…without our self-appointed intellectual betters to tell us how we are just too stupid to see how enlightened they are?
From the finely polished turd file, we have this latest entry from New Age manure merchant and elitist twit, Deepak Chopra.
Now, on the one hand, I’ve gotten used to people who would have trouble finding a clue if it was nailed to the back of their hand pretending to greater intellect and wisdom (based on the consensus shared by their peers, and rarely by any objective measure or observable criteria other than the sound of their own voice) than that possessed by my friends, associates, and myself. They played this game in the last election, when it declared that opposition to Barack Obama was simply the result of our racism, and not his razor-thin resume, and record of making principled stands on nothing other than preserving a mother’s “right” to snuff her baby.
Well now, Mr. Chopra insists that Obama has the answer that we need as a nation in one word: “Evolve”.
Of course, the piece hits all the predictable points, such as Romney pointing out the uncomfortable truth about the President:
One foresees that a simple message may prevail over a complex one. The simple message, which Romney endlessly repeats, is this: The President is a nice guy, but he’s in over his head, and his wild spending has bankrupted the country.
Now keep in mind, Mr. Chopra chooses not to demonstrate the level of denial of many Obama supporters; he doesn’t refute this message. He tries to recharacterize it as he extolls the virtue of what he thinks Obama’s winning message is:
The complex message, which comes from Obama in mixed, varied, and confusing in ways, is this: We must revamp America in order to meet the future.
The only thing that is complex about the Obama message is the choreography that we see performed by those who would have you believe that there is still HOPE and CHANGE instead of historic and unprecedented failure and decline at the hands of someone incapable and unwilling to change either.
Because Romney has blame, impatience, and angry frustration on his side, he may succeed in his uphill climb. Already most of what the pundits told us – that Romney had been damaged in the combative primary race, that the conservative base is opposed to him, that the religious right is suspicious of him – has proved invalid. Republicans are rallying en masse behind the simple message, while seething underneath is an irrational hostility to Obama that no sensible person can quite fathom.
What is overlooked or avoided in this suspect analysis is the fact that the President has had 3 and a half years to “revamp” America, two of which with majorities in Congress that should have gotten him all his little collective salvationist heart required to get these things done. What it has gotten us less drilling on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico (and climbing gas prices to go with it), a coal industry facing annihilation, which WILL see electricity prices skyrocket (a promise kept), and the worst labor market since the great depression, with the historic and unprecedented benchmarks of no new net jobs and a downgrade in the country’s credit rating. To ask for more of the same would be like being donkey punched by an entire football team, only to ask them to do it again.
And to allege that Romney has blame on his side is cheeky, considering that instead of correcting his failures during the last three years, the President, who asked us for the job, and was briefed repeatedly throughout the campaign, gave us excuses about what he “inherited”. Any negative has always been someone else’s fault, usually his predecessor. And while there is angry frustration and impatience with the failure that is this administration, I believe to say it is on Romney’s side is projection…it certainly exists, but it isn’t because of anything Romney has said or done. This is the result of an administration that put a priority on regulation, making the engines of prosperity off-limits or so restricted as to be ineffective. It also carries the taint of irony, as it was the undertone of the campaign of HOPE and CHANGE that the President ran in the last campaign. Romney’s momentum isn’t for a great enthusiasm for his message thus far as much as a resignation to the understanding that he represents the lesser of two evils, and the prospect of at least retaining competent management for the economy for the first time since January 2009. Given the record that the President dares not run on, the hostility towards him is hardly” irrational”, and to suggest that those who realize this, and aren’t willing to acquiesce to a brilliance that simply isn’t in evidence is insulting. The fact is that despite a gradual dumbing down of the population which has been exploited by those who have decided that they are our betters because they have been “trained” to rule, the average person still has a better grasp on basic economic truths than any 12 graduates of Harvard Law or the Kennedy School of Government, if only because the finite nature of money is something that they can’t escape by printing money or raising taxes.
