A couple of things have come over the transom lately to remind us how cramped and limited is the man President Obama.
The first is his asinine remark that he's not that ideological. Good grief, man. If you don't understand that a politician calling for "fundamental transformation" is ideological through and through, you must be more dependent on your TelePrompTer than we thought.
The other "tell" is the president's remark to Barbara Walters that he might stay on in Washington until after Sasha is finished at Sidwell Friends, her exclusive private school.
"We gotta make sure that she's doing well.... until she goes off to college," Obama told Walters, according to an advance transcript of the interview, which aired Friday night. "Sasha will have a big say in where we are."
According to the president's aide, Josh Earnest, it's not just Sasha's school, but "being able to keep her social group as much as possible" that concerned the Obamas.
Is the president really that narrow gauged that he can't see that, important as Sasha's social development is to the Obamas, there is the little question of political mischief when two "presidents" are in town at once. Most departing presidents have the sense to get out of town and never come back.
Speaking about One-dimensional Man, guess what? Next year is going to be the 50th anniversary of semi-Marxist Herbert Marcuse's bible for the New Left of the 1960s. Here's a quick rundown from the Wikipedia entry. There's a lot there for the liberal ruling class to ponder.
The concept of "one-dimensional man" asserts that there are other dimensions of human existence in addition to the present one and that these have been eliminated. It maintains that the spheres of existence formerly considered as private (e.g. sexuality) have now become part of the entire system of social domination of man by man.
Golly, what could Marcuse have been thinking about? Liberals that cannot imagine a world without their darling welfare state? ObamaCare's contraception mandate, perhaps? "Why is President Obama trying to politicize the holidays?" asks Byron York. Because he's all in for the "system of social domination of man by man," as any liberal one-dimensional man would want to be.
Technological rationality, which impoverishes all aspects of contemporary life, has developed the material bases of human freedom, but continues to serve the interests of suppression.
Gosh, Mr. President, I guess the failure of healthcare.gov is worse than we thought. If only your website worked then we could really get on with serving the interests of suppression of all non-liberal forms of life.
The book [One-dimensional Man] is generally pessimistic about the possibilities for overcoming the increasing domination and unfreedom of technological society; it concentrates on the power of the present establishment to contain and repulse all alternatives to the status quo.
Marcuse couldn't be thinking of the cultural and political choke-hold that the present bicoastal ruling class has on the country class in our nation, could he? The ruling class that has rammed ObamaCare down our throats, and printed a couple trillion dollars in the last few years, and sicced the IRS on its political opponents? The ruling class that Victor Davis Hanson was writing about just this last week in "Coastal Royalty?"
The president, in his one-dimensionality, has mused occasionally about the possibilities of ruling without benefit of Congress. It would make things so much simpler -- and so kingly. How wonderful it would be just to command Republicans to get lost.
How wonderful it would be for everyone-except-Obama just to command ObamaCare to get lost. But we can't, because things don't work that way, not in the real multi-dimensional world.
Here's Charles Krauthammer increasing the dimension count. Democrats, he states, must be the ones delivering the death of ObamaCare.
Had it been delivered by Republicans before it was enacted with a defunding or any other measure, liberals would have said for 100 years we tried to get national health care, and the Republicans have thrown orphans in the snow again.
Democrats must be the ones to repeal ObamaCare. And that's what one-dimensional men like President Obama don't understand. In the society beyond the boundaries of the state you don't get to be the centurion that says to one go and he goeth or to a servant do and he doeth. You need to persuade other people about your good ideas instead of ordering them.
As we look back at the presidents of the 20th century we can say of all of them, except perhaps President Carter, that they were men of parts. We cannot say of them that there was no there there, no dimension beyond the purely political.
Would we could confidently say that of President Obama.
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