Calling Dr. Johnson
The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side.
Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ enjoins us to love our enemies. But that presupposes that we can know who our enemies are. He doesn’t tell us to have no enemies, which is hardly possible.
Some people will choose to be our enemies and will often tell us so. The ancient Romans didn’t pretend to be friends of the early Christians.
Christians are told to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The founders of the American Republic had few illusions about man and government.
Freedom, they insisted, depended on “jealousy,” not “confidence” or faith in rulers. They would have thought Obama foolish or cynical for demanding that we give our rulers the benefit of the doubt for good motives. Government, as they knew, is the natural enemy of liberty. They weren’t hypnotized, as later generations would be, by the word democracy. Nor were they terribly shocked by evidence of Original Sin.
Liberal high hopes for our first black president were a hangover from the naive old belief in the Noble Savage. Obama has banked heavily on that belief. Samuel Johnson, immune to every form of ideology, never fell for such emotional rubbish: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”
The jingoism of democracy defies reason. Frequent headlines attest that elected rulers are no more corruption-proof than any others.
Nothing seems to disillusion Obama, however. He used to teach constitutional law; but if he ever read the Federalist, it appears to have been lost on him. His literacy is quite superficial. He barely knows what he is saying, and he never mentions the Tenth Amendment, the key to the whole Constitution. (Even Lincoln knew that much.)
James Madison explained that the new Constitution didn’t give the federal government new powers but rather “invigorated” those powers it already had under the Articles of Confederation. Obama wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
Federal powers, Madison said, would be “few and defined,” and those of the states, “numerous and indefinite.”
Johnson opposed popular elections, on the grounds that the choice of a “rabble” had no more moral value than that of sheer chance. It isn’t hard to guess what he would have thought of opinion polls and approval ratings.
Obama may be the perfect representative of a nation that no longer speaks the language of its ancestors. True, he is more fluent than George W. Bush, but both have done much to bring government into disrepute.
To dispraise Obama is by no means to praise Bush. On the contrary, Obama’s presidency is the result of Bush’s. Americans today grossly overvalue politics and regard political victories as substantive achievements. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson can put such things in proper perspective. Even Johnson’s offhand witticisms reveal a mind as profound as it is hilarious.
The U.S. Constitution, as I often say, poses no serious threat to our form of government. It has roughly the same tenuous relation to our political institutions as the book of Revelation has to the Unitarian Church.
Arizona’s attempt to discourage illegal immigration has exposed the huge gulf between Obama and most Americans. At the rate he is going, he seems more likely to be deported than reelected.
Like most people of both major parties, Obama takes for granted that the War Between the States ended as it should have—with slavery abolished and secession crushed. It also marked the virtual extinction of the Tenth Amendment, which George Will says is “dead as a doornail.”
Was anyone very surprised when Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee turned out to be a fanatical lesbian? It was quite in character for him—one more Historic First for this President without precedent. In the view of today’s liberalism, there is no such thing as sexual perversion, as long as both (or all) parties give their consent. If this widespread attitude needs a name, it might be dubbed sexual bolshevism—the Playboy Philosophy with a vengeance.
Some politicians’ vices become eponymous—McCarthyite, Clintonian—and it looks as if the incumbent may earn his own niche in the lexicon of invective. After one of the warmest and most hopeful welcomes any president-elect has ever received, he has quickly proceeded to disappoint and alienate the country that chose him. He evidently despises the rabble, and the feeling seems to be mutual.
This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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Mr. Sobran you are going to get hate mail by comparing Obama to a 'noble savage' no matter how indirect the comparison. My hat is off to you. Further any man who believes in the myth of the 'noble savage' must have actually never met a savage. Perhaps the 'nobility' has a direct correlation with distance.
"Obama may be the perfect representative of a nation that no longer speaks the language of its ancestors. True, he is more fluent than George W. Bush, but both have done much to bring government into disrepute.
To dispraise Obama is by no means to praise Bush. On the contrary, Obama’s presidency is the result of Bush’s. Americans today grossly overvalue politics and regard political victories as substantive achievements"
I don't know if Americans in general grossly overvalue politics,but certainly neo-cons, leftist,(yes, that is a redundancy ) and perhaps the less than 45% of Americans who actually vote in the national elections do. The other 55%-- 60% quit choosing between the two evils a long time ago.