Chopra goes on to list the factors that he wants the reader to believe that Republicans aren’t capable of addressing, while avoiding the fact that the only answers that Democrats seem willing to give are “Spend more, tax more, government more”. These answers demonstrate a disbelief that the American people can and will come up with their own solutions if government is scaled back, and pulled off the backs of on whom the burden of making it all work.
It’s a tragic irony that the Republican Party has become the domain of white blue-collar workers, because they are the worse off and the ones who need Obama’s vision the most. All governing classes come from the elite (after all, both candidates have Harvard degrees, just as all the leading contenders in 2004 went to Yale). The difference is that the Democratic vision is fostered by an elite that wants to retool our whole society for the benefit of the greatest number. The Republican Party wants to benefit well-off white males.
Of course, the governing class doesn’t have to come from the “elite”, and there are members of Congress who do not fit this classification thanks to the very same Tea Party that he holds in such disdain. That is why the Republican Party is typically as hostile to it as the Democratic Party is. And the desire to “retool society to benefit the greatest number” is nothing of the sort. It is merely the latest incarnation of a “benevolent” spirit in government that looks to be generous with as much of other people’s property as it can, in order to purchase as much power from those voters as it can. The elephant in the room is and always has been that entitlements have NEVER been the Federal government’s to give, and the longer that it has been able to engage in this generosity, the better it has been for government, not the subjects of its supposed benevolence.
Somehow, after forty years of reactionary conditioning, the working class has been persuaded to support rich white males while ignoring their own best interests.
Or maybe they realize that all the left has offered is envy and gilded chains, and that isn’t in anyone’s best interests but the Democrats.
Abortion and gay marriage are typical red herrings, as are foreign wars and stoking mass fear about terrorism.
Or abortion is a crime against the nation’s charter and a betrayal of our most cherished ideals, and gay marriage is an insult to the struggles and sacrifices that characterize the real civil rights gains our country experienced in the last century, which cheapen that history, and pretend that the morality that its proponents pretend is neutrality is of greater benefit to society than what they want to replace. But then, I doubt Mr. Chopra is sufficiently well-versed in American history, law, and the philosophy of law to truly grok the significance of that which he would trivialize. And considering the man he is campaigning for got us into Lybia’s war, over the objections of Congress, and still has troops in Afghanistan, is waiving Osama Bin Ladin’s bloody dress to anyone who’ll listen, GITMO is still open for business, and American citizens still have to consign themselves to nudie scans and being felt up by unionized government subcontractors when they fly around our own country, the cheap talk about the distractions of foreign wars and terrorism is just that. Cheap and talk.
For all that, America must evolve on all fronts.
Why is it that we keep having to suffer the self-righteous opinions of British twits like this man and Martin Bashir? Seriously, if we wanted to live like EUROPEONS, we never would have fought and won two wars against the Crown. If I wanted to know how to fail, I still wouldn’t ask either of them. There are plenty of Democrats here who I could take seriously.
Obama realizes this quite clearly; hence his programs for alternative energy,
The wind power that is proving to be a boondoggle, to such a degree that its biggest cheerleader, T. Boone Pickens has bailed on the idea, and the generously taxpayer-funded failures like Solyndra , or the taxpayer money frittered away on foreign auto companies like Fisker, or the brilliant idea of subsidizing biofuels which are harmful to engines, incredibly inefficient, and perform the stupid government trick of turning food into fuel, making food that much more expensive for the very same people who Democrats keep purporting to help?
a cleaner environment,
And all it will cost is energy bills that will necessarily skyrocket for the average consumer, and businesses who will either go out of business, or cut their work force, further depressing an economic already gasping for air because of choking regulations and the anticipated costs of ObamaCare.
infrastructure repairs,
Which, shockingly, as it turns out, were not so shovel ready. But, hey, since that wasn’t HIS money, its ok to laugh about it, right?
universal health care, and on and on.
