The Burning Question: Gross Incompetence Or Cloward-Piven Strategy?

I liked Steven Den Beste’s post over at  Hot Air, today: The Paranoid Answer because it’s nice to know that other rational people are struggling with the same questions I  have… questions  that boil down to:  Is Obama and his cohorts just grossly incompetent, slow learners when it comes to the economy and the Gulf oil spill, or is the destruction of the economy and Gulf intentional? Are we witnessing Cloward-Piven strategy of manufactured crisis in action?  I admit, after having researched Obama’s background as thoroughly as I have, I’ve leaned toward the “paranoid”, “tin foil hat” explanation.

Back in Feb 26, 2008, Spengler asked, “Who is Barack Obama”, and was amazingly prescient in his analysis:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

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Be afraid – be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

Spengler could see in Feb, 2008 that we were dealing with an elite leftist who hated American exceptionalism. Tragically, the Dem Socialist majority in Congress have been more than happy to enable a President bent on our decline.

James Simpson of The American Thinker. pronounced in 11/09:

It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact…

…The real goal of “health care” legislation, the real goal of “cap-and-trade,” and the real goal of the “stimulus” is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.

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These people are our enemies. They don’t use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II
It is time we fully internalized and digested this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people have violated countless laws and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so — the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but it could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but they could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but they could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.

One aspect of Obama’s agenda Den Beste’s Hot Air piece didn’t deal with, was foreign policy. As he makes one wrong move after another, one can only ask….is he doing it on purpose? Spengler predicted that Obama would do his utmost to destroy America’s standing as a superpower. He said, “it might take the country another generation to recover”.

Charles Krauthammer, for one,  has had it with the absurdities of Obama’s National Security Strategy:

President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy — how else do you define those seeking your destruction? – “a loose network of violent extremists.” But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooter runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan’s Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as “religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor.”

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century – from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers were of various national origin, occupation, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted.

And what do we use NASA for, now that space exploration is off the agenda? It becomes an expensive,  high tech, international social program, with these (you’ve got to be kidding me) goals: “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.

A visibly disgusted Krauthammer did not hold back on Special Report, tonight:

“This is a new type of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of ‘feel good about your past’ scientific achievements is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy. If I didn’t know that Obama had told him this, I’d demand the firing of Charles Bolden.”

Video at link (Gateway Pundit).

As Charles said;  unbelievable.

This whole Presidency has been like a bad dream, but at least Michelle’s proud.