4 Mar 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald
This whole Obama madness will someday -- when that someday comes is the big question -- -- be recognized for the national embarrassment it is. It demonstrates a popular confusion between the aims of politics, and the pastime of self-improvement and self-validation. The degradation of the democratic dogma is, in the current case, explained in part by a sense of desperation, fed by both the colossal fiasco of the war in Iraq (and that in turn has been prompted by the continuing inability to come to grips with the meaning, and menace, of Islam), and what is now rightly sensed as almost a third-worldish maldistribution of wealth. Furthermore, while there is no doubt that the spectacle of the insensate money-making by the grasping Bill Clinton, with his Kazakhstan contacts, and his assorted Burkles, and his self-aggrandizing "charity" that only provides an excuse for him to piously rope still more billionaires into his orbit for his own purposes, has disgusted, that is not sufficient reason to prefer, if one prefers Democrats, someone who has been in national office for exactly two years, has no legislation to his credit, at the state level was similarly undistinguished in what he accomplished (though good at claiming credit), who has here and there -- the obvious plagiarism, which he made such light of, the dealings with an obviously louche character like Rezko, the reliance on such people as Zbigniew Brzezinski and other foreign policy advisers whose records offer every conceivable warning signal of being unable to come to grips with Islam -- including Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism, as in the Sudan, the special interest of Samantha Powers, and of being unable to recognize, much less join other Western countries in beginning to deal with, the Muslim threat within Western Europe. And the troubles that Israel faces, because of its own inability to articulate the nature of what it faces (a permanent Jihad, with enemies among the immediate, local Arabs -- those "Palestinians" -- divided, as the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, as to tactics and timing, not as to the ultimate, permanent, demanded-by-Islam goal: an end to the Infidel nation-state of Israel.
The comical and hollow talk about "change" and "Yes We Can" should, by this point, embarrass even the most ardent supporers of Citizen Obama. But apparently things are too far gone for that. It's a Tent Rally, a Revival Meeting, a renewal of Whitfield's Great Awakening. Yes We Can. Yes We Can. Yes We Can. If you like crowd psychology, and losing yourself in a mass of true believers, then this candidacy is just for you.
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