In one of his finer moments in repose, Mick Jagger remarked, “Only a madman or an actor would want to be President of The United States.” Well, Sir Michael Philip Jagger, I’ve rambled through many a midnight and ask, “Why not both?”
While I want to be clear that I am not espousing the man, his personality, his party or even the presidency of our 44th POTUS, Barack H. Obama, amongst his parting statements at the end of his 2nd/final term were statements about the so-called “Bubble” in which we might exist. President Obama went on at length about our deliberate association and kinship with those who think and talk and act like us, who may even look like us, among all other possible combinations of such familiarity.
The truth is, we all do it and we shouldn’t need a politician to uncover our eyes for the first time about just how much we tend to circle the proverbial wagons around us and those who share our core beliefs. The outgoing-POTUS in no way intended to get across a caustic point that suggests one’s singular devotion to America’s exceptionalism (or lack thereof) as bad things in and of themselves. Rather, Mr. Obama does find ample room within that field to bring up such unsettling points.
It’s one of those “If the Shoe Fits…” type assertions he makes that the outrageous response to his words have served only to lend further credibility to. We don’t wanna hear things that we don’t want to be true, especially if those truths are espoused or made available to us by people that, for whatever reason, we just don’t like. This might seem like a bit of a passé` way to pour the nightcap for an outgoing administration.
Regardless, I feel compelled to direct my own sentiments here in a dualistic manner: 1) President Obama himself has at times sounded as though he were occupying his very own bubble after meeting with, oh, I dunno, anybody from the Joint Chiefs? While, yes, that’s quite hyperbolic there’s no denying that the prior first-term junior senator from Illinois had insight that career military commanders did not. He drew from his vast well of contrived conflicts via brilliantly-closeted Communists who came off as socially-retarded socialists, men like Saul Alinsky. Where do I get off saying, in any case, that Barry, while enamored with Alinsky, felt he was best served veiled by the bubble? Right here: in the ghost-authored book “Dreams of My Father”, Alinsky was reduced from iconography (for writing the neo-Commie Bible, “Rules For Radicals”) to “my good friend Saul.” Were there an “Ideological Father’s Day,” Obama would be enshrining Bill Ayers while getting misty-eyed to an angle-perfect, graph-and-diagram of “The Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
What, you demand, does that have to do with Willy Mayes being the best outfielder to ever play the game of baseball? A lot, if you’re slipping about with me, going along for this Louisiana Hayride of “Bubble Talk.”
Helping President Obama along in his refuse-to-recuse, post-POTUS ways is a full-time charade, and some body’s gotta do it. Enter’s stage left, Salon, who wised up and decided it had better stop breaking up with body parts before a full-blown muffin party ran riot. What happened next (last week, actually), was less coups de grâce and more incidental tours de force due to the commitment demanded in pulling off a plausible bait and switch. For all that I got right in the 2016 election [predictit image], I made two genuine errors: 1) I was entirely unprepared that I’d find myself alone with Michael Moore calling The Rust Belt (namely, in order of likelihood of their going GOP: Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) for Trump & 2) I severely underestimated the depths to which the victory-deprived would become Exhibit A (for effort!) in the “Sour Grapes” gallery of the once-and-future Museum of The Modern State.
Do I feel his assertion that the problems of the people he cares about and the failures of some items of his eight years in office are to blame on Fox News being on in every bar in the country…? Yeah, so that’s a stretch. Following this outrage, he’s made use of what’s called “A Straw Man” (debate parlance indicating you raise an issue related to the real topic, one that you’re more capable of defeating), making an ideal example on a couple of counts: tribalism is what he’s referring to and that’s neither anything new nor does it go hand-in-hand with racism. We see as much in both urban and suburban areas [“You’re in the WRONG neighborhood, Bro” etc.], or in Sol Yurick’s “The Warriors”, et al. The latter example clearly wasn’t about race. The juxtaposition forced haphazardly on numerous levels of the boroughs of New York City in the later 1970’s was, yes, about survival and, sure, bad news that failed at getting the (innocent) accused group decimated completely but they lost some lives (including at least one to an undetermined period of conservation). All because one of the sleaziest, whiniest and pugnacious jerks ever to ooze across the cinema grime as a faux gangster takes the case of a massing of many like minds (allegedly) and fomented a tragedy which the crime’s architect then painted as the dirty work of someone else…
…2) was President Obama a victim of the greater pantheon of American history? Hear me out here, before the pitchforks and Molotov’s, come out, citizens on the right. And, yes, I must see through your disingenuous anointing of President Obama before he took office, friends on the left. Let me persist in stating that the pressure, however much warranted by his own embrace of “hope as you plan and let the deals make themselves,” was stifling from far outside the White House. Granted, he ran for the office but I’m not sure if I would’ve accepted the Nobel had I been in his spot because it was a clear case of being forced to punch above your weight. Nothing at the time (nor to date) warranted such an elusive award, particularly for a man who campaigned on ending two wars and prematurely drew one down (only for it to privately escalate) and with the other prolonged it to being the longest war in America history and it continues even still. And, please, don’t insult our collective intelligence by asking “how so?” about his merits. You know “how so” as he had barely been in Federal office long enough to have a desk and stationary in tow on the Senate floor when the European cultural barons that be saw it befitting their supreme position to say that we pathetic Americans had very much arrived on the global stage. This was because, yes, we did indeed elect a minority and this was their snide way of acknowledging it. Coming from the continent that saw fit to tolerate the emergence of the Third Reich and the Warsaw Pact, this question that ought to be rhetorical isn’t: is Europe really in a position to dictate duty to America? Please. Don’t sniff your nose at me, Neville Chamberlain.
