Amused Cynic

“…We are five days away from fundamentally changing the United States of America.”
Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

If you think The One was exaggerating about what he thinks he can do to this country and those who live in it if he is elected to the presidency of the United States–with a madly complicit Democrat congress–think again.  This is show-time people, a point of no return.  What amazes me is how many of my fellow citizens seem to have already donned their headsets from the United States Handicapper General, which tunes out their ability to reason logically, making them just as average and dependent as everyone else.

There was a little impromptu Halloween party across the street last night–not really a Halloween party, just a bunch of grown-ups gathering for some wine and snacks after the trick-or-treaters had stopped for the night.  For nearly two hours no one talked politics, which was great.  Then someone brought the election up, and I knew I had to leave, because I’m just sick of thinking about it.  The die is cast, at this point, and there’s not much we can do except wait and see what comes up when it stops rolling.

But, before I left, it was interesting to hear some of the resigned fatalism of people I know to be Democrats, speaking about the likelihood of an Obama presidency.  Two in particular–a prominent physician and a very high-level money manager talked openly of early retirement or of going part-time.  Others echoed the sentiment.  As I got up to leave I said “Ah, so you’re going to go John Galt on Great Leader, eh?”

As I walked home, I mentally added Harrison Bergeron to the mixed metaphor, adding to the overall queasiness I’ve been feeling lately.  You can see the whole film adaptation of Vonnegut’s classic short story here.  Fast forward to 13:44 for a remarkable explanation of where we are right now, but the whole thing is well worth a watch…it stars Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee in LOTR), and features numerous cameos, including his stepfather John Astin.  Very cool–and disturbing, given the impending political/economic situation, and Obamessiah’s railing about the need for a “Second Bill of Rights.”

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

However, I remain hopeful, as I have since this campaign started two years ago, that in the end, when grass-roots America walks into the voting booth, all the rope-a-dope will fall away, and we will elect a person who will protect the country as we know it, both physically and philosophically.  The alternative just makes no sense, and in the end, we Americans are sensible, if not always brilliant.

There are three articles out today that I think make the closing argument against Obama.  Failing to see the logic therein is a disconnect from the obvious reality.  Plain. And. Simple.

Thomas Sowell:  Ego and Mouth

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise– whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team– is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama’s trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges– very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

The signs of Barack Obama’s self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

Roger Kimball:  Commander-in-Chief vs. Nanny-in-Chief

Remember his call for “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military”? Remember his suggesting the creation of “national service” programs” that high-school and college students would be required to participate in? Those, too, were initiatives meant to combat our “selfishness.”

As I observed in this space a few weeks ago, Obama espouses a form of what James Piereson has called “punitive liberalism.” Because he regards the American people as essentially selfish (a sentiment memorably reinforced by Michelle Obama when she described the America was “just downright mean“), Obama cannot help regarding success as a form of failure. That side of Obama’s program does not play well outside his inner circle, so he has been careful to overlay it with seductive talk about “tax cuts for 95 percent of taxpayers”–an absurdity on the face of it since 43 eprcent of those who file do not pay any income tax at all. (Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that those reporting the top 1 percent of adjusted gross income pay nearly 40 percent of all income taxes collected, while the top 5 percent pay more than 60 percent. To use another word Obama likes, is that “fair”? How much more does want?)

“Selfishness” can be a vice. It can also be another name for that “well-ordered self-love” that Thomas Aquinas extolled as “right and natural.” (I have more to say about selfishness and altruism here.) But the important issue facing the American people at the moment is whether they wish to elect a commander-in-chief or a nanny-in-chief. Obama’s seductive rhetoric and and emollient promises have not been able to conceal his ambitions to become America’s protector and nanny-in-chief. He wants you to be happy–but on his terms. He wants to tell you what to drive, what temperature to keep your house, how much to eat. He wants to conscript your children in “voluntary” national service programs that are all-but-mandatory. He wants to determine how prosperous you will be allowed to be–and then to tax you back to a pre-determined level if you make too much. He has similar plans on the international front. He craves approval for America from the “international community, which means he will do everything he can to accommodate that community. He dislikes criticism so much, he is willing to call upon his supporters to silence journalists and besmirch the character of Joe the Plumber, using supposedly protected state information to do it.

