I agree. There’s only two ways to deal with such people: Keep them at an arm’s length, because their inability to analyze their own motivations and behavior will complicate your life unbelievably. And second: Remove them from decision loops, because they will screw up all consistency and, over time, sabotage what you are trying to accomplish. Inadvertantly, yes, but they will undermine and sabotage nevertheless. (I am giving Obama the benefit of the doubt here, not viewing him as a CONSCIOUSLY manipulative liar; but unfortunately he IS a politician, so…)

The problem: Our citizenry elected this man as President, so you can’t keep him at arm’s length, and you can’t remove him from the decision loop.

As 11B40 said above: It’s going to be a long 3.5 years.

The persuasion process happens in a democracy, but it is actually designed to happen that way. Because the military commander can only do what Sun Tzu advocated, if that military commander had the powers of a Dictator. And that cannot be a requirement of a Western republic or a democracy (except the Roman ones, of course). But the Founding Fathers, the designers of the Executive branch, knew this. That is why the President can act and give orders, if he does no persuasion at all (Bush comes to mind).

We’ve all heard of pathological liars and now we all know a pathological ‘excuser’.
It’s worth reciting again here from 11B40 …. “I won” or “I’m only the President”.
The president plays it both ways depending upon which way the wind is blowing or should I say smoke. Not even when asked if he still smokes could he manage an affirmative, yes, but danced around the answer until he finally came up with his 95% cure rate – it’s just like being a little bit pregnant or I am ‘only’ the President.

I’d caution everyone to watch his ears to see if they enlarge with time – like Pinocchio’s nose.

So now we come back to the ignorant voters and cult followers of the Obamanation. When they were told that Bush lied or was wrong on WMDs as being a valid justification in Iraq, they didn’t stand and fight for their former opinions that WMDs were a valid justification for the invasion of Iraq. In fact, more than 66% of the American people answered the polls that WMDs were a good justification for the invasion of Iraq. But they didn’t fight to uphold this belief, after the media continued the brainwashing. No, it is because they preferred to believe that they were wrong about Bush, that Bush was wrong and had deceived them, than to believe that they had deceived themselves by allowing the MSM to inform them of what is or is not real.

People only fight tenaciously for their beliefs if those beliefs are intimately connected with their sense of identity. Thus I would fight for the US Constitution because the US Constitution provides me the framework, the backdrop foundation, from which I form my philosophical identity of a classical liberal. A classical liberal, by my definition, would not fight against the US Constitution and would not aid its enemies, foreign or domestic. Of course, some people have different identities that they hold just as strongly in their opinions, such as being a father, being a lawyer, a Congresscritter (Barbara Boxer), and so forth. Bush was never seen by most of America as being part of their identity. They could drop Bush, the Presidency, and his attempts to secure America because their fundamental identity of being “Americans”, “Independents”, or “human beings” had nothing to do with supporting the President of the United States in finding the truth or winning a war for America. It had everything to do with “me, me, me” in the contemporary American cultural lexicon. “Bush betrayed me”. “Bush betrayed my country”. “Bush lied to me”. “I was duped by Bush”. “Bush misinformed me”. It was never about “I lied to myself” or “I deceived myself” or “I made a fool of myself”. No, it was never about that. It could not be about that. Because when the ego is given a choice between reforming one’s basic identity vs hating the alien, the foreign, and the Other, guess which one the ego will pick 99% of the time?

So now here we stand with a bunch of Obama cultists that fight for Obama, against Bush, against America, against the rest of us standing or sitting here today. Why? Because Obama provides meaning to their pathetic excuses of calling themselves “human beings”, “Americans”, or “Independents” (intellectually forthright independents even). Their very basic identity of what they see as “Good” requires Obama to be what they say he is. Obama is smart, thus they don’t have to be smart. Obama has authority, moral authority to challenge enemies of America, but the basic people of America do not for we are guilty of “white privilege, “racism”, “slavery”, “warmongering”, etc. etc.. Obama is not guilty of any of that, his victim status and his affirmative action record makes his soul clean in the Original Sin of America. And when I vote for Obama, I partake of this holy cleansing. If you have shook the hand of the Obama, I will want to shake your hand, to get me some of that. But Bush, Bush was guilty of everything America was guilty of. That’s why Obama voters can forgive themselves for ever supporting any foreign policy of Bush, even if it was a private whisper of a thought (due to the political pressure of 9/11). Bush was evil, he was manipulative, being manipulated by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and so I can forgive myself if I ever believed any of the WMD stuff.

You cannot penetrate this defense with anything short of a psychological nuke.

