I prefer clarity to agreement, and Obama’s second term is getting increasingly more clear
I trace back to Dennis Prager one of my favorite expressions: “I prefer clarity to agreement.” Too often, agreement can be like Tacitus’s definition of a Roman peace (“they make a desert and call it peace”). In the years since Obama’s election, I’ve frequently argued that, with a weak American president, the world might get some necessary clarity. (For example, in January 2011, I said apropos Obama’s retreat from the world stage, “The clarity that emerges when the strong man is gone might be helpful.”)
Looking at the headlines, it occurs to me that Americans are getting a lot of clarity about what today’s Democrats really stand for, while the world is getting a lot of clarity about what a post-American world looks like. The following links all tie into this post’s theme about the clarity that Obama has wrought.
Obamacare reveals Obama for what he is: not a glorious tyrant, in the mold of Louis XIV or Henry VIII, but a petty bureaucratic Leftist. You and I knew that early on, of course, but the rest of America is catching on to this reality . . . so there’s clarity for you.
The young and the poor just got a dose of clarity today: Even the wealth transfer that is Obama’s core (but don’t call it redistribution) was done incompetently, with low-income, especially young low-income people finding that they’re in the increasingly expensive Obamacare market without a subsidy net.
I hope John Fund is correct when he says it can still be repealed — but that will happen only if the American people have learned their lesson and vote Republican in 2014, and if the Republicans don’t prove that they’re as complicit in Big Government as we currently suspect. (And in that regard, the end of the filibuster may also bring some welcome clarity for conservative voters.)
Peter Wehner comes right out and says it: Obamacare is finally causing people to see the President and the Democrats for at least some of what they are — failed technocrats. But again, the question remains whether we’ll get intelligent action in clarity’s wake.
Angelo Codevilla thinks the same is true with Obama’s appalling agreement to allow Iran to continue building its nuclear program; namely, that it forces clarity (or, as he phrases it “reality’) on the world: “But let us look on the bright side: There is value in leaving no doubt about reality.”
Certainly the Israelis now know where they stand. Keith Koffler’s faux quote passes the Homer Simpson test.
And finally, even the media is getting a little tired of being pushed around. This tiny rebellion won’t stop the media’s slavish devotion because, even if media members have had it with the man, they still support the cause. However, to the extent the media consuming public watches this little tiff, it might produce enough clarity in some that they start backing away from the cognitive dissonance that enslaves them.
Clarity . . . it’s a good thing.
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*Thanks to Earl for pointing out that I’d forgotten those three very important words.