"After one of the warmest and most hopeful welcomes any president-elect has ever received, he has quickly proceeded to disappoint and alienate the country that chose him. He evidently despises the rabble, and the feeling seems to be mutual".
I am still utterly amazed people believed Obama was a moderate.
"Arizona’s attempt to discourage illegal immigration has exposed the huge gulf between Obama and most Americans. At the rate he is going, he seems more likely to be deported than reelected".
I prefer he be overthrown like the tin pot West African Presidents he emulates
JS: "Nothing seems to disillusion Obama, however. He used to teach constitutional law; but if he ever read the Federalist, it appears to have been lost on him. His literacy is quite superficial."
That Obama taught con. law at the University of Chicago, without having published anything serious on the subject or having previously taught it elsewhere, smells of affirmative action (as does his admittance into Columbia and Harvard Law, given that he didn't make the honor roll at Occidental and didn't seem to do very well at Columbia).
Obama's legal and historical illiteracy is unsurprising considering that he seems confused as to how many states there are in the US:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws&feature=related
..
Obama's very presence in the White House serves as further evidence of our great decline.
Mr. MAR makes some salient points in his response.
I had also forgotten Obama's brilliant expansion of the number of states in the union! It does remind me also of his several utterances involving the "US Marine "Corpse"!" I suspect most of the people here knew by about, say, the third grade at least, how to pronounce "corps!"
Is there nobody in the Foreign Service or White House staff to give briefings on miltary bearing and etiquette anymore? It always makes my bowels shrivel within me (in the words of Evelyn Waugh) to watch un-grown men like Bill Clinton, George Bush or Barrack Obama attempt a military salute to those young Marines as they board and disembark the various aircraft. As much as I disliked the dishonesty and conniving duplicity of Vice President Dick Cheney's politics,his reckless ways as a hunting companion, his love for Washington D.C. over Wyoming, his fifteen or sixteen deferments to avoid combat in Vietnam, and all his other character flaws, at least the man could at least act or "seem" like an oligarch in a pinch. The last three Commanders @ Chiefs,haven't even been good actors.
Which is worse, the fool that leads or the fools that put him there? The republic is gone and the ship of fools that let it happen can't even see it. Long live the republic!
Good 'un, Joe, as always!
I would say the proximate cause of Obama's election was the nomination of that traitor and enemy collaborator John McCain, who also owes his political start to organized crime in Arizona. What further evidence is needed to conclude the Republican Party is rotten to its very core?
McCain, the Bushes, Dole and probably Romney or Palin. The Republicans have no answers.
"The Republicans have no answers."
This is true. Palin and Romney would probably lose, although one can never under estimate the attractive power of the circus on any given day. The one chance the party might have is to run Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul in 2012 to establish a new beachhead. But the more war and more government duopoly still select our nominees, so I suspect it will be Romney/Palin for 2012 vs. Obama/Biden. After the winner of the that contest is decided,we should be pretty close to the end.
I think you're right robert. I predict an Obama defeat, but who knows? We will be close to the end either way, and the thing I hate most about that is that there is no way to foresee just how it will play out, so there is no way to prepare, aside from the obvious (food, water, etc.).
We'll just have to hang on and take the plunge.
If anything big happens with Iran and Obama nukes them, etc, you can forget 2012. The retaliation alone would give him the needed excuse to suspend elections. The economy tanks, we go to war, and a big retaliation will kill off the old republic forever.
To Allen,
I am not so sure Romney/Palin could beat Obama. Too many true conservatives/libertarians know that that isn't much of a choice and might just stay home on election night. If I do vote it is going to be 3rd party yet again.
Palin, really? I don't understand why Palin is still around. She was picked by McCain as a cynical attempt to create conservative enthusiasm and pick up some disaffected Hillary supporters...it failed, so Palin should have just gone away.
In any case, Obama will win again in 2012. The Republicans have no one (we wouldn't be talking about Romney if they did), and given all of his mistakes his approval rating is still pretty high.
I am of two minds about democracy. One the one hand when I walk through a mall in San Diego, I shake my head knowing that this polyglot group votes and elects non-democratic and socialist incumbents or Republican globalists time after time. On the other hand, it is the People who vote against gay marriage in the passage of Proposition 8 and the judicial establishment who decide if the people know what they are doing. Maybe Buckley had it write when he said he would rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.