It's ingenious from a marketing standpoint, but from that same standpoint, it's also a bad tactic. The last thing that a company or a campaign wants to do is wear people out. But that is exactly what Obama is accomplishing by burning through his base for a short-term cash grab, when what he really needs is to have those people committed to him at the end.
Obama's people are clever, but not good, which is a common combination at dot com companies that go under when the trend passes them by. The Obama trend has long since gone and no one is all that excited about another four years. Like Steve Jobs debuting one more feature, the campaign has doled out gay marriage and the DREAM Act to gets its base excited about another four years. But it still isn't excited. These are features that it expected years ago and it's not in the mood to work itself up into a frenzy over finally getting them.
This is the part where the marketing consultants spend six months on a study and inform the company that their brand is done and has to either be retired or salvaged through a high-profile campaign that will reinvent it as cutting edge. But when your brand is a man, how do you reinvent him? And when your brand is "Transformative Politics" and even your staunchest supporters don't feel like anything has been transformed, how do you move the product?
Cults shift the burden of failure from the guru and the program to the participants. It isn't the man or the idea that failed, but the people.
There are the outside enemies who make enlightenment impossible. "How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life. But in spite of all of my trying a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible," Jim Jones said at Jonestown. That is the epilogue of the Obama campaign. The one being scripted for him by the media.
Like Jim Jones, Obama has done his best to give us a good life, but the Republicans, FOX News, the Supreme Court, the Koch Brothers and powerful interests have sabotaged his efforts with their lies. And yet in the end it's not the enemies who bear the final burden, but the people who weren't good enough.
Cults demand more and more from their followers to impose upon them an unreasonable and unshakeable burden of guilt. The cult appeals to those who want to make more of their lives, and it destroys their will by making them feel like failures. The Obama campaign's endless demands of its followers have that tenor as well. Behind all the flowery words, the burden of responsibility is being shifted from his people to his supporters.
The cult frames everything in terms of commitment. What begins as a commitment to personal and global transformation becomes a commitment to the demands of the cult. The commitment is meant to be mutual, and it is occasionally even framed in terms of a marriage.
"In all our years of marriage, he's always looked out for me. Now, I see that same commitment every day to you and to this country," Michelle Obama's campaign mailing says. "The only way we'll win this election is if we can rely on one another like that."
The commitments, of course, aren't mutual. They can't be. The disparity in power is too great. The cult exists for the sake of the leader, but the leader does not exist for the sake of the cult. Once the followers realize this, the illusion of mutual commitment breaks down. And to keep them from realizing it, the cult strives to make them feel that they have not lived up to their commitment.
The cult intrudes into personal and marital relationships because it cannot allow any commitment to dwarf the greater commitment. That is why cults will arrange marriages and control whom members may marry. It may command divorces or just solicit donations to its cause at a wedding. It acts as if it knows no boundaries, but, in truth, it is setting its own boundaries. It is claiming the intimate territory of personal relationships as its own.
And yet all this only works for as long as the transformative illusion endures. When the sense that the commitment to the cult is not transformative, that the principles of its program cannot make a better world, then its power fades away and dies. The cult may amp up its marketing, but the only product that it ever truly had was intangible.
The Obama campaign never sold Obama; it sold the idea of Obama. The illusion that was more than the sum of his false biography, his chin up speeches full of momentous pauses and stolen poetry, or the typography of his posters. It was the sense of imminence, the perception of a transformative figure who could change the country and the world. That magnetic tug wasn't Obama, it was the confused mess of desires, fears, hopes, dreams and wishes that the people were encouraged to project onto him.
The essential product of every cult is the promise of global transformation through personal transformation. Years later, few people can say that their lives are any better, and while many are still willing to echo Jim Jones and blame that on outside enemies, there is no real faith that the program can work.
Whether or not Obama wins again, his cult has failed. It failed because it was not able to deliver on its promises of transformation, nor was it able to place the blame on its followers. Most of those who voted for Obama will drink the Kool-Aid one more time, but there will be little enthusiasm in the drinking of it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2899134/posts
________________________ ________________________ ________________________ __________
Sounds exactly like the cult worshippers of the messiah on this board
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333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts
HAhaha ;D
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/06/29/Michelle-Obama-Compares-Obama-to-Biblical-Figures
We have another Eva Braun on our hands.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/06/29/Michelle-Obama-Compares-Obama-to-Biblical-Figures
We have another Eva Braun on our hands.
Its the GOP who wants to let people and kids die for profit remember?
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/02/allen_west_obama_wants_americans_to_be_his_slave.htm
Slaves for Obama.
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The voices in his head are having a dandy conversation among their delusional selves it appears.
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Like anyone is going to waste 3 seconds of their time watching your dumb ass videos. Let alone 32 minutes of one.
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Like anyone is going to waste 3 seconds of their time watching your dumb ass videos. Let alone 32 minutes of one.
Hugo originally posted this video and you can ask him how accurate it is.
Obama is a media creation and myth for idiots like yourself buying into a lie.
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Only for paranoid duffel bag internet addicts like yourself.
The rest of the country possessing a rational mind doesn't seem to agree.
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More than 20 People Faint During Obama Speech
9:06 PM, JUL 13, 2012 • BY DANIEL HALPERSingle PagePrintLarger TextSmaller TextAlerts
The pool report on President Obama's trip to Roanoke, Virginia says that more than 20 people fainted during the president's speech this evening.
"TV viewers may have heard POTUS pointed out a couple of faintings during the rally in downtown Roanoke," writes the pool report. "In fact, fire officials say more than 20 people fell out during the course of the speech. There were waves of exclamation as one person after another swooned."
Paramedics treated 21 people on the scene and took one to the hospital, according to the Roanoke fire department.
It was warm out and the crowd of 3,000-plus was packed tightly into the 4-block area, the deputy fire marshal said by way of explanation. Volunteers passed around cups of water but some people didn't take them, he said.
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QFT x 100
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BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
Updated August 23, 2012, 4:55 p.m. ET
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Out of Mani, One
The philosophical roots of the Obama cult..
Article
Comments (162)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577607463243209208.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h
By JAMES TARANTO
In an interminable article on the president's fund-raising problems, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer puts it down in part to his aversion to schmoozing:
Big donors were particularly offended by Obama's reluctance to pose with them for photographs at the first White House Christmas and Hanukkah parties. . . .
Creating a sense of intimacy with the President is especially important with Democratic donors, a frustrated Obama fund-raiser argues: "Unlike Republicans, they have no business interest being furthered by the donation-they just like to be involved. So it makes them more needy. It's like, 'If you're not going to deregulate my industry, or lower my taxes, can't I at least get a picture?' "
Mayer has come in for criticism from irritated conservatives, who rightly note that the substance of the quote is preposterous. We haven't read the whole piece--we'll suffer for our craft, but only up to a point--but we can't fault Mayer for reporting that one of her sources said something silly.
