Reading left-wing articles - Part 1

With a meteoric fall in Obama's personal approval ratings, and the "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" of the Democrat Party in the coming Congressional elections, the liberal operatives in the Mainstream  Media are actively looking for the root causes of the failure of their agenda. As is customary in American politics, the liberals are disciplined enough not to question the validity of their ideology, but instead are busy trying to discover some way to blame this on the inherent evilness, stupidity and ignorance of the American people. For a while, the liberals proclaimed that any disagreement with Obama's plan to "fundamentally change America" could be easily traced to racism. But alas, this argument is too worn out these days and fails to sway a lot of people. "Ah, the old racism argument" is how people react to it this day. Long gone are the times when Obama could proudly proclaim  that "White folks' greed runs a world in need" - and get a standing ovation from the liberals. Ah, the good old days of Obama-mania.

A rather typical response these days from liberals is that American people are stupid, ignorant, childish and just too scared to see the brilliance of Barack Hussein Obama. As Bill Press famously said - "American people are spoiled" and that they are too critical, too quick to rush to judgement, too negative, too impatient. In other words - the Messiah cannot do miracles under so much pressure.

Not to be outdone in smuggness by a pack of liberal  reporters, President Obama proclaimed that American people were too damn scared to think clearly and comprehend his inherent brilliance. Of course, it comes to reason that the 2008 decision to put a community organizer in charge of the entire country - the decision that was made during the nerve-racking financial crisis - was probably not the wisest idea - and I can easily imagine Obama telling American people that they were responsible for his failures as president because they were stupid enough to vote for him. It's quite clear though that liberals are dreading the next elections, and as Obama himself noticed - people are hardwired to ignore logic and science when in terror - so one can expect Obama and his lackeys to come up with quite bizarre arguments and claims in the coming weeks.

And yet, if anything, like the energizer bunny, the liberals never stop and keep seeking the reasons to explain their lost popularity - and somehow this should involve the evilness of American people. A rather original argument was recently offered by Anne Applebaum, who in a recent article proclaimed that Obama's unpopularity is caused by - wait for it - popular resentment for upward mobility. Apparently, American people turned against Obama in 2010 because it was finally revealed that he (and his wife) came from the relatively modest roots. Up until that time Americans were in love with Obama and his glamorous wife - which I speculate was due to a mistaken belief by some that Obama was a long lost offspring of the Kennedy clan. Alas, in 2010, American people came around and read the two-volume long memoirs of Barack Obama and discovered a horrible truth - this man was no Kennedy - in fact he was raised by a dopey no-good do-gooder mother (perpetual graduate student in Indonesia) and her typical white parents. What a surprise - Obama did not grow up in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts - instead he was raised in the slums of Indonesia and a private school in Hawaii. Surely that had the most devastating effect on Obama's popularity - and not, say, the failure of Obama's economic policies.

A mildly surprising aspect of Anne's article was that she never came around to actually present any evidence supporting her claim that Americans resent upward mobility - in fact one could have just as easily speculated that American people cooled down to Obama because they resented his busy golf schedule or the fact that he throws a baseball worse than a 12 year girl with two left hands. For all it's worth, Anne talks a lot about Ivy League schools and their wonderfulness and how everyone who was admitted to those universities are the best and the brightest people on Earth - with IQs higher than Einstein's and perfect SAT scores - which by itself is a rather questionable claim. Clearly, Obamas, the proud graduates of the Ivy League schools, must be the top SAT scorers and possess IQs so high that the current testing methodology cannot reach those levels. And surely the American people fully share Anne's admiration of Obamas' intelligence and scholarly success - their only beef is with the fact that Obama came from a atypical white family.

