Constancio Asumen, Jr.
Obama’s Contempt: Hallmark Vestige of His Own Incompetence
February 1, 2010

"In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment...But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order...” -- Randy Barnett (emphasis added)

To the best of my reckoning of history, the degree of contempt towards the American people that President Obama showcased in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, was extraordinarily comparable in repugnance to that painstakingly postulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in "The German Ideology,” when they referred to the German public’s mentality as (my emphasis), "...the putrescence of the absolute spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum [dead head] began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances..."

The seventy-minute pedantic spectacle, punctuated by more than 100 partisan standing ovations, and several lamely disguised derisive sniggering of some in the crowd, should dispel any iota of a doubt that the POTUS is a certifiable agent of the patently destructive hubris of communist ideology. Only an ideologue, categorically convinced of the superiority and righteousness of his cause, can be so unabashedly angry that his agenda has been decisively, if temporarily, thwarted by the will of the people.

The self-proclaimed transformational President proceeded to transform a traditional ritual of governance in the hallowed halls of Congress into a locker-room pep talk on his expectations of how the nation ought to behave and think, and how his party and the opposition should conduct themselves in order to live up to his standards of decorum and accomplishments. He admonished the nation for not appreciating his unique genius in governance. He rebuked Congress for excessive partisanship. He falsely vilified the Supreme Court Justices for doing their duty with a majority finding to declare McCain-Feingold unconstitutional, because there is "no basis for allowing the government to limit corporate independent expenditures.”

Admittedly, we had a preview of this elitist mean spirited streak of Obama’s during the campaign when he derided the rural folks of Pennsylvania as people who would "...cling to guns or religion or antipathy...as a way to explain their frustrations." At that time I just mentally noted that the remark was eerily reminiscent of Marx and Engels’ blatant characterization of the lumpenproletariat as the social class composed of "beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements...”

Both the atmospherics and rhetoric at the State of the Union ritual merely confirmed the bona fides of Barack Hussein Obama as a hardcore ideologue and rendered it unwise for this country to seek a compromise with any of his policies. Fortunately there are encouraging indications of his bungling incompetence lending a glimmer of hope that America may yet prevail. Unfortunately, retrenchment is one of the principal instinctive reflexes, integral to the arsenal of survival strategies for a hardcore ideologue "sympathetic toward the general aims of Marxian socialism.” The contempt for "we the people” which he amply exhibited and articulated during the campaign and validated at the State of the Union can propel him to let his ideology determine the vector of his policies regardless of the consequences to the nation.

Bereft of Effectiveness, Replete with Excuses

To keep matters in perspective, it behooves to revisit a few items in the catalogue of scenarios of policy formulation and execution to count some of the most recent ways.

First: Outsourcing writing of the Health Care bill to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. The adults who occupied the Oval Office before President Obama, used to draft legislations and present them to Congress for deliberation. This President on the other hand let loose the bureaucratic and clerical fury of congressional staffers to wrought havoc on what he deems his flagship legislation. That was why he could not articulate on the substance of the bill in any coherent fashion or graphic details and resorted to reciting platitudes every time he held a press conference on the subject.

Second:Outsourcing handling of terrorist culprits to nobody in particular. That was how nobody could answer the question of who authorized Mirandizing drawers Umar. That was how DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano pronounced the verdict of all systems peachy at her first press conference on the incident. That was why the futile if pathetic finger pointing of who did not notify the not-yet-constituted High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was a spectacle on national TV at Congressional Hearings because nobody knew that nobody bothered to constitute what was supposed to be an all-important instrument of protecting the country, or who was supposed to do the constituting. The lawyerly formalism of dubbing drawers Umar an "alleged suspect” is sickening. The powers that be might as well call him a hero and make the charade consummate!

