The Clinton-Obama Axis

After 8 glorious years of the liberty-loving, avuncular Ronald Reagan, the 1990s was a cesspool of Clinton skullduggery.
The villains of Mayberry propped their grimy feet on the Oval Office desk, pointed flaccid index fingers at us (the public), tilted their aw-shucks heads in feigned empathy, grinned executioner-style, reigned surly when caught in the cookie jar, and meted out character assassinations like footloose mobsters.
That wasn’t the scary part. A large segment (40%) of credulous or adoring citizens ate it up, loved it, applauded it. A neighbor of mine in North Carolina during the Lewinsky escapade smiled when we met one day and said, “Ol’ Clinton’s gettin’ him some on the side, huh?”
While teaching a class on analytical writing at a North Carolina college around the same time, I posed a hypothetical question to my students: “What if you could steal a million dollars and know that there was absolutely no way anyone would every find out? Would you do it?” The room erupted. Boys high-fived out of their chairs. Girls put their hands to their mouths and giggled uncontrollably and looked at me like I was crazy for asking such a ridiculous question. Not one solitary individual showed serious compunction.
“What about the person you stole it from?” I asked. More hysterics. I leaned against my desk and watched the commotion for a couple of minutes, waiting to see if conscience would take hold. If it did, I could not see it. The discussion about morality afterward did nothing to assuage my fright at what I’d witnessed.
These students and their older comrades around the U.S. are a large segment of the Clinton voters: the amoral, the duplicitous winkers, the backroom handshakers, the get-away-with-it crowd. They rejoice in the Clintons, who are the embodiment of effrontery, the coward turned bully (a la Lyndon Johnson), the snickerer who becomes ominous sniveler at the audacity of confrontation. The Clintons live in make-believe: They make it up, and then they believe it – and by damn, you better, too!
They are outraged by facts that interfere with make-believe, like when little obsequious girls save stained blue dresses and when film footage reveals no snipers. Hillary Clinton is the eminence rouge who desperately demands no more “rouge.” They are enfants terrible, and they somehow (via their high-fiving backers) have represented once-grand America to a laughing world.
But there is one thing refreshing about the Clintons, in a macabre sort of way: They are transparent. They are not the inquisition sequestered in dank abbeys. To a candid audience, they are clearly bullies.
Not so for Barak Obama. He is the ideologue (not a bad thing if your ideas are about liberty) and a believer – a believer that most Americans are obsessed with race, that Americans must be protected from big corporations, that most Americans cannot manage their own lives and need far-seeing Barak Obama to ensure that those who do manage their own lives pay dearly for those who don’t. He is the master of rhetoric and wishes to be master of all.
He is the man who makes implausibility seem plausible, even to the mostly candid, by standing erect, projecting sincerity, waxing eloquent, radiating empathy. He sounds new while rehashing the anti-capitalistic dogma of the 130-year-old fascism of “progressivism.” He studiously “rejects” some of the ideas of his longtime minister without eloquently and succinctly denouncing the pastor’s racism, anti-Americanism and lunacy about HIV – without denouncing the minister.
He throws carrots to whites by acknowledging that whites are disgruntled, too, by entitlements and affirmative action, but instead of offering an official cure for these transgressions against liberty, he proffers only his trademarked empathy and a tip of the political hat.
He says that blacks are mad but does not say specifically what they are mad about in modern America. There is racism to some small degree in every country in the world, but the only government racism in America actually is designed to work in blacks’ favor. So what can many of them be mad about? Have they become spoiled by preferential treatment? Citizens from every populated continent in the world beg to enter to this country. They love this country. They do not complain that we are racist. They may complain, like new residents in a neighborhood, that it’s hard to become a part of the clique, but they don’t seem to think, by and large, that Americans are racist.
So what are Obama and his minister talking about? What world do they inhabit? What is their weltanschauung? It is one of alleged victimhood and power. One of victims and saviors. The alleged underdogs (though there is no underdog when anyone in a free society can be a Horatio Alger) need their mellifluous messiah, the Harvard man of the hoi polloi, the grand entitler.
This makes Obama scarier still than the abominable Clintons. He is the smooth-edged blade to the Clintons’ soiled, serrated butcher’s knife. He is the invisible virus to the Clintons’ strident fusillade. He is the artful dodge to the Clintons’ hapless bludgeon.
And yet they are two sides of the same fascist coin, skeptical of individualism and personal responsibility, insistent upon expansion of government, protectionist for guilds, guileless in their corrupt and bankrupt ideologies. They are, in fact, an axis of evil, paternal twins of the same political color.Once this competition to be America’s Commander-in-Cheat ends, they will kiss and make up, as all evil twins do – with a wink and a smirk.