And it's a revealing quote. We encountered almost exactly the same bizarre claim back in June, when we were on a cable-news panel with one of those Democratic "strategists."
"What's going on," she said, "is you have billionaires who are trying to buy this election because they understand that Gov. Romney will put in place policies that put more dollars into their pockets while taking dollars out of the middle class. And you have contributors to President Obama's campaign who are doing it because they want to grow the economy for everyone in a fair and equitable way."
Note carefully what is being asserted here. It's not just that Democratic ideas are morally superior to Republican ones or that Barack Obama is a better president, or a better man, than Mitt Romney or would be, or is. Rather, the claim is that whereas billionaires who support Romney are greedy and selfish, those who back Obama are altruistic--or, to the extent they have a selfish motive, it is a relatively benign one, a simple desire to be in the presence of the Dear Leader.
It's a leftist cliché that money corrupts politics. These leftists, however, believe that their politics somehow purifies money--that writing a check to Obama for America is an act of moral money-laundering.
There's a word for people who see the world in such stark terms of good vs. evil: Manichaean. As the capitalization suggests, it's a proper noun, referring not just to a generic attitude but to a specific creed, founded by a man named Mani. "The religion disappeared from the West in 10th century, and from China in the 14th century, and today it is extinct," according to an essay by Tore Kjeilen.
Can Mani help us explain The One and his acolytes? Perhaps. "Manichaeism is the largest and most important example of Gnosticism," Kjeilen explains. "Central in the Manichaean teaching was dualism, that the world itself, and all creatures, was part of a battle between the good, represented by God, and the bad, the darkness, represented by a power driven by envy and lust."
Gnosticism is a utopian philosophy. Its essential premises are that the world, not man, is fallen and the route to salvation lies in knowledge (gnosis in Greek), not faith. As poet David Solway explains in a PJMedia.com essay: "The world and all its customs, beliefs, norms, usages, and statutes was disavowed as a vast and perverse deception. The imperative was to restore a prior or potential, but shattered, harmony by whatever means necessary and thus to recreate the Creation."
Solway argues that the psychology of contemporary left "is intrinsically a Gnostic one":
All of the Left's diverse manifestations, from radical communism to the more complaisant forms of soft-focus socialism, are actuated by the mystical lure of a harmonious society posited as the end-goal of History--a society in which the elements of conflict have been banished and sufficient wherewithal is assured for all its members. The Hegelian assumption--partially adopted by Marx--of the "end" toward which the forces of History are tending is the secular version of the Gnostic reverie of the benign blueprint that was somehow botched. The Leftist dream of ultimate "ends" mirrors the Gnostic illusion of first beginnings, of a pre-existent purpose. For this psychology, only the Ideal is Real, and the Real is recognized as something that is opposed to the actual, to what is presently the case.
This makes sense of the disconnect between Obama's largely uplifting 2008 campaign and his unrelentingly vicious 2012 one. Then, he presented himself as "the Ideal," the bringer of "hope and change" whose promise was "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
What won him the election was that the voters were as "opposed to the actual" as he was. But they didn't want fundamental transformation, just peace and prosperity, which he has manifestly failed to deliver. This time around, he's still running as "the Ideal" opposed to "the actual," but he's lashing out and blaming others because he is constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures in office, which he may not even perceive as failures. What difference does it make if unemployment is the 5.2% his advisers promised or the 8.2% it actually is when you've got a country to fundamentally transform?
Yahoo! News's Walter Shapiro, picking up on the Mayer piece, writes:
Obama is unusual in politics . . . in his apparent refusal to be awed in the presence of billionaires. Unlike the Clintons and the Romney-Ryan ticket, Obama is not a devout believer in the gospel of wealth. As a Democratic fund-raiser, quoted in the Politico e-book [Glenn Thrush's "Obama's Last Stand"], says about the president, "He doesn't understand the rich. He's an intellectual elitist, not an economic one."
An "intellectual elitist"--one who believes that the route to salvation lies in knowledge. Shapiro concludes, however, that "the president's steadfast reluctance to schmooze-you-can-use with everyone else in politics may speak to a far deeper problem about using the full powers of the White House to govern."
There's a word to describe the "problem" to which Shapiro alludes: incompetence.
Solway writes that "there can be little doubt that the suffering caused by the Gnostic disease is immeasurable, for the world is not amenable to radical transformation." Immeasurable perhaps, but not limitless, especially in America. Not only is Obama subject to regularly scheduled elections and the 22nd Amendment, but the otherworldliness of his outlook is a check on his political effectiveness.
The Vetting
"NBC News unsuccessfully went back to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to request an interview for this week's prime-time special on the Mormon faith," the Associated Press reports:
The newsmagazine's ["Rock Center"] producers thought it worthwhile to examine the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the eve of one of its members becoming the Republican nominee for president. During the hour, correspondent Harry Smith does a piece on why Mormons are so successful in business and tours a Salt Lake City warehouse where a huge amount of supplies is kept for the needy. . . .
"What we set out to do very broadly is not an hour on Mitt Romney but an hour about the religion that has played a very important role in shaping who he is," [executive producer] Hartman said Wednesday.
That sounds fine, but do you remember NBC's 2008 prime-time special exploring the views of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ and its pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Neither do we.
The Presidential SEAL?
"A detailed first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, written by a member of the Navy SEALs who participated in the mission and was present at Bin Laden's death, will be released next month, the publisher said on Wednesday," reports the New York Times:
A closely held secret within Penguin, the publishing house that is planning to release it on Sept. 11, the book promises to be one of the biggest titles of the year, with the potential to rattle the presidential campaign in the final weeks before the Nov. 6 election.
Titled "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden," the book was written by a member of the SEALs who is using the pseudonym Mark Owen.
So Barack Obama is writing under a pseudonym now?
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Now it’s biblical: ‘Obama 3:16' at DNC [God so loved the world, He sent us… Barack Obama]
WND ^ | SEPTEMBER 3, 2012 | Drew Zahn
Posted on September 4, 2012 6:28:43 AM EDT by RobinMasters
An observant reporter at the Democratic National Convention came across a shocking bit of “kitsch” for sale that seems to suggest God so loved the world, He sent us … Barack Obama.
“The Cult of Obama staggers on,” writes David Weigel of Slate.com. “The streets near the convention zone are dotted with vendors selling for-us-by-us Obama merch [sic].”
Among the available merchandise, Weigel came across a photo calendar attributed to James Hickman and offered by a man who reportedly claimed to be Hickman’s nephew.
