George W. Bush spoke Spanish.
Obama cannot speak another language, and admitted this in April 2008, in a townhall meeting in Dayton, Ohio:
(DAYTON, OHIO) "I don't speak a foreign language. It's embarrassing!" Barack Obama exclaimed today at town hall meeting here. Obama, who often touts his time growing up overseas, made the confession while speaking about the importance of teaching foreign languages in schools."
People believe that Obama is the multicultural, not Bush. And yet Bush speaks another language, while Obama is trapped inside of English. Obama has lived elsewhere, but he did so as if he lived in a bubble.
"What sort of an effect must it have on a people not to learn foreign languages? Presumably an effect similar to that which a complete withdrawal from society has on an individual" (Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters, p. 39).
Obama is what Virgil Nemoianu calls a "monoglot multicultural." These are people who are convinced the English-speaking world is one vast misery, and all other cultures are superior to it, without actually bothering to know anything about any other cultures, exemplified by not knowing their languages.
I have never dreamed about Obama or Bush. Are they really that important to me? I write about them here because they are common reference points. The former is supposedly a paragon of everything cosmopolitan, the latter a rube. And yet, the latter speaks a second language, has a wife who clearly loves him, and is from a family whose members tend to remain together.
The two form a common language of what we think we know.
All the great thinking of our time is shallow.
I cannot say of either president, as Lichtenberg said (of I don't know whom), "He loved pepper and zig-zag lines" (49).
I don't know either Bush or Obama from the inside, but suspect that Bush is the more authentic. I know him. Whatever or whoever Obama is, he hides it behind a facade.
Obama was yesterday's darling. His popularity is falling. I remember the music of Tiny Tim. It stunned everyone to hear Tiptoe Through the Tulips. But the tune was thin, and it began to grate after a third listen.
The country is in a fratricidal state over which is which, and whether we should love the one and not the other. To care so much about this, and so little for poetry is probably a sign of our dullness as a nation. But it's more too: one is genuine, and the other is a fad.
The people with real sensibility can tell the difference. The others have been fooled by the creepy romance of monoglot multiculturals: the RGC crowd.
When a culture can no longer distinguish between the real and the false, between a religion and a cult, between good and bad, between prudence and imprudence, it has lost its basic instincts. I think this November will show that America has not yet lost its nose even though Obama temporarily confused it with his zigzags and pepper.
The hounds are closing in on the Democrats.
32 comments:
Bush spoke Spanish?
Kinda. Not really. There were rumors that he would sing the National Anthem in Spanish at some Spanish events, and the defense was that there was no way he could have done so, since his Spanish wasn't good enough. (It was a mini-righty controversy 'round the idea that it was un'merican to sing it in Spanish.)
Anyway, that doesn't really matter - Obama seems inauthentic because of his speech patterns. He talks like a professor, or like someone from Chicago.
The slight Southern drawl that Bush had points to 'stupid but authentic Southerner.'
Lefties glom on to the 'stupid' part, righties glom onto the 'authentic' part.
It's all a non-issue, and this framing is just another way for Kirby to say that he has a feeling about something, and then to come up with a very weak argument as to why those feelings mean something.
This happens a lot - I do think the right is better at manipulating feelings.
The right has made people feel like their taxes have been raised, when in fact they've been cut...
It's a pretty powerful approach.
And while it's based more on emotion than declarative statements that could be factual or no, it's pretty close to lyin'.
At the least, it's dishonest.
Whatever or whoever Obama is, he hides it behind a facade.
What makes you think Bush didn't have a facade? he admitted he never read newspapers and didn't give a hoot about demonstrations in DC, outrage over the mess in New Orleans, etc. He was going to do whatever he wanted, opinions be danged.
Same with Obama. He's going with his agenda and that's that. The popularity contest was pre-election.
Perhaps Bush is the better actor. All I can say is that Bush read authentically to me. That is, what came across was a soul.
With Obama, I just have the sense of a weasel inside an opportunist inside a snake, inside of a race hustler inside of a nerd inside of a Marxist inside of fake Roman senator, inside of an Acorn lawyer inside of an abortion advocate inside of a confused person.
Or something like that.
It's just my sense of things: subjective, and possibly, wrong.
Tony blair argued for BOTH Bush and Obama in his new autobiography, as stand-up, sterling Americans.
I can say that Bush impressed me once: the five-minute speech he gave right after 9/11.