I’ve read about this before, seen it as if it were my own eyes witnessing the event. Themistocles is one example. Hannibal Barca another. Scipio Africanus yet another. They were all visionary leaders that fought for their home, their country. And what was their reward? Witness the history of the Bush Years and you will have an easy guess of it.

People are weak. That is why they need government and cannot withstand anarchy. That is why they need leaders, and cannot simply vote on everything of importance. American prosperity and bountiful plenty have fooled many into believing that strength is the natural condition of the human species. But strength is cultivated. It is worked at. It is earned. And even then, many will demonstrate themselves incapable of strength, just as many demonstrate themselves incapable of athletic ability or the absence of physical/genetic defects. We are talking about humanity, and humanity will always cover the entire spectrum of the bell curve, from the bottom 25% (which Congress, Fannie Mae, and ACORn are composed of) and the top 5 percenters. But we have a choice. We can let the bottom 25%, the weakest of the weak, have authority over us. Or we can choose a different path.

The tree of liberty must at times be watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots because weakness is to be despised, not cultivated. Anymore than you would cultivate weeds in order to grow your garden. Weakness will not invigorate and grow the tree of liberty. The cherry blossoms must fall for the trees to survive, sacrifices to the inevitable cycle of life and death. But if you give a choice, as the Libertarians wish is the optimal, to the people, then the people will choose the path of least resistance. They will choose to become weak rather than strong, for at least weak people get to rely on the Obamas and the Bushes to handle stuff. Strong folks, however, have no delusions on this score. They will have to rely upon themselves, in the end. And that’s just so messy. The Left, the Communists, as well as the Socialists, the Iranian mullahs, and so forth had their own personal answer to this issue. Their solution was to have a few elite leaders decide for the rest of the human body what that body will be doing. Their solution was to strip free will, the ability to choose, from humanity. This was their solution to human flaws, to human inequality.

My solution is the psychological nuke. It does not matter if people have a choice, when you manipulate the consequences of their choices. Thus I have no need, like the Left, to strip people of the ability to choose. You can get people, easily, to choose to be strong, by making the consequences of choosing to be weak, of choosing the path of least resistance, to be horrendous in pain and sacrifice. And this is not hard to do, for life will punish the weak far more than I could with any reservoir of power available to me. Make it possible for the punishment to manifest itself and people will grow strong, because the human species was designed to meet and overcome challenges (I suppose men and women got tired of seeing their children slaughtered for food and what not, so while it was harder to fight, it was also easier than dying horribly). That is what our entire mental bag of “delusions, denials, regressive tendencies” and other insane idiocies are for. When you make the choice of self-deception, which is what every Obama voter has done continuously since the first time they were told to vote Democrat or anti-American, the consequence must be horrible beyond belief in order that folks will either meet the challenge or be obliterated by it. Either way is fine by me.

The Libertarians do not understand this, because the very idea of any power, government specifically, imposing certain consequences is a little bit too much for them. The idea of US Marines safeguarding Iraqis was too uncomfortable for them, even. And for the Left, the imposition of consequences, while easily understood, is not favored by the freedom hating Leftists. They would prefer that you have no choice. The ACLU, ACORN, and so forth are compromises made because they cannot overturn the entirety of US law and the US Constitution whenever they wish. But their first instinct, always, is to make sure that you lack the ability to choose, regardless of the potential consequences if you had been able to make a choice either way. As the Tea Party organizers of Atlanta well know.

Remember this, even if there is not a God in this universe that ensures liberty, justice, and whatever in the afterlife, there does exist an entity with the Power to do so in this life, regardless of what you call the entity holding that power. And no, it’s not Obama.

If we’re lucky, 11B40. They are working very hard to queer the next election, whether it be by funding ACORN to the tune of 8-million, giving citizenship to 20 million illegals, smearing and undermining the competition with false legal charges, or queering the Census.

Back during the campaign, I wrote a comment about how I would play now President Obama in basketball. I would what we called “play him without the ball”, basically forgoing my offensive game and devoting all my effort to preventing him from even touching the basketball. I would bump him, step on his toes and the back of his sneakers, pull his shorts and maybe even a leg hair or two. I would stay as close to him as possible for as long as possible. I would enjoy every minute of it; he would not.

When I saw the clips of today’s performance, what occurred to me is how vulnerable he is to pressure. I can’t believe that this guy has ever dealt with any serious confrontations, at the negotiating table or elsewhere. You see, when he goes into the “I won” or “I’m only the President”, he has reached his breaking point and plays the only Ace in his deck. And this is at a point when he still has most of the press in his hip pocket.

It’s going to be a long 3.5 years.