The Wizard of Ooze
Bookworm on Apr 08 2008 at 10:37 am | Filed under: Barack Obama
I’ve been boasting for some time that, so far as I know, I was the first person to liken Barack Obama to Chance the Gardener in Being There. I did so because the Obama we first met appeared to have nothing going on behind the smooth exterior, a fact that allowed people to project onto him all of their beliefs and desires. For a long, long time, using this comparison, I hammered away Obama’s being a political nothing. I’ve concluded, though, that I was completely wrong.
There is in fact, a great deal to Obama, all of which he’s carefully kept hidden. He isn’t Chance the Gardener at all, who truly was nothing. Instead, he’s a weird inversion of the Wizard of Oz. As you recall, the Wizard of Oz presented himself as all-powerful and all-knowing. He warned his audience to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” knowing that a glimpse of this man would reveal the truth: the Wizard had no power at all. He was a charlatan. In other words, the Wizard of Oz pattern has a nonentity masquerade as a person of ideas and stature.
The opposite appears to be true with Obama. He is a person with a long ideological history and lots of ideas, who is purposefully masquerading as a cipher. I’m still right, I think, in deriding his lack of practical experience, but I’m wrong in claiming there’s no there there. There’s lots of there there, and none of it is the kind of stuff that would appeal to the ordinary person. Hence his “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” shtick.
Now that Obama has achieved rather lofty heights, though, people are beginning to notice that curtain flapping in the breeze behind him, and they’re sneaking peeks. And what we’re discovering is that the banal Wizard has a whole lot of ooze attached. Here’s just a partial list, and you should feel free to add your own hidden, oozing realities:
- He closely allied himself for 20 years to the arch-racist Jeremiah Wright, whom he described as his mentor, who married him and his wife, who taught his children, and whose radical Church he attended regularly. (No links needed here, right?)
- He freely admitted his fervent attachment to his Dad’s political philosophy without apprising anyone of the fact that his father was an extreme Communist.
- At the start of his political career, he consciously sought political aid from homegrown Leftist terrorists.
- Amidst all the shades of gray that characterize the United States Senate, he stands out as the only Senator with a perfect liberal voting record. That is, he’s so far to the left, even Kennedy and Boxer can’t keep up with him.
- The Rezko trial is showing with ever greater detail that Barack Obama entered into shady financial deals with the political fixer in order to finance his lifestyle and his politics.
- Obama has tried to hide and has lied about the fact that he is has in the past held (and probably still holds) positions about guns and abortion that lie to the extreme Left of the political spectrum.
- Obama is not some naive guy who stumbled into the political limelight because of integrity and talent. Instead, he is a deliberately created product of the Chicago political machine.
- Obama distinguished himself from just about every other person in Congress by deliberately turning his back on Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the extraordinarily brave and principled Bangladeshi newspaper man who is being persecuted by his government for suggesting detente with Israel.
- When it comes to charity, Obama gives Scrooge a run for his money. Despite having made significant sums of money and despite already being in the public eye, he and his wife gave just about nothing to charity — and there’s no indication that he offset his financial cheapness with the gift of his own time and energy. True to his liberal credentials, while Obama and the Missus are making money hand over fist, he wants to enact legislation that drags money out of your pockets to force you to fund the charities in which he believes. (That is, he wants to raise taxes.)
- Contrary to his faux-humble exterior, Obama is more than willing to lie about his Senatorial accomplishments in order to bloat — I mean, puff — his record.
- On the subject of judges, Obama has been open about the fact that he will appoint activist judges. He doesn’t believe that Supreme Court judges should be bound by anything as insignificant as the Constitution. Instead, he says, they should be allowed to base their decisions on “empathy.” I’m assuming he won’t choose judges whose empathy is directed towards fetuses or victims of crime or some weird “conservative” things like that. I’ll leave you to guess where their empathy will lie.
- I noted above that Obama has lied about a few things. It also turns out that his best-selling, fame-creating biography also contains some lies, or perhaps we can just call them acts of artistic license. No matter how you want to characterize them, it’s clear that Obama has only a distant relationship with the truth when it comes to shoving his past behind the curtain.
- Jeez, thinking about it, Obama lies about everything. Here’s a nice little post listing some of those lies, along with some hits at a complicit media.
- Obama surrounds himself with a significant number of political advisers who espouse views about Israel that are at odds with how the majority of Americans view that beleaguered little country. Samantha Powers was the one who first got the spotlight, but more information has been oozing out about his other foreign policy advisers as well. The problem seems to infect his entire campaign.
