Whistling Dixie

Barack Obama has seen fit to lecture us benighted Brits on the value of the European Union.  I have only one observation: I do so wish that he would stick to his own Union and not ours.  Does he not have troubles enough on his doorstep?  Perhaps he might care for a few helpful tips on managing his own affairs?  Would he welcome such a thing?  I rather think not.

He's a bit worried, you see, by Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposed in out referendum on British membership of our less perfect Union.  His administration has gone so far as to ‘warn’ (good word) our government against secession.  Has Obama, by chance, started to wear a stove pipe hat?  There he is, hoping that the mystic chords of memory will swell as they are touched by the better angels of our nature, that and a word or two from him.

My mystic chords are starting to hum.  I’m a secessionist; I want the bells of Charleston...sorry, London, to toll that day when we are once again free as a nation.  I want to be the first to fire on Fort Sumter, now conveniently located in Brussels.  The better angels of my nature tell me that the European Union is an affront to liberty, an affront to everything this nation stands for; an affront, for that matter, to everything America once stood for.  Quite frankly I can’t stand it; I can’t stand the bureaucrats and apparatchiks, the foreigners who exercise more control over our destiny than our own Parliament.  If Obama thinks it is possible to fool all of the people all of the time then he is wrong. 

But he can stand it, sitting in Washington, knowing not the first thing about this country or Europe.  Apparently he has raised the issue personally with Cameron.  A strong Britain in a strong Europe is in “America’s national interest.”  Oh, really? Well, then, let me return the favour – “Mister President, it is in the British national interest for a strong America remains a member of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)”  Now, just imagine the reaction to that!

Obama’s earnest desire that the British people are not allowed a vote on their future, just in case that such a vote proves contrary to the ‘American interest’, has a long history in his administration.  Three years ago Vice President Joe Biden (what a perfect foil against presidential assassination he is) visited Brussels, ludicrously describing the place as “the capital of the free world” and the European Parliament as the “bastion of European democracy.”  He went on to compare it with the US Congress.  To that I say he understands little about his own political process and nothing at all about ours.

But, please, please witter on, Joe.  As Neil Gardiner noted in the Telegraph, Obama and Biden’s views on Europe “are as relevant to British voters as the futile ranting of Herman Van Rompuy or Jose Manuel Barroso, and will only serve to reinforce the determination of millions of Britons to throw off the shackles of Brussels.”  If that’s the case then they are to be welcomed! 

American liberals, so I believe, think that the EU is a jolly good thing, a beacon of benevolence, an icon of peace, fairness and equality, as Lionel Shirver ironically observed in the latest issue of Standpoint.  Criticising the EU, she goes on to say, is like “drawing horns on Nelson Mandela, or making lewd thrusting hand gestures at Aung San Suu Kyi.” 

Do they know, do you know, what incorporation in this Union actually means?  Well, let me tell you this – the Southern Confederates of 1860 and 1861 had not a fraction of our grievances.  Let’s play a game, one which may help to focus things just a shade or two better.  Just imagine if the United States was part of a super national Conglomerate, incorporating both North and South America.  Just imagine the capital of this Conglomerate is in, say, Mexico City.  Are you ready?  OK, then, now we are set to go. 

There are so many aspects of your national life that are controlled from south of the border, down Mexico way.  Traders face severe legal penalties if they use any other than the metric system; so forget about your quarter pounders.  Washington has no control over immigration policy or the nation’s territorial waters; foreigners and foreign fishermen can come and go as they please; that’s all to the good, because Guatemala and Honduras are about to join the Conglomerate, thousands and thousands already looking hungrily towards your vanishing border.  Your law making bodies are no longer sovereign; even judgements by the Supreme Court can be overruled.  By the lights of the American Court of Human Rights, based in Bogota, even foreign terrorists will be allowed to remain, living for years on public support, because they have a “right to a family life.”  If, for any reason, the government offers the people a choice on some aspect of the Conglomerate’s policy, then, if the result is a negative one, the people will be asked to vote again and again until the people get it right. 

You think this is a joke, that things could not possibly go to this extreme?  It might be a joke for you; I assure you it is not joke for us.  The EU, contrary to Biden’s BS, is not the beacon of democracy but its shadow.  The European Parliament is not Congress but a hugely corrupt sinecure.  European democracy is a pretence, a hollow shell, eaten from the inside by termites.  It’s not the people who decide on the great issues of the day but the bureaucrats.  Manuel Barroso, the bureaucrat-in-chief who heads the Commission, is a former Maoist, which may give some insight into the political techniques he favours. 

People of my generation have never had a say in whether we want to be part of the EU or not.  The last vote we had on the subject was in 1975, so only people of my parents’ generation have had a choice on something that is of fundamental importance to us all.  And that referendum, I should add, was based on dissimulation, evasion and outright political fraud.  Mother and father voted yes then; they will not vote yes now.

I have no interest in the American interest.  I have an interest in my own interest, an interest in my future and the future of my nation, which is precisely why I want out of this corrupt and deadening Leviathan, this contemptible Union.  For all these reasons and more I’m a secessionist.  Obama can go hang and, for good measure, let the EU drop with him.  Meanwhile I shall sit on my hands and whistle Dixie. 

Another Fine Mess

Doh!

There is a letter from Josef Goebbels to Barack Obama in the latest issue of Taki’s Magazine (Dear Barack Obama), an online publication.  What, the long dead Nazi Propaganda Minister to the present Propaganda President; how is such a thing possible?  Apparently the poison dwarf has taken to time travel! 

Actually the letter is from one Gavin McInnes, not at all thankful on this season of Thanksgiving for the outcome of America’s early November jamboree.  It’s a reasonable effort, though personally I think the real Goebbels could have done so much better.  Mister McInnes rambles and digresses just a tad.  Keep the message simple, that’s the key.  Goebbels knew that. 

Still, once the verbal outer leaves have been stripped away, there is a tasty inner core to the McInnes fruit.  It’s this: Obama won on the basis of what is conceivably the emptiest message in American electoral history: there is simply nothing there, nothing of any substance.  It was all about ‘making a difference’.  What difference, what exactly were people voting for, what exactly made their vote count?  Obama's victory was in essence a brilliant propaganda coup: promising nothing while seeming to promise everything.  Come to think of it these are more or less the same thing, nothing and everything.  

Present economic difficulties, of course, are all the fault of George W. Bush.  Let’s see how thin this wears over the next four years.  Barry O, as one of the respondents to Doctor Goebbels said, is Bush on steroids! 

Meanwhile the great Barry treads the world stage anew, as fumbling and as cack-handed as ever.  America’s East Coast liberal press fell on Mitt Romney’s alleged gaffs like a pack of hungry dogs in pursuit of a bone; there is really no surprise in that.  No matter how meaty the Obama bones they remain curiously uninterested, and I don’t suppose there is any surprise in that either.

