Beware The Cult Of Obama

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Apr 012009
 

This opinion piece is completely right. Obama is a religion, a very dangerous one.

For years many brave men have defended our country from foreign enemies. It is sad to see that all that may have been wasted as we watch it now being completely destroyed from within by this “Cult of Personality”.

You’ve met them. They may be friends of yours, or family members. You may even be one of them (in which case you’ll hate this column). I’m referring to those who’ve heard the Call of Obama.

Tucker Carlson compares it to a dog whistle: Inaudible to most, but irresistible to those who can hear it.

Obama “walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney gushed to Charlie Rose.

“I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make [Obama’s] pathway clear,” Halle Berry recently told the Philadelphia Daily News, “I’ll do whatever he says.” (Does Michelle know about this?)

Hollywood stars aren’t known for their political wisdom. More disturbing is how starstruck the mainstream media has become. Hardball host Chris Matthews isn’t the only one who gets a “thrill” up his leg at the very thought of our new president.

Last summer, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote that “Many spiritually advanced people I know … identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who … can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

The Politico recently ran a 900-word article entitled “The Power of Obama’s Hand,” reverentially describing how the president “uses touch to control and console simultaneously,” laying hands on supporters and opponents alike.

And in February, author Judith Warner used her New York Times blog to confess that “The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs.”

Instead of keeping that information to herself, Warner “launched an email inquiry,” which revealed that “many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.” Those of us who like to point out that the Emperor has no clothes now have to worry that when we do, we may give rise to a new round of lurid cougar fantasies.

Conservatives like to think they’re above this sort of thing. Their attitude is summed up by the subtitle of Jerome Corsi’s recent bestseller: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.

But any conservative who thinks cultishness is exclusively a leftist phenomenon ought to take a good long look in the mirror. Because many of those who decry the “cult of Obama” are the same people who made a flight-suited action figure hero out of such common clay as George W. Bush.

Peggy Noonan called Bush’s post-9/11 address to Congress “a God-touched moment and a God-touched speech.” Fred Barnes wrote that “the stage was set for Bush to be God’s agent of wrath.” National Review Online ran ads for the Bush “Top Gun” action figure, and an article about how wonderful it was to have a presidential superhero to complement your GI Joe collection.

On Hardball, after the “Mission Accomplished” speech, G. Gordon Liddy got graphic enough to embarrass Judith Warner: “Here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness…. and it makes the best of his manly characteristic…. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America!”

Presidential cultishness can be found all across the political spectrum. It’s a pathology that needs to be rooted out, because when we swoon over the man who holds the office, we risk making the presidency far more powerful than it was ever intended to be.

William Hazlitt, the 19th-century English essayist, argued that man was by nature “a worshipper of idols and a lover of kings.” As savages, Hazlitt wrote, we fashioned “gods of wood and stone and brass,” but now, thinking ourselves above superstition, “we make kings of common men, and are proud of our own handiwork.”

But America’s very existence repudiates the idea that we’re hard-wired for leader-worship. We became a nation by throwing off a king, and our Founders gave us a Constitution that’s based on the notion that all men are flawed and none should be trusted with too much power.

Americans, of all people, should recognize how bizarre and dangerous it is to fawn over professional politicians.

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Our Problem is Immorality

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Apr 012009
 

As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, doctor, what have we got?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Looks like we only managed to keep it for 222 years – just a stitch in time, really.

It’s all so terribly unnecessary… and so terribly sad… so much has been sacrificed… so much promise… shall we just allow them to throw it all away?

Do we not have a responsibility, a moral obligation, to do something about it, while there still is time?

This an excellent article by Walter E. Williams.

Most of our nation’s great problems, including our economic problems, have as their root decaying moral values. Whether we have the stomach to own up to it or not, we have become an immoral people left with little more than the pretense of morality. You say, “That’s a pretty heavy charge, Williams. You’d better be prepared to back it up with evidence!” I’ll try with a few questions for you to answer.

Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another? And, if that person does not peaceably submit to being so used, do you believe that there should be the initiation of some kind of force against him?

Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me, the answer is no to both questions, but I bet that your average college professor, politician or minister would not give a simple yes or no response. They would be evasive and probably say that it all depends.

In thinking about questions of morality, my initial premise is that I am my private property, and you are your private property. That’s simple. What’s complex is what percentage of me belongs to someone else.

If we accept the idea of self-ownership, then certain acts are readily revealed as moral or immoral. Acts such as rape and murder are immoral because they violate one’s private property rights. Theft of the physical things that we own, such as cars, jewelry and money, also violates our ownership rights.

The reason why your college professor, politician or minister cannot give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether one person should be used to serve the purposes of another is because they are sly enough to know that either answer would be troublesome for their agenda.

A yes answer would put them firmly in the position of supporting some of mankind’s most horrible injustices such as slavery. After all, what is slavery but the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another?

A no answer would put them on the spot as well because that would mean they would have to come out against taking the earnings of one American to give to another in the forms of farm and business handouts, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and thousands of similar programs that account for more than two-thirds of the federal budget.

There is neither moral justification nor constitutional authority for what amounts to legalized theft. This is not an argument against paying taxes. We all have a moral obligation to pay our share of the constitutionally mandated and enumerated functions of the federal government.

Unfortunately, there is no way out of our immoral quagmire. The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral.

People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes.

As it stands now, close to 50% of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient. You might as well join in the looting, including the current looting in the name of stimulating the economy.

I am all too afraid that a historian, a hundred years from now, will footnote America as a historical curiosity where people once enjoyed private property rights and limited government, but it all returned to mankind’s normal state of affairs — arbitrary abuse and control by the powerful elite.

Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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