Third: Attributing most if not all the pitfalls of his administration as the legacy from the previous administration and proceeding to appoint Pres. George W. Bush as the co-leader to "coordinate efforts to involve more Americans in the recovery and rebuilding effort that's needed in Haiti.” By so doing, he telegraphed to the world these three alternatives as each equally likely to be true:

1) Haitian relief is not that important so it does not matter much if the relief effort succeeds or fails;

2) The pervasively blame-worthy President Bush can really be counted on to deliver when the chips are down;

3) President Obama himself does not really know what he is talking about or doing, for that matter, he is just learning on the job.

Fourth: The audacity of hubris exhibited at the Massachusetts campaign: the POTUS showed up at Martha Coakley’s political rally and showcased his teleprompter-free eloquence when he proclaimed on national TV that:

1) He knew absolutely nothing about Scott Brown therefore he was uniquely qualified to campaign for Scott’s opponent. Unbeknownst to us, Brown might just be the best thing since sliced bread and the country cannot risk deploying such an impeccable talent to the U.S. Senate.

2) He was acutely aware that the Truck is practically the folk symbol of American manhood, therefore it is the POTUS’ sworn duty to deride it. Otherwise, the country runs the risk of unleashing the unbridled American competence on the universe thereby undermining all the good will this nation had earned resultant to all the serial apologizing to the world in the first few weeks of his administration that the President had most painstakingly and tirelessly undertaken for America’s competence and historical generosity.

I can go on for a few more but I don’t have the intestinal fortitude for it. Besides, an exhaustive list would be logistically prohibitive for our immediate purpose. The bottom line is, we sent a spoilt brat to do a man’s job and we have been rewarded commensurately for our foolishness.

Cognitive Dissonance or Ideological Delirium

The great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed, "we only see what we know." Accordingly, in this White House nobody hears anything except ideas which tend to promote the Oval Office agenda, which is the takeover and control of every aspect of every citizen's life.

That this is problematic for the future of the country is not recognized by the mindset of a Community Organizer, aka, a neighborhood agitator, or rabble-rouser. In order to thrive and flourish, a Community Organizer requires a significant amount of dysfunction in the domain, which viewed from the Oval Office translates into the entire national polity.

Once a Community Organizer, always a Community Organizer: the world is viewed always from the prism of structural and/or operational dysfunction in the community. The danger at this juncture is much greater and potentially more devastating because the principal dysfunction is in the Oval Office.

"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” is the mantra consistent with the rabble-rouser’s mindset. And if there is not enough of a crisis brewing to warrant the citizenry’s attention, its urgency has to be contrived as in "the stimulus bill has to be passed this week else all hell will break loose, etc., etc.”

Thus it came to pass that this White House had done everything it could to deny that the Scott Brown victory was a wake-up call for them, to slow down their drive to take the country into the precipice of (fill in your favorite blank: health care reform, auto/bank bailouts, stimulating shovel ready projects, green jobs, global warming, etc.).

From denial to delusion, from delusion to obsession can be a razor-thin transition, if we get so lucky. In fact, there needs not be any transition at all. It can very well be a quantum leap or a tsunami deluge depending on insinuatingly instigating ad hoc circumstances. Waning fortunes at the voting booths are mighty dangerous and persistent instigating and insinuating dynamo in a regime of electoral governance. That a regime of czars has already been stealthily introduced into the system serves to intensify the menace.

The danger is mortally grievous because the ideologue has the drive of a jihadist, especially if an annoying obstacle blocks his way, such as the patriotic resolve of the overwhelming majority of the populace. Then the operative battle cry becomes "Allahu Akbar " or some secularist variant thereof but doubtless as devastating if not more so. On perception of adversity, an ideologue is akin to a wounded beast, sensing its mortality, insisting on survival. The blinders of ideological delirium and retrenchment instincts are a lethal combination.

The defiant if condescending peroration ritualized at the SOTU served to brand, with platinum-titanium plating, the Stalinist seal onto this Obama Presidency. Whoever first recognized the Stalinist trappings in the Obama Paradigm deserves to be congratulated for insight and vigilance, but needs to remain demure in anticipating any rewards from posterity.