I would prefer to write about a happier subject than Michelle Obama -- and few subjects are more unhappy -- but I just can't get her dumb-as-a-stump speech out of my mind. Hugh Hewitt was playing it on the radio yesterday afternoon, so I heard parts of it on the drive home from work. It was an odd juxtaposition. Driving up the coast, to the left of me, the beautiful blue Pacific. But further to the left of me, the bluest waves of bleak rhetoric you'll ever hear coming out of the piehole of a would-be first lady.
I'm just kidding about the "dumbbell" crack, of course. I don't really believe Michelle is stupid. Rather, I believe she's psycho. To put it another way, never mark something down to stupidity when it is much more easily explained by mental illness. Hewitt took some callers during the speech, and to a person, everyone thought she was not just deranged, but palpably disturbing in a way that only an unhinged person can be, since they are leaking their mind parasites all over the place, to such an extent that they are the last person to notice them. As the PowerLine boys put it, "she is woefully deficient in the ability to see herself as others see her."
One caller remarked that if Obama can't even cheer up his morbidly depressed and paranoid wife, how is he supposed to lift the nation's mood? Put Zoloft in the drinking water?
I wish I had a full text of the speech, so I could fisk it line by line. (Hewitt's website has the link to it, but don't listen to it if you are vulnerable to depression.) As Hewitt writes, "This is the rhetoric of resentment and victimization.... [T]he radio audience reacted with a combination of astonishment and anger. Michelle Obama discounts all the good that is going on in the country, skips over the deep generosity of Americans, and ignores the astonishing economic and social progress made in the U.S. since the close of W.W. II, as she indicts [every] aspect of American life. Her very grim vision chills those who do not share it, which I guess to be the 'vast majority' of Americans."
You just have to be so ahistorically narcissistic to share Obama's bleak vision of the United States. Your mind has to essentially circle in a tight spiral around your own myopia and provincialism, so that it is simultaneously petty, and yet, grandiose and presumptuous. Far from having doors closed to her, this is a woman who has probably never been confronted and brought down a peg, one of the sad legacies of white liberal guilt. This is the very reason why left wing black "thinkers" tend not just to be such cringeworthy mediocrities, but downright embarrassments, such as Cornell West, whereas conservative black thinkers such as Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele are as brilliant as they come. The left systematically substitutes compassion for standards, which is not a recipe for excellence, to say the least.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with race and everything to do with it, in that left wing ideology systematically rots the mind, but especially in more vulnerable communities (Dennis Prager also discusses this in a column today). In other words, it doesn't so much harm a tenured white leftist professor (at least economically) to adhere to his pathological views, since he's got a lifetime gig at our expense. The people who suffer from the white leftist's dysfunctional ideas are the underclass -- even if they are upper class, like Barack and Michelle, who certainly prove that poverty is not just a state of mind, but more importantly, a state of the soul. When white liberals sneeze their viral ideas, urban blacks catch a head cold. They publish and blacks perish.
I am reminded of P.J. O'Rourke's "graduation speech," in which he mocks those who complain that "Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We'd better close that 'income disparity gap.' It's not fair!"
"Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, 'That's not fair.' When she says this, I say, 'Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you.'"
That's what I want to say to Michelle Obama: Damn right, life isn't fair. It's not fair that someone as dense as you attended Harvard law school. It's not fair that you pull down $$273,618 for being a "vice president of community and external affairs," whatever that is. It's not fair that that crook Tony Rezko sold you that prime lot at such a discount. It's not fair that the liberal media are in the tank for your husband. It's not fair that he's going to surrender to our enemies, placing me and my family in jeopardy. It's not fair that American blacks are the most wealthy and prosperous the world has ever known. And most of all, it's not fair that your husband made a million bucks from his vacuous book, The Audacity of Hope, but Gagdad Bob hasn't even seen a royalty check for his spiritual classic!
There is also some incisive analysis at PowerLine: "Michelle Obama seethes with bitterness. While she preaches the gospel according to Barack, she wears resentment and bitterness on her sleeve. It is therefore painful to listen to her. She's apparently even still angry about her SAT scores. She didn't test well in school, she explains. Somehow, she has overcome.
"Mrs. Obama seeks to convey convey the impression -- she expands on the theme at great length -- that Senator Obama's campaign is, to borrow Joe McCarthy's formulation, the victim of 'a conspiracy so immense...' It is not clear whether the Obama campaign can overcome the power of these sinister forces.
