A few days ago Condoleezza Rice stated that America would be just fine under an Obama administration. That, of course, depends on how things go down and especially on how you define “just fine”. It has been repeatedly observed that Obama is a cipher. Cipher being, for those of you too lazy to click on a free on-line dictionary is a zero; one that has no weight, worth, or influence; a nonentity; a method of transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning; a coded message. One couldn’t ask for a more thorough description of the man as we know and understand him today. He is a ghost, a phantom, a shadow in the dark at best.
You have to ask yourself, “How does a man get to be in his late 40s and the presidential nominee of the largest political party in the United States, and do it all while leaving little more than vapors as his background?”
I have been mocked by a few folks for believing that John McCain would be a good president. Which is strange, because I don’t believe that. I believe John is the classical example of the lesser of two evils. The only candidates I could enthusiastically support were the first ones eliminated, which should have told me more than it did about the state of intellectual obliviousness prevalent in this election cycle. I don’t believe that John McCain would be a good president. I just believe he’ll screw the country up less and that the mess he leaves will be fixable—mostly.
Obama is like some physical phenomenon that can’t be observed directly, atoms for example, and we can only learn about him through indirect means. The man’s critics have been accused of practicing guilt by association but when that’s all you’ve got, that’s all you’ve got. Besides, if I find out that your best friend spends most of his time hanging out with drug cartel hit men, that tells me a lot about your friend—and you. One only has to go out one degree of separation to find a myriad of two-legged cockroaches scurrying away from the light. Saul Alinsky, for example. and in his case a list of his disciples is a veritable rogues gallery in its own right.
So is Condoleezza right? Will America be just fine? As I said, that all depends. If the man gets too cocky and overreaches himself in his efforts to make America a socialist paradise and just another neighborhood in the global village, I say yes. We’ll have a few really, really bad years. The nation and Congress will realize their mistake and dig in, marginalizing him until he can be voted out of office. America would be truly just fine. We would only have wasted a few years which is small when you consider the 1930s or the 1960s and realize that, as a nation, we’ve wasted entire decades and survived.
But what about the far more likely case? Obama gets what he wants while the unthinking herds of the electorate get what they deserve. Then we get to the matter of definition. If you define “just fine” as American still existing pretty much as is at the end of his term, then yes we’ll be just fine. If you define “just fine” as the existence of some political entity calling itself “The United States of America” a century or so down the line, then yes we’ll be just fine.
But what if you define “just fine” differently? What if you define it as a constitutional republic with freely elected representatives? What if you define it as a sovereign nation-state actively seeking to achieve its best interest in the long-term? What if you define it as a distinctive English-speaking culture that stresses the traditional ideals of Western Civilization, especially the Anglo-American model? A culture that stresses individualism and self-reliance? A free-market economy where one is taxed lightly and only for direct benefits that he receives that can’t be provided by the free market, such as national defense and protection from people who think like Obama?
Well, friends if you define “just fine” that way—as I do—then we are well and truly screwed.
The more I study the man, the more concerned I become. A similar reaction to what I’ve experienced in my studies of Islam and Muslims. (The more you know, the more you wish you didn’t know.) No, Obama wouldn’t kill the country by his second day in office, nor by the end of—God forbid!—his second term. But he could very well be the guy who nicks that artery that allows Uncle Sam to slowly bleed out over the next forty or fifty years. Don’t believe it? Look back fifty years to the 1950s and what could and couldn’t be done then, what was thinkable and unthinkable.
Science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote a number of stories described as being “if this goes on…” in nature. I submit that if the country continues on its current trajectory that within most of our lifetimes, we could all find ourselves Strangers in a Strange—and Hostile—Land.
