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.
I doubt the “Main Stream Media” will even bother with this story. Let’s face it… she isn’t a Bush or a Palin.
A “friend” of Vice President Joseph Biden’s daughter, Ashley, is attempting to hawk a videotape that he claims shows her snorting cocaine at a house party this month in Delaware.
The anonymous male acquaintance of Ashley took the video, said Thomas Dunlap, a lawyer representing the seller.
Dunlap and a man claiming to be a lawyer showed The Post about 90 seconds of 43-minute tape, saying it was legally obtained and that Ashley was aware she was being filmed. The Post refused to pay for the video.
The video, which the shooter initially hoped to sell for $2 million before scaling back his price to $400,000, shows a 20-something woman with light skin and long brown hair taking a red straw from her mouth, bending over a desk, inserting the straw into her nostril and snorting lines of white powder.
She then stands up and begins talking with other people in the room. A young man looks on from behind her, facing the camera. The lawyers said he was Ashley’s boyfriend of a few years.
The camera follows the woman from a few feet away, focusing on her as she moves around the room. It appears not to be concealed. At one point she shouts, “Shut the f— up!”
The woman appears to resemble Ashley Biden, 27, a social worker for a Delaware child-welfare agency and a visible presence during her father’s campaign for the White House.
The only way this prick can be making money in this current economic environment is if he had something to do with causing it.
A hedge fund manager who predicted the global credit crunch has said the financial crisis has been ‘stimulating’ and the culmination of his life’s work.
George Soros, who predicted the global financial crisis twice before, was one of the few people to anticipate and prepare for the current economic collapse.
Mr Soros said his prediction meant he was better able to brace his Quantum investment fund against the gloabal storm.
But other investors failed to take notice of his prediction and his decision to come out of retirement in 2007 to manage the fund made him $US2.9 billion.
And while the financial crisis continued to deepen across the globe, the 78-year-old still managed to make $1.1 billion last year.
‘It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work,’ he told national newspaper The Australian.
Soros is one of 25, top hedge fund managers from across Wall Street who have defied the credit crunch crisis to reap a total of $11.6billion (£7.9bn) last year.
The managers made their profit by trading above the pain in the markets, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha Magazine.
Former maths professor James H. Simons, who has made billions in hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, earned $2.5 billion running computer-driven trading strategies.
And John A. Paulson, who made his fortune by betting against the housing market, came in second earning $2 billion.
Drudge should make a screaming headline out of this today since Dodd is up on deck grilling Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner today at the Senate Banking Committee.
Sen. Dodd’s measly little Irish “cottage” on 10 acres he values at between $100,000 to $250,000.
An intriguing item here from the dogged Kevin Rennie of the Hartford Courant that highlights a classic example of why ordinary citizens become cynical about politicians and the way business in Washington is conducted.
Silver-haired Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has already been getting a lot of heat for his two 2003 VIP mortgage loans from Countrywide, one of the major actors in triggering the current financial crisis.
Seeking Senate re-election in 2010, the 2008 presidential candidate (he dropped out on the first day of voting after finishing seventh in Iowa, where he had moved with his family as a way of courting voters) is now in a bit of a sticky spot with another accommodation- his “cottage” on the lovely Irish island of Inishnee.
Some digging from Rennie (a lawyer and former Connecticut state legislator) reveals that as well as there being a cloud over Dodd’s properties in Connecticut and Washington DC, considerable murkiness surrounds the financial arrangements for the purchase of his “cottage”.
As Rennie outlines, Dodd became part owner of the 10-acre Galway property in 1994 along with Missouri businessman William Kessinger, whom Dodd knew through investor Edward R. Downe Jnr, who had pleaded guilty the previous year to insider trading charges. The mortgage was listed as “between $100,001 and $250,000”. Downe was a witness to Kessinger’s purchase.
In 2001, Dodd circumvented the US Justice Department to help get his pal Downe a full pardon on President Bill Clinton’s last day in office. The following year, Dodd bought off Kessinger’s two-thirds share of the “cottage” for, Dodd said, $127,000.
Ever since then, Dodd has continued to list the value of the property as “between $100,001 and $250,000”.
Check out the picture of Dodd’s “cottage” (provided to me by Rennie), where he spends summers and which is looked after during the rest of the year by a caretaker. It’s not exactly the humble tumbledown abode with a leaky thatched roof, a fireplace with peat thrown on it and donkey tethered outside that the Senator might like you to envisage.
The nearby village of Roundstone is a celebrity hangout. When he’s there, the Sunday Times reported in 2007, he’s likely to “rub shoulders with [RTE’s] Pat Kenny, Bill Whelan of Riverdance, Lochlann Quinn, the former AIB chairman, and the singer Brian Kennedy”.
Given the Irish property boom, a conservative estimate would be that the house would be worth approaching $1 million, and very possibly much more than that.
So why hasn’t Dodd declared a more realistic true value of the property? No doubt he didn’t want to highlight the fact that he had a third splendid pile, to go along with his residences in DC and Connecticut, as he sought the presidency (remember how all those homes harmed John McCain?). Maybe he knew it would mean further scrutiny of his connection with the pardoned crook Downe.
Now that President Barack Obama – whom Dodd enthusiastically endorsed for president over Hillary Clinton – has declared a new era of ethical government in Washington, his former Senate colleague will order a fresh, long overdue reappraisal of its value. Or perhaps the Senate Ethics Committee will look into the matter.
Call me cynical, but I wouldn’t advise you to hold your breath.