Most of the calendar’s months are filled with complimentary photos of Obama and factoids about the history of black Americans, but for the August entry (the month of Obama’s birth), the photo features the short-form birth certificate originally purported to be Obama’s and the words, “Heaven Sent: For God so loved the world, that he have his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life – John 3:16.”
While the biblical verse refers to Jesus Christ as the sent Son of God, the calendar page, with Obama’s purported birth certificate and a separate photo of sunlight streaming down on the sitting president’s profile, seems to suggest the “heaven sent” is not Jesus, but Obama.
Nothing visible on the calendar suggests it is connected in any way to the Obama re-election campaign, but a video posted by Hickman shows him distributing promotional materials for the calendar earlier this year in Atlanta and explaining his adoration for Obama.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; Click to Add Topic
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/09/02/dnc_2012_still_kitschin_.html
Yeah, no cult devotion there alright.
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How Branding Sold America on Obama
Sultan Knish ^ | Sept 01, 2012 | Daniel Greenfield
Posted on Sunday, September 02, 2012 8:05:48 AM
What's the difference between a president and a can of Pepsi? When it comes to winning elections, the answer is very little. The 2008 election was not about issues, it was about image. Not just the image of the candidate, but the image of his brand.
In marketing terms, a brand is not just a label, it's the way that the customer is meant to perceive the product and interact with it. Take the can of Pepsi. It doesn't matter what's actually in the can, you don't have access to the full list of ingredients anyway. And if you did, it would take extensive research to even make sense of them. It's not even about how the actual soda tastes. That matters, but not very much. All that really matters is how the customer perceives the brand. It's not about the content. It's only about how people view the brand.
From a marketing standpoint, it's not what the product is, but how people perceive it in relation to themselves. This is an entirely image based approach, but a common one now. What that means is, is this a brand I want to be associated with. Do I want to be seen drinking this can of Pepsi? Is this a brand that makes me feel good about myself? Does it enhance my self-image?
The branding of American politics worked the same way. Obama was not sold as a set of positions and a track record, but as a brand. A brand that people were encouraged to feel enthusiastic about or at least comfortable with, using the same techniques that were used to sell soft drinks. Cheerful posters, meaninglessly simple slogans, celebrities, theme songs, merchandise, social media, viral videos, fonts, color schemes, logos and everything else that goes into pushing a billion dollar product from the shelves to the kitchen.
That transition took Hillary Clinton by surprise and hurt her most of all. Hillary had been working the party and the traditional campaign circuit, only to be sidelined by a media centered frenzy that centered around brands, not people. By the old political rules she should have won, but the new rules were in and they weren't political anymore.
Few voters could really nail down the policy differences between Obama and McCain, a mistake that was in part McCain's own fault and played into the image over substance approach of the Obama campaign. And those who couldn't, mostly voted for the candidate they felt most comfortable being associated with. The election came down to a cultural split with the cultural weapons of mass distraction in the hands of an omnipresent media and social media empire.
There was no longer any point in discussing programs or issues. They had become details, like the fine print at the end of a television commercial that no one can read, and no one is meant to read. It's there to fulfill an obligation, not to inform or play any meaningful role in the decision making process. All that mattered was the brand.
The approach was to make voters want to be part of the Obama "brand" and not want to be associated with the McCain/Palin brand. The Obama brand was positioned as cool and youthful, in the same way that soft drinks are. And the public was told over and over again that McCain was old and crazy, that Palin was stupid and crazy, and that both of them were uncool. Probably the most constant message repeated through the election and today, is that the Republican is for "old people". In marketing terms this is worse than being called a Nazi. The constant pursuit of youth means that brands which appeal to old people are ruthlessly eliminated or limited to the export market. (That's why you'll find many classic American brands in South America or Asia where they have strong consumer loyalty, but in the United States they were replaced with more "youthful" brands associated with a new generation.)
2008 was certainly not the first time that liberals had worked to position themselves as the face of a new generation, and the Republicans as the voice of the past. The strategy dated back to Kennedy vs Nixon and saw use again with Clinton in 1992 and 1996, when Silent Generationers, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole contended with the country's first Baby Boomer President. And then in 2008, the boomer Hillary Clinton was pushed aside for a Generation X candidate. The progressive left enjoys being thought of as revolutionary and youthful, even if their ideas and funding come from eighty year olds like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and George Soros. A youthful demographic is less likely to have the background and the life experience to know that their policies won't work, and to be fueled by the same inchoate mix of outrage and blind optimism. And a willingness to act without understanding the consequences.
Marketing is similarly aimed at capturing a youth market in order to lock in a new generation of consumers by manipulating their feelings of attachment toward a brand. In 2008 it was done with a candidate, rather than a soft drink, but the principle was the shame. The new approach stripped away most of the formal aspects of the campaign, focusing instead on creating a brand that people would want to incorporate into their own self-image. What they were being asked to do, was not to decide who should run the country, but whose sign would look best in their yard, which candidate could they feel good about being associated with.
Smearing Hillary Clinton, McCain and Palin poisoned the well. They retained a die hard demographic, but made those voters who watched the news, instead of doing their own research, who were casual consumers of politics and didn't really understand the practical differences between both parties too well, uncomfortable with the McCain\Palin ticket. Not for substantial reasons, but insubstantial ones.
The iconization of Obama on the other hand, the proliferation of appearances, merchandising and photo and video made many Americans feel as if they knew him, when in reality they knew next to nothing about him. This technique is commonly used by celebrities to create the veneer of familiarity, without the substance. Massive media exposure creates the sense that you know someone, even when in reality you don't. That false intimacy is exploited as a one-way connection. Charismatic politicians do it all the time, but there was something unique here because Obama was a complete unknown. He had come out of nowhere and made the leap from State Senate to Senate to the White House in an absurdly short amount of time. His omnipresence made him familiar, which disguised how much of a chimera he really was. And is.
The iconization of the self is the key element of the social media age. Social media bestows the celebrity's illusion of intimacy on everyone, allowing them to share without sharing and interact through a one way mirror. To focus attention on themselves while remaining apart isolated and apart from other people. The face in the camera that a hundred million people see but are unseen in turn. The message sent to a million people that seems as personal as if it were intended for only one. The illusion of an interaction that is not actually taking place.
This best describes Obama's public image. A brand that is as familiar as it is unreal. Like Ronald McDonald or Mr Clean, we are familiar with him, yet unable to go beyond the smooth surface. He is everywhere and yet nowhere. He constantly wants our attention, but has nothing to tell us. There is a real physical Barack Hussein Obama walking about somewhere, but there needn't be. He would be just as real, if he didn't exist. If he were nothing more than a poster, a logo, a few books, some computer graphics and a slogan. He would be no less real, because he isn't real. He's a brand.