I was worried he would come off as a weasel.
But he spoke like a true man, a king among men.
If Obama has a king of that nature inside of him (and he may) I have yet to see it.
Bush delivered a great speech. He didn't write it.
The few disorganized things he said immediately afterward is what I remember. Just when we needed someone strong and confident, he came across as an uninformed, confused man. Certainly not a leader.
His advice to shattered Americans was to go shopping. What does that say about the depth of that man?
It may be possible to overthink the concept of genuineness.
I've never been completely sure whether Bush was a pathetic fuck-up, bumbling along under the guidance of Cheney and his other "handlers," or a shrewd huckster, playing off a "dumb Texan" persona, like the engineer behind the green curtains in The Wizard of Oz. I think it was both. Bush WAS a pathetic fuck-up, but due to a very peculiar combination of circumstances, he was able to win the governorship of Texas, and eventually the Presidency. A fundamentally naive man who could see and capitalize upon a good thing when it finally came his way. Every day of his Presidency, I felt a loathing, and an apprehension about what he might say or do--a total embarrassment to our nation. We'll be paying off his debts for a generation.
Obviously one's proficiency or lack thereof is of no consequence whatever in measuring the political character of an individual. Of greater moment, was Bush's espousal of open borders, and complete capitulation to the Mexican bluff ("open the door or we'll fuck up the screen!").
The interface between Mexican and American official representatives is a joke. Mexico's a bankrupt nation--both literally and metaphorically--and every concession we make to them will come back to us as misery and devastation. I'm tired of hearing the public relations. Let's just build our wall and be done with it.
Bush. "A king among men."
Time to head for the exit.
Curtis, I too cannot understand the non-building of the wall. It will cost about 3-6 billion dollars. Obama claims he cares about America and Americans, which is why he wants to sink us with the trillion dollar stealthcare bill. But he won't spend 3 billion on the wall. It's a weird sense of priorities which shows where his own priorities are: getting the Hispanic vote at any cost to the nation that he and his wife feel disappointed by.
I see Obama as a man who has basically bought the notion that whites are evil, and must be brought to their knees, since all their wealth is stolen. He's going therefore to redistribute it to those who have had it stolen from them. He believes in reparations. He sees as his homies not only blacks, but also Hispanics, and to some extent, women.
That's the Race Gender Class hatred that is driving the left at this juncture.
I disagree with their fundamental precepts. I think it's work ethic that is the foundation of wealth, and there is no other real wealth. Stealing wealth is actually not gaining wealth at all. Mugging someone either with a gun or with a divisive law won't do it, either.
A wall would keep our country from being mugged.
I don't know why Bush didn't want a wall built, either.
But, yes, although I didn't vote for Bush, I moved into his column when he gave the speech. I thought it was the greatest speech of my generation. The only thing comparable was when Reagan told Gorby, the last communist leader (Yeltsin wasn't really communist, he was an intellectual who finished off the Evil Empire), "Mr. Gorby, tear down this wall."
A great speech makes for moral clarity. This is what Obama is totally lacking. He sends in troops to Afghanistan but without any clear sense of mission. At home, the nation drifts into chaos.
Obama's fundamental ruling principles are in hiding, but they were formulated during his two decades in Reverend Wright's Church. It's hatred for America.
We saw Bush's true colors during that speech.
Ridiculous. Obama wants to give reparations?
Let me know when to expect my check (you mentioned women as some of his "homies")
Obama is no more interested in sharing the wealth than Donal Trump. O made some nice money from his book royalties and will get lavish speech and pension payments once he is out of office.
Why should he pay anyone reparations?
Well, I'm not saying that Republicans are perfect, but I'm implying it.
Republicans have a strong sense of principles. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was the best American speech. Lincoln was a Republican. Lincoln wrote his own speech. It had moral clarity, concision, and a noble vision.
Bush's speech had some of that, too. It was brief. It is generally conceded that politicians have writers, but that they hire writers who more or less share their vision. Then they tinker with the speech, and make it their own. W's speech was the best speech I've seen live in my lifetime, and I doubt if I shall see another that good, ever.
Many see Bush as a simple guy, out cutting brush on his Texas ranch, daydreaming about his wife, and petting his dog, thinking of his memoirs (I can't wait to read them!).
But Bush could rise up like one of the kings of old, with a golden crown, and a fiery fervor that made America whole again.
