Lance Fairchok (can that possibly be a real name?) does not like Obama very much.

Grown men weep in his presence, women faint, and thousands scream his name like a rock star. The liberal press prints glowing tributes to their new progressive prophet, calling him “the triumph of word over flesh” and other absurd and profoundly unwarranted accolades. Obama, a very junior Senator, will guide us to a Utopia that has yet to be defined, an America that the left envisions but cannot quantify; but rest assured it will be swell.

Obama’s image is picture perfect Ivy League political correctness. He is an educated man of color. He is a socialist. He has an intelligent and lovely wife, which he publicly embraces with obvious devotion. Even better, he has a deep and melodious speaking voice, full of the heroic righteousness of Martin Luther King, which echoes a time of triumph over injustice. He is the embodiment of our popular culture, passionate and handsome, well spoken yet carefully imprecise, and so absent of consistency he cannot long endure critical examination.

His political history is painfully short; his track record, what there is of it, is pure leftist, there in nothing to indicate he has a uniting or bipartisan bone in his body. Yet he would have us believe he will “bring America together to solve problems” and fill us with an “Audacity of Hope.” Of course, how he will do that is merely a repackaging of the same leftist boilerplate we endured from Hillary, Kerry or Edwards. There is nothing new, nothing uniting, nothing to match the flow of his rhetoric or the timbre of his voice.

Read the whole thing.

Mr. Fairchok has written to assure me that he is using his real name and not a nom-de-plume descriptive of his belligerent editorial intentions. I’m glad I asked.

John Podhoretz on Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama today said that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.”

Really proud of her country for the first time? Michelle Obama is 44 years old. She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country? Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?

Mrs. Obama was speaking at a campaign rally, so it is easy to assume she was merely indulging in hyperbole. Even so, it is very revealing. …

Michelle Obama — from the middle-class South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, Princeton 85, Harvard Law 88, associate at Sidley and Austin, and eventually a high-ranking official at the University of Chicago — may not be proud of her country, but her life, like her husband’s gives me every reason to be even prouder of the United States.

Dennis Praeger asks a few questions which have often occurred to me upon reading press reports of these kinds of incidents.

Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally?

The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: “6 Dead in NIU Shooting.”

“6 dead” included the murderer. Why wasn’t the headline “5 killed at NIU”?

It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.

This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack”? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack. …

Question 3: Why are “shooter” and “gunman” used instead of “killer” or “murderer”?

If a murderer used a knife to murder five students, no news headlines would read, “Knifeman Kills Five.” So why always “shooter” and “gunman”?

The most obvious explanation is that by focusing on the weapon used by the murderer, the media can further their anti-gun agenda.

the liberal’s view of the universe

Frank Rich, spokesman for New York’s intellectually and politically homogeneous Upper West Side, points to diversity of epidural pigmentation in crowds of urban democrats as proof of the intrinsic superiority of Barack Obama and his supporters.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

One reads this sort of thing all the time in leftwing papers expressing the views of the narcissist urban elite. It is the large city, featuring struggling immigrants, lower-class minorities, left wing intellectuals, the Gay community, Bohemian young people (and lots of chic, trendy restaurants) which is the real America… the future! This, of course, is not America. It’s New York City.

Obama can win every single large city, and no one expects a democrat candidate to do anything else, and there is still all that terribly unfashionable, filled with middle-aged white guys, ordinary America, who could care less what the latest thing is, still amply large enough to vote him down. That should be a frustrating thought for Mr. Rich.

WorldNetDaily:

Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”

While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.

Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

“A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do,” he says. “A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do.”

Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;

satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;

augmenting primitive feelings of envy;

rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

“The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind,” he says. “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.”

David Shearman, co-author of The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, thinks democracy and individual liberty can get in way of the quick implementation of the kinds of measures experts like himself have decided are necessary. Calling people like himself “communists” is so unfair!

Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. The subject is almost sacrosanct and those who indulge in criticism are labeled as Marxists, socialists, fundamentalists and worse. These labels are used because alternatives to democracy cannot be perceived! Support for Western democracy is messianic as proselytised by a President leading a flawed democracy.

There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. It is not that liberal democracy cannot react once it sees a threat, for example, the speedy response to a recent international financial emergency. If governments can recognise a financial emergency and in an instant move heaven and earth (and billions of dollars, pounds sterling and euros) to contain it, why are they unable to do the same in response to a global environmental emergency? Quite simply our system is seen to live and breathe by the present economic system; the problem is that living and breathing within the confines of the world ecological systems is contrary to the activity of progress and development as defined within liberal democracy. …

We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.

If there was ever any doubt that inside the environmentalist movement’s green, there lurked a bright pink core, Shearman is there to prove it.

Provoked by snarky responses to a six-word-motto-for-America contest at the NYT’s Freakonomics blog, James Lileks gets a little testy about the characteristic reflex attitudes of the American elect.

Someone somewhere is a practicing Baptist and someone somewhere else is eating a hamburger larger than you’d prefer, and other people are watching cars go around a track at high speed. As your skinny unhappy friend said the other night: people are just too fat and happy. He bites his nails and plays WoW six hours a night, but he has a point. It doesn’t matter that these fascists-in-fetal-form never quite seem to accomplish anything; it’s not like they drove the gay Teletubbies off the air or had Tony Kushner drawn and quartered in the public square. But they’re preventing something. Something wonderful. And they’re driving large cars to Wal-Mart and putting 18-roll packs of Charmin in the back and they have three kids. Earth has withstood a lot in its four billion years, but it cannot withstand them. And even if it does, who wants to live in a world where these people don’t care that they’re being mocked by small, underfunded theaters in honest, gritty neighborhoods? (Which are being gentrified by upwardly-mobile poseurs who have decided it’s a great place to live because the theater is good and the restaurants are cheap. F*#*$ing interlopers. But we’ll deal with them later.)

ANYWAY. Bottom line: we will never be a great nation until we all realize how much we suck, and then we will also realize it is wrong to be a great nation. For that matter, nationhood are overrated. (The only nation that gets to be a nation is France.)

Nations are bad enough, but we’re something else:the only nation that has ever fought a war, acted in self-interest, had a good opinion of itself, permitted slavery, elected leaders who lacked a certain Olympian quality, had a popular culture that included simple catchy melodies and bright pictures, harbored racist attitudes, had a strong religious element, and contained a sizable amount of stupid people.

(Side note: the existence of stupid people in America is a touchy subject, and not easily explained away. It would seem to suggest that some people are smarter than other people, which could conceivably have an impact on their ability to succeed – but there are so many stupid people living in comfort that this almost implies that the bounty and opportunity of the country are sufficient to lift the leakiest dinghies if the occupants bail and plug, and that can’t be true. It is also unacceptable to suggest that some people do not succeed because they aren’t smart, since that suggests that merit is rewarded, and that can’t be true. Merit has nothing to do with America; it’s all about white male privilege. Do not be fooled by the rise of Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male.)

Anyway, America sucks except for a few parts of some cities if you ignore the Starbucks, and people in other countries are basically okay but no one in America knows it because they don’t have passports, and Dubya wants you to hate Islam which is ridiculous because I was backpacking in Tunisia for a few days and people seemed pretty cool. Hey, look at this, someone posted a video on YouTube that makes it seem like Huckabee is supported by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What’s for supper? Thai? Again?

C. MacLeod Fuller discusses the 13-point program offering new hope for the unfortunates addicted to Liberalism… and for America.

