Hugh Kingsmill, “The Genealogy of Hitler”, section 1, The Poisoned Crown (1944):

Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.

From Roark Wolfe:

Jim Geraghty (via email):

May 8, 2012: The Night the Primaries Became a Lot of Fun

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker received more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major Democratic candidates got combined.

In North Carolina, “No Preference” garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack Obama.

In West Virginia, “A felon incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37 percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the remaining 63 percent.”

The night could have gone worse for Democrats, but . . . I’m not sure how.

David Harsanyi asks: Who the hell is “Julia,” and why am I paying for her whole life?
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Donald Douglas replies: Meet Julia: The Big-Government Dependency Robot and Dream Woman of Leftist Ideology.

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James Taranto explains that Julia really represents the Obama Administration’s new model for society’s fundamental relationship: the union between the dependent individual and the administrative state.

In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy” to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

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Nicole Gelinas describes just how Julia’s choices subsequently impact her son Zachary and what ultimately happens to Julia.

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Iowahawk swings at the Obama Campaign’s low, hanging curveball, offering his own version of Julia’s life, which ends with a a characteristically left-wing bang.

Yesterday’s big item was a Vanity Fair teaser excerpt from David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story, hitting the shelves on June 19th.

There was general wonder and astonishment over the revelation that Obama’s New York girlfriend in Dreams from My Father was actually a composite character based on multiple girlfriends in New York and Chicago.

Jim Geraghty contended that the use of composite characters in Obama’s autobiography was a key aspect of the book’s evasive, downright mendacious, character.

Why was young Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, Frank Davis only identified as “Frank”? (Probably because Davis was alleged to be a Communist.)

Why does Obama’s description of his duties at a consulting house not match the memories of his co-workers at all?

Why does the book’s kind, easygoing portrait of Jeremiah Wright… not match the man seen in videos of his sermons and at National Press Club years later?

Every autobiography probably includes some inaccurate or self-serving memories, some interpretation of past events that portrays the author in the best possible light. But when Obama describes conversations and interactions with people who didn’t exist, or at least existed in a quite different form from the way they’re described on the page, readers have a right to wonder if they’re reading fiction or nonfiction.

Among the conservative grassroots, it is an article of faith that one of the reasons Barack Obama won in 2008 was because he misrepresented himself to the American people, and he was “not vetted.”...

When you think about telling the world your story, and telling the world about the people who shaped you… would you use a composite?

Some excerpts from a 1982 letter from Barack Obama to girlfriend Alex McNear provoked discussion.

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

On a Yale conservative discussion list, one of our alumni who teaches English Literature at a major Eastern university, remarked that from the perspective of a professional student of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound Obama’s verbiage struck him as “half gibberish, half misunderstanding,” and commented with frustration that he’d never heard of “Münzer” and could not even find him in Wikipedia.

I, too, was puzzled, but only a little investigation made it clear that Obama had misspelled the name of Thomas Müntzer, an early Reformation era heretic extremist and leader of a servile insurrection in Thuringia, who was defeated and well-deservedly executed in 1525.

Müntzer is, like Gracchus Babeuf, the kind of obscure historical figure that is remembered by specialists in the particular period and by members of the hard-core revolutionary left. Obama’s knowledge of the very existence of Thomas Müntzer is one more proof of his upbringing in a communist family, the kind of family in which the works of Engels are a standard reading staple.
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The above and this additional excerpt of the same letter seem to, at least, clear up, once and for all, more than one major historical controversy.

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

John Hinderaker: That, folks, is not a parody. It may provide a hint as to why Obama’s college and law school grades remain a well-kept secret.

Ann Althouse concluded: “I am now willing to believe Obama wrote his own memoir.”

03:45 “There’s a term for guys like President Obama. (pause) Probably not two terms.”

John Hinderaker points out that, behind all the frivolous humor about Obama eating dogs, something serious was really going on. The commentariat of the Right was able to take an Obama campaign attack meme, turn it right around, and make the whole thing into a national humor fest.