Here, let me throw some flesh your way. There he was in Asia, meeting Burma’s Ang San Suu Kyi (pronounced Ahng Sahn Soo Chee), possibly the most famous human rights’ activist in the world, long held incommunicado by the country’s military dictatorship.  Associated Press reports that he pronounced her name wrong several times.  She is now seemingly Aung YAN Suu Kyi.  He also made a mess of his greeting to Burma’s new president;

The meeting came after Obama met with Myanmar's reformist new President Thein Sein – a name he also botched.  As the two addressed the media, Obama called his counterpart "President Sein," an awkward, slightly affectionate reference that would make most Burmese cringe.  Note to presidential advisers: For future rounds of diplomacy, the president of Myanmar is President Thein Sein – on first and second reference.

You may recall that Obama once made some abject overtures to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” during his first term as president, decisively snubbed by Iran’s Islamist dictatorship.  The process of appeasement continues.  Burma is the name of the country.  It’s the name that Aung SAN Suu Kyi and the democratic opposition use; it’s the name used by the United Nations; it’s the name used officially by the United States itself.  But Obama continued to refer to ‘Myanmar’, the name preferred by the former military junta and by the present fig-leaf civilian administration.  I expect if he had been around at the time of the Khmer Rouge he would have called Cambodia ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ 

In the Telegraph Neil Gardiner writes;

It is rather embarrassing, as well as sad, that the leader of the free world can’t even pronounce the name of the most famous human rights activist on the planet. Or that he is so quick to appease Burma’s authoritarian regime by calling it “Myanmar”. Barack Obama’s gaffes demonstrate not only a marked lack of attention to detail and a high degree of amateurishness on the part of the White House, but also a disturbing willingness to curry favour with unsavoury regimes. Hardly a good omen for Obama’s second term.

That’s rather well put, I thought, a little more targeted than ‘Doctor Goebbels’ fireworks.  Meanwhile, as far as the real Doctor is concerned, Americans might do well to reflect on the following in the years to come;

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Follow the Politics

In a recent discussion on the resignation of David Petraeus as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) I made the following observation;

Honestly, in this day and age, I’m surprised at such big fuss over something as minor as sexual indiscretion. But always, always follow the politics. I have a hunch that there is more to this story; that Caesar, not just Caesar’s wife, should be above suspicion. 

Well, then, there is indeed more to the story, and yes, it touches more on politics than personal morality.  The story of Petraeus, his biographer and inamorata and the third woman would be difficult to make up, even in the most farcical sex farce.  The toing and froing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also looks ridiculous, intelligence work that might have been conceived in the mind of Inspector Clouseau.  The whole thing would be risible in the extreme if it was not for the tragedy; if it was not the horror of Benghazi.

During the recent presidential campaign not enough was made of the murder of the American ambassador and three others in Libya; not enough was made of the present administration’s intelligence failures.  There are those who still wish to hide the inconvenient truths.  The suggestion – one I find wholly convincing -  is that Petraeus was effectively forced out of office because of potentially damaging revelations he might have made before today’s Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. 

What happened in Benghazi in September must count as one of the most serious breaches of security in recent American history.  The mother of Sean Smith, one of the diplomats killed alongside Ambassador Chris Stevens, said recently that that President Obama had effectively “murdered her son.”  And so he did, by simple negligence.  Obama’s reaction was ‘not very optimal’, to use his own peculiar and tortured English.

Consider the facts.  First the fuss over The Innocence of Muslims was no more than a silly smokescreen.  There was evidence that the attack on the embassy was planned well in advance by Al Qaeda, a 9/11 celebratory bash.  The administration had received hundreds of warnings but did nothing to improve security.  Contrast that with the British, who closed their own consulate after the failed assassination of Ambassador Dominic Asquith earlier in the summer. 

Quite apart from anything that Petraeus might have revealed about the Benghazi fiasco, as a political animal he was suspect, a horse of a Republican colour.  Con Coughlin says in the Telegraph that the general’s friends suspect that his political enemies in the administration simply used his sexual indiscretions as a convenient way of ejecting him from the CIA.  It certainly looks like it, the speed of the whole thing adding to the suspicion. 

Do you believe, does anyone believe, that if Petraeus had been an ‘insider’, if he had been ‘one of us’ these inconvenient facts would ever have come to light?  Even if they had, some kind of effort would have been made to stop the ship sinking.  After all, the Democrats are used to sexual scandals; they know how to manage sexual scandals, even so far as the Oval Office.

There are indeed serious questions as to why Petraeus gave a brief to the House Intelligence Committee that contradicted those of the agency he headed over the events in Libya.  Victoria Toensing of Fox News has written;

For some reason DCI Petraeus backed the Obama unsupported theory that the video made the attackers do it rather than his own Chief of Station’s assessment that it was a planned military attack. Why do the shifting stories and misplaced theory of cause matter?  Because if an administration pushes a political agenda that applauds the killing of Bin Laden as the ultimate act for eradicating the radical Islamic threat, then that same administration ignores its Ambassador’s urgent pleas for more security for fear it will appear Bin Laden’s demise was not the answer to that threat.  Our country’s chief spy is supposed to know which theory is held up by the evidence.

Indeed.  But now he has been silenced.  The guilty may never be put on the spot.  The mystery remains and the questions, the real questions, may never be answered.  Forget the sex.  Follow the politics, always follow the politics.  

A House Divided

I was amused to discover on Blog Catalogue last night that secession petitions are flooding into the White House in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election to the presidency.  What, are we really back in 1860, is American on the threshold of a new Civil War?  No and yes, is my answer, a point to be clarified a bit later.

There they are, pleas flooding in from some of the same offenders: from Texas, from Alabama, from Georgia, from Louisiana, from South Carolina, from North Carolina, from Tennessee, from Arkansas and from Florida, all former members of the old Confederacy.  There are also petitions from Missouri and from Kentucky, states that at least had a presence on the Stars and Bars.

But – my goodness – there are also petitioners from the blue North, from Indiana, from Oregon, from Michigan, from Montana, from New Jersey and – would you believe it? – from New York!  So the Civil War solved nothing.  Secession is alive and well in American political consciousness!  Actually, it’s one of the great ironies of American history that the original thirteen states in casting off one imperial union bound themselves to another, far less mutable in every sense.

Anyway, Obama has only himself to blame.  Oh, I don’t mean in being re-elected, though that is the clear cause of an autumn of discontent among some Americans.  I mean he is at fault in agreeing to the White House’s We the People website, set up last year with the aim of allowing “all Americans a way to engage their government on issues that matter to them.” 

