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This is about Barack Obama’s relationship to a charming, well-meaning but ultimately rather contemptible chap called Dave.
This Dave. Another guy called Lawrence also comes into it as well.
I loathe the film Dave. As entertainment it’s fine. Politically it is a liberal (US sense) wish fulfillment fantasy with the sole redeeming virtue that it implicitly acknowledges that the only way they would get their way is by lies. In it a nice but dopey guy called Dave substitutes for his double, the philandering, i.e. Republican, President of the United States. The switch was intended to be just for one appearance at first but ends up being permanent when the President has a stroke.
From the synopsis: “When he takes the extreme action of reworking (with the help of his friend Murray, an accountant from Baltimore) the national budget in order to save a $650 million program for helping the homeless … ” When he takes the extreme action, you mean, of foisting on the American people a programme they did not vote for and presumably voted against when they elected a President who opposed it. Again from the synopsis: “…Dave convinces her [the president’s wife] to remain and keep up the ruse, when he realizes he has a chance to improve the nation.” You mean, a chance to impose his will on the nation. “Dave then holds a news conference announcing that he is firing Alexander [conniving Chief of Staff], and proposing a comprehensive full-employment program to Congress. [Liberal wish fulfillment fantasy.]
For some reason the film does not cover the bit where he gets hammered in the mid-term elections, having suddenly proposed a lunatic plan to Congress that seems to come from the manifesto of the sort of party that Ralph Nader voted for when young and silly.
None of the nice characters in the film seem troubled by the idea what they are doing – unconstitutionally replacing the elected leader with an unelected leader who takes the country in the direction he personally thinks best – scarcely differs morally from a coup d’état. All is justified by Dave’s goodness.
The plot of Dave, a movie that deeply annoys me, is very close to that of a science fiction novel I love, Heinlein’s Double Star.
Can I think of a better reason than political partisanship for claiming that the people who substituted Dave Kovic for a political leader in a coma in Dave acted wrongly and the people who substituted Lawrence Smith a.k.a. The Great Lorenzo for a political leader in a coma in Double Star acted rightly? I think so. Heinlein, who had thought deeply about democracy even if he did not always like it, went to some trouble to give John Joseph Bonforte’s staff as little choice as possible.
Most urgently, if Bonforte does not turn up at a Martian ceremony in which he is to be adopted into a Martian clan it will be taken as an insult graver than any human can imagine and will probably cause inter-species war. That’s the whole reason he was kidnapped.
Secondly Bonforte is not out of commission because of natural causes but because his political enemies kidnapped him and used drugs to damage his mind. In other words the substitution is stopping the bad guys benefiting from their evil deeds. People are being deceived, yes, but the deceivers are doing all they can to make what would have happened without the crime happen despite it, not to make new things happen.
Oh yeah, thirdly, he is not actually in office when the substitution occurs. The voters are not having someone they did not vote for secretly substituted for someone they did; they are subject to the lesser deception of being asked to vote anew (in an election part-way through the book) for someone who is not really who he says he is. I think that makes a difference.
Anyway, back to Barack. This “secret Muslim” theory is conspiracy crap, or possibly people having a laugh when answering surveys. He was born in the US and Trig is Palin’s child so you can all put away your warming pans. And the man has a rather distinctive physical appearance that would be difficult to duplicate.
Bodily he is but morally he is not the Barack who campaigned as a centrist. Which deceiver does he resemble the most, do you think, Dave or the Great Lorenzo?
Added later: I would like to expand on my last sentence above in the light of thoughts prompted by the comments. Having an elected leader diverge from the manifesto he or she was elected upon is sometimes the price you pay and sometimes the benefit you get for electing a human being rather than an automaton. Human beings adapt to circumstances, which may include justifiably breaking a promise. They also deceive or – and this is an interesting case – are happy to let others deceive themselves. Caveat emptor.
The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d’etre.
And I thought hipsters were knickers that came up to your hips. Now I know better. Chap in the Guardian says that because this clothes company called American Apparel went bust it just goes to show what he always said about capitalism.
Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation’s role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d’etre… I tells ‘ee, one of these nights we’ll all be murthered in our beds.
“So Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reid are all on Air Force One. Suddenly it malfunctions and crashes. Who survives? America.”
From a commenter on this item.
Actually, the logic applies to most countries and their governments. Parts of our MSM like to believe that if the leader of X or Y has a problem, dies or whatever, that the nation will be plunged into chaos. Not so; it is a mark of a healthy country that the passing of a leader, even in tragic circumstances such as those affecting Poland recently, is not a massive blow to the country per se.
Tangentially, this book by Gene Healy about the “cult” of the modern presidency is worth reading.
“Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble? When it comes to handling oil spills, the answer is Richard Nixon. Like our current president, Nixon too presided over a major offshore oil blowout—the three million gallon Santa Barbara spill of 1969. And, like Mr. Obama, Nixon responded by whipping up anti-oil sentiment and passing a sweeping moratorium on drilling. This parallel is important to keep in mind, because Nixon’s reaction helped cause the worst energy crisis in American history.”
Alex Epstein.
Alas, the rest of the article is behind the WSJ subscriber firewall (I wonder how that is working out for Mr Murdoch, Ed).
Head Start, which provides preschool programs to poor families, is a prime example of the Senate committee’s true attitude toward evidence-based decision-making. In January, the Health and Human Services Department released a study of Head Start’s overall impact. The conclusions were disturbing. By the end of first grade, the study found, Head Start graduates were doing no better than students who didn’t attend Head Start. “No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year,” the report concluded.
And how did the Senate panel react to this dismal evidence? They set aside $8.2 billion for Head Start in 2011, almost a billion dollars more than in 2010. Of course, the fact that Congress spends billions of dollars each year on unproven programs does not itself argue that the government should start spending hundreds of millions of new dollars on new unproven programs. But it does undercut the argument that federal education dollars should be reserved only for conclusively proven initiatives.
– Paul Tough in an op-ed in the New York Times.
…via Steve Sailer, who comments:
That’s pretty funny when you stop and think about it.
The United States operates what it refers to as the Visa Waiver Program. This allows citizens of other rich countries to make short visits to the US without the hassle of obtaining a visa in advance. This follows what is pretty much standard practice: citizens of most rich countries can visit most other rich countries without obtaining a visa. In recent times the US has also required visitors to register their passport numbers with a US government website prior to coming to the US, presumably so that potential visitors can be checked against a list of prohibited visitors. This is more than most other rich countries require (although my native Australia has a very similar system) but is a very minor inconvenience.
Up until now, this whole process has been free of charge to the traveler. However, as of September 8, the US will start charging a $14 fee for people who wish to use the visa waiver program.
It is not actually terribly uncommon for governments to extort charge money from tourists in ways like this, but it is once again relatively unusual for such fees to be charged when citizens of one rich country visit another rich country. (Fees are more common when citizens of rich countries visit poor countries or vice versa). As a frequent traveler, however, I find such fees loathsome. Having a moneygrubbing government steal money from you is not a good first impression of a country. Such policies do of course influence where I choose to travel to, and whether I will return to a country for multiple visits.
What does boggle the mind about the new US policy is its justification. The fee has been introduced under something called the Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which was passed with overwhelming support in both houses of Congress. Apparently, the money is to be used to set up something called the Corporation for Travel Promotion, which will apparently “promote America to overseas tourists”, and thus halt the decline in tourism to the US.
Got that? A tax is to be imposed on tourists, the proceeds of which will be used to set up a new bureaucracy to promote US tourism to foreigners, who will then come in greater numbers.
Brilliant.
I was about to stick this up as a(n) SQotD, but I see that there already is one. Never mind, here it is anyway:
Belief in magic and faith in spells runs strong in political Washington. The New Republic’s print edition describes the reaction of the Administration on “April 14, 2009 as Barack Obama’s standing in the polls was beginning to slip”. Obama was looking for a phrase to bring back the love, “something that would evoke comparisons to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”
Obama had hit on the phrase the New Foundation. He tried it out with Presidential historians at a private dinner in the White House. Doris Kearns Goodwin nixed it. She said it sounded “like a woman’s girdle”. Goodwin was right. But it underscores the complete vacuity of a public policy built on wordsmithing. The administration was trying on words like a courtier at Versailles might try on a hat or a dress thinking it would make a difference.
Not that there is anything wrong with hats or dresses or deckchairs. The only thing wrong is imagining that rearranging these articles on the deck of the Titanic will keep it afloat. There’s something crazy about that, something pathetically crazy.
That’s Richard Fernandez reflecting on the declining esteem in which President Obama is now held, abroad and at home.
Two thoughts. First, I’d have put a comma where it says “hats or dresses or deckchairs”, to make it “hats or dresses, or deckchairs”. There is a slight change of gear there, which, I would say, needs a bit of punctuational acknowledgement.
But second, more seriously, is Obama’s present nosedive in esteem, well described by Fernandez, irreversible? Having just watched our own former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, damn near levelling out from what looked like a nosedive towards total catastrophe for himself and for his party, and achieving a very decent, under the circumstances, crash landing that nearly saved both. Brown only lost by an extraordinarily narrow margin, given how things had looked only a few months earlier, and his main opponent, from having looked a winner by a mile, had to make do with leading a mere coalition. Seemingly doomed politicians – inevitable losers, to use the word that Fernandez also uses – can make comebacks. Can Obama? Can this Titanic yet be kept afloat?
One thing that might improve matters for President Obama is that just now (or so it looks to me from over here) even the one party media who got Obama elected are now criticising him, a bit, partly for real, but partly in order that their next burst of slavish support for him will look honest instead of slavish.
On the other hand, if what happened here with Gordon Brown is anything to go by, Obama’s saviours will not be his media cheerleaders, or for that matter his own speechwriters, but his leading opponents, who will somehow contrive to look as clueless as he now looks.
In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic – the perceived party of free stuff – rather than for the party that ended slavery.
– Rachel Marsden
The American media has used up its credibility on vanity projects. AGW was the primary one over the last few years, but the biggest vanity project of theirs was Obama. He’s been elected, and no one in America really has any illusions, on either side of the aisle, that he was “the media’s candidate.” The problem that they face is that they are now tied to him, and he’s sinking fast. Turns out, despite how many times they claimed it wasn’t true or didn’t matter, that he’s inexperienced, indecisive and lacks any sort of guiding principle. They spent all the credibility they had with the American people over the last 15 years or so, and ramped that spending way up to get Obama elected. They are now broke, incredible, and paying the price. Fox News is the only one that didn’t waste its credibility capital on this (and have learned to horde it viciously after being under credibility attack by the others since its birth) and is now thriving because of it. Even leftists in America are now turning to Fox more than the rest of the media when they need hard news, like in a crisis or attack situation. The media wasted the reputation they built up since WW2 on tawdry baubles like AGW and Obama, and now no one trusts them. That’s the state of the US media.
– Samizdata commenter “Phelps”, writing about this.
I would be very interested to learn what our American commenters make of Andrew Breitbart. My impression is that he’s really making misery for the One Party Media in the USA, but occasionally making mistakes. Did he mishandle that video featuring Shirley Sherrod? Or is he being falsely accused of having done so by lilly-livered Conservatives who are too keen on being liked by liberals who will always despise them? My impression is that Breitbart didn’t call Sherrod a racist, but that he did, rightly, call her audience racist.
I ask because the latest Breitbart sally seems to contain a (another?) quite serious error. The New York Times has issued what looks to me like a deeply dishonest “retraction”, saying that the racist things said to some Congressman in the street were nothing to do with the Tea Party Movement, when the actual truth, as commenter number one on his piece immediately points out, is that they were nothing to do with anything because they never even happened. And Breitbart seems to me to be letting the New York Times get clean away with this piece of blatant scumbaggery, contenting himself with merely demanding that all the other One Party Media organs issue the same utterly dishonest semi-retraction. If this is Breitbart hitting back twice as hard, my reaction is that he could have landed a far heavier flurry of punches than he just did. Is that a fair criticism, and even if it is, am I just doing that old arm-chair moaner thing of saying that whoever is doing the real business for my team, when I am doing nothing, could be doing even better. Am I demanding the best in a way that is for practical purposes hostile to the good?
Whatever the particular truth about just how good a job Breitbart is or is not doing on the One Party Media, I get the distinct impression from over here that something very big is happening to the US media. Some kind of – sorry but the phrase is exactly appropriate – “tipping point” seems to be being reached.
The thing is, people on the whole tend not to unleash cumbersome solutions upon circumstances that don’t seem to be a problem. It takes time for people to desert their old familiar ways of acquainting themselves with what’s going on in the world, and there has to be a solid reason to do this, same as there has to be a solid reason to move house or switch from PCs to a Mac, or to stop drinking any alcohol. It takes some particular lie about something that they are personally familiar with, to “tip” them, like when their own genuinely good-guy cousin and his thoroughly nice wife get called (along with a few thousand other people) racists by some loud-mouthed hand-deep-in-the-government-till scam-artist on the television, without any corrective complaint from the grey-haired professorial old guy introducing it, and when they read the same stuff in their newspaper the next morning. At which point they start suspecting that everything else in their formerly trusted newspaper, or on their hitherto perfectly adequate TV channel, could also be deception and scumbaggery. The point being that this switch wasn’t going to happen all in one go, with the overnight arrival of the internet. But I have the feeling that the number of US citizens who are, just about now, arriving at this point in their news and current affairs habits, is becoming something approaching a Moment in US History.
Is that right? Or just wishful thinking. To put it another way, Paul Marks is fond of saying in comments here that “most people” still get their news from the regular old media rather than from blogs and such. Is that observation starting to become seriously obsolete? After all, if a quite large percentage of those who still read (exclusively) and trust (implicitly) the regular old media now have family or friends whom they do not consider to be completely mad who don’t and who don’t, that has to change things. Doesn’t it? At the very least, that means that the One Party Media are now experienced by most as putting forward a distinct point of view, rather than just serving up The News. And that’s quite a change. Isn’t it?
ADDENDUM: I wrote what is immediately above before reading Dale’s piece immediately below.
I have not yet read ‘American Empire: Before the Fall’ yet myself but have been hearing a great deal about it.
I do not myself believe America is going to ‘fall’. Quite the contrary, I believe it is the ruling class in America that is about to go through a very big fall, albeit with some bad short term consequences for the nation before that occurs.
The very fact that a self-published book can rise so far in the Amazon rankings is a testament to just how ticked off average Americans are with the power elite.
Their day of reckoning is coming.
Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you.
– Tom Smith
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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