Though his list of offenses against American liberty is lengthy, Barack Obama will not be held accountable. The American press will never become critical of his words or deeds in a substantive and sustained manner. And, short of an epiphany, Congress will not muster the courage to judge him with normative standards.
We all know why, but we are not allowed to say it: he is immune to substantive criticism because of skin color.
And Mr. Obama is absolved of more than criticism; he is immune to reality itself.
Attempting to remedy the former institutional injustices that black people suffered in America, the press overcompensates to alleviate the ongoing white guilt phenomenon of postmodern liberalism. Racial narratives are sometimes manufactured when racism is nonexistent in the actual story — and in the case of Barack Obama, storylines were created out of whole cloth.
The unimpeachable sainthood afforded to Obama because of the new nobility has taken the unreal to the surreal. American journalists are the proud producers and directors of the Obama as president production.
One of the requirements of movie-going is the ability to suspend disbelief. The willing suspension of disbelief is a 19th-century concept attributable to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The term is used today when moviegoers ignore the implausible and impossible in order to enjoy the production on the big screen.
Imagine a moviegoer shouting, “That’s fake!” during a moment when the good guy is doing something that would be ridiculous in the real world. That’s effectively what Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) did when President Obama was pushing his health care bill before the full Congress in 2009. During his presentation, Mr. Obama was arrogant, and accusatory of those who disagreed with his grand vision of central control of our health care system. Even worse, the lecture was filled with untruths and misrepresentations. Joe Wilson could suspend disbelief for only so long, and finally he shouted out those two words which will live forever in idiosyncrasy:
“You lie!”
Congressman Wilson broke decorum, but not because of the forum alone. The public, liberals and conservatives alike, have been conditioned to suspend disbelief and exercise good manners and enjoy (or at least accept) the performance of Obama as a post-partisan, post-racial, all-American president of the United States.
Though, remarkably, almost everything about the Obama production is built on pretending one thing or another.
The very candidacy of Obama was make-believe. It was Obama himself who, when asked by a reporter if he would run for the presidency in 2008, said:
You know, I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. And I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I’m not one of those people.
Well, once the liberal press selected him for the job, Obama became comfortable “doing that” overnight. Mr. Obama himself acknowledged that, if plunged into the White House, he would not know what he was doing. Nevertheless, once he realized that he had been ordained, indispensable experience took a backseat to clever slogans, like “hope and change” and big-voice speeches (with a little help from his teleprompters).
By running anyway, Obama revealed a complete lack of character. Nevertheless, the elitists who form public opinion pretended that Obama was ready for the White House. After, all, they were making history.
At the core was a man with no entrepreneurial, business, executive, or military experience. Yet layer upon layer of made-up persona was wrapped around the empty center until fiction somehow became non-fiction. With each layer of pretension came a new occasion to suspend disbelief. At some point, the line between the unreal and real became blurred.
For many, what otherwise would have been normal and reasonable vetting of a candidate became unreasonable persecution of a black man.
During the Democrat primary, Hillary’s campaign was set to elaborate on Obama’s “lack of American roots.” But once the racist label began to attach to anyone who raised the truth about Obama, Hillary backed off — and ultimately lost the nomination.
John McCain became so fearful that he actually instructed his supporters to cease from uttering the middle name of Barack Hussein Obama II. Saying his full name, you see, was unfair — and racist. Running from reality didn’t fare well for McCain, either.
Mr. Obama further revealed his lack of character and his utter contempt for the citizenry by refusing to deal openly with the question of whether he was even constitutionally eligible for the presidency.
Regardless of venue, Obama does not deny that he was born with dual allegiances because of his father’s foreign citizenship.
The question of whether one could be born with conflicting national allegiances and still be a “natural born” citizen per our Constitution’s presidential eligibility clause has never been answered by our Supreme Court.
But instead of welcoming an authoritative legal ruling, Team Obama became contentious, secretive, and evasive.
The possible red herring or bait-and-switch was the birth certificate debacle. As Obama was creating a sideshow with his arrogance, evasiveness, and secrecy, he and his media were accusing others of creating a sideshow for asking questions about his unreasonable secrecy.
Yet, based on peer pressure and fear of name-calling, many willingly suspended disbelief. Regardless of the seemingly endless oddities of Obama’s background, including the fact that Obama portrayed himself for a decade and a half as having been “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii,” those who wanted full disclosure were the bad guys — the racist haters. It was beneath Mr. Obama to provide basic records to remove the doubt and mistrust of a large percentage of the citizenry.
Prior to Obama’s re-election, Mitt Romney had the perfect occasion to call for the end of Obama’s stanch secrecy. When Obama was demanding that Mitt produce old tax records, the governor could have made that request contingent upon Obama actually producing his birth certificate — and, for good measure, his college records.
Of course, Mr. Romney followed the conventional wisdom, stuck with the “real issues,” and ignored Obama’s unique background and bizarre secrecy. And we saw how that turned out for Mitt and the establishment Republicans thereafter (they had their derrieres handed to them by Obama).
In our Orwellian environment, it would have been crazy-land talk for Mitt to have made such a request. But take away the skin color immunity and the D after his name, and the press would have demanded that Obama produce his records at the onset.
If we were to consider, without emotion, the matter of Obama “releasing” his birth certificate, we would weigh Obama’s level of inconvenience in producing against the benefit Obama would get from transparency.
It’s a no-brainer. The inconvenience to Obama would be slight compared to the immeasurable reward of establishing trust with the people.
The president would earn respect from his skeptics by taking the next logical step to signing the release for his birth certificate: making certified copies available for interested state election officials. Then Mr. Obama could sign another release form for his birth hospital to admit he was born there. And if he really wanted to get caught up in the confidence-building moment, he could sign a release allowing Occidental to provide his college application.
If Obama has nothing to hide, his minimal effort would provide a soothing balm for a divided country.
I dare to bring up the eligibility issue to show that once the country broke from reality and suspended disbelief, common sense was lost along the way.
Mr. Obama was shielded from his lack of experience, his own middle name, and the facts of his training in Indonesia (third-world Islam), Hawaii (Marxism via Frank Marshall Davis), and Chicago (black grievance via Jeremiah Wright). Since Obama was and is above the
inconvenience of submitting to a controlling legal opinion on the question of natural-born citizen status or even producing a requested legal document, what else might he be shielded from?
The answer, in short, is everything.
That is why we have a president who adds to the national debt like no other, but insists he is reducing it; wastes tax dollars by the trillions, but preaches about fiscal responsibility; condemns Bush for illegal torture of terrorists, but summarily drone-kills suspects (and even an American citizen); stirs up racial divide with his impetuous remarks, yet is portrayed as a post-racial healer; ignores laws and Congress when he wants to (see the bombing of Libya without congressional authorization) but seeks congressional authorization to bomb Syria because democracy makes us stronger (not because he couldn’t gather a coalition and again surrender U.S. military power to the UN); and on and on the list goes.
It’s surreal. It’s pure madness.
What other U.S. president ever had a different foreign identity, two first relatives in the country illegally, a brother with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and unresolved problems with a host of records relating to his eligibility?
In order to get to the core of Obama, an army of brave statesmen would need to rise up and deal with the real issues. Until then, come hell or high water, the show must go on — until that blessed day when the curtains finally close on the theatre of the absurd.