An exercise in the usurpation of power that the Federal government was NEVER intended to have, which will drive up costs until private insurers are out altogether, and which will necessarily reduce the quality of care, and destroy the most innovative health care system in the world. But given the fact that the Federal government has done such a bang-up job with the Postal Service, Social Security, and Medicare, I’m sure that we can count on that quality, efficiency, and careful stewardship of our money to carry over into this latest venture in to the nanny state. After all, the NHS has done wonders in Great Britain, right?
Nothing offered by Romney is remotely commensurate. One prays that in his heart he is the moderate, sensible person that the extreme right hates and fears.
If the “extreme right” had the numbers and the power that our good friend Mr. Chopra would have us believe, there would be no doubt that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected…because he never would have been elected to begin with, as he would have had a competent candidate opposing him in the LAST election, and someone other than Romney facing him in this one.
Funny how a new age charlatan like Chopra use the term “evolve” when it is they who wish to return a past where elites make all the important decisions for the lumpenproletaiat.
This type of control had been the state of the relations between sovereigns and oligarchs and their subjects from time immemorial until the advent of the Magna Carta and it’s epigone the American constitution as it eschewed the positivist law of state power to actually constraining the authority of government.
This is part and parcel to the left’s profound mistrust of both liberty and free markets. Quite often it is liberals like Chopra who indulge in the conceit that it is they who embrace ambiguity and change more readily than the conservative other. This despite the fact that it is conservatives who embrace the ambiguity and seeming chaos of both market economics and personal liberty. It is the liberal mind that disdains the confusion of the market and wishes to enforce a PC homogeneity from abortion to gay marriage to single parenthood. It is the liberal who wished to elevate the access to commodities to fundamental rights and of course the more rights they can establish the more government is needed to enforce those rights.
That leads us to the idea that some how coming to the liberal position is some how an “evolution”. Think of it this way when you are a child you need someone to tell you what to eat, when to sleep and when to wipe your ass. The answer to why is “Because I said so”. Eventually you grow up and you make those choices on your own you to an extent mature of in a more attenuated sense “evolve”. Adult life is ambiguous and complex just like free market economics and personal liberty. The answer to why is not because some said so but whatever objective information you can glean in order to navigate the ordered chaos that is life in a free society.
These are admittedly grossly simplistic summations of the two world views but one, the “liberal” view, is an argument for going back to an atavistic system that would be akin to reverting to a childhood. This would be the exact opposite of evolution- devolution.
The basis of progressive thought is that this/it is the next “evolution” on our socio-economic Darwinian human development. They’ve said so since the 1800’s. They just keep trying to re-frame their argument in different terms. But it’s the same old bullshit. We are not fooled.
I do find it amusing that Obama’s “complex” solutions only seem like simple, non-answers because we are simply too dumb to understand his brilliance.
ga, I feel stupider for having a read at the whole article, but I’m like a farking moth to a flame.
Workers with only high school diplomas are at a permanent disadvantage that grows larger every decade.
there is a reason for this – 1) high school graduates are less and less prepared every year to even work at McDonalds, and 2) Higher education has convinced the powers-that-be that it is necessary for everyone to attend college, which, strangely enough riches few but Higher education.
A Starbucks manager does NOT need a college education. A police officer does NOT need a college education. This list is endless.
there is a reason for this – 1) high school graduates are less and less prepared every year to even work at McDonalds,
I found myself thinking the same thing and wondering how many liberal arts majors at the end of their college indoctrination could actually pass the final exams given to 12th graders at the turn of the 19th century.
I fear not many.
“there is a reason for this – 1) high school graduates are less and less prepared every year to even work at McDonalds,
I found myself thinking the same thing and wondering how many liberal arts majors at the end of their college indoctrination could actually pass the final exams given to 12th graders at the turn of the 19th century.”
Answer? Very few. My daughter graduated near the top of her class. I say near because in the multicultural world of today’s… Okay, twenty years ago now, High Schools? There had to be a list of the top grads, one from each race and sex…
In any case, I happened to have a copy of California’s Constitution Test from back in the day, circa 1965. This had to be passed in order to even graduate from Junior High and enter High School. One hundred percent pass. No curves or any other tweaks to get you by. She got a score of around forty percent…