The Obama Eats Dogs theme is silly, of course, but as many others have said, it is silliness with a purpose. The Obama campaign seriously intended to make an issue of the fact that decades ago, Mitt Romney put the family dog on the roof of his car, in some sort of kennel or container, because there was no room inside. The dog was fine, but the Democrats crowed that focus group testing showed that the incident would make voters dislike Romney. I think that claim was sheer fantasy, but in any event, the Democrats won’t be able to talk about Seamus now that everyone knows that Obama used to eat dogs. ...

While in the microcosm these issues may seem silly, they are important in the context of the 2012 campaign. The Democrats can’t defend Obama’s record and want to talk about anything in the world other than the economy and the federal debt. Thus, their campaign will consist of one distraction after another. The Romney campaign’s ability to hit back, turn the faux issue back on Obama, and return the conversation to the economy will be critical. At the moment, Romney’s counterpunching against Obama’s irrelevancies is looking strong.

From Iowahawk.

Frank J. Fleming:

Had a few people try and tell me the Romney thing was horrible but Obama dog-eating is nothing. My response: nomnomnom

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

ABC News:

Much has been made about Mitt Romney, in 1983, putting his family dog Seamus in a kennel on top of his roof and driving from Boston to Canada, with said canine Seamus making his displeasure known in a rather scatological way.

Democrats have signaled they have every intention of making sure the American people — especially dog-lovers — know the tale. In January, senior Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod tweeted a photo of the president and Bo in a car, with the snide observation: “@davidaxelrod: How loving owners transport their dogs.”

The Romney campaign signaled Tuesday night that they are not about to cede any ground when it comes to a candidate’s odd past with man’s best friend. ....

The Daily Caller noted that in President Obama’s best-selling memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” the president recalls being fed dog meat as a young boy in Indonesia with his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy),” the president wrote. “Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

After his mother married Soetoro, Obama lived in Indonesia from 1967 until 1971, from roughly the age of 6 through 10.

0:37 video

Richard Fernandez identifies precisely why 2012 will be very different from 2008.

What must be truly terrifying among the president’s supporters is the growing realization that he could actually lose to Mitt Romney. Yes: Mitt Romney. Not because Romney is a superlative candidate electrifying the American voter, but because the contest is clarifying as “anyone but Obama” in 2012.

The core problem is the extent of the president’s incompetence. It had always been thought that even if the president were poor at governance, he would be good at campaigning. They relied on that idea, and forgot what all track and field coaches know: the 100-meter man will not necessarily place well in the 42,195-meter marathon.

President Obama could find a second wind, yet clearly his key strength of futurism — the ability to act as a blank screen upon which people could project their aspirations — can no longer be useful in the face of his track record. Barack Obama in 2008 was a promise; Barack Obama in 2012 is a busted flush.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Hat tip to Theo.

Hat tip to Jim Geraughty.

America’s thinking class saw Barack Obama as a light shining in the wilderness.

In deep despair over the coarsening of public discourse during the Dark Ages of the Bush administration, American intellectuals saw Barack Obama as one of their own, someone who could restore their exalted social status and raise the level of deliberative democratic debate.

Obama hadn’t accomplished anything of note; he wasn’t really qualified for the presidency; but he was superbly intelligent, had presided over the Harvard Law Review, had professed Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and had authored two brilliant books. ...

A few days ago the curtain was drawn and people could see that the Wizard of Oz was not what he claimed to be.

In an effort to get personally involved in Supreme Court deliberations over his signature piece of legislation—Obamacare—our president made it appear that he did not understand the most fundamental doctrine in American jurisprudence.

The former president of the Harvard Law Review, former professor at the University of Chicago Law review managed to mangle an explanation of “judicial review.” As every high school history student knows the doctrine was adumbrated in 1803 by Chief Justice John Jay in the case of Marbury v. Madison.

Obama asserted:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

As everyone but Obama knows, Marbury v. Madison established the right of the Supreme Court to strike down Congressional legislation that it deemed unconstitutional.

The Court has done just that on hundreds of occasions.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Barack Obama made history of a kind in the course of his 2010 State of the Union address, when he openly criticized the Supreme Court for deciding in Citizens United that federal restrictions on political speech by corporations and unions was unconstitutional.