"According to Mrs. Obama, the Obama campaign has been constrained by nameless forces constantly changing the rules of the game and thereby preventing Senator Obama from securing the nomination. Who are 'they'?... 'They' seem... (incredibly) to include the mainstream media. These nameless forces have approximately the same specificity as the names on Joe McCarthy's list."
As an example of how clueless Michelle is about her projections, one of the central themes of her speech is how frightened Americans are, and how Obama is going to somehow heal this. But if America is controlled by the dark, conspiratorial forces of her imagination, we have every reason to be frightened, and no reason to believe that Obama is equipped to take on an enemy so simultaneously nebulous and ubiquitous.
In this regard, her cognition has the exact structure of a clinical paranoid -- big on generalities, short on specifics. Rather, the paranoid just knows that someone is out to get them. Furthermore, if you don't agree with them, you're one of the people who is out to get them. You are inducted into the conspiracy. So there's your proof that it exists!
In an amazing display of unintentional irony on stilts, Michelle accuses the rest of us of "victimizing our children" with our bleak and frightening world view. This from a woman who deliberately exposed her own children to the hateful ravings of a racist conspiracy monger week after week, in the one place that should be free of such poison!
The Obama's campaign slogan ought to be, We Didn't Make It, And So Can't You! At NRO, Yuval Levin writes of The Unhappiest Millionaire, and her weirdly nostalgic, dystopian and dyspeptic vision:
"In fact, a great bulk of Mrs. Obama’s speech is devoted to nostalgia for a simpler time -- an odd approach for a progressive, yet an altogether common one on the left today. She describes a steady downward path from that golden age of distant memory. 'We know where we’re living,' she tells the slightly confused audience, 'this is where we are right now, and this has been the case for my entire lifetime: that trajectory of hope has gotten more difficult for regular folks.'”
What. Is. She. Talking. About.
"This view of America has been a real problem for the Left in the Bush years. As the liberal labor economist Stephen Rose has put it, 'What progressives generally say about the economy is unrelentingly pessimistic -- stagnant wages, rising costs, overwhelming burdens of debt. It’s a message that doesn’t resonate with the middle class -- not only because it’s overly negative (by itself political poison), but because it’s simply flat out wrong.”
Byron York also has some good analysis. The left always uses and abuses children for political purposes, and he describes a particularly vivid and disturbing example:
"[Michelle] tells the story of a ten-year-old girl she met in Newberry, S.C., before that state’s primary.... After the rally, the girl came up to her and said, with great seriousness, 'Do you realize when your husband becomes the next president of the United States, it will be historical?'
"Everybody laughs; what a cute thing for a child to say. But then Obama asked the little girl what that would mean for her. 'It means that I can imagine anything for myself,' the girl said.
"The crowd begins to applaud; they think they’re hearing a happy, inspiring story. But that’s not where Mrs. Obama is going.
“'And then that little girl started to break down in tears,' she continues. 'She sobbed so hard. She was crying big, huge tears. And I had to think, why is this little girl crying so hard? And I thought, you know what’s going on? This little old girl gets it.”
“This little ten-year-old girl knows what’s at stake. She knows that she’s already five steps behind.... She knows that her hopes for college are already dwindling.... She knows that if she gets sick, maybe has an asthma attack, instead of going to a doctor and being treated, she’s going to be sitting in an emergency room for hours on end.'”
Again, this is not a stump speech. This is a cry for psychological help. Why on earth would you steal the innocence of your children and indoctrinate them with any political ideology, let alone this deeply depressing, hopeless, fearful, and defeatist view of the world? Indeed, one of the main responsibilities of a parent is to shield your children from such concerns until they are old enough to be "disillusioned" by the world. For in order to cope with the rigors of adulthood and deal with its inevitable disappointments and frustrations, we need to internalize a deep well of love, trust, and security from our parents, otherwise we will spend the rest of our lives searching for the Lost Entitlement of Childhood.
Which it certainly appears that Michelle is doing. She is in essence inflicting her own childhood on the rest of us. Hey, I didn't say it. She did. For this little girl -- who is "suffocating under a veil of impossibility" -- is "in all of us."
Speak for yourself, Michelle. You're confusing projection and empathy, condescension and compassion.
