The Cult of Obama

[Soul Crusher]

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
________________________ ________________________ ___________________

He will be considered worse than Carter by the end of the year. 

[Soul Crusher]

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


________________________ ________________________ ______________-

Disgusting.  Typical 95% er. 

[Soul Crusher]

         
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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

[Soul Crusher]

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...

[LurkerNoMore]

A fine day of talking to yourself here?

Complete with little photoshopped pictures to boot?

Your life sucks.  We get it.

[Soul Crusher]

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.   

[LurkerNoMore]

Sure it is not.

And you are not bumping a three year old thread to talk to yourself.

 

[Soul Crusher]

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.

[LurkerNoMore]

Don't let me get in the way of chatting with the voices in your head. 

Old ass thread bump = meltdown.

[Soul Crusher]

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

[Soul Crusher]

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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 ...

[Straw Man]

333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts

[Soul Crusher]

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 ...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Agnostic007]

333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts

^^^^
this

[Agnostic007]

out of about 50 threads on this 1st page, over 30 are 3333.....

[Soul Crusher]

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


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Sounds exactly like the cult worshippers of the messiah on this board

[whork]

333 - why don't you just start your own blog rather than bumping threads where you're the only one who posts

HAhaha 

[Soul Crusher]

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/06/29/Michelle-Obama-Compares-Obama-to-Biblical-Figures



We have another Eva Braun on our hands. 

[whork]

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?

[Soul Crusher]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/07/02/allen_west_obama_wants_americans_to_be_his_slave.htm



Slaves for Obama. 

[LurkerNoMore]

The voices in his head are having a dandy conversation among their delusional selves it appears.

[Soul Crusher]

[LurkerNoMore]

Like anyone is going to waste 3 seconds of their time watching your dumb ass videos.  Let alone 32 minutes of one.

[Soul Crusher]

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. 

[LurkerNoMore]

Only for paranoid duffel bag internet addicts like yourself. 

The rest of the country possessing a rational mind doesn't seem to agree.