The promise is that if a petition from any given state reaches 25,000 signatures within thirty days the White House has to respond.  When I drafted this article yesterday evening Texas had already exceeded this threshold with 34,000 signatures.  Now it stands at 77,000.  I await Obama’s reaction with interest. 

Most of the petitions make reference to the words of Declaration of Independence;

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…

That from Texas is more specific, taking us to the real heart of the matter;

Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect its citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

I think this is superbly put.  On the news sites I’ve looked at a lot of the responders are saying that the whole thing is racist, that there are lots of people, especially in the South, who simply do not like a black man in the White House.  I’m not saying that’s not true; it probably is in some cases, but I can see no evidence on the point.  This kind of observation looks more to me like an unthinking reflex: that criticism of Obama, any criticism, is almost racist by definition.  It’s a way of sidetracking the real and substantive issues over his imperial presidency. 

With Obama back there are genuine concerns, as the Texans make clear, over the future direction of the country.  It’s as well that people have an opportunity to make their views known, even if it’s only to challenge the darker angels of Obama’s nature.  He is hoist, so to say, with his own petard! 

Anyway, the real issue is about consensus, the real issue is about democracy itself.  In any normal electoral process the minority, small or large, bows out with reasonable grace, agreeing to abide by the outcome, recognising the government as their government, even if they did not vote for it.  In essence this is governing by consensus, a civil society bound together by a common understanding, a common set of values.  

The alternative, a highly dangerous state of affairs, is governing without consensus, where the minority feels alienated from the whole political process.  This was the state of affairs in Northern Ireland for decades. Now I'm not suggesting that the United States is any way similar to Northern Ireland, but fissures are appearing in the body politic which may very well have serious future consequences.  Many people increasingly begin to feel that the federal government no longer represents their interests, no longer reflects the principles upon which the nation stands.   

No, we are not back in 1860 but over the next four years a new kind of civil war may very well be fought. Obama clearly presides over a house divided, more divided than it has been in decades.  If anything his victory has compounded his problems.  His constituency is younger, poorer, browner, more blue collar and less self-reliant.  John O' Sullivan rightly notes in the Spectator, that this will inevitably lead to pressures for more regulation, more welfare, great government spending, higher taxes and more unionisation; it will lead to expectations that Obama, faced with a precipitous fiscal cliff, cannot meet, at least not without ruining an older and wealthier America, no matter its race or ethnicity.  Meanwhile America's creditors, particularly China, are looking on.

So, yes, the house is divided against itself.  Will it stand?  I honestly can't say.  But one thing I am certain of - Obama is no Lincoln.  

America Defeats America

There are two speeches in American political history that I find wholly admirable.  The first is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  The second is Richard Nixon’s Great Silent Majority oration.

It was the latter I thought of in the wake of Barack Obama’s recent re-election to the White House, specifically the conclusion, where Nixon offered the following observation;

Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

That’s it exactly: in voting for Obama Americans have defeated and humiliated themselves.  The country faces four more years of drift, uncertainty and decline.  The business of America is business, former President Calvin Coolidge once said.  It isn’t any longer: it’s big government and welfare.  The country is well on its way to becoming just another European social democracy, its standing in the world diminishing by the day.  How are the mighty fallen.

I speak as an outsider, of course, one who has a tremendous respect for the United States and the leadership it has traditionally offered the free world, a leadership, as Nick Gardiner noted recently in the Telegraph, which depended on a sound economy, limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defence.  I speak as an outsider living in a European present, knowing exactly what that entails, a present that is obviously destined to be America’s future.

Yes, I can understand the uncertainty.  I’m sure a lot of Americans voted for Obama less out of love and admiration than fear of the possible changes that a Republican presidency might bring.  Obama, perhaps, offered hope.  What kind of hope, one has to ask?  His record shows clearly enough that it is the greatest of the many misfortunes that escaped from Pandora’s Box.

What did you get?  Was it a new vibrancy, a new economic energy, a new horizon?  No, it was bailouts that bailed out nothing; it was crippling levels of debt that crippled the economy, which will cripple the economy far into the future.  More taxes, more poverty, are all part of the Obama legacy, the answer to which is the vicious cycle of welfare.

The facts are stunning.  America’s national debt now stands at $16 trillion.  Yes, trillion.  Can you picture even one trillion?  I can’t; it’s too big a figure for my limited imagination.  But in actual figures it’s this: 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, that’s a million million.  One trillion dollars laid end to end would reach from here to the sun. Even like this it seems to defy comprehension.  In more manageable terms the actual American debt per taxpayer amounts to $111,414 and rising. 

The position, astonishingly enough, is worse than Greece, Europe’s economic Achilles heel.  The Weekly Standard reported recently that

According to estimates from the International Monetary Fund, America’s total government debt will be $16.8 trillion by the end of the calendar year, compared to $441 billion for Greece…On a per person basis, that means U.S. debt is $53,400 for every man, woman, and child, compared to $39,400 for every man, woman, and child in Greece. The disparity between per capita debt in the U.S. and Greece has grown 40 percent (roughly $8,400) since 2011. Now, U.S. per person debt is 35 percent higher than that of Greece, and is also higher than per capita debt in Portugal, Italy, or Spain (which together with Greece make up the so-called PIGS countries).

With rising debt comes declining economic freedom.  The United States has now fallen to tenth place in the world rankings, with government spending exceeding one third of total domestic output. In other words, the US government now spends more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of China, Australia and Spain combined.  To this burden has to be added the promised health care reforms, not a dream but a bureaucratic and financial nightmare.

The businessman challenged the lawyer and the lawyer won, that’s the verdict of last Tuesday.  Look for more of the same, look for ‘progressive’ policies that offer no progress, look for increasing forms of paternalism and liberal totalitarianism.  Look, above all, for a nation divided against itself.  

Obama's Bust

In responding to my recent BrooWaha article on Obama’s incapacity for high office (Don’t Mess with Mr In-Between, 26 July) one contributor made the following observation about Mitt Romney’s supposed London Olympic gaff during his recent foreign tour:

…Mr. Romney goes to London on his first foreign visit as a presidential candidate and he insults our greatest ally. He went on a soft-ball tour and screwed it up. He showed he's not even qualified to be a foreign service officer never mind the president of the U.S.

This is a subject I intend to return to, a Michigan Yankee in the Court of Queen Elizabeth, but first I really want to focus on the subject of political gaffs, not Romney’s supposed faux pas, but that of the Man in the White House, who, when it comes to this sort of thing, for once makes his opponent look like a rank amateur.

I read recently that Americans still love Sir Winston Churchill just as much as we do in the land of his birth. The Morgan Museum and Library in New York is presently running an exhibition entitled Churchill: the Power of Words. It’s caused quite a stir in Midtown, with more than 30,000 people visiting in the first six weeks, some fifty percent in excess of the curators’ expectations.