*****
Such a different vibe from just a generation ago, when Aretha could sing with such positivity of being
Young, gifted and black / Oh what a lovely precious dream / In the whole world you know / There are billion of boys and girls / Who are young, gifted and black / And thats a fact!
So saith the First Lady of Soul. So cheer up, Michelle. Forget what they told you at Harvard. You're not young, shafted and black!
When you feel really low / Yeah, there's a great truth you should know / When you're young, gifted and black / Your soul's intact!
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42 comments:
The worst part of Michelle's speech is, I know people who will, I'm fairly certain, agree with her; her mind parasites are practically singing a love song to theirs. Their lives can easily be viewed as a series of bitter struggles (due, of course, to their own very poor judgment), but of course it's much easier to project those struggles and poor choices outward than to internalize them and learn from them and change their own lives or communities for the better.
I am depressed now - not because I agree with her crazy speech, but I know all too well that a lot of people will...
Yes, her joylessness is infectious!
Geez, haven't they ever heard of 'joyful sorrow'? It's so narcissistic: It's so important that my life be just peachy that if it isn't it's the end of the world!
Of course it's hard. But complaining about it just makes it unbearable, and also automatically forecloses the 'joyful' part of the sorrow of this 'vale of tears'. Just like you can't utopian, you also can't be dystopian. Neither corresponds to the bizarre paradox that is reality. Sorry Obamunists!
HA! Can I stop at the title? Do I have to keep reading? The 1st 2 words cued up the music in my head and the rest completed the whole story. OK, I'll read the rest - it's got to be great with that title.
Seriously, I've been reading a lot about personality disorders lately, but there's not one that describes what we are seeing here. There was clearly pschic damage early in life. It was reinforced by a whole generation of like-"minds". I cant' quite come up with an appropriate term for this disorder, so I will refer back to one of my favorite Far Side cartoons: patient on couch, doc writes in book "just plain nuts."
I think we are learning more about "Black Liberation Theology" than we ever would have without BO and company daily exemplifying it before our eyes. For me its simple - sit under that kind of "preaching" week after week for 20 years and tell me it won't be formative on your soul.
...or liberate you from your soul.
Ricky Raccoon said,Hillary will not be the first woman president.
Are you trying to say Hillary is woman?
Damn.
MO's test scores were low, hmmm.
From a comment on the "Good Michelle" Malkin's site: many Asian students are not given affirmative action or even considered minorities due to the fact that their “test scores are too high"
Assuming this comment is correct -- and I fear it is -- that means "minority" is not about race. People like the "Bad Michelle" and the never-end Rever-end Do-Wright hate high-achievers of any skintone, culture or ethnicity. They do not judge a person by the color of their skin but by the color of their heart.
voting for latter description.
If, like Asians, you excel in America, you lose your right to be a "race," and are deprived of all the perks that go along with being a victim. No wonder leftists are so obsessed with race. It's one of the main ways to scam the system.
In other words, racial membership is the first refuge of losers.
MICHELLE OBAMA FRIGHTENS MY INNER PANSY!!!
You have an inner pansy, Dupree?
Julie:
Yes. My anima. If you must know, her name is Wanda.
My anima
Body, body bah!
My anima
Body, body bah...
"There was clearly psychic damage early in life. It was reinforced by a whole generation of like-"minds". I cant' quite come up with an appropriate term for this disorder, so I will refer back to one of my favorite Far Side cartoons: patient on couch, doc writes in book "just plain nuts." -nomo
Well, I took a break from Grand Theft Auto four, and started writing; and the end is where it went. Of course, no one has to read it. It's mostly stuff you guys know anyway. Figured I'd still post, though.
A dirge and a heavenly tune
There has to be a difference between Leftism as a deep structural flaw, or deformity, and all the normal liberals that follow unknowingly behind the hypnotizing dirge that emanates from it.
Let's see, I have 2...3...4...no...it's more like 7 or 8 of my regular friends that espouse the typical liberal cool-aid drinking nonsense, some worse—way worse—than others. The worse one has a Che Guevara sticker on his car and applies, or filters everything through, the glass of Marxist class struggle confusion, where every poor person is a victim…bla, bla, bla etc. The others on the other hand still have a pretty healthy deep structure, a good relationship with what Grotstein would call the “background object of primary identification,” that being the “sense of tradition that spawn’s each individual, the continuity of the sense of cultural or racial identity that ultimately devolves into the individual’s personal background.” Winnicott called it the “environmental mother” in distinction to the “object (image of subject) mother,” and it is primarily our early relationship to the (m)other (gagdad), whether we’re talking about the differentiation of the first “object”—the first gestalt “other”—or the actual mother, that determines how safe and secure that we feel in the world.