The man beneath that brand is another question. Like all pitchmen and actors, there is something of him in the image we see, but it is mostly a convincing simplification. And what is startling about his brand is just how little of it is really human. Toss away the merchandise and the art, and very little is left. Probably because what's underneath was never meant for public consumption. The Obamas constant oversharing is as much a defense as an offense, an obsessive need to control their own narrative and tell their own story over and over again. Even when there's no story and nothing to tell. The last time we saw it this bad was in the JFK administration, when the tours of the White House and the stream of photographs concealed an uglier reality lurking outside the frame of the camera. And that's almost certainly the case here.
Those most eager to play a role are looking to leave themselves behind, to escape and run away from something. People like that make some of the best actors and the splashiest celebrities. But underneath their mask of charisma is a towering pile of human wreckage. They are so eager to be something they are not, that they are convincing. And because they need us to believe in the illusion so badly, they are omnipresent. Always hungry for attention and adoration, getting high on it and crashing down when the attention is withdrawn. Incapable of any real empathy, they mimic it brilliantly. So well that they seem more empathetic than actual working human beings. So perfectly compassionate that it's almost inhuman. But it's never other people they cry for, only themselves.
This is the kind of man perfectly ready to be turned into a brand, made into a symbol, an idol and an icon. But brands tell us more about how their creators see us, than how we see them. The brand is a 'wire mother', a collection of symbols that are meant to draw forth emotional reactions from us and create an attachment to inanimate objects. The brand manipulates our ideas of who we are and want to be in order to incorporate itself into our self-image, to be the parasite in our worldview. To identify the brand as aspirational and link it to our own aspirations.
The idea that an election would cease to be about issues and become entirely an exercise in selling a product, sight unseen, the proverbial pig in a poke covered over with the symbols of capitalism might have seemed unduly alarmist once, but 2008 was our pig in a poke election. A man who had virtually no experience in national government was elevated to the highest office in the land because a fortune was spent on making voters feel good about voting for him. Not based on the issues, but based entirely on externals.
Obama did not have an aspirational candidacy, he had an aspirational brand. A brand that people wanted to be a part of, because it made them feel good about themselves. And so we learned that there is indeed something worse than Bread and Circuses. An electorate that votes on that is at least somewhat capable of using self-interest to make judgments, but one that votes for the brand that feels good has abandoned even the vestiges of reason and self-interest. Such people are no longer exercising their power over government, instead they have become customers, buying a product that they have no say in how it gets made or what goes in there. Not because they need it, but because they have been programmed to feel good when buying it.
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Obama, the Victim’s President ["- what is required is an army. Led by Barack Obama"]
Front Page Magazine ^ | September 10, 2012 | Ben Shapiro
Posted on September 10, 2012 4:51:12 AM EDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Last Thursday night in Charlotte, the death of the American dream was on full display. While adoring throngs cheered President Barack Obama’s hackneyed bloviating, Barack Obama gained points in the polls. Whether those points last or not – whether Obama wins or not – the fact is this: America is now a nation balanced on the razor’s edge between the self-reliant and the self-declared victims.
The 2012 presidential campaign was supposed to be a referendum on two major questions about Obama. First, has he done a good job? Second, what will he do if given four more years? And Thursday night provided Obama with his first opportunity to answer both those questions.
Instead, he answered neither. Obama knows something the rest of us don’t: this election isn’t about what Obama has done or what he will do. This election is about whether the American people consider themselves victims requiring a savior, or entrepreneurial individuals who value freedom over the comfort of faceless community. This election is about the crowd inside the Time Warner Arena, not about the politician on the stage before them.
And that crowd considers itself a group of victims. Walking around the Arena, two connected phenomena rose above all the chatter: worship for President Obama, and the perception that both Obama and his fans had been somehow slighted. Any opposition to Obama was considered treasonous bullying. That perspective infected the campaign itself; Obama for America wouldn’t even allow major Democrats to speak to the conservative media arrayed at the Arena. Conservatives were victimizers; liberals were the victimized. The philosophy of unearned victimology dominated the lectern.
Obama played on this perspective throughout his address. According to Obama, America is no longer a place where “everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” Some people cheat. And those people are winning. Said Obama, “I ran for President because I saw that basic bargain slipping away … when the house of cards collapsed in the Great Recession, millions of innocent Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings.” Those “innocent Americans” were apparently helpless to get back on their feet; someone had rigged the system. Republicans, said Obama, wanted to “stick it to the middle class.” Insurance companies, said Obama, wanted to put Americans at their “mercy.” Companies wanted to “release toxic pollution into the air your children breathe.”
In this world of victimhood – in this world where individual Americans simply can’t get ahead thanks to the obstacles imposed on them by others (the wealthy, the businessmen, Wall Street, Republicans) – what is required is an army. Led by Barack Obama.
Obama’s military language pervaded his speech. This was a war speech, given by a would-be war leader. It was a speech that celebrated “The values my grandfather defended as a soldier in Patton’s Army; the values that drove my grandmother to work on a bomber assembly line while he was gone.” Obama utilized territorial analogies: “We’re not going back. We are moving forward, America.” Obama likened himself to America’s last great non-Cold War military leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, calling for “common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued.”
The speech wasn’t merely martial. It suggested that Americans can only accomplish things by ceding power to the government. Or, as the slogan went during a DNC video, “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.” As individuals, we are nothing; as a collective, we are infinitely powerful.
That collectivism formed the central component of Obama’s speech. Obama never used the language of compulsion – he suggested that government was a way we “ask” each other to do things. That, of course, is a lie – government compels people to do things. But according to Obama, that’s just fine. In fact, that’s the only way to get things done and to stop the victimizers from victimizing the victims. Citizenship is, according to Obama, giving up your autonomy and your rights to a government that can protect individuals from each other. “This country,” said Obama, “only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.” Those obligations include forcing CEOs to pay higher salaries; forcing banks to bail out bad borrowers; forcing taxpayers to subsidize the women’s studies courses of every little girl.
More than anything, government, said Obama, is not the problem. We are the problem, if left to our own devices. “We don’t think that the government is the source of all our problems, any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles … America, we understand that this democracy is ours. … America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together.” Individuals are the problem. Government can be the solution.
And the would-be victims in the hall cheered for a leader they would hand as much authority as possible. They saw in him the hope to escape their lonely destinies in favor a greater communal one. As Obama said, “the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you.” Obama is the vessel.
But he isn’t an empty vessel, as the American people will find out during his second term. Government, in the end, is still comprised of men. Men who exercise their power. Men who have agendas. Men who are individuals – the same sort of individuals Obama tells us not to trust, except given unspeakable power.