America’s fascination with Britain’s greatest ever wartime leader, the only man ever to be accorded honorary American citizenship while still alive, is really not that surprising. After all, quite apart from the citizenship, he was half-American by ancestry. Jennie Jerome, his mother, was born in Brooklyn. His story is an American story, if one step removed.

There is one man who does not admire Churchill. There is one man skilled in undiplomatic skills. There is one man who, in his conceit and arrogance, was prepared to offer a gratuitous insult to America’s most consistent ally. That man is Obama, so far as I am concerned the most un-American American ever to occupy the White House.

No sooner did he take command in 2009 than he ordered Jacob Epstein’s bust of Churchill removed from the Oval Office. Previously loaned by the British government to President George W. Bush, officials offered to let the new President hang on to it for another four years. Thanks but no thanks, was the response. At a time when British soldiers were fighting and dying alongside their American comrades in Afghanistan it was an act of breathtaking insensitivity, a clear and direct snub.

Reacting in anger to Mitt Romney’s recent announcement that he intends to restore the exiled Sir Winston if elected in November, officials said that the bust was still in place, that it had never been removed, that it was all an urban myth. Dan Peffer, White House Communications Director, attacked Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor, for daring to suggest that Sir Winston had gone AWOL.

“This is 100 per cent false” he declared, “The bust is still in the White House.” Unfortunately for him Krauthammer was 100 per cent correct; the bust is not in the White House but in the residence of Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador, as embassy officials confirmed. Peffer at once had to eat crow, issuing a grovelling apology on the White House blog. The whole thing has become something of a pantomime along the 'oh, no, it isn’t, oh, yes, it is' lines, an American, sorry, Obama farce at its most farcical.

We are becoming used to Obama’s clumsiness and numbing insensitivity. He’s on record as referring to “Polish death camps” during the Second World War, causing huge offence to the Poles. Meeting David Cameron, the British Prime Minister earlier this year he promised stop pressing for negotiations between London and Buenos Aires on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, only to go back on his word and join with Argentina on calls for a ‘negotiated settlement.’ The feelings of the people who actually live in these islands is clearly a matter of no importance.

Enough of Obama. Let me get back to the Churchill show. Among the exhibits are his notes for a speech he made in the House of Commons on September 11, 1940. The Blitz had just begun, German bombers pounding the city night after night in the months to come. “Adolf Hitler”, Churchill said, “hopes by killing a large number of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise the people of this mighty imperial city…Little does he know the spirit of the British nation”.

Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular have not failed to notice the significance of the date and the significance of message about the futility of terrorism; the message about the strength, the spirit and the determination of a great city and a great nation. Most understand Churchill, even if their President does not.

How Many Camels is Obama Worth?

Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al-Qaeda, has offered a bounty of ten camels to “whoever reveals the hideout of that idiot Obama.”  It’s their response to the US State Department's recent announcement of a reward of several million dollars for information on the whereabouts of the movement’s leadership. 

I wonder, perhaps, if the Somalis are being a little too generous in their assessment of the beleaguered President’s worth.  Ten camels seems excessive for a man who recently said that the American private sector was “doing fine”, an assessment, I would hazard, not quite in keeping with the experience of most people struggling with the economic realities of Obama World. 

I wonder also what ordinary Americans make of their president’s worth.  While pondering this deep question they may perhaps consider what they themselves are now worth after four less years.  Unfortunately I can’t give the depreciation in round camel figures but the dollar value is alarming enough.  The Federal Reserve report published at the end of last week shows that the net worth of a typical middle class American family has fallen from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 today.  I’m guessing that’s a heck of a lot of camels. 

The Dear Leader, struggling to turn attention away from the dire state of the debt-laden economy, says that America faces a straight choice between him and a return to the policies of George W Bush under Mitt Romney.  What would that involve exactly?  Why, spending trillions of dollars that the country does not have, open-ended, expensive and unwinnable foreign wars, an escalating economic downturn, slow job creation and ever more layoffs.  Wait a moment – I’ve just drawn a picture of the last four years.  Vote Obama and get Bush?  No, vote Obama and get Obama. 

The President’s negative campaigning calls to mind the concluding lines of Hilaire Belloc’s poem Jim.  Do you know it?  If not it goes like this – “And always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.”  Could things get any worse than they are at present?  It hardly seems possible. 

Just think about it, think about the last four years.  Obama’s attempts to stimulate the economy – more trillions in the black hole – stimulated next to nothing.  His health care reforms are of such prodigious complexity that they would even defy the intellect of Einstein.  He was awarded a peace prize for no peace.  His foreign policy initiatives have spluttered and died.  He has alienated Israel, America’s one true friend in a troubled region.  His Afghanistan campaign is creeping towards an ignoble end.  If that’s not bad enough I now understand that America has been covertly arming militants in Syria, seemingly blind to the fact that the Islamists among them have been involved in a murderous pogrom of local Christians. 

But it’s never Obama’s fault, oh no, it’s always somebody else.  His White House motto clearly has to be the buck stops anywhere but here.  Meanwhile on we go.  It’s never mind the economy, stupid - it’s legalising the residency of illegals; it’s gay marriage; it’s a kulturkampf with the Catholic Church; it’s all sorts of trendy liberal causes that are just so meaningful to Americans in the midst of their present presidential woes. 

Al-Shabaab should really devote those camels to better ends.  America, though, may feel it’s got the better of the deal.  

Obama’s Creeping Tyranny

I dedicate this article to Bob Mack and all other American patriots

I love America.  It’s like a second home to me.  We have close family friends in south-west Georgia, people I’ve been visiting on and off since I was a child.  They live in the old Georgia, semi-rural Georgia, a town surrounded by cotton fields, further from the chaos of Atlanta than mere distance would suggest.  It was in cotton fields in winter that I first learned to shoot.  Georgia and the Old South is all part of my romantic vision of the United States.

It's going with the wind.  Romance is shattered by reality, the reality of what is happening to America today, what is happening to American democracy and the American people.  On this side of the Pond we know all about creeping tyranny, as democracy is steadily eroded by the European Union, a bureaucratic monster that eats ever further into our individual lives.  We should have seen this coming.  Sadly we were betrayed by the lies and dissimulation of our politicians over many decades.  The betrayal of America has taken place over a far shorter period.  The betrayal of America is Obama.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote a classic study of American democracy in the nineteenth century, would no longer recognise the country.  I do not mean simply because so much has changed in two hundred years.  No, it’s at a more fundamental level.  His American Republic was based on overlapping communities, a plurality of interests, something which gave it meaning and strength, something that kept state and government at suitable distance.  Now the state, Obama state, is effectively crowding out the older forms of civil society, the older forms of liberty.  It’s the big battalions now, no longer Edmund Burke’s small platoons.

