What Will It Take?

by
DAVID SOLWAY

Americans still seem willing to give a pass to the disaster in the White 
House.

Let me begin with a categorical statement that, given current events and recent political history, can be easily defended: Barack Hussein Obama is a willful, indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to govern. Indeed, he would not be fit to govern Lower Slobovia, let alone the United States of America. Obama is a historic disaster of the first magnitude and, if not restrained, he will see to the irrevocable decline of the country which foolishly elected him, leaving the world on the brink of a conflict — or in the midst of one — whose repercussions cannot be underestimated.

Accompanying the undeniable havoc and damage that Obama is wreaking on his country and equally on its allies — Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Poland, Czech Republic, Israel, and possibly Taiwan — is the sense of helplessness that overcomes one when writing or speaking about a rogue president and his destructive administration. I feel this personally, having done my utmost in books, articles and lectures, from 2008 to the present, to warn whomever might read or listen that Obama represented a greater threat to the U.S. and the oddly named “free world” than any of our most dedicated and belligerent enemies. Even prior to his nomination as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, my distrust of this man was proprioceptive. And after his Missouri address, I wondered why anyone would want to “fundamentally transform” a country which, for all its flaws, perched atop the pinnacle of success in comparison to any other country.

Everything Obama has done since then has only served to confirm what was originally a deep suspicion and soon grew to become a complete certainty. Dozens of meticulously researched books have been published to the same effect. And yet very few people seemed to be paying attention. No less disconcerting, those who argue that to criticize Obama is a sign of deep-dyed racism are, of course, relying on slander and misappropriation of language to protect their chosen standard bearer and his Marxist/progressivist/utopian project.

What will it take to convince the ersatz aristocracy of frivolous intellectuals and brainless celebrities, partisan journalists, editors and academics, and an indifferent or deluded laity that they are heading for a crisis that will change our lives immeasurably for the worse? The evidence is beyond dispute.

America is drowning in a state of unredeemable debt — $17 trillion in actual debt and, according to economic historian Niall Ferguson, in the vicinity of $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities, while one in five households depends on food stamps. At the same time, it is printing money like there’s no tomorrow — and there may not be — while subsidizing green energy fiascos at enormous cost to the taxpayer ($90 billion in wasted stimulus funds, and counting). It finds itself in the throes of a metastasizing race war, caused in no small degree by the president’s rhetoric and behavior and fomented by his attorney general. It is a country increasingly governed by executive fiat and by an administration rocked by a near-endless gyre of political and ideological scandals. It is a country whose federal government opposes voter ID, opening the door to electoral corruption. It is a country that spies on its own citizens, software corporations and web search engines, tries avowed terrorists in civilian courts, allows its ambassador and his entourage to be killed, without reprisal, and suffers its higher echelons to be riddled with Muslim Brotherhood operatives, giving the impression of a College of mujtahids. They are the advance cohort. “Today,” writes Larry Kelley in his sobering bookLessons from Fallen Civilizations, “millions of militant Muslims awake every morning plotting the destruction of the US. Many are among us.” And there will be more, if these reports of fast-tracking the citizenship applications of large numbers of Muslim immigrants are reliable, as they appear to be.

It is a country whose president purges its military — 197 senior officers, including nine commanding generals — as did Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to ensure the continuity of his regime. It is a country that refuses to defend its borders, even suing to keep them as porous as possible. It is a country shifting precipitously to the Left, now mired in the exorbitant socialist travesty of Obamacare built on an ascending pyramid of lies and false enrollment numbers — or in the words of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Patrick Frey at his Patterico blog, “they’re not just lying about politics now. They’re lying about data. They’re lying about everything. All the time. Constantly. It’s what you have to do to prop up an unsustainable government. … You lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie.”

It is a country whose domestic agenda is predicated on the Marxist principle of redistributive economics that amounts to stealing from the productive class to maintain an ever-growing parasitical constituency. It is a country at war with honest science, transmuting NASA into a program for Muslim outreach and buying into the Gore/Hansen/Mann-inflated, IPCC climate scam. It is a country that is retreating on every front and that has lost the Middle East as well as the respect of its adversaries. It is a country that betrays its allies and endangers the world in the process, as in the phony, eagerly sought agreement that allows a self-described genocidal and nuclearizing Iran to keep spinning its centrifuges while profiting from relaxed sanctions. It is a country whose administration has sold its loyal partner, Israel, down the Jordan River.