President Obama’s highly partisan statements actually provoked Justice Alito to murmur “Not true.”

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In a further triumph of jurisprudential diplomacy, Barack Obama yesterday “warned” the Surpreme Court not to overturn Obamacare.

FoxNews:

President Obama, employing his strongest language to date on the Supreme Court review of the federal health care overhaul, cautioned the court Monday against overturning the law—while repeatedly saying he’s “confident” it will be upheld.

The president spoke at length about the case at a joint press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. The president, adopting what he described as the language of conservatives who fret about judicial activism, questioned how an “unelected group of people” could overturn a law approved by Congress.

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said.

Peggy Noonan reflects on how the current president decidedly worsened his relationship with his opponents, while never really developing much of a relationship with the general electorate.

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault. ...

In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the ‘Is America over?’ part.

And so the relationship the president wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they’ve read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them, which is why they were so surprised by the town hall uprisings of August 2009 and the 2010 midterm elections.

I think Peggy hit this one dead on. People are shocked at the president and his administration’s utter indifference toward, and contempt for, perspectives and values different from his own. We’ve never had a president, however liberal, who would simply shrug off the constitutional protection of religious freedom so casually. Beyond that, Obama not only failed to act so as to restore economic confidence to improve the economy, he made it perfectly clear that, for him, social justice (and democrat party patronage) was far more important than prosperity and growth.

It isn’t clear that Mitt Romney (or whoever) really deserves to win, but Barack Obama certainly deserves to lose.

Hat tip to Peter Somerville.

Some of the basic objectionable features of liberalism include a profound contempt for the past combined with an overwheening sense of personal superiority. Barack Obama excels at embodying liberalism.

His energy policy speech, delivered on Thursday at Prince George Community College, was a truly classic performance, featuring an utterly empty and fraudulent claim to eminence based upon superior learning and understanding embodied in a series of totally erroneous self-flattering comparisons.

Barack Obama demonstrated, once and for all, that he is an historically-illiterate imbecile, too ignorant, vainglorious, and incompetent to factcheck supposed historical claims, which really constituted a series of excellent examples of “things every badly educated idiot know to be true,” all of which were dead wrong.

Mark Steyn did a fine job of kicking Barack Obama’s boneheaded and abysmally ignorant butt around the block for this one, not failing to remind his readers of the time liberal presidential historian Michael Beschloss (Andover, Williams, Harvard) shared his opinion with the savant Don Imus that Barack Obama “is a guy whose IQ is off the charts” and “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” The gods of history fell over laughing.

As John Hinderaker reports “the smartest guy ever to become president”’s public pratfall was not without consequences. A new Internet meme of captioned portraits of Rutherford B. Hayes, avenging himself for Barack Obozo’s inaccurate slights, has taken off and become a craze.

You can see page after page of examples via this QuickMeme link.

Andrew McCarthy argues that Barack Obama has done a much better job of applying Alinskyite methods and achieving radical ends than is generally recognized.

Alinsky looked down on [Bill Ayers] and the other Weathermen, just as much as he looked down on progressive “moderates.” On goals, Alinsky and Ayers, were on the same page, but Alinsky dismissed him as a clown because Ayers’s methods were counterproductive.

In Alinsky’s view, the only radicalism that had a chance to succeed was the one that could bore inside bourgeois institutions, co-opt the language, and move the mainstream in the radical direction — but only as fast as political conditions would allow. Remaining radical but being coldly pragmatic kept the Alinskyite both effective and viable, allowing him to keep coming back for more. Ayers eventually learned this lesson — the lesson that you can do more for the cause by running the classroom than by blowing up the classroom or occupying the campus. As Ayers himself says, he’s just as radical today as he ever was — he is no moderate progressive. But now he’s actually accomplishing things, affecting thousands of minds. To borrow the words of Van Jones, another radical Leftist turned Alinskyite, he decided “to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.”

Obama has never shifted. He’s always been the same guy. But he adjusts to the conditions of his environment. He’s not mainstream; he’s about moving the mainstream.

Read the whole thing.