The whole process saddens me.  It saddens me that more Americans are not aware just how civil society and civil liberties have been eroded over the past four years by the most centralising government in the country’s history, a form of government that would once have been described as, well, un-American.  Even religious communities are threatened by the overweening power of the state.

My thoughts here were focused by a brilliant article by George Weigel in the latest issue of the political journal Prospect (Liberty, faith and Obama’s Leviathan).  Take the massive health care bill which Congress passed in 2010.  Did the senators and representatives actually read this document in its entirety?  Has anyone read its 2000 odd pages and lived?  No, probably not, but it’s a monster that has acquired a life of its own.  Its acquired a life in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where, as Weigel says, one finds Obama’s statist tendencies at the most refined.  Here the sacred flame of creeping state socialism is guarded with care. 

This self-serving bureaucracy is set to acquire power over so many aspects of American life, of the life of ordinary Americans, set to be strangled in red tape.  It’s staffed by people who represent the hard left of American politics.  These are the refugees from The West Wing, now enjoying unprecedented and vicarious power, like the bureaucrats in Europe.  They have a bigger agenda.  Weigel puts it thus;

For the regulators at HHS are not simply dedicated to the nationalisation of healthcare in the United States; they are committed to the use of federal regulatory power to promote and enforce their understanding of “preventative healthcare”, a euphemism that masks their commitment to the sexual revolution in its most extreme forms and their devotion to a virtually unrestricted abortion licence…Thus it seemed self-evidently clear o those drawing up plans for implementation of Obamacare that all employers be required to buy insurance plans that covered, not only contraceptives, but sterilisation and abortifacient drugs – all of which, to the permanent bureaucracy at HHS, are components of “preventative healthcare.”

Contraception here is not the issue.  Contraception is widely available in the States.  No, we are dealing with something more crucial; we are dealing with matters of conscience, conviction and religious principle.  Obama, in his lack of wisdom, has taken on the Catholic Church and other religious communities in a manner I would never have believed possible in the United States. 

It’s not about birth control; the Church is not trying to impose itself on anyone.  It’s about the use of coercive state power. It’s the insistence that the Church carry out procedures which conflict directly with its own teachings.  In essence it’s about religious freedom and freedom of conscience, an issue over which Obama and his HHS minions have little or no comprehension.  In Stalin’s Russia, when the church was not being persecuted, it was turned into a department of state.  In Obama’s America the Church is similarly set to be turned into a department of state. 

An administration blind to religious freedom is also blind to other forms of freedom. The state is filling so many areas of discourse.  The bureaucratic nightmare of Obamacare is creating, as Weigel indicates, a new Leviathan, the anti-pluralist form of rule identified in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes.  Power is being centralised, dissent marginalised.  This is not a disease in isolation.  America has been infected by a European virus.  Here the left is intolerant of dissent and debate.  In American the left is equally intolerant of dissent and debate.  Public space, in other words, is being filled with state power.  American democracy is being consumed.  Leviathan has a huge appetite.  

It seems to me, that in this electoral year, that America stands on a crossroads almost as critical as that in 1860.  I can’t predict the future but the auspices are not good.  I could only wish for a more effective and persuasive opponent to Obama than Mitt Romney.  So much depends on opening the eyes and minds of the people to the dangers they face.  If you want a possible view of the American future look to the European present - big government, big bureaucracy and massive waste all against the diminishing of personal freedom.  It’s not a happy prospect.  I feel sure that De Tocqueville would be horrified by the land of Obama, the land of creeping tyranny. 

No Sale

I said in discussion recently that Barack Obama’s slogan for the coming Presidential election should be “No, I can’t”, a more honest and apt statement about him as a man, a leader and a chief executive than “Yes, we can.”

There was something else I said, that if a play is ever written about his time in the White House it really should be called The Death of a Salesman. It’s such a pity that it’s already been done. But I wasn’t actually thinking of Obama in the guise of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. It’s another salesman I had in mind – Samuel Bick from the movie The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

This is a movie about personal drift and decline that I saw last year on DVD, with Bick drifting in ever faster eddies, a yacht without a compass or a rudder. Bick is a salesman in a furniture store, not a very good one, diffident and lacking in self-assurance. His boss tries to motivate him in various ways, pointing to the then President Richard Nixon as an example of the perfect salesman. Why? Because in the Presidential election of 1968 he sold America the idea of ending the war in Vietnam and then failed to deliver. Nothing deterred, he sold exactly the same idea in 1972. Bick, in an increasing mood of despair, then takes Nixon as the avatar for all that is wrong in his life.

Obama is far more like Bick than Nixon. He tries so hard to be a salesman, tried to sell the idea that all that mattered was positive thinking. Time and again he has shown that it doesn’t. As his abysmal presidency, in so many ways the worst in American history, drifts from one nadir to another, he flails around, looking for scapegoats and excuses, looking for his own personal Richard Nixon, if I can put it like that, as an explanation for his failure

I noted from an article by Andrew Roberts in the political journal Standpoint that he is now is blaming the “millionaires and the billionaires” for blocking the recovery – i.e. tax hikes - , the kind of scapegoating that small people always resort to when in difficulty. But it’s the millionaires and the billionaires who have been taking up the reins that the state has allowed to drop.

The Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy, a research body which monitors corporate giving trends, reporting from a database of 184 companies that corporate giving has increased by 53% since 2007, not at all bad in the midst of one of the most serious recessions since the 1930s. The total contributions across all respondents in cash and products amounts to more than $15.5billion. The biggest increase of all has been among companies working in the healthcare sector.

There are individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook himself, who has contributed $100 million to create a better grading system in public schools. And then there is the financier Toby Forstman, who responded to America’s failing education system by setting up the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a programme that so far has provided scholarships to the value of $483million for thousands of low-income children to get into private schools. In foreign aid programmes the state now provides a mere 15%, the balance coming from private capital.

As Roberts says in his article, this is the ‘can do’ attitude that built America in the first place. Get the state out of the way, and then see what happens. This is yes, we can, in sharp contrast to Obama’s no, I can’t, and I never could. All he sells is hot air, big, windy meaningless speeches.

In 2008 many greeted Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that many of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity. In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

Obama against the Deer Hunters

This is a piece I wrote a year and a half ago. It has a topical relevance though some of the reference points are now slightly dated.

The United States is a nation built by rebels, built by those hostile to the state, those who sought freedom across the ocean and deep into the frontier. Looking over the country’s history one can see this principle, this hostility to state power asserted time and again, from the Bill of Rights onwards. Last century the House of Un-American Activities was set up specifically to examine those who embraced ideologies that challenged the basic principles on which the nation had been built. Senator Joseph McCarthy also set off in pursuit of those same elements.

