Category Archive 'Paglia Embarassed by Obama'

08 Apr 2009

“A Jaw Dropping Spectacle”

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Is how Camille Paglia, in Salon, describes Obama’s bow to the “Custodian of the two Holy Mosques.”

Obama bows.

Paglia urges Obama to get himself a Chief of Protocol and learn some manners. And, in impressive defiance of the MSM coverage embargo, she actually comments on Obama’s stonewalling on his birth certificate and education records.

Arriving at the White House, he understandably stayed in his comfort zone by bringing old friends and allies with him — a team that had had a fabulous success in devising the hard-as-nails strategy that toppled the Clintons, like crumbling colossi, into yesterday’s news. But these comrades may not have the practical skills or broad perspective to help Obama govern. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal ascending the throne, Obama may have to steel his heart and banish Falstaff and the whole frat-house crew.

Obama’s staffing problems are blatant — from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another — from the president’s tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady’s over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama’s sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol.

Enough already! These slips are worsening the anti-Obama backlash, which began with the administration’s bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package. Conservatives seem deliriously drunk with their cartoon picture of Obama, to whom is glibly attributed every pathology in the book. Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama’s educational records remains troubling. . But I am still waiting for hard evidence about the host of other charges that are continually being hammered against him — from his alleged fidelity to the crypto-tactics of Chicago leftist Saul Alinsky to the questions raised by right-wingers about the production of Obama’s two memoirs. Out of respect for the presidency, conservatives need to put up or shut up about these issues.

I found her “put up or shut up” demands concerning Obama’s assimilation of the political agitation techniques of Chicago radical Saul Alinsky and the theory originated by Jack Cashill that William Ayers might have ghost written Dreams from My Father less impressive.

Mr. Obama does a fine job of supplying proof of his commitment to Saul Alinsky-style agitation, the technique of seeking illegitimate forms of political power through media spectacles of public demonstrations of ressentiment by an aroused canaille manipulated into emotional paroxysms by the flattery of supposititious grievances.

The Obama Administration recently pulled off a very spectacular Alinskian tour de force reducing Congress, the mainstream media, and major portion of the American public to the stature of a howling mob over the manufactured issue of the injustice of AIG paying contractually-specified employee compensation bonuses subsequent to receiving federal bailout monies. When 1/10 of 1 percent of the federal contribution becomes the focus of national attention, and the public has no attention to spare concerning the disposition of the other 99.9%, you know that Saul Alinsky has triumphed.

The public firing of the CEO of General Motors was obviously another Alinsky moment in Obama presidency.

As to the ghost-written memoir theory, I don’t believe it rises to anything closely resembling the level of pertinence of the question of Obama’s Constitutional eligibility for the office he was elected to, or to that of his unsavory radical political background. There is also no real possibility of proving such a thing one way or another. Jack Cashill found several arguments for similarities between DFMF and William Ayers’s own memoir and other writings. Either one finds Mr. Cashill’s arguments persuasive or one does not. I don’t believe it is provable either way.


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