Obama is too ashamed of America. Obama sees America as having to give reparations. He said this in an issue of Ebony Magazine in the early spring of 2008. He doesn't think it should come as checks. You won't get a check. What he is going to do is do it in the form of an enormous healthcare package, giving free college loans, and other things, that are less visible on the radar, he said. He is the master of stealth, you have to remember. It's why he likes those sneaky drones popping over the borders of Pakistan to wipe out whole villages. He's a sneaky guy who operates best in the dead of night like a ninja assassin.
Figuring out what he's up to is hard, because the media covers for him. His books are just cover stories, but you get a sense of reverence for his father, who was the Mugabe of Kenya (except unlike Mugabe he never got into power).
Obama feels that America stinks, and so he wants to redistribute its ill-gotten gains to Hispanics, blacks, women, and others.
What he doesn't understand is that America's wealth was based on its Protestant work ethic, its willingness to help others, its good heart. He's not redistributing that, because he doesn't understand that part. He's completely mistaken about everything about America.
He sees America as Ginsberg did, or as LeRoi Jones does.
Bush sees America as Lincoln did, which is why his speech was so golden, and why no matter what Obama says, his words will be like huge drops of lead hammering us dead.
Gender reparations seem just what the Obama administration wants as part of his vast redistributive scheme, including pushing what Demos are pleased to call the "Paycheck Fairness Act."
There's a short article by George Will, "A New Project for the Gender Police" (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/25/george-f-will-new-project-for-the-gender-police.html), that gives corroborating evidence for Will's piece from Diana Furchtgott-Roth's recently-published study.
Just part of his "Perpetual Democratic Party Power Protection Act" strategy for lavishing unnecessary favours on what he fancies as his most loyal constitutencies. More race-class-gender politics at its most contentious and tendentious.
Curtis Faville's disparagement of Bush smells like it's right from the college-town cafe's nearly-empty coffeepot that's been left on the burner for six hours. It's like the stuff you used to hear there among the semi-educated but grandly self-important conspiracy theorists in their disquisitions on the simultaneous stupidity and cunning of the CIA.
Bush? Miss him yet?--You betcha!
James, I really liked the George Will article! My paper carried a piece today about how women are still 32 cents on the dollar behind, which is obviously not true, unless they are stacking the statistics in some very unusual way. One neat thing that's done is they figure in women who choose to be housewives, as if they should get the same money that firemen and garbagemen get. This is one of the few times that women love orthodox Jewish women, for instance, since it rounds down women's salaries (ordinarily feminists hate religious women but when they're useful to concocting a lie, they love them). Another article recently said that women under 30 living in cities make 1.5 times as much as men, and are way less likely to be fired.
Does Obama care? Nope. Women are his constituency.
Truth for Obama, as for the Sophists, was whatever you could get the public to believe that would also increase your power.
Bush? Miss him yet?--You betcha!
How is that possible, when the effects of so many of his policies are still with us.
1. Wall Street looting middle class
2. Resulting near-collapse of our economy
3. Give-aways to the top 2%
4. An unnecessary/phony war that cost us billion$ plus so many American lives
(and so much more)
But it's pointless to discuss these issues with someone who is paranoid without substantiation (example:
He is the master of stealth, you have to remember. It's why he likes those sneaky drones popping over the borders of Pakistan to wipe out whole villages. He's a sneaky guy who operates best in the dead of night like a ninja assassin
I guess Obama's "sneakiness" explains why you can't supply any substantial proof that he's anti-American. That, and "the media covers for him" right?
C'mon, I'm just gonna say what every warm-blooded male on this site is thinking.
Wow, who's the cute girl with the riding crop?--rahwr!
I'm the one in the bigfoot costume...
Yet there's still a group of people who view it as real, even though my friend admitted it was a 'hoax,' a silly little promotional video for a short film that's not even done yet and might make it to a festival or two, but that's about it...
But in spite of all rational evidence to the contrary, the 'analyst' uses all sorts of quasi-scientific b.s. and pseudo-psychology to confirm his bias.
Just sounded a lot like Kirby...
Sally (JHs friend) said I should have a nice-looking woman atop every post.
So she's a model for those riding clothes that I found online.
Ad I thought Sally would be pleased.
Oddly, she's not my type.
I only believe something if it's marvelous, and also unlikely.
I do believe that golden lion marmosets and God exists, simply because they are almost beyond my imagination. For the same reason, I believe in Bigfoot, and gargoyles, and weirwolves, and fairies and pixie dust and starfish.