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https://store.barackobama.com/obama-2012-store-collections/artists-for-obama/our-stripes-flag-print.html
DISGUSTING.
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Obama, the Victim’s President ["- what is required is an army. Led by Barack Obama"]
Front Page Magazine ^ | September 10, 2012 | Ben Shapiro
Posted on September 10, 2012 4:51:12 AM EDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Last Thursday night in Charlotte, the death of the American dream was on full display. While adoring throngs cheered President Barack Obama’s hackneyed bloviating, Barack Obama gained points in the polls. Whether those points last or not – whether Obama wins or not – the fact is this: America is now a nation balanced on the razor’s edge between the self-reliant and the self-declared victims.
The 2012 presidential campaign was supposed to be a referendum on two major questions about Obama. First, has he done a good job? Second, what will he do if given four more years? And Thursday night provided Obama with his first opportunity to answer both those questions.
Instead, he answered neither. Obama knows something the rest of us don’t: this election isn’t about what Obama has done or what he will do. This election is about whether the American people consider themselves victims requiring a savior, or entrepreneurial individuals who value freedom over the comfort of faceless community. This election is about the crowd inside the Time Warner Arena, not about the politician on the stage before them.
And that crowd considers itself a group of victims. Walking around the Arena, two connected phenomena rose above all the chatter: worship for President Obama, and the perception that both Obama and his fans had been somehow slighted. Any opposition to Obama was considered treasonous bullying. That perspective infected the campaign itself; Obama for America wouldn’t even allow major Democrats to speak to the conservative media arrayed at the Arena. Conservatives were victimizers; liberals were the victimized. The philosophy of unearned victimology dominated the lectern.
Obama played on this perspective throughout his address. According to Obama, America is no longer a place where “everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” Some people cheat. And those people are winning. Said Obama, “I ran for President because I saw that basic bargain slipping away … when the house of cards collapsed in the Great Recession, millions of innocent Americans lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings.” Those “innocent Americans” were apparently helpless to get back on their feet; someone had rigged the system. Republicans, said Obama, wanted to “stick it to the middle class.” Insurance companies, said Obama, wanted to put Americans at their “mercy.” Companies wanted to “release toxic pollution into the air your children breathe.”
In this world of victimhood – in this world where individual Americans simply can’t get ahead thanks to the obstacles imposed on them by others (the wealthy, the businessmen, Wall Street, Republicans) – what is required is an army. Led by Barack Obama.
Obama’s military language pervaded his speech. This was a war speech, given by a would-be war leader. It was a speech that celebrated “The values my grandfather defended as a soldier in Patton’s Army; the values that drove my grandmother to work on a bomber assembly line while he was gone.” Obama utilized territorial analogies: “We’re not going back. We are moving forward, America.” Obama likened himself to America’s last great non-Cold War military leader, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, calling for “common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued.”
The speech wasn’t merely martial. It suggested that Americans can only accomplish things by ceding power to the government. Or, as the slogan went during a DNC video, “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.” As individuals, we are nothing; as a collective, we are infinitely powerful.
That collectivism formed the central component of Obama’s speech. Obama never used the language of compulsion – he suggested that government was a way we “ask” each other to do things. That, of course, is a lie – government compels people to do things. But according to Obama, that’s just fine. In fact, that’s the only way to get things done and to stop the victimizers from victimizing the victims. Citizenship is, according to Obama, giving up your autonomy and your rights to a government that can protect individuals from each other. “This country,” said Obama, “only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations.” Those obligations include forcing CEOs to pay higher salaries; forcing banks to bail out bad borrowers; forcing taxpayers to subsidize the women’s studies courses of every little girl.
More than anything, government, said Obama, is not the problem. We are the problem, if left to our own devices. “We don’t think that the government is the source of all our problems, any more than are welfare recipients, or corporations, or unions, or immigrants, or gays, or any other group we’re told to blame for our troubles … America, we understand that this democracy is ours. … America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together.” Individuals are the problem. Government can be the solution.
And the would-be victims in the hall cheered for a leader they would hand as much authority as possible. They saw in him the hope to escape their lonely destinies in favor a greater communal one. As Obama said, “the election four years ago wasn’t about me. It was about you.” Obama is the vessel.
But he isn’t an empty vessel, as the American people will find out during his second term. Government, in the end, is still comprised of men. Men who exercise their power. Men who have agendas. Men who are individuals – the same sort of individuals Obama tells us not to trust, except given unspeakable power.
HTC Debuts Windows Phone 8 Smartphones
HTC hopes to resurrect sales with Windows Phone 8X and 8S smartphones, which have vibrant colors, Beats Audio, and Gorilla Glass.
By Eric ZemanInformationWeek
September 19, 2012 02:03 PM
(click image for larger view and for slideshow)
Windows Phone 8 Preview: A Visual Tour
HTC unveiled its first new Windows Phones 8 devices Wednesday, the 8X and 8S. Both devices run the brand new mobile operating system from Microsoft.
The 8X is the top-of-the-line Windows Phone from HTC and the 8S will fall in the mid-range. Shared features include colorful new designs forged from polycarbonate. (HTC used polycarbonate for its One X flagship Android phone, announced earlier this year.) This high-end plastic is scratch resistant and light as a feather. Rather than stick with boring blacks and whites, the 8X and 8S will be available in vibrant colors. Both devices include Beats Audio for improved music playback and displays protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass.
The 8X has a 4.3-inch 720p HD display, 1.5-GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, and an 8-megapixel camera. It uses the same dedicated imaging chip that HTC designed for its Android devices earlier this year. In addition to the image chip, the 8X has an f/2 lens and backside illumination for improved low-light performance. The 8X's user-facing camera rates 2 megapixels and includes a wide-angle lens for better video chats. Last, it has a dedicated 4-volt amplifier to boost the audio signal being sent to headphones.
The 8X, which will be sold by AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless, will support LTE and HSPA+ wireless networks.
[ See Windows Phone 8: What Microsoft Needs To Compete. ]
The 8S dials things down a bit. It has a 1-GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a 4-inch display, and a 5-megapixel camera. It loses the user-facing camera entirely.
According to HTC, an LTE 4G version of the 8S is not yet in the works. It will stick with older networking technologies, such as HSPA+. It's not clear which U.S. network operators will sell the 8S.
What HTC didn't share were details about Windows Phone 8. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's exuberant presence didn't bring with it any more information about the features that will be a part of Windows Phone 8. Microsoft remains mum on the full feature set for Windows Phone 8.
At first glance, the 8X and 8S seem to be decent devices, though they don't quite hit the mark as well as Nokia did with the Lumia 920. The 8X, for example, has too much phone and not enough display. The 920 also comes with features such as inductive charging, which the 8X does not.
