Thursday, January 12, 2017

Obama's Farewell - The World Breathes A Sigh Of Relief

From my 'safe space' in Britain I was spared all but minimal exposure to the farewell speech of America's first black president, Brack Hussein Obama. The snippets I have read, heard or seen suggest it was every bit as self - aggrandising, vapid, cliche - ridden and divorced from reality as every other speech this poseur has made since 2008. No surprises there then, anyone who has seen Obama standing at the podium, mouth noiselessly flapping like a codfish on the deck of a trawler on occasions when his autocue has failed will know that the great orator, acclaimed by his sycophantic disciples for his intellect and soaring rhetoric, is a gibbering idiot when there is no electronic device feeding him words.

It hardly needs saying then that Obama's final speech as president, peppered liberally with strongly emphasised personal pronouns as per usual, was all about what a great president Barack Hussein Obama has been. No mention of course of the deeply divided, economically failing nation he will hand over to his successor, nor of the wars, those he has started and those he has failed to finish. Oh no, the boy  Barry is quite convinced the USA is a far better place now than it was when he was inaugurated.

A majority of Americans seem to differ however. Here's a masterful deconstruction of the farewell speech, , from David Harsanyi for The Federalist, in which the lies, delusions, arrogance and hubris of Barack Hussein Obama are exposed.

The Comforting Fictions Of Obama’s Farewell Speech

Last night the president cast himself as a resilient truth teller. The reality is quite different.
 
Watching Barack Obama’s speech at the 2008 DNC in Denver, I doubt I could have imagined the kind of turmoil his presidency would incite. Almost everything has changed in the subsequent years, and yet his farewell speech to the nation was brimming with the same kind of haughty lecturing we got back then.

Obama loves to conflate progressivism with patriotism, pitting the forces of decency and empathy — his own — against the self-serving profiteers and meddling reactionaries who stand in the way. All of it is swathed in phony optimism.

The president’s central case for government’s existence rests on the notion of the state being society’s moral center, engine of prosperity, and arbiter of fairness. This has never been normal. Obama speaks of government as a theocrat might of church—and his fans return the favor by treating him like a pope. This was true in 2008. And it’s true now. Just check out liberal Twitterdom.

There was much to process, and many policy claims to debunk, but for me the most grating aspect of the address were the broader fictions Obama likes to repeat.
“When Congress is dysfunctional,” Obama explained, “we should draw our districts to encourage politicians to cater to common sense and not rigid extremes.” For the president, a “dysfunctional” Congress means a Congress unwilling to pass progressive legislation. That is not the definition of dysfunctional, I’m afraid. Nor is it the definition of extreme.

There is nothing in the Constitution instructing legislators to acquiesce to the president. In the near future, the GOP Congress will be passing tons of legislation, and I can assure you neither Obama, nor his many fans in the media, will be celebrating the fact that Congress is finally “getting stuff done” or “doing its job.” 

Progress will no longer be measured in the number of bills signed.

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