No wonder Obama has presented a bland, history-free exterior, and no wonder he’s relied on orotund phrases in his speeches that carry with them no actual meaning. This is not a case of a man trying to be all things to all people. Instead, this is a case of a man desperately trying to divert attention from his true political persona, one that would, I think, revolt most American voters. I’m sure that every morning, Obama rises and recites to himself “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” He knows that he’s done for if some little Toto comes along and the curtain vanishes altogether.
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[...] Bookworm Room created an interesting post today on The Wizard of Ooze [...]
Hello Bookworm,
Yes, instead of the vacuous rhetorical black hole that we thought Obama was, I think many people who follow politics closely are realizing with increasing fear and horror about the man who is the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Obama is not simply a typical liberal. Brushing him off with this casual complacency speaks to a remarkable lack of seriousness on the part of the observer. It should be abundantly clear by now that Obama is neither your run of the mill liberal nor a man to be brushed of lightly.
So far, not many people are taking him to task on all his hedging half-truths and overt lies. Those that are are often already marginalized. Others whose shrewd political acumen I’ve admired for years are lauding Obama against all reason. I don’t understand it, and I don’t have to. Whatever this Obamessiah schtick is, it makes people gravitate toward him like flies to honey no matter their personal political ideology.
Note what Obama wrote in his book:
“Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me. The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided. Religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagine myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing, if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.”
Read his books. They tell an awful lot about him, and it’s not spin. It’s him in his own words.
Howdy Bookworm,
If you haven’t checked yet, I’ve got a comment on moderation on this post.
I guess this is most apropos to points 1 and 3.
Campaign ‘08: The Radical Roots of Barack Obama : Rolling Stone Destiny’s Child. No candidate since Robert F. Kennedy has sparked as much campaign-trail heat as Barack Obama. But can the one-term senator craft a platform …
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13390609/campaign_08_the_radical_roots_of_barack_obama - 38k -
This is an admiring profile of how Sen. Obama sought out Rev. Wright. Also note how search engines show the original title of “Radical Roots …” but the actual article is now renamed the less provocative “Destiny’s Child.” I guess the folks at Rolling Stone figured that too much honesty might not be the best policy.
When the Left said “Bush lied and people died”, obviously what they were really saying is “people will die so long as it is we who lie”. Bush stepped out of line, you see, by being perceived as trafficking in manipulation and offensive movements that move the public conscious. That’s the fiefdom of the Left, after all.
Submitted for Your Approval…
First off… any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here. Die spambots, die! And now… here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council li…
This blood-heritage thing has always puzzled me. Frankly, on my Dad’s side we’re mostly French, but no one knows the whole blood-heritage story. On my Mom’s side, no one really has a clue about more than half of it.
If I were 1/8th each of Black, Italian, German, English, Irish, Norwegian, Russian and Chinese, then as far as I’m concerned, I’d be eligible for participation on a WHOLE LOT of ethnic festivals! I really couldn’t care less.
I don’t think I have any ancestors who lived in this country in 1860. Yet I’m probably 15/16th white. Do I have the blood of slave-owners running through my veins? Do I have anything to feel guilty about? If I discovered that all my ancestors owned slaves, would *I* still have anothing to feel guilty about? I am not them; they are not me. Of course I would have nothing to feel guilty about.
Yet we see Michelle Obama identifying with Malcolm X’s urge to expunge any and all traces of the evil white blood from his bloodstream. I find that simply so strange, such a desire for racial purity.
If I’m concerned about *anything* in this cultural battle over privilege, identity and opportunity, I’m concerned about the American mythos that “education is the great equalizer”, and yet our schools across the country are profoundly unequal, ensuring that if that mythos were to be true, then “equality of opportunity” is an unrealized dream. Because if education is so horribly unequal, then opportunity itself must remain unequal too. (If the mythos surrounding education itself is held to be true, that is.)
Submitted 04/09/08…
The Watcher’s Council nominations are up! The Judgment Thing - The Glittering Eye writes about the cynical way that the Democratic contenders position themselves regarding Iraq. (Yes there’s more, but I have to summarize this succinctly.) In Honor of…
Hi BW,
I must agree with you that Obama is a very dangerous person. His studied, hands-in-the-pocket casualness, his iron calmness in the face of potentially infalmetory questions, identifies one who wants to be POTUS so bad he can taste it. And he has the charisma of Hitler. This campaign season will certainly reflect that oft quoted Chinese curse.