What's most interesting is that HTC is going all out with the colorful designs. Perhaps it's the rampant litigation raging across the smartphone space, but the colorful palette means more customer choice and designs that will stand out against the increasingly drab black-on-gray smartphone crowd.
How well the new HTC smartphone sell will depend a lot on pricing and availability. If they can beat the Lumia 920 to the market, then perhaps they'll develop a bit of a lead. For now, all we know is that they will be available by about November.
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http://washingtonexaminer.com/actress-jessica-alba-asks-voters-to-pledge-allegiance-to-obama/article/2508539#.UFsr0LKPUrW
Sick.
These people are freaking nuts
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http://washingtonexaminer.com/actress-jessica-alba-asks-voters-to-pledge-allegiance-to-obama/article/2508539#.UFsr0LKPUrW
Sick.
These people are freaking nuts
WTF!!!
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http://www.humanevents.com/2012/09/20/the-creepy-obama-cult
Yes, its a cult of personality headed by the ghetto thug and piece of trash.
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Return to the Article
November 16, 2012
Obama's Jonestowns
By Jack Cashill
At first, the numbers seemed too absurd to be true: did Mitt Romney really receive zero votes in 59 Philadelphia voting districts? Did Barack Obama really outpoll him by a combined 19,605 to 0 votes cast in these 59 districts.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has no interest in deceiving, the answer is yes. Immediately, one suspects some element of fraud, but fraud isn't the real issue here. Obama was producing nearly comparable numbers in inner-cities throughout America, especially those in contested states.
Worse than fraud is the process that turned nearly 20,000 black Philadelphians -- and millions of inner-city dwellers throughout the country -- into automatons. Hope does not produce this kind of regimentation. Fear does. In looking at these numbers, in fact, one can begin to see how, 34 years ago this Sunday, in the jungles of Guyana, Jim Jones was able to persuade 918 of his followers, most of them poor and black, to drink their lethal Kool-Aid. Fear can do that.
Not surprisingly, it was while at college -- Indiana U -- that Jim Jones got his first injection of Marx, and he was hooked from the beginning. Given that promoting communism in 1950's Indianapolis held about as much promise as promoting traditional marriage in contemporary San Francisco, Jones took another tack. "I decided how can I demonstrate my Marxism," he would recount years later. "The thought was 'infiltrate the church.'"
In 1955 he and his wife Marceline did just that, opening the Peoples Temple Christian Church in Indianapolis. Here, Jones embarked on a second strategy, this one a proven winner in Communist circles: exploit America's Achilles heel, racial injustice. This he did as well, recruiting hundreds of Christian blacks and then subtly shifting their focus from Jesus to Marx, all the while reinforcing their fear of White America. In 1965, he moved the whole shebang to Ukiah, about 100 miles north of San Francisco up Highway 101.
By 1970, the Peoples Temple had shed all but the illusion of Christianity. "We are not really a church," one of the leaders confided to Debbie Layton, a Jonestown survivor, "but a socialist organization. We must pretend to be a church so we're not taxed by the government."
Layton remembers Jones explaining "how those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought into enlightenment -- socialism." In his own reminisces, Jones called religion "a dark creation" of the oppressed. Salvation would come through other channels. "Free at last, free at last," he led his temple comrades in prayer, "Thank socialism almighty we will be free at last."
Faux Christian that he was, Jones pioneered the "social justice" mission. To be clear, though, he had no real interest in helping black people than do contemporary liberals. They provided his base, his path to power. As in today's Democratic Party, the hierarchy was almost exclusively white and female, many of whom Jones had raped. A sexual progressive, Jones raped his white male followers as well.
Like so many Democrats, Obama among them, Jones worked to aggravate race relations in America, not improve them. To that end, Jones had his people write hateful, racist letters and attribute them to lesser white people. Obama likewise worked to intensify the fears of black America, as he famously did at Hampton University in June 2007, when he reminded his listeners that the Republican administration did "not care about" them or consider them "part of the American family."
By 1973, after aggressive recruiting in black neighborhoods nationwide, the Peoples Temple boasted some 2500 members, most of them in San Francisco. Better still, they voted as if with one voice, Jones'. And not only did they vote en bloc, they rang doorbells and made phone calls and hung posters en bloc. Given their affection for independent thinkers -- and so many of them in one place! -- the city's progressive politicians wooed Jones like a Southern Belle.
From gay icon Harvey Milk to Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy's wife, they all come a courting. "I figured if these people -- if anybody should know, they should know," testified one black survivor as to why he stuck with Jones. After taking office as mayor in 1976, San Francisco mayor George Moscone repaid Jones by appointing him to the Human Rights Commission and then to the chairmanship of the San Francisco Housing Authority. That same year, The Los Angeles Times named Jones "the humanitarian of the year."
"In my later years," Jones reflected near the end, "there wasn't a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist." In the People's Republic of San Francisco that fact bothered almost no politico of consequence. "And that is what is very strange," Jones added, "that all these years I have survived without being exposed." In San Francisco, what was strange was that he even worried about it.
In 1974, Jones leased 3,000 acres of land in a Guyana jungle and began construction of a commune called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project. Hundreds of his followers were dispatched there to work. What they discovered was a South American gulag equal parts Werner Erhard and Pol Pot.
The buzz about Jonestown persuaded Democrat Congressman Leo Ryan to check the place out. When Jones found out about Ryan's impending visit, he resorted to the ultimate Democrat gambit -- race baiting. He denounced Ryan as someone who had "voted sharply in racist terms and fascist terms" and began rehearsing his people for "White Night," the night when Ryan and other evil white people would come to kill them.
In preparation for visits from outsiders, Jones had earlier issued proclamation #75, "Give your original name when guest is here -- do not use your socialist names such as Lenin, Che Guevara, etc. . . " (87) On his visit Ryan quickly saw through the subterfuge. When he attempted to fly back to civilization with inside dope on the commune, a Jonestown security team murdered him and four others on the runway.
That night Jones put his well-drilled minions through a "White Night" exercise. They had been through this before, drinking the proverbial Kool Aid and surviving. They likely presumed that this was just another test of their loyalty. It wasn't. This time the drink was heavily laced with valium and cyanide. Everyone who drank it died. Those who refused to drink it were injected with it. As to Jones, he shot himself.
Despite the tragedy, Democrats from the president on down have continued to do almost exactly what Jones did and get away with it: embrace minorities, alert a partisan media to the embrace, woo the minorities for their support, reward them for it with Obamaphones and the like but never with real power, scare them with tales of racist whites, promise to protect them from those whites, engineer societies (or school systems) from which there is no escape, and when all goes to hell, as it inevitably does, blame Mitt Romney or some evil "other." In 2012, this strategy would seem to have paid off. Despite record poverty and unemployment, atrocious schools and neighborhoods, all the residents of Obama's Jonestowns voted for him.