“The United States is no longer a rational nation,” mourns James Lewis. “Under Obama we are burning our traditional allies, and since weakness brings aggression, Iran is now empowered, China is grabbing ocean territory for shale deposits, and the worst offenders against women’s rights are now elected to the UN Human Rights Commission.” It is hard to contend with his summation.

All this proceeds under the direction of a president who has sealed his vital documents so that very little of crucial importance is known about him.  Roger Simon notes, as many others have done, “that Obama’s academic records are perpetually unavailable for a reason — and that reason is most likely that they reveal he received financial preferences, scholarships and/or loans, as a foreign student.” I have been arguing this thesis, and more, for several years about a president who is essentially a cipher. Intentional lack of evidence comprises evidence of its own that something is amiss. Further, if Obama was a foreign student, it follows that his presidential legitimacy is in question. But Simon is forgiving here, averring that he “would vote in a heartbeat for a foreign born person if I thought he or she were the best candidate, assuming it was all legal and public.…” Pace Simon, considering Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution, how such a process could be legal is distinctly moot.

Indeed, all other reasons aside, to have conferred immense power on a public figure with so meager a track record and so thin and discontinuous a résumé defies even the most rudimentary logic. Who is this man who sits in the Oval Office? (As PJM commenter “cfbleachers” correctly remarks in response to a previous article of mine, “Obama has spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mask.”) And what is his modus operandi? “Obama,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream, published just prior to the 2012 election, “is possessed of a certain low cunning that makes him politically formidable. Obama’s skill…is to figure out what the American people want to see and hear, and then give it to them, while doing something entirely different.” By 2012 Obama’s lack of a paper trail, his craftiness and his penchant for deceit should have been blatantly obvious to any sensible and mature American voter, irrespective of class, race or gender.

TV personality Monica Crowley concurs. In a recent speech, she spelled out what should have been plain for all to see: “We have a president who…came out  of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist professors…who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky, who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries and domestic terrorists… who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about the fundamental transformation of the nation…who waged war on entire news organizations, Fox News, and who spent his first term slamming into place radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine….What I’m describing here is the classic tin-pot dictatorship. We never thought it could happen here, and yet, here it is….Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the beginning before he was even elected president, but now it’s starting to dawn on more and more people what is really happening here.” She is right. Even for those who were not “in this room,” there should have been little doubt that Obama was a man without a discernible moral core, inspired by an anti-American political philosophy and utterly devoid of presidential heft.

But American voters were ready to be taken in by a smooth-talking, shape-changing, confidence-man, like the gullible “marks” in Melville’s last novel about the exploits of an adroit charlatan, and to trust the image rather than the substance (or absence of same). This is another way of saying that America elected the results of Obama’s wholly predictable dogmatic fecklessness. America elected not to be America anymore, to fundamentally transform itself from a solvent, powerful, feared and respected nation into a quasi-European basket case. America surrendered to reparation chromatics, as if seeking absolution for a history that no one today is responsible for and that Obama himself never experienced. Admittedly, Obama’s approval ratings have plunged of late, but public opinion is notoriously volatile and will probably rebound at some point. Liberal dogma and white guilt will see to that. One can only hope it will assume the form of a dead cat bounce.

The question remains. What will it take to awaken the tranquilized sector of the public and shake the elite corps of complacent opinion-makers out of their blind and factional torpor? How long before reality pre-empts fantasy? “The last five years of the Obama administration,” writes Russian émigré Alexander Markovsky, “have been like living on a volcano.” How long before the lava starts to flow?

One must hope that America will come to its collective senses before it is too late. But I am afraid that it will take nothing less than a major catastrophe, a fiscal implosion that takes the “food” out of food stamps, coupled with more high-casualty terrorist attacks both abroad and on its own soil, leading to the eruption of civil unrest and the possible impeachment of the most destructive president in the entire pageant of American history — a sorcerer’s apprentice in a house on fire or a Machiavellian schemer following a carefully contrived plan — before America emerges from its devastating slumber. Assuming, of course, that it ever does, or that a path to recovery will still be possible. For nothing is guaranteed in a nation so divided as America is today.