Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Obama 'Accident Of History'

From Wes Pruden at The Washington Times:
The president's critics ought to lighten up. We should give him credit for not knowing any better. (He was "finished" and "polished" at Harvard, after all.) Barack Obama is an accident of history, a street hustler from the South Side of Chicago with the gift of gab who landed on the world stage like a whale beached at the whim of a storm, the wrong man at the right time.
He landed on that beach just as the nation, or a large part of it, desperately wanted absolution for the sins of the past, some real and some only imagined, and suddenly we had our own Susan Boyle, a honey-tongued idol of the moment. He not only had the gift of gab, useful for presidential candidates as well as aluminum-siding salesmen, but a gift for the seductive language of the black pulpit. The masses, for whom the poetry of the King James Bible and the musical cadences of Sunday morning are as foreign as the culture of rural Timbuktu, eagerly stepped forward to take the pledge of the cult.
Only Barack Obama knows what's in his heart, but there's the possibility, not heretofore considered by his critics, that the blundering loose tongue he packs with his teleprompter, scorning the dignity and good name of his country for the cheap applause of tin-pot dictators eager to throw rotten bananas at their betters, comes easy and naturally to him.
This wouldn't be one of Dr. Freud's difficult cases. He was born to a mother obsessed with the pursuit of inappropriate men who would treat her badly, abandoned by his father from Kenya, uprooted again from life with a stepfather in Indonesia and ultimately raised by a grandmother he would later publicly scold for her presumed racial bigotry. Why wouldn't he feverishly pursue sanction and esteem, however mindless much of it would be, wherever he could find it? Only a man with a screwed-up psyche, the likes of which we've probably never had in the White House before, would fly off to foreign shores to campaign against his predecessor and to offer abject apologies to anyone listening for the harm he imagines his country did to others, while carefully excluding himself from any of the criticism.
All for the embrace, physical and otherwise, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, of Evo Morales and Danny Ortega. Most of us would say, in word or deed, "insult my country, dude, and you're insulting me, so back off." But this is the kind of fierce pride in home, kith and kin that Barack Obama never knew; he even married a woman who said she never felt love of country until her husband reached the front gate of the White House. . . .
If President Obama judges his Latin American trip by the personal accolades, the trip was a roaring success. Nearly every criticism of the United States was prefaced with assertions that none of the insults of America were meant for Mr. Obama. The president let these cheap accolades pass with a grateful smile. He listened to a 50-minute diatribe by Danny Ortega, cataloging American sins over a century (and conceding nothing about the brutal sins of the Sandinistas). When he followed the commandante's jibe at the United States for its support of the Cuban exiles' attempt to land at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Mr. Obama said only that he was "grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old."
Everybody laughed, but Mr. Obama even got that wrong. He was born three months after the Bay of Pigs landing. The history of the country that elected him president has never been of much interest to Barack Obama - he once referred to "the 57 states" - and we shouldn't be surprised by anything he does and says now.

1 comment:

Radu Gherman said...

An accident of history. A history that Mr. Pruden may not have wished on this country. Freud would have an equally difficult time dissecting his own intentions.
How one disparages the accomplishments of a black man, raised by a single mother, who eventually made it to Harvard is hard to understand. Surely, his oratory gifts only carried him so far. But things are clearer when looking at Pruden's own life.
The child of a Southern segregationist, who once said implied that the South had two loyalties, Mr. Pruden's true colors begin to show.
He views community organizers as hustlers, and the majority of Americans as Godless. He stews about the America that could have been without our Civil War. He relegates the journey of our current president to the sidelines of history, while chiding We The People for our collective "accident". His hate is palpable, but thankfully, it is not shared by the majority. This diatribe, complete with maternal references, serves only to reflect his odious animosity to the path that the country has chosen democratically. I'm not sure where one can find the style of intellectual slavery Mr. Pruden so longs for, but I'd be the first to pay for his one way journey there.