In short, it’s your life and Obama wants to run it for you. On Tuesday, Americans will have the choice between electing a leader and a chaperone. Obama has vastly out-spent and–it saddens me to say–out-campaigned McCain. But that doesn’t mean he is better suited to lead America in this difficult time. I suspect that, in their heart of hearts, most Americans know that.

Mark Steyn:  Obama in 2-D

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America’s original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush — his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I’m not saying he’s Muslim. It’s worse than that: He’s a pasty-faced European — at least in his view of state power, welfare, and taxation.

But, in a sense, he’s not anything in particular, so much as everything in general. The media dispatched legions of reporters to hoot and jeer at Sarah Palin’s Wasilla without ever wondering: Where would we go to do this to Obama? Where’s his “home town?” Bill Clinton was famously (if not entirely accurately) from “a place called Hope.” Barack Obama is from an idea called hope. What’s the area code? 1-800-HOPE4CHANGE. The 1-800 candidate offers the hope of electing a younger Morgan Freeman, the cool, reserved, dignified black man who, when he’s not literally God walking among us (as in Bruce Almighty), is always the conscience of the movie.

You can understand the appeal of such an idea. Even if you’re not hung up on white liberal guilt or Bush loathing, there’s an urge to get it over with, to say, well, America should have a black president, and the sooner the better — ie, the sooner we do it, the better it speaks of us. They have a point. I look at the roll call of the dead on 9/11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Scandinavian, Balkan, Arab, Asian — in a word, American. The presidential pantheon has a narrower ring: Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson. Obama has a tedious shtick about how his name sounds odd and he doesn’t look like “all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” He’s not just picking out the drapes for the Oval Office, he’s ordering up the new currency and booking the sculptors for Mount Rushmore.

And why not? Obama in the White House, Obama on the dollar bill, Obama on Rushmore would symbolize the possibilities of America more than that narrow list of white-bread protestant presidents to date.

The problem is we’re not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that’s where the problem lies.

The Senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he’s not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed non-relevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about “spreading the wealth around” was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of “social justice.” Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be “accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not “sharing.” In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It’s the government confiscating your Elmo to “share” it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around — hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf’n’turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama’s world view, that’s not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber’s wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama’s writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his “fundamental belief” was that “I am my brother’s keeper.” Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why couldn’t he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy’s income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother’s keeper, and his aunt’s keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama’s life, friends and votes. The Obamacons — that’s to say, conservatives hot for Barack- – justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by “hoping” that he doesn’t mean it, by “hoping” that he’ll “change” in office. “I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible,” declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, “than his liberal record indicates.”

He’s “hoping” that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book, and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that. The “change” we’ll get isn’t hard to discern: An expansion of government, an increase in taxes, a greater annexation of the dynamic part of the economy by the sclerotic bureaucracy, a reduction in economic liberty . . . oh, and a lot more Chicago machine politics.

On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama — the image, the idea, the “hope”. But it will be the three-dimensional Obama — the real man with the real record — that America will have to live with.

And finally: “One ring to rule them all….and in the darkness, bind them.”

It ain’t over….don’t forget to vote.

RELATED: The Anchoress has a new post on the corrupt media that is leading us down this sorry path.

At this point, I pretty much want to see O lose just to punish the press. They’ve manufactured his candidacy (”you go sit down, Hillary, even though you’re tied and you’ve won all the big states”) and now they’re trying to manufacture his “win.” Should they succeed, we’ll be seeing the press become a monster unlike any seen in our history. “Different parties, different rules,” indeed. The press needs to lose this election.

ALSO: A link to a PUMA site Hillbuzz that I hadn’t seen before, telling you what to watch out for as the pollsters try to stifle your urge to vote for McCain.  Their message:  don’t fall for it, like some of the Hillary supporters did in the primaries.

The same pattern that unfolded during our primaries is happening again, because the media has just one tattered old used playbook (written by David Axelrod, of course), and they have not deviated from it yet. What the media and Obama campaign did, in concert, to Hillary Clinton before every major primary is what they are doing to McCain/Palin now. Here are the top three media/Obama head tricks to watch out for in the last days before the election.

If you, collectively, can keep Republicans and other McCain voters from falling for these, we believe there’s nothing Obama can do to win this election.

MORE on the craven press corps by Beldar.