How things have changed, how things are changing. The House and McCarthy would not have to look in hidden places for threats to the rebel nation; for the most un-American American is now lodged firmly in the White House. The most un-American American is now the President.

I’m not sure if Americans knew what they were getting when they voted for Barack Obama in November 2008. But what they are getting is arguably the biggest structural transformation in their country’s history, bigger than FDR’s New Deal, which was nothing more than smoke and mirrors in contrast. Obama’s socialism, expressed in the centralised health care system and a redistributive tax programme, comes, as all socialism comes, with an increase in the power of bureaucracy, an increase in state power and authority.

The irony here is that the Democrats are losing the support of the deer hunter vote. Who on earth are the deer hunters, you might wonder, and what have they got to do with American politics? My reference here is to The Deer Hunter, the 1978 movie about men from a blue collar community who went to Vietnam, inspired by now unfashionable ideas of patriotism and love of nation.

Blue collar and working class these people are; socialists they are not. They are people who gain no benefit from the Big State and Obamaism, people who resent their tax dollars being used for welfare programmes and administration; people who resent America being turned into just another ‘social democracy’, just another version of the European Union. Obama told Joe the Plumber, the archetypal deer hunter, that he intended to “spread the wealth around.” What he did not tell him was that it was his ‘wealth’ that would be spreading.

Janet Daley writing in The Sunday Telegraph said that it was unacceptable in bien-pensant circles to express concern over mass immigration or Obama’s heath care programme. They are educated people, sophisticated people, people with a bourgeois sense of morality. Those who do express concern over big government and mass migration are, of course, small-minded bigots, rednecks; just not the right sort.

The thing is ‘the right sort’, these refugees from The West Wing, did not build America. That was the achievement of small people, those who believed in self-reliance, those who had ambition and the drive to clear the wilderness, those who believed that they should benefit from the fruits of their own labour. It was the deer hunters who built America; it’s the liberals and the socialists who are destroying it.

Obama and the American Nightmare

In responding to a question on whether or not Barack Obama had shown great leadership I wrote as follows;

I think he is the worst, least competent, president in American history, an accolade I once awarded to James Buchanan but have since changed my mind. I think the buck stops everywhere but the Obama House. I think he shames the free world, which has long expected a lead from Washington, with his stunning incompetence. I think his capacity for high office is zero and counting downwards. I think he is a crypto-Marxist who has created a poisonous ideological atmosphere in the States, standing over a house divided almost as badly as it was on the eve of the Civil War. Do I think he has shown great leadership? Why, of course.

Taking out that final twist of irony that is exactly what I think. I could say that Obama was responsible for America’s present malaise, but he’s really too little a man for that, an individual of no real historic significance, beyond being the first black face in the White House. No, he is more of a symptom of a disease than the disease itself.

The nature of that, the nature of the disease and its pathology, I am really finding quite difficult to determine. But there is America, a crypto-Marxist as chief executive, an America whose business seems to be anything but business, an America where people can gather in one of the nation’s leading cities, decrying the very capitalism and enterprise which made it great in the first place. There, in New York, are the socially and politically suspect, playing at being Arabs, desperados in search of doles, the antithesis to everything that America represents, as bad, in their own way, as the communists and anarchists of the past.

At the end of his 1969 Silent Majority oration, Richard Nixon said of the war in Vietnam “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” Vietnam could not defeat America, the Soviet Union could not defeat America, Iraq could not defeat America, no power on earth could defeat this great country. Nixon was right: only Americans can do that; only Americans have done that.

I’m a historian; I like to draw parallels with the past. Every Empire declines, some more rapidly that others, but who would have believed that the American decline would have been so rapid. It’s just over twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States, Ronald Reagan at its head, as the preeminent power on the earth, the victor in the Cold War. It was the occasion for The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s premature celebration of all that was good and true and noble.

Now here we are, here America is, in retreat across several fronts. It took Rome four hundred years to travel from the zenith of Augustus to the nadir of Honorius. It has taken America a mere twenty to go from the hopes of the age of Reagan to the mediocrity of the age of Obama.

Yes, Obama is a symptom; he’s not the cause, but his own weakness and incompetence has compounded the many problems confronting the nation. There is nothing inevitable here. The problems are bad but they are not intractable. The will and the vision are needed to overcome them; simple determination is needed, the ability to do what is necessary.

I take this point, this present time, to be the trough of American history. There is a way up but only when Obama is in the past, only when American can see this weak, incapable and fatuous man was the wrong choice at the wrong time. With a man like this history never provides a right time. Big, meaningless and windy speeches, head turning this way and then that, that’s the only trace that Barack Obama will leave behind, a silly and insincere voice in the depths of the American nightmare.

The Peace President

I wrote the following piece for another site not long after Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. I've decided to archive it here in the light of a discussion on Blog Catalogue, and in the light of recent developments on the world stage.

Those who have read my previous blogs will know that I have little time for Obama politically. Still, I can recognise that he is a clever man, a good speaker and a public figure with a warming personality. I also thought that he had a certain degree of tactical skill. The acceptance of this award proves that he has none.

Just think: how much greater he would have looked if he had declined, if he had simply thanked the committee for its generosity but said that the goals set out have still to be achieved. But he could not, because this unexpected and quixotic decision by the Nobel people came at the end of a bad period for Super Obama, capped by a humiliating personal snub by the International Olympic Committee.

I now have a deeper understanding than ever of Obama: he is no more than a celebrity president for a celebrity age, an age where style and image have triumphed over substance and results. Having failed in Copenhagen he bounced back in Oslo. As far as the X factor stakes go he is still up there with a chance.

Now a word or two about the Nobel Committee. My first reaction on hearing the announcement-after thinking it must be a spoof- was that it says nothing at all about President Obama, nothing about his achievements, and heaps about them, about the obvious political bias of these people and, I would add, their desperate attempts at political correctness. It seems obvious to me that Obama is being awarded less for what he is and more for what he is not; he is not a Republican; he is not George W Bush. I also suspect that he was awarded because he is the first black American president, which, if true, is an act of appalling condescension.

Look back on the history of this absurd prize, to whom it was given and, just as important, to whom it was not. Did you know, for example, that Ghandi was nominated five times but never recognised? Those who were recognised included such doves of peace as Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin. And now Obama joins their company, still at the outset not at the end of his career. From this point forward he has the burden of being a peace laureate who most likely will have to take his country ever deeper into war. On the domestic stage he raised expectations that he has been unable to meet. Now on the world stage impossible expectations have been thrust upon him. Who, but a fool, would accept the role of Messiah for a day?