"They're going to put y'all back in chains," Joe Biden told a group of African American supporters in August.
Silly us -- we thought it was a gaffe!
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/11/obamas_jonestowns.html at November 16, 2012 - 04:57:35 AM CST
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democrats live in dream world
when a bs artist wins, even by cheating, they love it
its like it reinforced thier dream you can bs your way to the top
real world of course is more grim
in real world you gota produce, unless you work at welfare job, then fun fun since u get tax money stolen from tthose who do
so the parasite bloodsucker rejoice, never getting that the happiness a productive person feel when you do a awesome job and somethign works will forever be alien to them
to these people cars just pop outa nowhere, compluters jsut work, and paying people to sit on ass aka pensions is fair
silly
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democrats live in dream world
when a bs artist wins, even by cheating, they love it
its like it reinforced thier dream you can bs your way to the top
real world of course is more grim
in real world you gota produce, unless you work at welfare job, then fun fun since u get tax money stolen from tthose who do
so the parasite bloodsucker rejoice, never getting that the happiness a productive person feel when you do a awesome job and somethign works will forever be alien to them
to these people cars just pop outa nowhere, compluters jsut work, and paying people to sit on ass aka pensions is fair
silly
You are absolutely right... if you ignore the fact people with jobs and who have worked hard to get where they are, also voted for Obama, in addition to the "parasites" you mentioned. But I think psychologically, it helps people like you and 333 accept the fact you lost, when you can paint the other team as inhuman blood suckers.. It hurts too much to face reality and accept that your party apparently sucks and the best they could put forward was a Romney
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You are absolutely right... if you ignore the fact people with jobs and who have worked hard to get where they are, also voted for Obama, in addition to the "parasites" you mentioned. But I think psychologically, it helps people like you and 333 accept the fact you lost, when you can paint the other team as inhuman blood suckers.. It hurts too much to face reality and accept that your party apparently sucks and the best they could put forward was a Romney
Boooooommmm!!
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You are absolutely right... if you ignore the fact people with jobs and who have worked hard to get where they are, also voted for Obama, in addition to the "parasites" you mentioned. But I think psychologically, it helps people like you and 333 accept the fact you lost, when you can paint the other team as inhuman blood suckers.. It hurts too much to face reality and accept that your party apparently sucks and the best they could put forward was a Romney
This was like a bitch slap. But after Agnostic covered his hand in broken glass.
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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/11/26/jamie-foxx-calls-obama-our-lord-and-savior#ixzz2DKou43ep
Insane, but typical of the 94Er
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http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/11/26/jamie-foxx-calls-obama-our-lord-and-savior#ixzz2DKou43ep
Insane, but typical of the 94Er
Your obsession with black men is weird.
You lie in the ghetto and still you need more.
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December 10, 2012
Who Goes Obama?
By Cindy Simpson
In 1941, Harpers Magazine published a fascinating article by writer Dorothy Thompson titled: "Who Goes Nazi?"
Seventy years later, we're asking the question: "Who goes Obama?"
(Before the reader is shocked that this article dares mention "Nazi" and "Obama" on the same page, don't worry -- there will be no comparison of Obama to Nazis here. I will only mention that both fascism and modern liberalism are, at heart, ideologies that fall at the statist end of the political spectrum. So bear with me a moment.)
In "Who Goes Nazi?" Ms. Thompson thoughtfully described and evaluated the personalities of each of the various attendees at a gathering at which she was a guest. She explained:
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one's acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi... I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
Like Thompson at her dinner party, the Obama campaign played a similar parlor game with the American electorate, as its strategists asked and then built a program around the question: "Who goes Obama?" Of course, any successful campaign endeavors to evaluate the personalities and motivations of potential supporters. In a recent American Thinker article, Zach Krajacic outlined the fact that Obama won because Democrats did a much better job than Republicans of "segmenting their market, targeting their potential buyers, and appealing to their emotions."
In the Obama playbook, "segmenting the market" essentially meant "community organizing." Although modern liberal philosophy is grounded in collectivism, progressives effectively mass their troops using division and agitation. The trick is maintaining voluntary cohesion and support, in a failing economy or security threats or disasters, among the various personalities in the parlor. (For example, imagine a dinner-party-scene where the Obama-phone lady was suddenly aware that Obama-money had run out, and she was seated next to Eddie Murphy when he just heard he would be hit with a 75% tax rate.) But camaraderie is never the ultimate goal of the host and his fellow bureaucrats at their utopian party anyway -- their intent is to create and forcefully implement one-size-fits-all collectivist policies for their guests.
Divisive conversation on "Fairness" and motivational phrases such as "We can't wait," "Vote for revenge," "You didn't build that," and "Punish your enemies" were addressed to those in the parlor whom the campaign already knew would answer "I do" to the question, "Who goes Obama?" A helpful mainstream media provided the venue, orchestrated the background music, and perfectly coordinated entertaining distractions.
However, there's much more at stake in political parlor games than simply formulating targeted marketing strategies. Ms. Thompson endeavored to ask not just who, but beyond and to the more important question: Why? What was it that made some people, at a deeper level, more susceptible to the allure of such an ideology? She answered:
Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Thompson explained her conclusion further:
Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work -- a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
Those chilling words were written decades ago, yet they seem to describe much of today's society. For a real jolt, reread Thompson's article, replacing Nazi wherever it appears with "Obama-supporter." Besides being a very politically incorrect exercise, the uncomfortable parallels are inescapable: both statist ideologies, besides being led by riveting personalities, seem to appeal to childish minds -- many of them highly educated -- whose souls have been neglected.
In a previous article I argued, on the basis of Diana West's brilliant book, Death of the Grown-Up, that American has become a nation full of adolescent minds disguised as mature adults. And in general, juvenile minds vote liberal, and mature minds embrace conservatism. By its very nature, modern liberalism, in the guise of "caring," treats citizens like children, creating a powerful, paternalistic government, which, as Tocqueville warned, seeks to keep its subjects in a state of "perpetual childhood."
It is an indisputable fact that our educational system -- reflecting Ms. Thompson's comments -- is thoroughly infected with progressive philosophy and indoctrination. If Thompson worried about an inhibition-releasing education in 1941, imagine what she would think, for example, of what Obama-Czar Kevin Jennings meant by "safe schools," or the recent activities at Yale, or the newest club at Harvard.