No matter what, conversely, one event and one name define the solid majority, the first six years, specifically, of the Obama Presidency. The event being, but of course, when Vice President Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic stating, “this is a big fucking deal!” The profanity, however amusing, wasn’t historic but histrionic. What was historic was ramming what was (and remains) a highly unpopular piece of legislation gave rise to some brilliant assertions, like Nancy “Did I Shave My ‘Stache For This” Pelosi stating that while it was indeed a big [expletive deleted deal] that, hey, it’s all good! We can just pass it, have the POTUS sign it and, that’s okay, we’ll just read the thing later. This is, mind you, coming from the Speaker of The House (at the time), mind you, and not just any Speaker. Nay, for these were not just any times and not just any Speaker would do. This was the Speaker of The House flush with victory after the (hopefully final) Texan left the White House and, above all, she was the Speaker of The House from the Democratic Party. This party, recall, is the party of the Ivy League, Hollywood’s brilliant strategists who’ve just sacrificed so much for the country, giving faithfully of themselves, per Tom Cruise (whose work is akin to goin’ “Bangin’ in Sangin’” with the Marines in Afghanistan; just ask him!”) and, lest we forget, it’s the Party of the founders of Eugenics. Ah, such fondness with which we can all share in this legacy. Lyndon B. Johnson really nailed the spirit of men like Joe Kennedy and his ilk when looking at what he’d wrought with his Great Society quipped about having “these [expletive deleted] voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” Who was he talking about perhaps the most loyal of all Democratic voting blocks ever since that time: black voters. Surely a Democratic POTUS didn’t use the infamous “expletive deleted” bit before Nixon! You’re right. He didn’t.
The name that will forever stand out, no matter how many sons killed might’ve been his in a different time and space, no matter how many full-frontal sneak attacks he gave the enemy advance notice of (and somehow it tended to work out in his favor), no matter how many letters you add to the LGBT acronym for that rutting boar Kim Kardashian and her synthesized tears (NOTHING’S REAL!) and sign off on it, President O., you’ll always have to deal with the fact that a plastic salesman from Ohio is your legacy on the real budget you never got done. But let’s not focus on John Boehner. Rather, us think of the legacy you managed to create without even the pen and phone that felled that living and breathing pest called “The Constitution” you taught for twelve years in Chicago. What was a fringe issue as I began my research for this obviously anti-intellectual column of mine brought flooding back the best of days of promised transparency for your administration as I searched and searched.
Gone was any record of how you acquired such selective amnesia, your dozen pained years teaching Constitutional Law stripped away so thoughtfully by whatever power that was, but what remained were the good times. Good times wrought by essence of Jeremiah Wright, your good friend Saul and The Cloward-Piven Strategy and the good sense to bring the good times to others as, in a true show of hopeful gamesmanship, you passed up the New York Times and Washington Post and knew no pen nor phone was needed. Because in recognizing for the earliest question(s) at the press conference on that bitter-cold 2009 winter day that you didn’t need Saint Valentine to tell you what is love when you gave the nod to Sam Stein and The Huffington Post. Like Carl Brutananadilewski bellowed when he had the powers of the Foreigner Belt sans instruction books, you knew you don’t need no instructions when you know how to rock! That’s why you kiss the babies, not the voting supporters. You knew from Bill Clinton’s inverse reading of the rules there just how perverse an inversion can really be. Even so, there were a few days leading up to the HuffPost incident where you’d been a little bitter at the rules, imagining the Super Bowl champion’s bringing their cheerleaders, and then you looked at the editor of said bastion of the far left, and the bitterness disappears when you see the name “Stein” on the editor’s nametag. “Dear God,” the thought occurred. “What if the rules really sucked, and I had to kiss that…that monster from…what in God’s name was her…what was it’s name?!”
Gertrude Stein, Mr. President.
Let’s make a swift return to this matter of the “Legacy” amid this “Where to now, Saint Peter?” era for the DNC. Fortunately for Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats, the newly-inaugurated POTUS seems more content to revel in his “Captain Chaos & The Jokers” phase of making a wreck of the place than to seize the existential crisis that the Democrats (and not the GOP as the MSM predicted) are enduring. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell {R-KY) and Speaker of The House Paul Ryan (R-WI) are doing their utmost to appear composed while likely running neck-and-neck for who’s going to beat the other in the race to full-blown alcoholism. Somewhere, with all the grace of a leaden zeppelin, John Boehner cajoles an adult beverage of his own from its glass, mumbling through his tears about “the legacy of ‘The Grand Bargain’ being undone by that socialist Pope…my legacy.”
Currently nursing his still-fresh wounds from the Pope’s political ideals imported from Argentine politics just in time to help him out of one jam and then straight out of Congress, the star-mangled Boehner is rumored to have begun a new work: a fictional, autobiographical thriller set in a zombie-ravaged world where his K-Street lobbying job barely oozes out enough scratch to buy cigarettes and Pabst Blue Ribbon by the can, D.C. is the only civilized city still unaffected by the zombie plague. New Orleans had long since fallen, rumored by the credible historians not named John Boehner to have collapsed under the zombie siege as early as twenty years after the French sold the city to America. In Boehner’s fictional world D.C. is all that matters, but where the book differs from his real life is the title, while sure to amaze all except Speaker Ryan (long rumored to be a zombie himself), is all but assured a lawsuit from every single member of the Trump line in America and Germany: “The Art of the Un-Deal”…
…it’s true. Look all of this up and then tell me whether it’s real or not. Contrary to Alice’s “Wonderland on Acid” running riot with D.C. reality, it’s definitely one or the other.