So, there he stands, with one disappointment laid hard upon another. He is dithering over Afghanistan while Americans die; his health reform programme slips and slips; Guantanamo Bay is still open in the face of all of the liberal hopes; he has provoked a quarrel between the politicians and the generals; he looks less and less plausible. And in the midst of all this, all the domestic and foreign problems, he and Michelle had the time to slip over to Copenhagen to put their weight behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, yet another failure, another sign that ‘Obama power’ does not work.

But cast down in one Scandinavian capital he was raised up in another, a form of personal compensation. He did not get the Olympics but at least he got ‘Peace.’ I rather suspect that the celebrity President has not the wit to understand that he did not get peace either, that he is unlikely ever to get peace. It’s the triumph of pious hopes over solid achievements.

No, we can't

This is a piece I wrote for a multi-author blog site earlier this year. I’m reviving it here, slightly adapted, in the light of the American mid-term elections.

The United States at the moment is a bit like a yacht drifting without a rudder, twisting this way and that in the wind. Casting an eye over American history one would have to go back a longish way to find a similar period where the country was so lacking in leadership, right back, in fact, to the time before the election of Abraham Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War.

In 2008 many greeted Barack Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that most of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity! In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

I was never at any point seduced by Obama-mania, never seduced by those vacuous words and lofty promises. He’s a Democrat and I dislike the Democrats as much as I dislike the British Labour Party. I was convinced that his showmanship and lack of practical politics would eventually show him up for the shallow fraud that he is. But even I did not expect him to flounder so badly after such a short time. I thought demagoguery would at least carry him through to a second term. Now there has to be serious doubts over such a prospect. I absolutely hate to say this but Obama even makes the Wicked Witch of the State Department look good in contrast.

Quite simply Obama has absolutely no capacity at all for leadership. He is astonishingly weak, a real buck-passer in the one job where the buck cannot be passed. His dithering over troop reinforcements for Afghanistan handed the strategic initiative to the Taliban. His floundering, name-calling and scapegoating over the oil spill in the Gulf was not in the least edifying.

Look at his domestic programme, promise unfulfilled, failure ever present. The health care bill, his one triumph, a pyrrhic victory achieved by dividing the nation, just hangs around still waiting to be implemented after all this time. When it comes to dealing with the nation’s massive public debt he does not seem to have the first clue, other than to continue on a course that would shame the Greeks. Unemployment remains stubbornly high in spite of billions of dollars sucked into wasteful and inefficient local government initiatives.

On every front Obama is failing; on every front America has never looked weaker and less decisive. Not one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives has come within a mile of success. His laughable appeal to the “Islamic republic of Iran” was effectively thrown back in his face, making him look extraordinarily naïve, a gesturing child on a dangerous world stage. He is turning out to be the worst friend that Israel ever had, though he has gained no advantage in the Arab world in consequence. Even his commander in Afghanistan could not hide his frustrations over presidential incompetence.

Now the brand is toxic. The Democrats are fearful that they may not just lose the House in the November mid-terms but the Senate too. Even if they do not the Republicans are likely to make sufficient advances to block any legislation they don’t like, a log-jammed legislature matching a log-jammed executive. Yes we can is set to become no we can’t.

Yes we can, that was Obama’s 2008 campaign leitmotiv. Perhaps he should have been mindful of other words; perhaps he should have been mindful that what is right and what is practicable are two different things. Who said that? It was President James Buchanan.

The Ghost Confederacy

The Obama camp is jubilant over the health care 'triumph.' I suppose one has to allow them a moment of celebration; after all, it's been a long a difficult passage, a hard fight, not just in the House and Senate but across the country at large. It may lead, I'm sure they hope, to a Democrat bounce-back in the face of a steady Republican advance; it may lead to a renewal of the increasingly tired-looking Obama brand itself. Ah, but wait; let a little sobriety descend. The time is coming, and coming soon, to ask just exactly what kind of victory has been achieved. One battle has ended; other battles may be about to begin.

Ever since the United States was founded there has been a tension between local rights and federal authority. The issue was supposedly resolved after the Civil War, when the victory of the North over the South led to the formation of “a more perfect union", which seems to have meant a more centrally controlled Union, a Union directed from Washington. But the issue of States' rights never entirely went away. Now a new Civil War may be about to break out, though on a far lower and less intense level than that of the 1860s.

On 10 March Virginia, one of the greatest of the old Confederate bastions, the home of both Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, passed a law saying that citizens of the state can neither be required to have health insurance nor be penalised for not having it. The interesting thing is that the bill passed through both houses of the state legislature with considerable support from the Democrats. Idaho followed this lead a week later and the voters of Arizona will have the opportunity later this year to decide whither such protections should be written into the state's constitution. Seemingly similar measures are in process in no fewer than 35 other states, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, which means that, if these measures are carried through, almost half the Union will have local legislation in direct conflict with federal law.

There should really be no contest here; for legislation passed by the national Congress takes priority over that passed by the states, the issue supposedly settled once and for all in the nineteenth century. Oh, if only it were so simple! Obama's legislation, so many believe, is in direct conflict with the constitution. As I have said states' rights have proved to be remarkably resilient. In Gonzales v Oregon, a case concerned with a local assisted-suicide law, the government argued that doctors who prescribed lethal doses of medication were violating federal law, an argument rejected by the Supreme Court, believing that it would constitute "a radical shift of authority from states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality." The Supreme Court has also recognised a right to medical self-determination.

But the strongest argument of all, as The Economist reported recently, concerns the power of the government to make the purchase of health-care insurance obligatory. The commerce clause in the constitution allows the federal government to regulate trade between the states but it has never before been used to require citizens to buy a good or service.

Still, even with these caveats and qualifications, it's difficult to see that the Supreme Court will do anything quite as drastic as invalidating the supremacy clause, as invalidating the mandate of Congress. State laws to the contrary are, on the balance of probability, likely to be set aside, something that happened repeatedly over the course of the last century. Even so, Obama might have been said to have conjured up a ghost Confederacy, an indication of deep national anxiety. The celebration may very well have been premature.

The Manchurian Candidate

It’s obvious to anyone with a smattering of political theory that there has to be some philosophy, some guiding principle behind Barack Obama’s drive towards social equality, based upon ever expanding government intervention. It’s possible, I suppose, to place this within a left-Democrat tradition, a tradition going back to FDR, architect of the New Deal, that blend of socialist and fascist economics.

But FDR was a no intellectual; his political programme was always based on a mixture of fashion, opportunism and instinct. Not so Obama; his programme is rooted in Marxism, the elements of which he embraced in college. I have this on excellent authority.

