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| Circus Elephant. Roger Hilton, 1973. From Animalarium. |
Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does. There is an alienness about him...
You keep your hands off my finger, perverts!
Obama has been called many things — radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming number of authentic radicals, but the president’s politics are utterly conventional managerial liberalism.(Ah, yes, that's the tone! Not quite Mr. Buckley himself, of course, but maybe Whittaker Chambers?)
Obviously Obama's a diehard, doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, and yet, sophisticated analysts agree, he doesn't seem to do Marxism-Leninism. A bizarre paradox, but undeniably true! Could it be he has something in mind... more sinister still?
Is he going to make Kathryn Jean trample the Crucifix and send Jonah to the pig farm for reeducation and self-criticism? Is he going to force us all to acknowledge our races in public interactions? ("'Sup, Black Hispanic Marcos?" "Hey, White Ted, ¿Como te va?") Is he going to institute mandatory gender reassignment for those who stubbornly refuse to get gay-married? Is he going to ban laetrile, testosterone boosters, and the Atkins diet? Is he going to force gun owners to buy insurance?
Indeed, worse than you could have imagined—unless you were writing for the National Review, that is...
a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party.(Skips the enumeration of the president's crimes, with which I suppose his readers are already familiar, even though Greenwald himself hasn't been able to find any. The permanently expanded state doesn't sound any different from anything they've been complaining about since the 1830s and the Second National Bank, though it was Left to be against that, come to think of it.)
Shocking but true: The president's plan is MILD TOTALITARIANISM. Also known, I believe, as PARTIALITARIANISM. It'll make the nightmare of life under the leftist Bushes seem, in retrospect, like Republican.
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| Poster by Jan Młodożeniec, 1966. |