Science proves nothing to me! Science can't even prove I exist!
It's an appalling form of discourse, and its poverty of means has considerably impoverished our world.
I prefer Halloween and Christmas to the man in the white lab suit with his test tubes and cold eye.
I mean, he does have a place insofar as there's Frankenstein, and Mengele, and Diet Doctors in Scarsdale, I guess.
The Wall Street Journal is one of the few surviving journals that is in the black, almost as rare as a unicorn.
No one wants the news. At least not if it's from your viewpoint.
Phillies Teacher,
Didn't Obama's preacher of several decades say something like, "Gosh Darn America!"
Didn't Obama's wife say she was never proud of America?
If his wife and his pastor feel these ways about America, could he feel differently? I personally would have dumped the wife and changed churches.
But he obviously felt at home with such sentiments. His mentor in high school was a communist poet who was investigated by the FBI. He started his run in the home of the terrorist Bill ayers.
These are the people he feels at home with.
He mentions Saul alinsky in one of his books as another inspiration.
Birds of a feather flock together.
His church was an open sewer pouring filth into the minds of its congregation. Obama cut all ties with the church and what it believes in order to look untainted. He claims he's not going to be Chicago politics all over again. I don't see why people see in him such a saint.
"The right has made people feel like their taxes have been raised, when in fact they've been cut... "
Government spending as a percentage of GDP, which is really what matters in the long run has not been cut.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
"The right has made people feel like their taxes have been raised, when in fact they've been cut... "
Government spending as a percentage of GDP, which is really what matters in the long run has not been cut.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_20th_century_chart.html
EmmyBee:
*yes*
Errybody else.
Pfft. Bush and Obama are the same pieces of pandering crap that we've had in office for the longest time.
Bush was a Connecticut Yankee in Karl Rove's court and Obama is the Race-Card Shark.
At least we knew Clinton was a liar, Bush I was a spy, and Reagan was an actor.
Brett,
You did a great job being Bigfoot! You get 4.5 stars! That's really interesting that your friend used a hoax as a promotional tool for his short film! There was this crazy promo in Britain where a "faceless" man and woman would show up at public events, like Churchill Downs, etc., and people were theorizing that it was a political statement, but it turned out to be a promo for a new movie. Did you happen to see piccys on the net of them? It was seriously freakay!
What's your friend's film about? Maybe we should take this somewhere else than Kirby's blog, unless he doesn't mind, of course,--can I contact you at your gmail?
And Kirby, how can that woman NOT be your type!? Heck, she's almost my type and I'm heterosexual! Then again, she's not nearly as lovely as Mrs. Kirby, so I totally understand :)
Kirby, don't forget that Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer!
Hey, there, DeLater, I ain't been in college since 1985.
I have an office in Berkeley, but am probably as frustrated by Berkeley politics as you are.
My feelings about Bush are neither typical nor emblematic of my circumstances. California's a blue state, but independent thinking's as close as your neighbor's living-room, unless you live in the Wyoming outback, in which case it's a bit farther away.
Odd how seemingly intelligent people like you will buy into the "genuine" article nonsense about Bush II. The Afghanistan and iraq wars are winding down, and everyone on both sides of the aisle is about to breathe a long sigh of relief. What was it all for?--no one can say. Does it even matter now?
The important thing was to have done it. Give or take a few hundred billions of dollars, and a couple hundred thousand dead and maimed. What the hell. Gotta move on.
What's next on the agenda? Kill the health care legislation. Roll back the banking regs. Make the rich folks' tax cuts "permanent." That'll facilitate lots of "job creation"--in India.
Well, whatever, at least we have rich coffee. Maybe the Tea Party-ers can meet the boats at LA and San Francisco and Seattle and dump the beans into the Pacific. Good symbolic value. The salmon could misktake the beans for food pellets.
These are interesting times.
Curtis, the idea was to spread democracy into the Islamofascist world. It worked, and has created a very interesting dialogue within the Islamic world. Afghanistan's women can now read and write. 9 million newly literate people.
Those societies are not yet pluralist, but they will begin to be more so, I think.
Remember that 9/11 cost 500 billion dollars in the first two days.
We cannot afford closed societies that are blaming America for their problems. We couldn't afford to have the communists doing this, and we crushed them economically. We now have to open up the Islamic world, too.