Dr John Drew, himself once a doctrinaire Marxist, and now a libertarian, met Obama in 1980 when was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He was part of a group engaging in the kind of things students have always done - hanging out and setting the world to rights by moonlight. Obama took a hard-line point of view, arguing for a socialist government in the United States. Drew says;

He was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, led by revolutionaries who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute wealth…The idea was basically that wealthy people were exploiting others. That this was the secret of their wealth, that they weren’t paying others enough for their work, and they were using and taking advantage of other people. He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.

The Newsmax report on this issue quite rightly highlights just how little we know about Obama’s background, a rather strange oversight in a country where even fairly minor runners for office often come under intense media scrutiny. Drew tried to raise this particular issue during the 2008 election but his voice was simply lost.

Drew also highlighted the close relationship at Occidental between Obama and Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, his roommate from Pakistan, who was also present at this late-night impromptu seminar. When Chandoo, now a financial consultant, was questioned about his old friend’s opinions he said that he can’t remember him ever talking like that, ever expressing any interest in Marxism. But this is a man, I have to stress, who has a very selective memory. He also said that he had not seen Obama since before he became a senator, clearly a lie, as he is listed as a guest at a Ramadan dinner held in the White House last year.

There is other, more immediate evidence of Obama’s guiding ideology. His opinions seem to bear a very close resemblance to those of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his minister and mentor, whom he has described as his “sounding board” for twenty years. Wright advanced what he called a ‘Black Value System’, in which he denounces “our racist competitive society” and something he calls “middle-classness.” Despite his influence Wright is unlikely now to enjoy a White House junket. Why? That’s simple: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me”, as he told The Newport News last summer.

What an explosive mixture: Marxism, anti-middle class radicalism, hostility towards wealth creation and a racist anti-racist! What next, I wonder, what more is there to be discovered in Obama’s rather shadowy background? He himself is largely responsible for the endless speculation. Not only are his published memoirs highly selective in nature but he continues to refuse to release early documentation about his life, including his Harvard Law School transcripts and his senior thesis at Columbia.

Some of you, I’m sure, will know a movie called The Manchurian Candidate, either the original or the remake. Are we dealing, I wonder, with the most successful case of ‘entryism’ in all of human history? Please, please, if you are inclined to be humourless and literal-minded I would ask you to pause for a moment before rushing to the key board: I’m joking. Or, there again, am I? :-))

The Holy Fool

In the week that Super Obama delivered his State of the Union address I thought I'd say a word or two about his foreign policy.

For America to appear weak is a genuine danger to us all, a danger to the free world. Under the guidance of Obama and Hilary Clinton, his Secretary of State, America appears not just as weak but weak and indecisive to the point of absurdity. I sincerely hope that no challenge to the Monroe Doctrine emerges under the present administration. The Emperor Maximilian, sadly for him, was obviously born at the wrong time in history!

Take the case of China. Obama went there last year almost as a supplicant, not daring to raise the issue of Tibet, not even daring to meet the Dali Lama beforehand in case he ‘offended’ his hosts. All he could do was to make some vacuous noises about internet censorship before a hand-picked audience of communist cadres. One thing is sure, nobody is ever going to compose an opera to mark this less than historic occasion; perhaps a ditty or two might serve.

Then there is Iran, where the democratic opposition to the clerical tyranny cries to the world for some support and assistance, even if that support and assistance is only in the form of moral encouragement. There is no ‘evil empire’ rhetoric from Obama. Instead he holds out his hand to the likes of Ahmadinejad and Khameni, referring to the country as the Islamic Republic of Iran, as if it were the property of the ayatollahs, Nick Cohen rightly observed. And where did this appeasement get him? Nowhere, absolutely nowhere. Add to this his dithering over reinforcements for Afghanistan and the impression of weakness was compounded to a disastrous degree.

You see, this was all part of a bogus international charm offense. This was a president who really did think it was enough not to be George W. Bush; that not being George W. Bush, and mouthing windy platitudes, would be enough to open doors. He was seduced by his own myth, as indeed was the Noble Peace Committee in awarding what really should be rebranded as the Not the George W Bush Prize.

But the world is not made up of simple-minded and idealistic Scandinavians; the world is made up of cynics and realists like Vlad the Impaler Putin. They are well used to village idiots in Russia, a stock figure across so much of the national literature. But who would expect an American coming to offer himself in the part?

I’m mindful of Aneurin Bevan’s warning to the unilateralists in the British Labour Party that to abandon nuclear weapons would be to send a foreign secretary “naked into the conference chamber.” Obama did not even get as far as the conference chamber; he just knocked on Putin’s door, already naked, telling him that he was abandoning Bush’s missile defence programme, hoping that this, and a big smile, would result in something in return. What did he get? Yes, you already know the answer – nothing.

I do so hate repeating myself but it really is true that the world is not Wisconsin, a simple truth that Obama does not understand. The lofty visions and the empty rhetoric do not work on a stage where only realpolitik is effective and only students of Machiavelli know how to play the part. Obama must appear in so many capitals a little like the Holy Fool, as he did in Russia: too good for his own good; to good for the good of America; too good for the good of the free world.

Barack Obama-a Term Report

It’s not been a super year for Super Obama, that sheep in sheep’s clothing. The Sermon on the Mount rhetoric continues, but he is now beyond the stage where you can fool all of the people some of the time. Seemingly his approval rating is now lower at this stage in office, his first anniversary, than any president since Eisenhower.

Is there really any surprise in this? It was possible to predict this rather dismal outcome from those big, vacuous campaign speeches, promising all things to all people. There was never any lie; Obama genuinely believed in what he was saying, I would certainly give him that much, which makes the offence all the greater. Politics is not about ‘vision’; politics is about reality, and the self-deluding Obama was never more than a fantasist. Now reality kicks in. He promised a change when he was inaugurated last January. There has certainly been change, and all for the worst.

It’s a dismal picture. Unemployment is rising, house prices continue to fall, Guantanamo is still open and the war in Afghanistan is getting steadily more Vietnam-like and less popular by the day. It makes no difference if he wins peace prizes for no peace, the fairy-tale is over. The thing is America and the world, a good part of the world, was seduced by the Obama myth, the myth of the first black man in the White House. Here was Moses pointing a finger to the Promised Land; here was a man who would bring Americans together. But this was not Moses, it was not even Aaron; it was just, well, Barack Obama, just another Democrat, just another politician. He was deluded, America was deluded, the world was deluded.

Yes, the wind is still there, so, too, is big government and higher taxation, forms of creeping socialism that Obama does have to his credit. But as for bringing Americans together he has gone so far in the opposite direction that I cannot think of a chief executive who ever had a more divisive effect, and I’m not excluding George W. Bush! I read a report from one electoral county in Kentucky, a mining district, solidly blue collared; the sort of district that would elect Charles Manson before it would elect a Republican. Now, according to local people, even Charles Manson as a Republican could beat Barack Obama.

Year one has been bad; year two, I predict, will be even worse.