But where do we draw the line between the actual mother of our birth, and what we might call the environmental Mother with capital M? Though ultimately this might just be another they’re really not-two kind of thing, we could just say that the environmental Mother is mostly determined by vertical causes, whereas the earthly mother is a figure of horizontal causes. Horizontally, the infant breaks away from the flesh of the mother by discarding the placenta, the material envelop; and in a similar way, I believe, it is also true that we are vertically determined though our own relationship to the cosmic containing principle, the Mother, in how well the early differentiation between subject and object goes; Because without a descent harmony between this primary subject and object split, there can be no background “prescience” to help us categorize, conceptualize, and coordinate (k) (knowledge), (L) (libido, love), and (H) (hate, the so called death drive) links in relation to external objects of scrutiny. External objects are mysterious and threatening, and our internal pictures of them either incomplete or totally lacking.
This, I believe, is the pathological pattern of Leftism in principle (or anti-principle). The subject, because there was never a clear cut differentiation between subject and object, doesn’t have the strength of healthy “background object of primary identification.” The mind and thoughts, in other words, are not completely contained—“thoughts are without a thinker” (Bion) for there being no coherent mind to think them. But there is an incoherent mind; and every mind that dreams must have a dreamer; but what if there was a dream narrative and no author, that is a background prescience, to attribute it to. One would expect this kind of “person” to look out into the external world, which is really their internal images of world, and force someone to be the author of it. This is a good point that Gotstein makes in his “Dreamer who Dreams the Dream” that I had never thought of, that when a mind dreams “the characters in the dream are truly looking for a re-creator, a premise, a director. [But], psychotic patients no longer fear being abused in someone else’s narrative; they now fear being in a narrative that no longer has an author.” (Emphasis on the last line) I guess this is the primary fear that compels the psychotic (Leftist) parts of ourselves (or society) to share their drama with the rest of the world. The world of subjects become faux containers for damaged peoples’ imagination; and because this leftist pathology is deeper than normal, perhaps having vertical causes, normal people can’t even see what’s being projected upon them by the false leftist saints; Or prophets, as some of the MSM calls them.
Most people can’t discern a dirge from heavenly tune, a discernment that takes many people a lifetime of experience to figure out. Really, there are a lot of good people in America that haven’t really haven’t got these deep problems. There more superficial- like, intellectual misinformation errors, uneducation in traditional principles. One of the most important questions that we can ask as of now is whether or not the momentum of traditional deep structure can hang on though this “age of stupidity.” (Prager) I really do believe in looking at my liberal friends, that in the next ten to fifteen years or so, the best of them are going to come around and see the light. About the nation I cannot say.
Nice conversation breaker coonified!
Rabid, you could have started the conversation up again.
I'm kinda fonda Wanda.
Right; well, someone has to do it. I, for one, would like to know more about Dupree's inner pansy. I can't help thinking he spends idle moments threatening to pull off its petals if it won't sit quietly in the corner (as opposed to shrieking loudly when someone like MO starts spouting off nonsense), but maybe I'm way off on that one.
Dupree?
Sounds a little fishy to me, Robin.
Nomo, since you're reading up on personality disorders, relate Narcissistic Personality Disorder to Gagdad Bob. Scary.
Bob, it is hard to know how seriously to take any of the views of someone who favorably compares the intellect of GW Bush with Barack Obama; I can't find the quote, but that was one of the most idiotic things I've ever read on the internet (which is saying something).
That's because you fail to realize this blog is a mirror. Then it reads, "Redrosid Ytilanosrep Ticsissicran."
Which isn't scary at all.
Heh - I was watching the Big L tonight.
"...you have no frame of reference, Donny. You're like a child who wanders in in the middle of a movie... You're out of your element."
Oba Man said...
it is hard to know how seriously to take any of the views of someone who favorably compares the intellect of GW Bush with Barack Obama; I can't find the quote, but that was one of the most idiotic things I've ever read on the internet (which is saying something).
