Vote For Me, I’m Tall
(why I cannot vote for Obama)
The political rise of Obama resembles the rise of George Bush so closely it makes me want to throw up on my shoes. It also makes me fear for my country. Obama and Bush both arise from grave flaws in our political culture, symptoms of a nation on the downslope: a news media so useless, it makes the First Amendment almost irrelevant; the rise of extremists, on both the right and left, with skewed power to warp the two major parties; and too large a segment of the voting public that picks candidates for trivial reasons: whether you’d like to have a beer with the President, lovely speeches, likability. Voters have the right to vote for whomever they choose for whatever reason. I can only hope that voters fooled by faith healer Bush will see through faith healer Obama. Because the faith healer game crosses party and ideological lines.
Unqualified Obama, having reneged on the hopey changey bullshit, now asks for my vote on purely partisan grounds: Bush is a Republican. McCain is a Republican. Therefore McCain = Bush. I cut the question along a different axis: Bush is unqualified. Obama is unqualified. Obama = Bush. Bush rose on the back of blind faith evangelicals. Obama rose on the back of ultra-left blog lemmings. Obama = Bush. Bush’s many failures have less to do with conservativism and more to do with his lack of ability. But how did he ever get into office? I look at Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower, and though I see plenty to protest from a liberal point of view, I see nothing like Katrina or Iraq. Bush is a malignant, tumorous growth on conservatism, an anomalous freak birth out of conservativism. If Republicans stank up the White House like Bush, they would never have run the table on Democrats over the past four decades. Why are we seriously considering, nominating and electing unqualified people to lead our country?
I hear talk about the ‘direction of the country.’ Repubs nominate Bush over McCain. The nation picks Bush over Nobel Laureate Gore, the Dems nominate Obama over Clinton. Same difference. That’s the wrong direction of our country. Something has gone wrong in our culture, and as a result, we’re nominating/electing unqualified leaders. That is the fundamental ‘issue’ in this election. For me, it will have to trump the other issues. I’d rather see the Republicans get back to being a conservative, pro-business party that I disagree with, than have Obama spread the cancer of Bushism into the Democratic Party as yet another national failure, a weak, unqualified President, a media phoney propped up by the radical left instead of the radical right. Same difference.
I’ve never seen a Presidential candidate who invokes childhood images of himself constantly like Obama does. Let’s count:
" ... 'the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in southeast Asia' ... I was only 8 years old when the Weather Underground bombed the Capitol ... my white grandmother hurt my feelings when I was a little boy ...
Again and again, he plants and reinforces images of himself a child. And there's that boyish smile-defense mechanism he flashes to deflect reporters on the rare occasions when they press him. "Come on, fellas, I've already answered 8 questions." This is all deliberate. When Mark Penn joked that Obama’s Presidential ambitions dated back to kindergarten, Obama ops hyped the ‘controversy’: Penn was picking on a little boy in kindergarten. If you remember the briefly famous Iowa ‘switcher’ lady on Youtube, she said the attack on Obama in kindergarten was the final straw. “If my kid said in kindergarten he wanted to be President ... that would be an exciting thing.” Obama’s tactic worked. By repeatedly evoking childhood images of himself, he triggered a protective maternal response in the ‘switcher’ lady (who later switched away from Obama).
Obama deliberately tweaks the maternal instincts of the ‘switcher’ lady. But I’d bet he triggers a different instinct--the hunter-killer instinct--in Vladimir Putin. Just imagine the rush this predator feels at the prospect of Obama as U.S. President. The drip in his salivary glands. The throbbing in the reptile brain. Obama turns his cotton-tail up on the world stage. I don’t think it’s wise for the U.S. to tantalize a KGB assassin by electing prey.
I saw a joint press conference with Putin and Bush on Youtube. It was so sad. We’re talking Lloyd Bentsen-Dan Quayle territory. Bush actually said, ‘I hope Russia will embrace democracy like we’re trying to build in Iraq.’ Putin embarrassed our folksy, likable elected ‘leader.’ ‘Russia’s not really interested in the kind of Democracy they have in Iraq.’ And I thought to myself, we’re in trouble.
Would You Like to Have a Beer With Putin?
No, I would not like to have a beer with Putin. He’d probably slip cyanide in my drink just to keep in practice. But if I were Russian, I’d vote for him a hundred times. I’m not suggesting the U.S. elect a murderer for President. But it’s not too much to ask that we elect a leader who can sit down at the table with Putin and come back with his kidneys. Rival nations are led by brilliant, effective heads-of-state while we elect leaders for reasons like ‘he’s tall, he’s cool, he’s likable.’ That’s a doomsday scenario, in my view.
McCain says of the merciless Russian leader, ‘I look in his eyes and all I see is KGB.’ I look in Obama’s eyes and all I see is GWB.
Labels: bush, election, obama, putin
posted by 10-K @ 3:27 PM (permalink) 
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