Tomorrow, the animists of sub-Saharan Africa. How do they expect to get an economy going? We can help them.
"Government spending as a percentage of GDP, which is really what matters in the long run has not been cut."
What really matters are the dolphins...
Won't anyone think of them!!!!
(Changing subject so drastically seems fallacious...falling back on a pet issue seems childish. That being said, Bush created lots o' structural deficits, and I guess we can argue about keynesian economics, but that seems boring).
And thanks Emmy! My favorite parts (and a few other 'analysts' have noted this as well) are about how it Can't be a human because its arms are too long... I'm a bit of a lanky-armed freak, I suppose.
When I got measured for the tux to be in my bro's wedding, and I phoned 'em in, the dude on the other end didn't believe me - I'm a freak! But the perfect dude to play Bigfoot, I s'pose...
The short's about a guy who pretends to be Bigfoot...a sorta day in the life/survival character study of a hoaxer/fetishist... Thematically, it's about our drive as humans need to create and destroy myths (or something artsyfartsy like that).
(and to clarify, I started addressing Emmy as 'you,' but then switched to a more general 'you' that would be defined as the group of people with the worldviews that I was talking about...so don't take those personal! :-) )
Brett,
S'ok, nothing taken personally!
That sounds like a really great idea for a short. I'd especially play around with the idea of "is this dude a deviant or is he just like you and me, making and holding on to our every day myths."
And yes, your arms are epically long--all the better to climb trees with, my dear!
Are you interested in the psychology of superstitious behavior, like making false neural connections between an arbitrary action causing a fixed result? I'm big into that, actually. I know, weird me! There's this video I saw a couple of days ago. It's a sociological experiment-- sort of about the myths we make for ourselves, and come to believe in fervently when we've got no other yardstick to measure our reality.
I thought you might be interested in it. If you do watch it, let me know what you think! This is the first part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDi2NlsA4nI
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX18zivi6QM
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzXSSPp4Epg
I know I'd be the one with the hula hoop and an apple in my mouth lol
Hey, Faville, now you don't have to show a student ID to enter Berkeley's rich conspiratorial cafe culture, right?
I did spend at least a decade in Southern and Central California attending grade/high school, working in a factory, and training at Ft Ord. Don't think I'd find most of the state liveable today (haven't even been there since
'96). Another college town like Ann Arbor's OK for now (Emmy and I postponed our removal to St John's, Newfoundland due to considerations for me mum's health); at any rate, I expect our coffee here is as good as any and perhaps a bit cheaper than in Berkeley.
While I agree with some of your views expressed on the threats posed to us all by illegal immigration (I may be the only reg on LS who's actually done bracero farm labour) and by Islamist aggression (on which I'm short of your solution to a problem that's not going away--I'm with Kirby's at present), I can't walk your way on the gratuitous Bush abuse. While I'd fault Bush on some accounts, in comparison with an incompetent, narcissistic, left-ideologue like Obama, he was gold.
That's right, "A Phillie Teacher,"--if indeed you're still around--who might find some substantiation (as if your delivering of four pathetic signboard slogans constitutes substantiation) for Obama's socialism and anti-Americanism in Dinesh D'Souza's speculative but instantiated "Forbes" article mined from a forthcoming book.
Hey, imma throw some fuel on this here fire.
Happy reading!
With Obama's ratings way down (the nos are stronger than the pros at this point), I think this kind of thing will grow to a crescendo, GM.
I don't know if November 3rd will be a tsunami catching the lolligaggin picnickers on the beaches of Thailand but the way the polls are way down now for Obama seems to suggest a powerful surge is coming. It's been building at least since Scott Brown.
But expect the entire media except Fox and WSJ to try to spin everyone's perceptions in the next four weeks. They probably will get the CBO to say two days before the election that everything is hunkydory (as they did with the steal-care spiel).
Orson Scott Card is a Mormon writer, I think.
I hope his homie, Romney, runs.
It's still too much to know if everything will turn around, or whether the whole country will jes go down the toilet of debt and poor fiscal policies that are currently in line.
I'm cautiously optimistic, quand meme.
"don't forget that Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer!"
And Samuel Johnson said,
"the first Whig was the Devil"
The plot runs deeper than is commonly supposed.
Read your Mencius, y'all.
And yes--the first whig was the devil--democrats of all stripes believe they know best
which is to say
that they know better than God
when we should pattern our lives after Christ
they pattern their lives after the Devil.
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