Many LibAnon members have never before experienced an opinion actually based in either fact or the experiential real world, much less both. Academicians, politicians, and Episcopalians are the organization’s most difficult members in which to affect even a semblance of thought moderation – much less cure. …

Each LibAnon member uses these 13 Steps in an individual way, and so, unfortunately, results cannot be guaranteed. However, the principles are highly recommended as a program of recovery for even the most egregiously opinionated but uninformed, as well as for the intentionally deluded, for the faux-sophisticate, the youth-induced progressive, and every other cultural or academic leftist-inspired opinion, hallucination, or delusional ideation — including, inter alia, that: capitalism is evil; Che was a hero; anthropomorphic global warming is factual and more dangerous than Iran; Al Gore won in Florida; Israel is the “cause” of the Palestinians’ problems; the world owes you something; (item I don’t agree with)… Islam is a religion of peace, love, and tranquility; all opinions are of equal value; “Hollywood” is real; pro-abortion proponents occupy the moral high ground; there is a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama; the government owes you (pick your poison) a living, a handout, free day care, free medical care, free retirement in Florida, etc.; gender is a cultural construct; tribal, tree culture is as meaningful and valuable as that of the ancient Greeks; something for nothing; freedom without attendant responsibility; the United Nations is a worthwhile institution; karma makes more sense than Christ; free and easy sex without physical, spiritual, fiscal, or temporal consequences; Ebonics; and Keynesian (consumption) economic theory; just to mention a small handful.

Jonah Goldberg sounds the alarm over the elect’s revival of enthusiasm for coercive expressions collectivist paternalism.

Remember this? “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical….”

Younger readers may not remember the opening to “The Outer Limits,” a pretty good sci-fi rip-off of “The Twilight Zone” (and they may have only a fuzzy understanding that TVs used to have knobs to control the horizontal and vertical). But as they read the news these days, maybe they can find a new appreciation for the creepy feeling of powerlessness that opening once gave viewers. …

We are seeing a return to the idea — first championed by social planners in the progressive era — that government can and should play the role of parent. For instance, Michael Gerson, once a speechwriter for President Bush, advocates a new “heroic conservatism” — an updating of his former boss’ compassionate conservatism — that would unleash a new era of statist regulations. On the stump, Hillary Clinton refers to her book, “It Takes a Village,” in which she argued that we all must surrender ourselves to the near-constant prodding, monitoring, cajoling and scolding of the “helping professions.” Clinton argues that children are born in “crisis” and government must respond with all the tools in its arsenal from the word go. She advocates putting television sets in all public gathering places so citizens can be treated to an endless loop of good parenting tutorials.

Mike Huckabee, who represents compassionate conservatism on steroids, favors a nationwide ban on public smoking. Everywhere, from Barack Obama to John McCain, we are told that our politics must be about causes “larger than ourselves.” What we used to think of as individual freedom is now being recast as greedy and selfish.

Read the whole thing.

Thomas J. Lueck, one of the New York Times’ professional chin-strokers, contemplates a recent case of self defense against New York City crime, draws comparisons to history (Bernhard Goetz shooting four subway muggers in 1984), consults “expert” authorities, and concludes the incident must have been a meaningless aberration.

Law enforcement experts looking for parallels between Mr. Parks’s confrontation and that of Mr. Goetz 23 years earlier said there were few to be found.

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, included an analysis of the Goetz case in his 2000 book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” …

“These two events are just not comparable,” Mr. Gladwell said. “The Goetz incident was when we hit rock bottom.”

“There was a spontaneous outpouring, with people calling him a hero,” he said. “We are so far from that now.”

There’s the classic liberal perspective. The shooting of four criminals in the process of attacking and robbing him by a New Yorker was widely publicly applauded. Consequently, Bernhard Goetz’s self defense rose from the level of an incident to a historical event. The Goetz shooting was an intolerable assertion of individualism, one potentially capable of effectively politically challenging the principle of the state’s monopoly of force. Thus, from the statist perspective of the left, it was the Goetz self defense incident, not the crime level, which constituted the nadir of history for New York City.

The routine, daily use of force by criminals against innocent people was not the same level of problem at all.

J.R. Dunn discusses the incompatibility between a republican form of government and the left’s yearning for messianic leadership.