Or as Rush has been signing off occasionally, “We are so screwed.”
Al
On reflection, my hat if off to you, Book. This is the most incisive “slice-and-dice” jobs on the Obama mystique that I have yet to read. It further confirms that the discipline of law does provide the best incubator of critical thinking skills. I will use this post in my own discussions with the Liberal/Lefties in my family.
That being said, I have to concur with Al’s referenced statement, “we are so screwed (up).” Not just in that Obama might win, but that so many in the U.S. can be lulled by his fascist visions of an omnipotent State. A country that once took pride in being a nation of individual guard dogs, we now have half of our population willing (begging) to submit to the supposedly uncomplicated roles of grazing sheep presided over by a supposedly benevolent shephard (i.e., Democrat Party). Wolves the world over must be licking their lips in anticipation.
[...] Bookworm Room, “The Wizard of Ooze” [...]
The real mccain…
via memeorandum Slate recently ran reprint of part of a NYT magazine profile of Sen. McCain written by Michael Lewis, The great McCain story you’ve probably forgotten. It tells of the Senator’s devotion to one of his political patrons: liberal Democr…
Wolves are always licking their chops, Danny. That is the nature of wolves. And they are not that particular about the sheep being delivered by Insane Clown Posse-D or Insane Clown Posse-R. Political alliances shift like sand, but predators are constant. Reading a piece about Obama in TNR by Ryan Lizza I am struck by how much, as a “community organizer” in Chicago he was a disciple of Saul Alinsky. As is his opponent, Hillary Clinton. They have common antecedents IMHO in that radical vision and that mission to rewire society. But it appears that Obama, being an astute man, has simply out-Alinskied Hillary in pursuit of his political goals.
“And he has the charisma of Hitler. ” I have been thinking the same thing.
In all times, rhetoric has moved masses, for good or ill. Think Sermon on the Mount, Gettysburg Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you ..”, ” I have a Dream …” the Keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Rhetoric is undoubtedly responsible for the rise of Hitler, the entry of the US into WWII, the Civil Rights Movement — and the rise of Obama.
In the face of a great orator, be afraid, be very afraid.
I must be missing something: I do not get, and have not gotten, the “charisma,” or the the “great orator” stuff at all.
However, as I have said from Day 1, and have noted here a time or two in the recent past: he is an absolutely standard-issue Chicago democrat machine pol. The other word for that is: “crook.”
JJ - have you ever heard him speak? I first felt the power of his oratory at the 2004 Democratice convention keynote.
You are absolutely correct: he is a Chicago pol/crook. Didn’t one of them say “I’m gonna make me a Senator”? NJ and Chicago have raised political corruption to amazing heights.
The Council Has Spoken!…
First off… any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here. Die spambots, die! And now… the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”…..
Council speak 04/11/08…
The Council has spoken. On the Council side the winning post was “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”… Accommodating Islam reflections on how Islam works its way into society by Joshuapundit. The Council runner up this week was The Wizard of Ooze, a poin…
[...] You Give A Mouse A Cookie”… Accommodating Islam”. Second place honors went to Bookworm Room for “The Wizard of Ooze”, a post on Barack [...]
“following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing, if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.”
Could it be that when Malcolm came to realize as I believe Obama has that Race in the end
is not what makes a person, that the origins of the blood that runs though our viens is the
same blood that runs through all of huminty itself, and that Race, or even the tribe you belong to, or have associated yourself with, is not what makes us as individuals the best we can possibly be, but rather it is the blood that runs through our viens that truely binds us as human beings who all share the same genetic material that does in fact make us human. It’s not the color of our skin that seperates us but rather it’s the blood that runs through our viens that binds us.
That’s interesting, since blood is a core basis for tribalism and it is tribal politics which I blame for the fracturing of American unity and will. The Democrats play a big part there.
For background info on tribes, check here.
http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/2008/04/06/tribalism-in-a-world-dominated-by-america-and-english/
Watcher’s Council results…
And now… the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”… Accommodating Islam by Joshuapundit, and Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement by The Brussels Journal. Here are…
Watcher’s Council Results…
The winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”… Accommodating Islam by Joshuapundit, and Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement by The Brussels Journal. Here is a link to the……
[...] Ymar, hat tip to Bookworm Room… I hadn’t seen [...]
[...] 2. “The Wizard of Ooze” by Bookworm Room [...]