Wonderful things hiding in my inbox

Victorian posy of pansiesMy email inbox produces such wonderful things.  I hope  you enjoy these as much as I did:

I received two articles that are mirror images of each other.  The first is an article by Daniel Greenfield, which contains a very good insight about Obama’s magical attraction for the Ivy League (and Ivy League wannabes) who constitute his core non-black demographic.  The premise of the following paragraphs is the way in which the media repeatedly assured Americans that George Bush (Yale and Harvard) was an idiot, while Barack Obama (Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard) is the smartest man ever to occupy the White House:

But what is “smart” anyway? What makes Obama a genius? It’s not his IQ. It’s probably not his grades or we would have seen them already. It’s that he makes his supporters feel smart. The perception of intelligence is really a reflection.

[snip]

Intelligence has since been democratized. Smart has been redistributed. Anyone can get an A for effort. And the impulse of manufactured intelligence is not smart people, but people who make us feel smart. That is why Neil deGrasse Tyson, another obsessively self-promoting mediocrity like Carl Sagan, is now the new face of science. Sagan made science-illiterate liberals feel smart while pandering to their biases. Tyson does the same thing for the Twitter generation.

Self-esteem is the new intelligence. Obama’s intelligence was manufactured by pandering to the biases and tastes of his supporters. The more he shared their biases and tastes, the smarter he seemed to be and the smarter they felt by having so much in common with such a smart man.

Everyone who encountered him thought that he was smart because he made them feel smart. And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart. Genuine intelligence is threatening. Manufactured intelligence is soothing. And those intellectually superior progressives who need to believe that Obama is smart in order to believe that they are smart cannot stop believing in his brains without confronting the illusion of their own intelligence.

Please read the whole thing.  I do believe that Greenfield’s insight about Obama’s “Chance the Gardener” quality (which I touched upon in 2007 before much was known about him) is a very important one.

The mirror image of thinking you’re the genius in the room, of course, is proving to yourself, and to others, that people who aren’t just like you are idiots.  (This is a typical narcissistic behavior, by the way.)  Adrienne Royer hones in on the Left’s recent attacks against Duck Dynasty.  The elites were fine with the show when they glanced over and saw yokels (i.e., Republicans) laughing at other yokels (i.e., the Robertsons).  The show became threatening when the Left realized that the Robertsons, despite their foibles, weren’t idiots, and that too many people from all political classes (Obamas included) were looking at the clan as avatars of common sense, faith, and patriotism in a crazy world.  At that point, it had to go.

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That the attack on the Robertsons has nothing to do with gay issues and everything to do with their overall politics is nicely illustrated in this poster:

Comparing Robertson and Ahmadinejad

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One of the things I write about quite a lot is the gender madness that the Left foists on America.  In that vein, a friend sent me a link to an Onion-esque military blog and a video.  Apropos the video, my son’s comment after watching it was “That’s really creepy.”

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The old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be . . . and neither is America.  A friend sent me a link to an article about the U.S. trying to evacuate a few stragglers from the Sudan.  He included this comment in his email:

“Pentagon officials were trying to determine how to mount another effort to evacuate the roughly three dozen Americans in South Sudan…”

We have become such a nation of hand wringing milquetoasts it makes me sick. There was a time when we would respond with overwhelming force, like say an entire Marine Expeditionary Force, taken over the airfield in Bor, land as may aircraft as we pleased, rescued our citizens, then leave a giant crater behind us as we took off again.

Instead, we’ve allowed a handful of illiterate bushmen with AKs to stymie the worlds most powerful nation.

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I don’t think Bill Whittle likes that Obama chap very much, nor does he like Obama’s friends, nor does he respect or like the media, nor does he think much of those Americans who willingly let themselves be led down the primrose path, both because they liked the lies and because they were intimidated by the cry of “racist.”

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And to end on a lighthearted (and slightly NSFW) note, here’s Sunny Lohmann on the week’s news: