The simplest explanation for a phenomenon, ceteris paribus, is to be preferred. Here is my candidate for understanding current American policy regarding Iran: Barack Obama wants Iran to acquire a a nuclear weapon, indeed several or even many nuclear weapons. Why? To teach Israel a lesson and put the fear of God into Israelis. The President very well may not be a crude anti-Semite, though his everything-but-casual relationship with Jeremiah Wright and other “black” radicals makes it at least plausible, in my opinion, that Obama instinctively dislikes Jews, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod definitely notwithstanding. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on that particular prejudice. Assume instead that he is at the very least a fervent anti-Zionist who much prefers, not a two-state, but a one-state solution, in which state, Jews and all Palestinians share a single citizenship as equals. (By the way, it’s pointless to object that I am only making a big assumption. The assertion is proffered in an Ockhamite spirit, as having the greatest explanatory power per syllable among all possible assumptions. If it is simultaneously an accusation of anti-Western bigotry on Obama’s part, well, make the most of it, says I.)
The President’s strategic priority here is that Westerners, and especially white Westerners, no longer be in the position of Middle Eastern dynasts, namely, statutory rulers of non-Westerners (Muslims for the most part) dwelling with and among the Jews in this case. Furthermore, the scenario that I’m suggesting is entertained by Obama (and key foreign-policy advisors) has two prongs. In the first, Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the ability to loft them Jerusalem-wards. Israel, put on notice by the US, does little or nothing about it. For reasons that I feel no obligation to flesh out here, such an outcome must before long lead to the extinction of the Zionist enterprise known as the State of Israel.
The second prong, obviously, is that Israel will strike Iran to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons over the near term. All the terrible things that have been forecast should Israel attack Iran very probably will occur. In that case, the Administration will sever all ties to the country, or will at least attempt to do so, and Israel will be abandoned to its fate. Needless to say, that outcome will not be the end of Israel but the end of American support for Zionism.
Like all leftists, Barack Obama is a leveler. He will bow enthusiastically to the Emperor of Japan because he is both non-white and non-Western. He will bow obsequiously to the King of Saudi Arabia because he is non-Western. On the other hand, he will merely nod to the Queen of England because she is echt white and Western. Elizabeth II is the literal embodiment of the historical dominance of non-whites and non-Westerners by white, Western “imperialists.” The Chinese, naturally enough, must be accorded supreme deference in this hierarchical scheme. In Copenhagen, for example, Obama wasted no time with the Europeans, whom, I suspect, he despises, but went hat in hand to the President of China for approbation. George Bush and Bill Clinton’s toleration of the political deformity that is present-day “Communist” China was largely pragmatic. Obama’s is viscerally ideological. It is a thoroughly depraved ideology, true, but an ideology nonetheless.
To resume, the Iranians, who are white but fanatically anti-Western, currently have a well-wisher in the Oval Office. Let them get the bomb, and let the Jews, the white, Western canaries in the geopolitical coal mine, tremble. What more might an anti-Western bigot, whom the West in a spirit of deracinated anti-bigotry nominated as its spokesman, desire?
Comments 82
It sounds like David Duke has invaded ZombieLand.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:01 am
It is interesting to psychoanalyze politicians, but what they do counts, and what they feel is irrelevant. Political figures have been known to reverse their positions. Does this mean their feelings have changed? It may or may not, but in all likelihood, they acted for political rather than psychological reasons. What does Obama feel about sending 30,000 more Americans to fight in Afghanistan? We may never know, but the decision was made.
Does Ahmadinejad really want to destroy Israel even if it means his own death and the death of half the population of Iran? Or is he just pursuing a cuckoo policy because of the inner workings of his political world? Again, we may never know. Knowing his motives might tell us whether we can deter him or not, which would be quite valuable. But we have to respond to him whether or not we know his motives.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:06 am
@ Rex Caruthers:
That’s unjustified and offensive.
I suppose Joe kind of asked for it by offering his theory in a provocative manner. It could have been offered without standing on intentionality: The notion that, regardless of what the Obami think about what they’re doing subjectively, what they’re actually doing amounts to the same thing or even worse as consciously seeking a rupture with Israel and a massive setback to US influence. In other words, it would be a socio-political psychoanalysis in which there are no mistakes, but in which seeming mistakes instead reveal a perhaps unconscious but no less powerful underlying dynamic.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:11 am
I feel like shouting “jinx!” to George on psychoanalysis: I’d just say that an accurate political psychoanalysis might be useful, not because it tells us something important about Obama (or Ahmadinejad) as an individual – in the end, why should we care who he is when he’s at home? – but because it might help us organize and integrate seemingly contradictory and inexplicable evidence, and anticipate the next moves.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:15 am
@ CK McLeod:
I don’t understand. What does “shouting jinx” mean?
December 29th, 2009 at 8:20 am
No, David Duke is a penpal of Ahmadinejad. It’s not about psychoanalysis it’s in his book “I will stand with the Moslems’
in dark times, it’s his batty preacher out of Bonfire. It’s the State
department planning chief, and ironically self professed genocide
historian, who has been proactively Palestinian. It’s the National Security Advisors own words on the subject, all wishing to circumscribe the action of Israel. The way he gave Kaddafi and Ahmadinejad carte blanche to slander Israel, and then seemingly sees settlements as the larger problem
December 29th, 2009 at 8:22 am
President Obama may desire it; but the country will not buy into breaking with Israel after a disarming attack on Iran.
Americans as a whole don’t love Jews; but an awful lot of them hate and fear Muslims.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:22 am
@ George Jochnowitz:
When we were kids, if you and someone else said the same word at the same time, you could call “jinx”: That meant that the other person could not speak until you released him or her from the spell.
I do not recall any specific penalty, punishment, or curse attached to someone who spoke without being released – because no one dared!
December 29th, 2009 at 8:29 am
“It is interesting to psychoanalyze politicians, but what they do counts, and what they feel is irrelevant.”
Irrelevant? Besides, I’m not “psychoanalyzing” anybody, at least in any recognizable sense of the word “psychoanalyze.” Obama seeks an Iran militarily at par – or better – with Israel because he’s an anti-Zionist. What tensions within his subconscious have I appealed to? I am looking for an “explanatory” principle here, one that possibly sheds light on his baffling, to my mind, Iran policy to date and does so as simply as possible. Let’s use your own criterion: Obama’s “words” are that he is against Iran having the bomb. Obama is “doing” absolutely nothing to prevent the Iranians from going nuclear. Which of those postures is relevant?
A lot of people with a great deal more expertise than I have on the matter have openly declared that Obama and his advisers are “resigned” to an Iranian nuclear capability. (By your lights, George, that amounts to psychoanalyzing them.) I’m simply pushing that position, which is certainly arguable, further along in claiming that it is something more than resignation that we’re witnessing.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Bravo, Joe! Welcome back, Dude!
Liberals/progressives never care to understand the logical consequences of their thought processes or intentions. They are who they are and they do what they do. This explains the Jewish Obamabot enablers, who wouldn’t mind seeing those right wing Israelis taken down a notch or two. They don’t care to direct their thinking in a way which might carry their little brains to the logical conclusion that their ideas and their policies and their lack of brisk actions would significantly increase the risks to what we might call a civilized way of life.
If you don’t want to see something, you resent and even try to destroy those who insist on asking you to see it. This could explain the nastiness of the political debate.
December 29th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Zoltan, thanks for the welcome. And Colin, I appreciate your efforts at explaining what I meant, but I do wish to stress that what I’m suggesting is the case really does depend on its being “intentional” if it is to have any persuasive force at all. That the Administration is standing by witlessly as a dire threat to our most important ally in the region grows ever more real cannot be simply a matter of not having thought the consequences of inaction through or of wishful thinking – with well wishes to all concerned parties. Something malign is afoot.
That said, I confess that in my penultimate paragraph I did venture into some psychological profiling of the President. I cannot evade the charge, so George (and Colin), you are correct on that score.
December 29th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Sully wrote:
I believe that your last sentence nails it pretty much. Touche.
Oh, and need I say it? The Muslims have made us hate and fear them because of their totally intolerant and uncivilized behavior. HELLO??
December 29th, 2009 at 9:22 am
I am trying to understand the baffling behavior of so many Jews who are Obamabots. Axelrod and Tutu (Rham has been known to wear one when his hair is down or up in a cute little bun) are observant Modern Orthodox Jews, not your typical secular Bernsteins. They actulally go to synagogue and have family and friends in Israel. Most of the tens of thousands of Jews who gave %O/ the max $2300 have some connection to their religion. The matriarch of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in the USA co chaired his presidential campaign.
So, yes, Obama might be a true disciple of Rev. Wright and Louie Farrakhan, but what of the Jews who surround him? Are they taking advantage of their own narcissistic desire to be close to the center of power?
WHAT MUST THEY BE THINKING? WHAT IS GOING ON INSIDE THEIR HEADS?
Are they just like the Jews who would not listen to Moishe The Beadle and got on the trains instead?
December 29th, 2009 at 9:45 am
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Why Are Jews Liberals?
I hope to have more to say about this book down the line. In short, NPod avoids modes of analysis of the sort that academics might indulge in if they hated Obama and liberals as they do conservatives, and instead privileges the historical experience of the Jews – centuries upon centuries during which the main threats almost always came first and most significantly from the political right, in whatever religious, nationalistic, or pseudo-scientific guise. He finally argues that for the majority of modern day American Jews, the Torah of liberalism has effectively replaced the Torah of their forefathers.
As for what goes on in the minds and souls of Axelrod and Emanuel… oi, now that’s a question! One might guess that they believe maintaining their positions at or near the centers of power is worth tactical sacrifices – the greater the power, the greater and more justifiable the sacrifice. I’ll resist any comparisons to the positions of Jewish leaders of other times and places.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:06 am
@ Joe NS:
What I’m suggesting is that if there is a simple explanation for Obamaism, and it lies along the lines you describe, it’s easier to believe that it’s largely unconscious. Otherwise, you have to conceive of Obama as a saboteur and impostor, not just a conventional political liar but an enemy agent consciously taking on the political burden of epochal setbacks to US policy and happily risking rejection from the citizenry.
Regardless of what he and some of his former friends and current supporters might prefer, broad American opinion has been durably pro-Israel and anti-Iran for decades. Bringing about a rupture with the ally and an epochal policy setback in relation to the enemy would entail risk of his complete political destruction, and the same can be said for some of the other positions or intentions you impute to him, even if on some level (conscious or not) he perceives an opportunity to re-define those relationships in the aftermath of catastrophe.
I find Zoltan’s suggestion more believable – that liberals/progressives of the Obamic variety act more in denial of logical consequences than in conscious pursuit of bad ends. It tends to make them easier to forgive as individuals, but more dangerous as politicians. (Forgive them for they know not…)
December 29th, 2009 at 10:19 am
You mean the Pritzkers, whose daughter Penny was involved withone of the first signs of the subprime meltdown with Superior Bank, who they floated ever so briefly as Commerce Secretary, and then was shot down faster than 1941.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:37 am
A lot of people with a great deal more expertise than I have on the matter have openly declared that Obama and his advisers are “resigned” to an Iranian nuclear capability.
I can conceptualize Kissinger,as a disciple of Metternich and with a fundementalist belief in the virtues of “Balance of Power” could have argued that a Nuclear Iran would operate as a balance to a Nuke Israel,would be a more stable,more peacful situation.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:48 am
@ Rex Caruthers:
Van Creveld – the brilliant but idiosyncratic Israeli military historian – has made that argument or something very close to it explicitly. He doesn’t accept the notion that the future rulers of a nuclear Iran will decide to go out in a blaze of 12th Mahdist glory, and suggests that they are instead much more likely to follow the example of other nuclear powers, becoming more cautious, especially in confrontations or potential conflicts with other nuclear powers.
Even if he’s right, however, Iran going nuclear would remain, in my view, objectively dangerous and a huge political setback with material consequences for the US and Israel.
December 29th, 2009 at 10:56 am
No, that is a ludicrous notion, to show equivalence between the two, the reason we needed a balance of power, was because of Napoleon
December 29th, 2009 at 10:56 am
CKMacleod
What is the evidence for this premise, except hope, the actions of Mohashtemi-pur, Vahidi, Ahmadinejad, don’t indicate this
December 29th, 2009 at 11:01 am
@ Rex Caruthers:
That presumes Israel needs balancing which is a stretch. Israel is already balanced (re expansion) by a whole host of powers that don’t want Middle East oil thrown into chaos. Osama bin Laden and Al Quaeda are said to stem from U.S. troop presence on Saudi soil. Imagine the long term reaction to Israeli boots on the ground anywhere outside Palestine.
I doubt there is anyone in an important position in the middle east who fears Israel moving beyond its current boundaries. The only purpose of nuclear weapons for a Muslim state vis a vis Israel is to eliminate it or roll back its borders.
That’s not to say Muslim states don’t have other reasons for wanting nuclear weapons, to balance the U.S. for instance, or as tools against another Muslim states – as CK, J.E. and others have written on at length.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am
@ narciso:
The main evidence would be the actual behavior of all other nuclear powers, even the ones (including the U.S.) that at various times have embraced the “winnability” of nuclear war in their political and military doctrines. Add to that the whole strategic nuclear deterrence arcana (“launch on warning,” “counterforce,” MAD, etc.), and the presumably diverse (i.e., normal as well as psychotically zealous) motivations of real existing Iranians, the vast majority of whom would likely prefer on any given day to see themselves, their families, their friends, and their country survive into the next day, week, month, year, etc.
For the actual threat to materialize, you have to imagine that the religious psychotics gain control, against the survival interest of all non-psychotics, and are able to act before their potential immediate victims (the Israelis, anyone in range of their weapons) or other interdictors (the U.S., other nuclear powers) can pre-empt them.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:22 am
@ Joe NS:
anti-Zionist???
Christ, what does that mean?
December 29th, 2009 at 11:29 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Projecting power usually starts with the neighbors, does it not?
The immediate adverse consequences might most be felt in the Gulf.
December 29th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Colin writes: “Otherwise, you have to conceive of Obama as a saboteur and impostor, not just a conventional political liar but an enemy agent consciously taking on the political burden of epochal setbacks to US policy and happily risking rejection from the citizenry.”
Does that all add up to someone who is not at all what he seems to be or professes to be and who won’t much care, when he’s played his cards, what the citizenry thinks?
Who does that remind me of?
December 29th, 2009 at 11:50 am
@ Joe NS:
The guy who said that he didn’t give a s–t about public opinion or popular approval as a guide to conducting foreign policy?
The guy who sat his stinking, smug ass in a wheel chair last January?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
There is a difference between doing the right thing and the wrong thing. Obama’s position was to abandon Iraq, even if the surge was likely to work. He seems willing to do the same with
Afghanistan, after a ‘decent interval’
December 29th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
@ Joe NS:Tokyo Rose?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
@ Joe NS:
Well said, Joe. I agree that you’re not “psychoanalyzing” Obama. Psychoanalyzing would be attributing his thought manifestations to the kinds of id-based causes popularized by Freud, Jung, et al.
The word “psychoanalyze” is thrown around rather carelessly in a lot of modern discourse. You’re certainly analyzing Obama’s actions and imputing motives to them, but your focus is on cultivated ideas and behavior rather than reflexive, non-deliberate responses (examples of the latter would be, say, the overreaction of the abused child to normal displays of authority). I discern from your piece the point that Obama is a product of the left’s deliberately-cultivated ideas about power relations between races and peoples — not that something in his youth or childhood (or race) has fated him to dark impulses.
I don’t actually get how RCAR equates your point to anything David Duke has said or done. I’m not convinced that Obama actively wants Iran to have the bomb, but I do think there’s something to the suspicion that he’d see a form of vengeful “justice” in it. You can find the latter sentiment in the pages of academic journals simply by throwing them in the air and reading a few lines of whatever page they fall open to.
December 29th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
@ narciso:
Bentidick Clinton???
December 29th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
@ Joe NS:Bentadick Clinton?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Uh, fuster, it’s hard to know where to begin here. Cheney the imposter? Cheney the lifelong dove who suddenly, to everyone’s utter astonishment save yours, it seems, sprouted the talons of an eagle? The Cheney who routinely says one thing and does another? You mean that Cheney? Cheney the chameleon? The Cheney whose true beliefs have long been an impenetrable mystery even to his closest friends because of the nigh-on countless times he has reversed course, mutating at the drop of a poll result into an entirely different person? That Cheney? Smug[?] Cheney? Always with his nose in the air and looking down on people? That Cheney? The Cheney who, while the US Army, Air Force, and Marines were in the middle – the freaking middle! – of a very hard, very bitter fight to the death, whimsically ignored the polls to insist that the US persevere with the Surge in Iraq. That Cheney?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
@ Joe NS:
What you are saying is not at all preposterous given he is married to a woman whose most famous memory of Princeton is “where is MY trust fund?” and who considers most Americans to be “mean.” Nevermind his affinity with R. Khalidi, Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn.
It is amazing to me that the daily media hosannas have pretty much erased these very connectible dots.
BTW, is the weather nice in USVI today?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
@ Joe NS:
I think that I could enjoy answering that, Joe, but I would prefer hearing you tell me what you mean by anti-Zionist.
December 29th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Zolt, ever meet Bill and Bernadette?
December 29th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Methinks Fuster does not appreciate it that Cheney told Leahy to go muck hisself.
Anybody who can say that in the hollowed halls of the US Senate must be an utter phony
December 29th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Joe, how great to see you! Happy New Year, my friend.
December 29th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
@ fuster:
How could I knot?
December 29th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Good to see you, too, HP! Happy holidays.
December 29th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
ZN, you Da Man, pun-wise. If ZC had a Pun Hall of Fame, you would occupy every nook and cranny of it.
December 29th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
George can speak for himself, but I wasn’t suggesting that Joe was psychoanalyzing Ø, I was suggesting that perhaps he should. A social-psychoanalytical explanation – primarily distinguished by a willingness to consider unconscious motives – would require less of our assumptions or beliefs about Obama the man than would a notion that he is consciously setting out to up the Persians and down the Jews, regardless of the cost to his presidency and reputation, and despite his frequent claims and statements, and whatever conduct, to the contrary.
Whether he was breast- or bottle-fed, laughed at when denied his boo-boo, or sexually abused and humiliated probably wouldn’t come into play, and whether the analysis was Oedipal, or post- or non- or anti-Oedipal would be secondary. I wouldn’t, however, necessarily assume that a psychoanalytical approach, or profile, wouldn’t reveal some interesting and useful insight into the big 0.
(As to the last point, my model is The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Study
The author takes the approach that, since Stalin was essentially all-powerful from the 1930s on, every aspect of Russian policy could be taken as “his” behavior, and subjected to rigorous psychoanalytic critique. I suspect it is one of the very few academic works on Stalin that can make a reader laugh out loud – as when the author examines Stalin’s latency issues with Hitler. In this chapter, the idea isn’t that Uncle Joe consciously lusted after Adolf, but that otherwise hard to understand aspects of his reaction to the invasion of Russia seem perfectly explicable within a psychoanalytical model of Stalin’s well-evidenced repressively homoerotic, sadomasochistic tendencies.)
December 29th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Hey JE, long time no hear, personally, I mean. I have been sporadically following your wonderful posts at – May I say this? – um, no, at the other place, taking a weird sort of pride at having exchanged with you a number of dumb-and-dumber opinions of mine in the past.
And Howard, my gourmandish friend, thanks for the HNY and the same to you.
Anyway, JE, I was recently pondering a question that has recurred to me ever since, oh, say, September 1st, when the first of Obama’s half-dozen deadlines directed at the Iran nuke program came and went like the morning dew, namely “What the heck is he waiting for?” It occurred to me, as it has to numerous others, I’m sure, that he was waiting for the Israelis to smash Qom and Natanz and whatever to smithereens and relieve him of a big problem, which, however and surprisingly, is not a nuclear-armed Iran, but his uncomfortable calling – for a leftist – as firm ally of the State of Israel.
I further imagined the President getting up every morning and rushing to the briefing book to see if they have finally gotten off their kosher asses and used all the sleek aircraft and bunker busters we sold them and finally done the damn thing.
But everyday . . . a big fat nothing. Well, two can play at this waiting game, you see. The US is going to display the patience of Job when it comes to Iran, if that’s what it takes. No matter the provocation or the insult, we are going to do absolutely nothing about it beyond putting the Mullahs on triply double-secret probation. We are going to extend them every indulgence, again and again, unto the far horizon, beyond belief and the most extravagant demands on credulity, until the Israelis’, along with the rest of the sentient world’s, nerves quite crack. Jews are smart. Christ, everyone knows that. When will it dawn on these geniuses that the US is not going to do a thing? Really, really, really nothing at all? Well whatever it takes to drive them around the bend and scramble those fighter bombers is going to be done. Of course, when the smoke settles, my shock and disappointment will be something to see, believe you me. Adio Israel!
fuster, anti-Zionist, as I see it, means embracing the position that there should not be a State that is statutorily tied to Jews, at least not in what is currently called Israel. That’s clear, isn’t it?
Zoltan, sorry to reply so belatedly. The weather here is mahvelous. And Carnival has just begun.
December 29th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Well, there you go. Sadomasochism and homoerotic tendencies: patterns that may have explanatory value, but that we — as a society acting in concert — have little hope of influencing early in someone’s life; or even, very often, discerning in the process of making our individual political decisions. In the sense of there being not much we can actually do about this stuff, I can see George’s point that what matters is a political leader’s actions.
George did say “psychoanalysis,” though, and I was responding to Joe’s response to him, more than to your “Jinx!” comment. (Which, having been an American grade-schooler those many years ago, I did understand. I believe the complete expression goes “Jinx, poke, you owe me a Coke!” with attendant hand gesture.)
Again, my impression from reading Joe’s piece was that the patterns he discerned in Obama fit with the deliberately-cultivated mindset of the googoo-brain Western leftist, the really sold-out guy who imagines himself to be channeling the aspirations of Third-Worlders for “justice” and “equality” and “leveling” whenever he ostentatiously treats people UNequally: Westerners badly, Other-ers with obeisance and downright moronic solicitude.
The “type” is so well-known to most people who’ve ever had a humanities course in a modern American college that invoking it carries inherent explanations, regardless of the psychological origins of any specific person’s propensity to embrace this posture. There are recognizable patterns in human philosophical assumptions, especially those cultivated in accordance with the best-known weltanschauungs out there (I could really use an “emphasis” tool for Italics here). It’s NOT psychoanalysis to recognize, predict, or deduce the workings of those patterns. Psychoanalysis is a separate discipline with other parameters and objectives.
December 29th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@ Joe NS:
Hey, Joe, and it’s great to see you back posting. Hope we’ll see much more of you around here, although I can fully understand how your real life is way too much fun to pull away from.
Myself, I don’t think Obama is determinedly opposed to Iran getting the bomb, which I think is the bottom line. What I deduce is that he’s making a show for the American people and the allies he was stuck with when he entered office. Just making the show eats up time, and allows conditions to shift even without effort on his part. Obama’s profile is thoroughly that of the Chicago pol and community organizer; I don’t think he’s ever applied much brainpower to international events and patterns.
I don’t know if you remember, months and months ago, when someone at NZC posted a link to an article OSlash wrote in the Columbia student rag, about the Nuclear Freeze movement. He was there in the high 1980s, of course, when the Freeze-ites were at their pitch of pink-haired, mutant-masked hysteria. The most interesting thing to me about that article, by far, was O’s focus in it. He dispensed with the philosophy and aims of the movement in about one and a half sentences. ALL the rest of the article — all of it — was taken up with the organizing of a student group at Columbia. It was all about the organized posturing. O quoted several people by name, diligently reproducing their every inane pronouncement, and featuring their actions as if they were heroic, and as if the survival of every shibboleth of civilized life depended on them. But hardly a word was said about the original pretext for a “nuclear freeze movement”; i.e., what the problem was, and why you would want one, or why what the politicians were doing wasn’t good enough. No, the point for OSlash was all the organizing, and student organizers making proclamations.
Obama has done his best work being the attractive leader of groups that are never accountable for anything, but spend all their timing kvetching and organizing and proclaiming. He is completely unready for international diplomacy or power-wielding. I think that’s the main amplifier of his generically hard-leftist fecklessness in this realm.
The happiest of holidays to you and yours, however!
December 29th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
I’m not sure we need a deep psychology of Obama, but the question of his “self-discovery” has been one that he himself put before us in his autobiography, whose title almost amounts to an invitation for a psychoanalysis conference. I’d anticipate seminars on the preposition between “Dreams” and “My Father” – day-long discussions devoted to the various versions of dreams and fathers that appear in the book, and at least some consideration of the implicit rejection of his mother and grandparents in favor of the father who abandoned him. The Freudians might be equally interested in his oral fixation – smoking, oratory – which bespeaks his deeper connection to his mother (who died, as we know, of cancer). He’s the most oral politician we’ve ever had, after all.
It’s true, as you say, that his type appears very familiar to us, but the fact remains that, among all of the laughable and annoying academic leftists of his generation, he’s the one who reached the top. Completely talking out my elbow, as this will be the first time I put these thoughts to pixel: The bowsto the father figures of color (or the Chavez soul-shake) look like further hopeless obeisances to the selfish and absent man whose obscurity somehow retains primacy in Ø’s psychic economy. Maybe there’s more to these repeated “mistakes,” and reason to expect they will continually recur, or inevitably assume some new form if he learns to restrain himself.
I’d actually have to force myself to read the books and collect other biographical info on Obama to take this much further. Either that or I may experience a useful dream on the subject…
December 29th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
snug socks.
December 29th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Note: The snubbed Euros might equal his mother and grandparents – repressed except when useful to him. Also somewhat like the predominantly white “progressives” who are currently feeling used and abused. The Jews, whom after Podhoretz’s book I’m seeing tentatively as divided into nearby/feminized/liberal/secular diaspora Jews and feminine/masculine/Old Testament Israelis, would offer a peculiar challenge to him, but in another way a familiar one. Maybe it will turn out that the Israelis, by rejecting him, will finally earn his affection. Maybe he needs them to reject him. Maybe, regardless of his preferences or intentions, the action Joe anticipates them taking will lead him to bow and scrape after them, after all.
December 29th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Joe NS wrote:
Almost. Do you mean that anti-Zionists disagree with the establishment of Israel or do you include the idea that they advocate abolishing present-day Israel?
December 29th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Colin, after reading this series of posts by you on the psychology of Barack Obama, especially the remark about bowing to the father figure of color (very deft), hell, I’m starting to believe it myself. I long ago dismissed Freudianism – after a two-year stint as an aide in a private nut house, I should add – and still believe that the id-ego-superego stuff is strictly from hunger. (Note to me: interesting that I resorted to that chestnut. What, pray, does that say about my being overweight?)
As I’ve noted once before, I agree for the most part with David Hume that, apart from saints, who I do believe exist, a man’s reason is and only can be the slave of his passions, something George might try to keep in mind when he dismisses the relevance of strong feelings. Resentment is a pretty ordinary passion, and the good innings the white Christian West has enjoyed the past five centuries or so has, I suspect, built up a powerful store of the stuff among a lot of differently hued furriners. Given his exotic antecedents, to say no more, I conclude that it is more likely than not that Obama shares the sentiment. To say that that would be untypical for an American president is quite the understatement. Plus, Obama is no saint. No shame there, but did I mention he’s a lazy cuss too?
fuster, I suppose I’d have to say both. I mean, if one is a committed anti-Zionist in the sense I outlined, one probably would also like to see Israel go away, meaning, at a minimum, changed drastically in its laws. That obviously does not mean desiring another Shoah, although given the excitable side of a lot of anti-Zionists these days, it might. Look, the ANC, when it came to power in South Africa, did not move to punish or deport the Boers. It would have meant economic suicide. The least insane anti-Zionists, among whom are numbered some Israeli Jews and, I am positing, our president, envision something similar for a post-Zionist Israel: not abolition but transformation beyond all recognition. Even the name might be permitted to survive. Jacob, after all, is a Muslim prophet too.
December 29th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Joe, After reading your opinions today, I am really in the mood for a fact or two. Your analysis is a Black Hole for those of us who prefer facts as the basis of our opinions.
December 29th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
RCAR – may I still call you that? – I agree with Bertrand Russell, who claimed that the only true “facts” in life are conventional. For example, that at present it’s Tuesday (in the United States) is a fact. Everything else is a theory, read opinion, of varying complexity in disguise. Conventions are conventional because we all agree to agree about them. Facts are in a sense trivial.
December 29th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
One could chalk this up to mere stupidity, that’s an easy conclusion, considering his track record. Of course if there is a larger logic, this might explain it
December 29th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
“Facts are in a sense trivial.”
I knew you wouldn’t let me down. And,of course,your opinions are constructed from profundity. Trivial Fact or Opinion:Obama is a Jew Hating Demagouge whose “secret” agenda is to arm Iran with Nuclear weapons and then encourage Iran to wipe out Israel.(That’s my understanding of your position. Please correct me if I’m in error.)
December 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
RCAR, I specifically absolved Obama of being a Jew Hater. So you are corrected there. I specifically stated that what Obama wants is a non-Zionist Israel, not its destruction. So you are corrected there. I never said his agenda is to arm Iran with nuclear weapons. Rather he is, in my opinion, not going to disarm Iran or do anything to prevent their getting the bomb because it suits a policy of anti-Zionism to level the military might of Iran and Israel. So that’s correction three. Now you keep writing without reading if you like. I can’t promise I’ll keep correcting because it’s too easy and more than usually boring.
December 29th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
@ Joe NS:
Thanks for the explanation, Joe. I was trying to figure out if thinking that the settlers in the West Bank should cease their expansion into the occupied territory prior to negotiating a peace agreement makes someone an anti-Zionist.
It doesn’t appear that, from your description, it does.
I’m glad about that.
December 29th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Joe NS wrote:
RCAR, I specifically absolved Obama of being a Jew Hater. So you are corrected there. I specifically stated that what Obama wants is a non-Zionist Israel, not its destruction. So you are corrected there. I never said his agenda is to arm Iran with nuclear weapons. Rather he is, in my opinion, not going to disarm Iran or do anything to prevent their getting the bomb because it suits a policy of anti-Zionism to level the military might of Iran and Israel. So that’s correction three. Now you keep writing without reading if you like. I can’t promise I’ll keep correcting because it’s too easy and more than usually boring
Bottom Line,it the SOS,Many here and at Contentions1 believe that a Nuclear Iran is a death sentence for Israel. And The Big O,sneaky as he is,must realize that as a distinct and desired possible outcome.
December 29th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
“Many here and at Contentions1 believe that a Nuclear Iran is a death sentence for Israel.”
We agree about that. I would like to point out that the words “death sentence” are not necessarily to be understood literally. In my post I used the words “extinction” of the State of Israel. Perhaps that left the wrong impression. I emphatically did not mean the military destruction of Israel. I read the Jerusalem Post website a fair amount, and one frequently finds expressed there the opinion that a nuclear-armed Iran will mean the eventual end of the nation because the risks involved will lead, first, to an end to 99% of Jewish immigration, and in time, the out-migration of many who are there, especially those with children. No one would prudently invest in such a small country, every inch of which would be devastated in even a low-level nuclear exchange, even if the probability of such a conflict is low. So the economy would gradually fold, leaving an insupportable nation of geriatric Jews – think Boca Raton from the Galilee to the Negev – with an ever-increasing and far more youthful Arab population both within and immediately adjacent to its borders. The problem here, it should be obvious, is that no one would be foolish enough to say that such a conflict is utterly out of the question. Who will confidently cite the probability of nuclear war or recommend carrying on in such a dire situation? I certainly wouldn’t. Would you?
December 29th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
@ Joe NS:
Land prices being what they are, I can’t readily think of a modern nation were everyone of child-bearing age simply packed-up and left.
Am I overlooking something obvious, as usual?
December 29th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
The problem here, it should be obvious, is that no one would be foolish enough to say that such a conflict is utterly out of the question.
The problem here is the question of Obama’s intentions. And let’s remember dear President Bush,who,had he been consistent,would have pre-empted Iran. Was it his intention,though not consciously,to deprive Israel of its existence. Let’s remember,also,that Generations of the Bushs,prior to W,were famous for their anti-semitism.
December 29th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
You know I’ve decided it doesn’t really what Obama intends or the reasons there in. The real life consequences of his actions,
on the stimulus, health care, Afghanistan, and Iran is the key thing. And the augurs are not good.
December 29th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
RCAR, Bush had enough on his plate. Furthermore, absent that bogus National Intelligence Estimate in 2007, you know, the one that concluded that Iran had folded its nuclear weapons program in 2003, he might have carried through on preventing an Iranian bomb. I say “might” because I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that that’s what he wanted to do; but even the POTUS doesn’t get to do what he wants when it comes to waging war. The NIE, as fraudulent and politically motivated a document as it was, cut the ground from under him. We know more now about the facts – there’s that word again – surrounding the production of that foolish intelligence report. One ironic “fact,” it now seems clear, is that the most potent reason the Iranians slowed their weapons-design program – not, it bears emphasizing, their enrichment efforts – was because the US invasion of Iraq had temporarily rattled them. As it happened, because of the AQ Khan revelations, mothballing the weaponization program was not much of a game changer. Khan had basically sold them everything they needed to know about putting enriched uranium into the form of a deliverable bomb.
Also, that the alleged Bush anti-Semitism was “prior to W.” is surely relevant here.
December 29th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Joe NS wrote:
RCAR, Bush had enough on his plate
You’re very kind to our retired hero,but folks like Mike Leeden,Andrew McCarthy,Vic Hanson,Ralph Peters,Max Boot and so many others of their ilk are not so pleasant about it.
I suppose the Fiscal Crisis only partially filled Obama’s plate.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
fuster, surely you didn’t interpret me to be saying that everyone would “pack up and leave” Israel? It wouldn’t happen overnight or even over a year or two, but it would happen. The crucial appellation here is not “child bearing” as a possibility but the reality of “child rearing.” If I were still raising children, I would definitely choose to do it somewhere besides in an Israel with nuclear weapons actively aimed at it by people who want me and my children dead. But I’m not Jewish.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
The Mousavian telegram, to the Grand Ayatollah was left out of the NIE, detaining the two years of deception against the PC-4
quartet of nations. The same kind if not level of deceit that characterized the resistance against subprime reform was at play here. The likes of Wilson sought to undermine the position in Iraq, through the cooperation of Armitage, by ‘taking out’ Scooter Libby, with the whole raft off scurrilous books, worst of which was Bugliosi’s bilious tome, accusing the President of mass murder.As to the supposed antisemitism of the President’s family,that’s rather a bridge too far, with the role of Brown Brothers Harriman in preWW2 Germany as a thin reed indeed.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
“The Mousavian telegram, to the Grand Ayatollah was left out of the NIE, detaining the two years of deception against the PC-4
quartet of nations.”
narciso, I assume you meant to type “detailing” above. This is something I’ve never heard of. Thanks for the information. The rubbish that passed for credible opinion during the Bush years truly was remarkable, not to mention disgusting, to behold.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Today’s fun was reminiscent of the anarchic brawls we often had on “Old” Contentions,maybe we are evolving to a higher plain of discord. If only Lester,Alsimov,Architophel,Gordon Chang, Seth Halperin,and so many unforgetable disembodied voices could once again join us on ZC. Boo Hoo
December 29th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
The rubbish that passed for credible opinion during the Bush years truly was remarkable, not to mention disgusting, to behold.
Today’s Rubbish would not pass for credible opinion in any era.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
GHWB may not have been anti-semitic, but he and the wing of the party he represented were and remain less philo-semitic and less pro-Israel. When your Secretary of State is James “F the Jews” Baker and you both refuse to let Israel defend herself against Saddam’s SCUDS, then later try to pressure them on the PLO & Settlements because Americans sacrificed “for them,” then you’re going to be treated with some suspicion.
It will be interesting in the coming years as memoirs are published to learn more about Bush 43′s policy toward Iran. I recall people regularly predicting that Bush would act before he left office: Some, mainly on the right, said he wouldn’t leave the problem for his successor. Others, mainly on the left, always acted convinced that the attack was just around the corner, on every day from around Jan 20 2001 to Jan 20 2009.
I tend to think that he concluded, whether intellectually or intuitively, that the country was too divided – that our political culture would have been torn apart by military action, especially if anything didn’t go exactly right. I think it’s quite conceivable he would have been impeached. Or the die may have been cast the first time clear evidence of Iranian subversion and attacks on Americans in Iraq came to light, and we didn’t respond with relatively massively retaliation or at least a firm ultimatum.
It may be too much to say we blinked. We certainly seemed afraid of taking further casualties and losing control in Iraq and Afghanistan. A president that hadn’t used up his capital, or was willing to swing for the fences, would have had plenty of opportunity to lay a predicate for intervention or remove the need for it by convincing the Iranians that if they didn’t deal away the program, it would be taken away.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
rex caruthers wrote:
Seth is around. lester I can’t say I miss. Nope. Can’t say I miss him. Ahithophel had dropped away at NZ Contentions before comments closed. Gordon Chang has got bigger fish to fry. Almasov – I’m surprised you miss him, wheelless.
There were a few whom I, for one, miss rather more, including the articulate lefties who used to have some game.
At least John Hartland and some of the other freakier types have left us alone – not that I would have hesitated to IP ban ‘em.
December 29th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Almasov – I’m surprised you miss him, wheelless.
He was my favorite,actually. He was enigmatic,I always imagined him as a Professor of Deconstructionism. He spoke like the Narrator of Jabberwocky,quite amazing,he had a huge intellect with seemingly nothing better to do than make up funny nicknames for his antagonists.
December 29th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Yeah there were some in that menagerie, you don’t want drifting here, nishi/aka strangelet is a sample of that kind of ‘thinking.’beetlejuice, beetlejuice,beetlejuice” is a handy invocation.
I had heard of Mousavian, some years before,the NIE his fate was not unlike that of Krasin, the early Soviet spyrunner against Reilly, punished by Stalin, for his deviationism, It’s interesting that his report never made it into the NIE, and some of the details in SAnger’s book, “The Gamble” detailing the mastermind of the nuclear program, Frazadeh, (sic) and Projects 110 & 111, which Heinonen of the IAEA left out were most curious
December 29th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
@ Joe NS:
Sustained outmigration once Israel is under nuclear threat is very likely.
For years I’ve encouraged young relatives not to live in or near signature cities here in the U.S.; so consistently that it’s a bit of a family joke.
I think dense city centers became obsolescent since nuclear weapons were developed, and the name brand cities became fully obsolete when the second attack on the WTC proved that the Islamists are determined to attack with any weapons they can acquire.
I visit New York occasionally, as I do San Francisco; but living 24/7/52/70 and owning real estate near a repeated ground zero is less logical than living on the San Andreas fault.
December 29th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
@ Sully:
You big chicken. Now I’m not sending you a
I came to NYC for a federal trial
and all I got was this lousy death sentence
t-shirt.
Even if you came to New York, we wouldn’t waste our time torturing you.
Like you might have any actionable intelligence!!
Feh.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
@ fuster:
Is that shirt available at the site that sells the
“Rio’s getting the Olympics and all we’re getting are some lousy terrorists”
T Shirt?
December 29th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I persist in viewing Obama as a narcissistic political “prodigy” who rode that perfect storm of financial crisis, race neurosis and war exhaustion into office. To call him an anti-Semite seems, ironically, to attribute to him something approaching a genuine principle. I doubt he’s held a sincere political, social or religious conviction in his life, in the sense of being willing to subordinate his ego to it or sacrifice his cynosural glow on its account. So I think his position on Iran is likely to correlate pretty directly with its utility in maintaining the wattage of that glow. Btw, nobody mentioned Grumpy!
December 30th, 2009 at 8:47 am
The words “cold” and “aloof” are cropping up in discussions about Obama a lot lately. They do not hate Jews per se. Nor do they truly hate conservatives and libertarians. They simply hate anything and anybody who might challenge their limitless self esteem.
Mister Peanut is the poster child for a kind of shallow arrogance which characterizes most self described progressives.
Remember the term, “the banality of evil?”
Isn’t it amusing in a chilling kind of way that these are the people who fancy themselves as especially endowed with moral virtue?
December 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
That, or chilling in an amusing kind of way. You pick.
December 30th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
@ Seth Halpern:
Agreed with everything up to the last sentence: Taking a forthright, Reaganist position on behalf of the protestors and against the mullahs would be a public opinion slam dunk. It’s not just, potentially, an epochal missed opportunity. It’s also an amazing political missed opportunity. It leaves the observer casting about for explanations: that he actually believes in “smart power” and “engagement” against all evidence; that he knows things we don’t that make him unwilling to risk capital on the protesters, or seem to him to prove it really would be harmful short- or long-term to stand up for them; that even more obscure or disquieting motivations explain his seeming disinterest; or that he really is the empty set and not even a good enough actor to fake concern convincingly.
December 30th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
CK, I expect he’s a lagging or should I say validating indicator, the way the NYT is the newspaper of record. Actually it doesn’t really happen until Barry acknowledges it. Perhaps I should have added that cynosural glows are sometimes in the mind of the cynosure.
December 30th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
As Mark Steyn has pointed out in his own inimitable way, Obama from at least one Columbia article, didn’t think the nuclear freeze went far enough, in derailing the wa machine and bringing about
‘peace and justice’ and there was a reference to a Peter Tosh song to punctuate the point
December 30th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Colin and Seth, he does possess a prodigious amount of false pride, something to do not simply with never admitting a mistake but with never admitting even to himself that he appears to others as mistaken. Too many easily impressed sorts have told him too often that he’s the brightest bulb on the tree. I suspect his mother initially. Mothers are all too easily impressed by their children.
December 30th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
BTW, I selected today’s CotD partly because I thought it and the rest of Steele’s article were relevant to this discussion.
December 30th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
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