Sadly, I've got to agree with you. Who could compare the two? Obama's intelligence--such as it is--begins and ends with rhetorical windbaggery; the man is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." GWB, on the other hand, is a poor public speaker but a genuinely intelligent, thoughtful and forward-thinking man who understands what must be done in the present in order to secure a peaceful future. That our press has managed to run down and disparage his intelligence at every opportunity while simultaneously lauding gasbag Obama is unfortunate, but not all that surprising. The press is fundamentally incapable of comprehending Bush or the conservative movement, and like the ignorant everywhere, they attempt to destroy what they are not wise enough to understand.
Not to compare for other properties, But I have heard that Lincoln was dogged by a similar problem; his 'folksiness' (he was from the country) was considered by many to be a sign of him being simple - or more specifically, stupid. Nevermind that the man taught himself arithmetic as a child using a piece of coal and the back of a shovel.
Michelle and her crazy thoughts and beliefs are like velcro that stick to those who can't and don't think for themselves. As we say in the recovery world, she's sticky as hell. Victim thoughts are always very thick and sticky.
Marimoishe, I'm sorry, but your comments are beyond ludicrous. I wish you luck with that perspective, but you are hopefully caught in an out-dated perspective ala Gagdad. I would recommend leaving this forum as it is a bed of hate and regression. Gagdad Bob, while reasonably INTELLECTUALLY intelligent, shows little-to-no emotional intelligence, empathy and authentic compassion (which generally goes hand-in-hand with most conservative perspectives). Which is why I speculate that he has at least some degree of NPD.
p.s. to Gagdad. You're like an erudite Rush Limbaugh, for what it is worth.
whoops: should read "hopelessly" not "hopefully". I'm sure all the paranoid loons here will interpret that as a telling slip.
Oba Man - so many words, so little content.
Just like the original.
/Johan
Oh, good - we've all been properly diagnosed as paranoid loons who flock around a narcissistic blog host. Is there a drug that'll cure that, I wonder? Or do we just have to realize that Obama is the messiah, and if we just give him our money and votes, the world will be perfect?
Now that we've been correctly identified, Oba, I'm sure you can rest easy, having done the good deed of exposing dangerous and stupid personalities for the day. We cower in front of your wisdumb; we shouldn't be reading what Bob has to say, when Oba's brilliance is so much more sparkly and effervescent. Please, Oba, enlighten us further!
The fool's reproach is a kingly title. Frankly, Bob is not deserving of such extravagant praise.
As usual, this has nothing to do with anything, but I just noticed the first raccoon on the sidebar. :D
Oba's criteria:
1)out-dated perspective
2)bed of hate and regression
3)emotional intelligence
4)empathy and authentic compassion
Yup, now THERE'S an outline guaranteed to engender Truth.
Bob: shame on you! You've lead us astray...... after all our faithful service........ I'm deeply hurt...... how COULD you!
Possibly no post today. Been taking care of FL for the last 2.5 hours, since wife is sleeping in as a result of jet lag. I had an idea when I woke up, but it may or may not be where I left it. I'll see what I can come up with in the next 45 minutes....
Oba Moron said:
"I would recommend leaving this forum as it is a bed of hate and regression."
Well don't just leave us hanging, tell us where we can go to hang out with your loving, tolerant, compassionate, Marxist, American ideals hating fellow travelers.
Perhaps some of the locals could meet you at a coffee shop to continue our re-education in order to get with the program and align ourselves with the new paradigm.
We gonna change America! We gonna change the World!
And what a comfy "bed of hate and regression" it is...yep, I guess we're of the same ilk as JC, the vicious hatemonger!
Did he say "hell"? Now that's regressive!
I believe this was a spot on analysis of Michelle. Absolutely great. Best post I have seen here in a long, long time.
A sparkling gem of a post about the chip on Michelle Obama's shoulder. Here's my take:
"Simultaneously petty, and yet, grandiose and presumptuous"
When opposed with dissention, the status quo always claims that the opposing point of view is insanity or heresy. It's a good thing you can't burn her on a stake. Your words will have to do. Your vehement disregard of her reflects your own shortcomings, not hers.
When opposed with dissent, the status quo always claims that the opposing point of view is insanity or heresy. It's a good thing you can't burn Bob at the stake. Your childish words will have to do. But your vehement disregard of him reflects your own shortcomings, not his.
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