Also, one need only recall some of the "social issues" on display at this election to wonder at the neglect of our nation's soul. Free contraception, abortion (aka "health care"), gay marriage, legalized drugs -- could such concerns truly have been the carrots that drew so many to the polls? The video of the scene at the Democratic convention where three times the audience booed the mention of God and Jerusalem makes us wonder at the state of the attendees' minds and souls.
In addition, any message of sound economic policy and individual freedom and liberty falls on deaf ears when childish eyes are focused on enticing payouts and sizzling bacon outside the voting booths, or vote-lever-pulling fingers are tightly grasping their Big Government security blankets.
Obama's win did seem to indicate that we have reached a tipping point in the electoral parlor, with the majority of guests having Thompson's "childish minds" or neglected souls, lacking in self-control and inhibition, or selfishly looking for handouts -- all ripe for a powerful host to harvest.
If we merely concede that our nation's parlor now holds a majority of unchangeable Obama-supporter-types, conservatives may never win a presidential race again. The GOP might try to build a bigger parlor-tent by picking up its stakes and spreading leftward, further away from what the establishment seems to consider the party-pooping Tea Party and the far right wing. Such a platform might even appeal to a majority large enough to win some elections. But what will America have gained? A tent set up on the same economic and social-issues sand as progressivism will still sink, albeit a bit more slowly.
If we believe that a conservative platform is the remedy for our nation's ills, an extended version of Thompson's parlor game may provide the cure. Instead of hoping that Republicans can reach some sort of "compromise," conservatives should stand firm on our principles and reach out to the guests standing on other side. Just as sugary payouts and revenge at the voting booths fail to satisfy the tummy or the spirit, neither does a message of "it's the economy, stupid" speak to the soul.
Each of us should play Thompson's game in the parlor of our own community. There are no set rules -- anyone can play, and we might be surprised at how skilled we may become at making the connections. For example, how many self-described liberals do you know who, although they may not realize it, run their own households and lives with conservative and not progressive principles? Like parents who have given up the keys to spoiled children, many others are less than thrilled with the terrifying view from the backseat as the car careens perilously near the edge of an economic cliff. Many guests at the party who went Obama will someday soon (if they haven't already) wake up next to each other and wonder, "What was I thinking?"
Thompson didn't offer any advice on how to sway her fellow guests' minds. But we know the real ending of her story -- that ultimately millions of lives were destroyed and for a time, anyway, the powerful evil spawned of radical ideologies was put in check.
Some conservative writers have begun to wonder if our nation is in for a shock to its senses, from within or without, or a combination of both. A terrifying thought, and all the more reason to focus -- a day at a time and a person at a time -- on the battle line that's been drawn in our community's parlors.
We must go beyond asking, "Who goes Obama?" or even "What can we do to earn your vote?" We should stand ready to offer both an alternative and a hand.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/who_goes_obama.html#ixzz2Ef0SMB00
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This was like a bitch slap. But after Agnostic covered his hand in broken glass.
x2
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dems love to fantasize that they are good for the economy.
Ron reagan proved them wrong yet with clinton, they thought they had the asnwer.
Clinton times were good because a new free market came into being from 80s research: the internet, combined with a republican congress.
lower spending and free market = good times
fed and fanny caued 2008
fdr caused great depression
growth after ww2 was due to huge drop in government spending aka war spending
:)
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On Wednesday, actress Ellen Barkin announced on Twitter that as long as Barack Obama is President, the people of the United States belong to him, Twitchy reported.
The actress made her opinion known in an exchange that started when she announced that she voted for Obama to "protect" all of "his" people.
"Yes I vote Pres Obama...to protect his ppl,ALL his ppl.The poor,the middle class,the jobless...the 1's that need our help..I vote 4 humanity, (sic)" she tweeted.
"HIS people?? Holy s**t you communists are insane," user "Linsey" tweeted in response.
"Right now he is the President of our country.He is our leader & we are his people, (sic)" Barkin tweeted.
Conservatives gave Barkin the civics lesson she should have received in grade school, letting her know in no uncertain terms that the American people are not the property of the state, or the president.
"Conservatives know a President doesn't own the American people but works for them," tweeted "Nathan Duffy," in response to a racially-charged tweet Barkin sent.
"He doesn't have any people - Americans are a free people. That means our presidents serve us, not us them. Kings have people," added "Teresa Graves."
"Doug" added: "I thought we weren't a monarchy? Is this like @donnabrazile referring to his beginning 'his rule' in 2008?"
"[W]ow, you sure are dumb," one person tweeted, while another called her "psychotic."
The staff at Twitchy suggested Barkin "seek help."
Barkin, the 58-year-old actress who appears in "The New Normal," a new NBC series about a gay couple who wants to have a baby using a surrogate, caused controversy in July when she expressed her hatred for conservatives in a series of profane tweets.
In August, she retweeted a message hoping that Tropical Storm Isaac would kill Republicans by washing them out to sea during the RNC convention.
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NOTE: This post will be continually updated… Also, I'm not including open partisans in this list, like Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memo. Those listed below pose as "objective" journalists.
The media stands by its own, at least until one of its own upsets The Narrative. Not even a living legend is immune from this rule. In the case of Bob Woodward, his detailed and lengthy reporting on sequester has resulted in the possible derailing of the most crucial Narrative the White House and media are likely to launch this year. The fate of Obama's second term and even his legacy rest on it.
The endgame of The Sequester Hustle is to blame the economy tanking on cutting less than 2% of the federal budget. Obama doesn't want his failed first-term policies blamed for a double-dip recession, so he's playing Chicken Little with sequester so the GOP and a lack of government largess are blamed. Naturally, the media is as all-in on this con as their Master is.
This, even though everyone knows it was Obama who suggested sequester, saw it passed, and then signed it into law.
Woodward's reporting threatens to monkey wrench all of this. His reporting not only confirmed that sequester was Obama's idea but that Obama moved the goal posts with his demand for tax increases. The original sequester deal did not include tax increases.
Yesterday, Woodward really threw the White House and its media a curve by being the only high-profile reporter willing to say out loud that Obama has the power to choose where the cuts hit. In other words, all this White House fear-mongering is an audacious lie.
Though no one's disputed Woodward's reporting, the media's Cult of Obama began pushing back against the Watergate legend even before he dropped the bomb last night that he had been threatened by a top White House official.
But when that news hit, many in media immediately chose to protect Obama by ridiculing Woodward, questioning his motives, and/or dismissing his reporting.
Meet the members of the Cult of Obama…
Politico White House reporter Glenn Thrush:
- See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/02/28/Rogues-Gallery-Journalist-Side-with-obama-over-woodward#sthash.0uNKCJvh.dpuf
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333 you're one of the biggest rubes to fall into the so called "Cult of Pbama"
Even though you hate the man, for you, it's all about Obama. You are a cult follower.