Republics are governed with limited powers by men making no pretensions to divine mandate or mystical empowerment. The left, on the other hand, is intrinsically an anti-republican party made up of political primitives, always awaiting the arrival of a god-king with transformative powers, capable of working miracles. With a single decree, the left’s magical leader can abolish economic scarcity, for example, giving free and abundant health care to everyone. Numberless liberal commentators have predicted that Obama by virtue of his racially mixed ancestry will miraculously cause America’s foreign adversaries to change into admirers.

When liberals refer to “leaders”, they’re not talking about the same thing as everybody else. One of the first acts of national leadership carried out by George Washington was to reject a crown. He was motivated by his personal sense of noblesse oblige, his awareness that he was setting an example of republican virtue. And the gesture was accepted in exactly that sense. Rather than imitate any of the rotten political systems of Europe, the U.S. would create its own, with a totally new interpretation of the role of the national leader.

A “leader” in the American sense is someone chosen to act as chief executive to handle a particular task for a particular period. He is a member of the team – the chief member, perhaps, but still a teammate. The fact that he is president is no different, except in scale, from someone running a charity drive, a company, or the army. The individual does the job, is suitably rewarded, and goes home. This system has its complexities (much of the structure of our government is in place to defeat the tendencies toward tyranny that afflicted every previous democracy on record without exception) and its drawbacks, but it has served this country well for over two centuries.

One of its major benefits is that it does away with much of the baggage surrounding the concept of “leader” as it’s understood in most of the world – the mystical, semi-divine nonsense that makes it so easy for “leader” to slide into “despot”. People will invade their neighbors, slaughter minorities, and march themselves right off the historical cliff on behalf of a duce, führer, or caudillo. They generally won’t for a chief executive.

It somehow comes as no surprise that American liberals have been trying to undo this innovation for much of the past century. To a convinced liberal, a leader is in no way limited to anything as mundane as running a country. A leader is a transcendent being, someone more than human, someone with a touch of the divine. Leaders don’t handle tasks, they lead movements, they embody the spirit of the age. They transfor. Leaders, to put it simply, are führers.

This explains why liberals are so attracted to tyrants on the international scene. Stalin is the classic historical example (for a dose of political hagiography at its most nauseating, see the film Mission to Moscow) though we’ve witnessed the same type of thing more recently involving Castro and Hugo Chavez. The search for this precise type of idol explains the visits to Chavez by the Sean Penns and Naomi Campbells. The fact that they’ve settled for Chavez, who on his best day reminds me of nothing more than a crazier Manuel Noriega, shows how pathological this urge can be.

The first American example of the new messianism was FDR. (Woodrow Wilson might have seen himself in the role, but certainly nobody else did.) It’s doubtful that Roosevelt, down-to-earth as he was, took it very seriously, much as he might have enjoyed it. He took advantage of what was useful in the role and dismissed the more outré aspects. Whatever his faults, FDR was no monster. American Augustus he might have been, but he left no trail of Neros or Caligulas to follow him.

Then we come to JFK, who set the image in concrete. Again, Kennedy did not seek the role – it was thrust on him, in large part retroactively, thanks to his assassination. But ever since, liberals have been searching for another example, for a JFK reborn to lead them to… well, lead them somewhere.

Bill Maher says the Republicans did it!

0:28 video

Maher opened the panel discussion, with Tony Snow, Crier and Mark Cuban, by observing how he found it “odd” that polls showed Obama ahead in New Hampshire, yet Clinton won, and “it does bother me that a private company runs the polling machines and that only they certainly seem to know what went on.” A couple of minutes later, Maher noted that “in crime they always ask…’who profits?’” Looking at Snow, he then pondered:

Who profits from the Hillary victory? They don’t want to run against Obama. Your party does not want to run against him. They want to run against Hillary Clinton and now they have a race with her in it.

A bemused Snow called Maher’s reasoning “totally wacko!” and “completely wacked” as Maher contended Republicans have thrown races before: “They did it to Ed Muskie.”