Neither of that is true. To start with, no one begrudges Obama that he was not born with a silver spoon up his ass like Ted Kennedy. In fact, this is probably the only think that all American like about him. Secondly, quite a lot of people have serious doubts that Obama actually deserved to be admitted to the Ivy League schools, let alone be elected president of the United State. Anne seems to be rather forgetful that conservatives spent the entire 2008 demanding Obama to release his student records (SAT, LSAT scores, his student grades and the list of classes he took). Same conservatives were saying that Obama had absolutely nothing in his record to justify his claim to the US presidency. Somehow, Anne does not acknowledge that there is no evidence that Obama deserved admission to Harvard (and Columbia), that he was a mediocre student and the only reason why he got into Ivy League schools was due to his race and political connections. "Can this man run a hot dog stand?" was a popular question back in 2008 - and it was surely not because people resented meritocracy - but rather because they instinctively suspected that Obama's meteoric rise had nothing to do with his merits. "We need for the black guy to prove we are not racists" is hardly equivalent to a call to vote for a man who is an underachiever - and if anything, Obama was a clean slate even to the journalists after the elections in 2008. According to Charlie Rose, Obama "is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches". Interestingly enough, the people who tried to investigate Obama's academic credentials are now being prosecuted by the FBI - after all, the records of Obama's student merits are the most guarded secret in the United States.  

Anne also does not shy away from saying that Americans resent Michele Obama because of how much she achieved solely because of her own hard work and high IQ. So, what exactly did this female hyper-Einstein achieve worthy of hatred (and not contempt which is a prevalent feeling towards Michele on the right-wing blogs)? Well, according to Applebaum, Michele Obama is a "daughter of a black municipal employee, graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, is now first lady." I have little doubt that marrying a future president of the United States is a marvelous achievement worthy of Nobel prize (don't laugh at this joke - Obama got his award for even less) - but Michele's admission to Ivy League schools was not based on her scholarly work or incredible intelligence. According to liberal Newsweek "Some of her teachers told her she didn't have the grades or test scores to make it to the Ivies. But she applied to Princeton and was accepted." And poor Michele spent all the years in Princeton and Harvard suffering from a well-justified feeling that she was not good enough to be in those universities - after all, people vastly superior to her  intellectually but rather unlucky in their skin pigmentation (Whites, Jews and Asians) had to be excluded to give way to the academic mediocrities like Michele and Barack Obama.  And things got hardly better when Michele received her law degree - in fact her career was nothing to talk about until Barack Obama was elected the US senator - and on that day her salary was tripled (a rather odd coincidence - but something rather typical in Chicago). Of course, the facts I am reciting now are well-known to anyone paying attention, so it's understandable that Anne attempts to ignore them in order to get an inch closer to her desired proof that it's American evilness that prevents us from seeing just how lucky we are to have Barack Obama and Michele Obama govern our nation from the White House. It's doubly ironic that Anne makes an argument about the decisive role of IQ and SAT scores to get into Ivy league schools - only to be blown off by Michele Obama herself, who said that "If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that."

And yes, Anne believes that Barack and his wife Michele are meritocrats who got everything they got (Ivy League education, millions of dollars in earnings and the White House residency) solely due to their hard work and superior intelligence. In fact, poor Anne uses the Obama and meritocrats practically interchangeably - as if these two were synonyms. And, according to Anne, Americans dislike and envy Obamas for their well-deserved rise to success. There is no other possible reason for this dislike evidently - even though Obamas seem to be the first couple that lost its popularity because of American envy. Surely, the poor (and worsening) state of American economy cannot possibly explain why Americans turned away from Obama. High unemployment, exponential rise in debt coupled with Obama's arrogance and dismissiveness of the working people could not change the American mind. For Anne Applebaum the worsening state of economy and rising distrust of the federal government and its ability to run the affairs of the nation are so inconsequential that she flatly  refuses to even mention them as alternative explanations to Obama's unpopularity. It's fair to say that few people are more closed-minded than the ones who claim they fight for diversity - and Anne Applebaum is a prime example of this blindness. But I have no doubt that my readers are smarter than that - and I promise Part 2 of this article will keep you engaged (and enraged).

Part 2 - a few salient features.

• Why conservatives don't like the "elites" - and what they do they even mean when they use this term?
• Anne Applebaum dowdifies the quote from Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas, in order to prove her point.
• Why could possibly Americans have cooled to Michele Obama?
• Barack Obama and his undergraduate years - Hyphenated American finished reading "Dreams from My Father" and is bursting with information to share.