Margaret Carlson: Is the President's Intellect Finally Engaged By the Catastrophe of Obamacare?

She begins with that Valerie Jarrett quote about Obama that I keep referencing, and then asks (rather sarcastically) if the "intellectually restless" Obama has finally found something that interests him.

Two statements explain the huge failure of Obamacare. One is by President Barack Obama, the other is about him.

The first was made in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the end of the 2008 primary campaign, when candidate Obama predicted that generations would look back and see his nomination as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Couple this with the assessment of his closest aide, Valerie Jarrett, about his exceptionalism. “He knows exactly how smart he is,” she told Obama biographer David Remnick. “And he knows that he has the ability -- the extraordinary, uncanny ability -- to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them.”

Obama “has never really been challenged intellectually,” she went on. “He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Or what an ordinary president does, for that matter. A chief executive less bored than Obama would have stayed on top of his signature legislation.

Sometimes commenters get on me about why I'm not defending this or that Republican's dumb statement. Well, because I have an ego. I do not wish to think of myself as some reflexive Talking Points Robot who is ready, willing, and eager to engage in any spin, no matter how preposterous, to protect the all-important team.

Well, other people are like that too. And the Liberal Chattering Classes are facing a question now: "Will my reputation and sense of pride survive Obama's incompetence?"

And: "How absurd am I willing to make myself in order to cover up for this arrogant buffoon's incompetence?"

Some people may begin to peel off -- not because they're not in-the-tank partisan shills, mind you, but because they're in-the-tank partisan shills who still have some functioning sense of self-respect left in them.

They are beginning to realize that loving Obama means, in the end, hating yourself. You have to sacrifice everything for him -- your honesty, your integrity, your autonomy. Your reputation, your legacy, your pride.

His incompetence and deceit are at such a level that he will not permit you to support him and retain a shred of self-respect for yourself.

Devotion to Obama requires destruction of the self. Obama is a jealous Messiah, and will not permit you to love anything else -- even yourself.

That may be too much for some worshippers to bear. Some worshippers may only be willing to worship casually -- Cafeteria Cultists, if you will -- and will not be able to muster the full commitment to the Obama Cult that the more senior acolytes demand.

And such people will then become apostates.

And the other cultists will shun them, declaring: "Obama asked nothing of you, except for one thing: that you love him and nothing else, and that you obey his every command as if it were the Voice of God Himself commanding you."

posted by Ace at 06:42 PM

| Access Comments