Yes, yes, Neo is right as always....haste makes waste. But it's only half of the story: the American people have been asleep-at-the-switch as the good times rolled for the last 10-15 years (maybe many more).

Some of the major things I've learned from Bowen theory and Edwin H. Friedman is there is no virulent virus (Obama) without a host that is weakened and vulnerable to that virus. What that means to me is that the Obama group is playing on our long-term weaknesses of not paying attention and being wedding to short-term fixes, luxury and quick fixes.

All the big financials that received bailouts and now face curtailed compensations should have been overseen by their stockholders...yet we live in a world of quick stock trading such that there's never any sense of ownership and over-sight. We're in for the fast buck. And since stockholders didn't do their jobs, now government does. It's the way of the world.

The Obama administration has come to fill in for our weaknesses and unwillingness to pay attention. And all we can do is point to Obama as the culprit.

Yet, he's only the virus that matches our nation's weakened political/economic/moral immune system. And what Obama's czars don't accomplish, the predatory lawyers and class action lawsuits will.

We forget, that every virus and predatory situation is always a response to a weakness in our society and each of us.

This boils down to the old maxim: no one can be swindled without our permission. We can only be victims of the Obama administration if we are too weak to resist it.

Posted by: Webutante at October 23, 2009 3:58 PM

Neo, whom I respect greatly is only looking at the Obama side of the equation....and not the concommitant weakness in our national immune system from decades of prosperity and short-term fixes....she who is a therapist, I say, is guilty of major national projection.

Let's start talking about our short-comings that led to a man like Obama in the White House and what we're going to to about it.

Posted by: Webutante at October 23, 2009 4:19 PM

Hm. Well Webutante, I'm a fan of both you and neo, but I think you're involved in a little wishful thinking here. It isn't that we the people have no short-comings to address - it is that the short-comings we have are called "human nature" and are eternal. And the Left are masters at playing to our basest instincts.

I believe the ONLY hope for wisdom and virtue in society is religious conversion (preferably "good" religions, like Judaism and Christianity - and I realize I'm speaking heresy here for lots of believers and non-believers), but what do you propose "we" do about that - especially if we believe in individual liberty? I pray for conversions, but other than trying to teach my own kids, I'm at a loss on how we are to proceed in society.

I'm guessing you want wiser heads to prevail in areas now dominated by the Left:
education
media
the legal system
the entertainment industry
etc...

Perhaps you have some specific suggestions as to what we do about it. If not, I'm afraid the best we can do is teach our children well (and have more!) and be vigilant as neo suggests.

Posted by: Western Chauvinist at October 23, 2009 6:04 PM

I like the virus analogy.

Carry that through to the logical conclusion that there's not a complex end goal, but instead simply a cure or death with no in - between, and you begin to see where I spend a lot of thinking time these days...

Posted by: TmjUtah at October 23, 2009 8:32 PM

You make good points Western Chauvinist and I don't disagree with any of them. However again what I mean is that Obama is a man who is a sign of our times and out-growth of our national weaknesses and lack of moral will and strength. I agree with you about the religion part but still think even moral and religious people have been guilty of not paying enough attention and living in too much haste for decades. This has had the effect of weakening our national immune system greatly.

Most stockholders don't know, care, oversee and protest executive pay of the management of companies we own stock in (often because we hold and trade stocks on the Internet). Then we come to find out little and late of the wildly excessive executive bonuses that are now being reigned in by Obama's bailout czars. BTW, I went to the first stockholder meeting of my life this past year because I realized this and that I need to become more deeply knowledgeable of one of the companies I'm getting a nice dividend from. I'm guilty of what I'm talking about here....a lack of involvement and wanting to skim the cream off the top.

In the area of healthcare, for decades, we've distanced ourselves from costs as we've grown ever more expectant that our health insurance pick up every single dime of our care. We don't do this yet with auto insurance, in that we don't demand that every single oil change be covered by auto insurance but it may be coming. As long as we never know what a procedure costs because everything goes through our insurance, we weaken ourselves and overload the system. And I won't even go to the fact that we often neglect the most basic healthcare through diet, exercise and moderation in favor of taking pills etc.

Lastly when 9/11 happened, after repeated smaller attacks on foreign soil one of my first reactions was: how weakened we have become by minimizing the dangers.

There are many other examples of this, but suffice it to say, that we've unfortunately gotten the president and Congress we deserve this election cycle. And it's dreadful. Hopefully this will wake us up enough to get more involved and take more personal responsibility in aspects of our lives that impinge on us personally. Because if we don't, all the insight in the world about how pathetic Obama is---and he and his administration certainly are---will be of no help to us on the way to the grave of tyranny, again of our own making. We can't just project all this stuff on Obama. We need to go further and see how we've gotten to this point.

Best wishes.

Posted by: Webutante at October 23, 2009 10:25 PM

Webutante is absolutely correct. If cannibals could vote, they would undoubtedly elect a cannibal king. They certainly wouldn't elect someone who makes them feel bad or self-conscious about being cannibals.

Obama is the symptom of a dysfunctional system -- the end stage of a disease process that's been going on for half a century or more, as the virus makes its way through every vital organ -- the judiciary, the educational establishment, the mass media, the major foundations, the professional groups, male-female relations, and even the religions (e.g., Rev. Wright, the National Council of Churches, liberation theology, etc).

I do believe that the only solution is a spiritual renewal, but it cannot be only a reactionary one involving contraction into a kind of closed spiritual ghetto. Rather, it has to be a new understanding of how the timeless truths of the past still apply to the present. Skeptical modern man needs to be intellectually convicted, which is eminently possible if the mind hasn't already been thoroughly rotted by scientism, postmodernism, relativism, and other pneumacognitive pathologies of the age.

Of course, a major part of this would be a return to constitutional government. If one's anthropology is wrong (e.g., Rousseau), then your political philosophy will be a catastrophe.

Fortunately, the Founders had deep insight into the dark heart of man, and created a government around that awareness. In contrast, the left denies the darkness, which is the most effective way for the darklings to seize power -- just as the best way for a virus to take over the body is to piggyback on an innocent kiss, or a handshake, or an anonymous encounter in a bathhouse.

Posted by: Gagdad Bob at October 24, 2009 8:14 AM

All socialist projection aside, what is missing in the conservative effort to preserve American experience and tradition is the palpable threat of violence, even as we see Islam provoke the hand of appeasement in the left with barely an effort. Intellectual arguments are fruitless, and enabling. So we watch, and wait.

Posted by: james wilson at October 24, 2009 8:51 AM

This upside-down crap sandwich we live with now has far too much in common with what I have come to understand of the crazy years experienced in Europe between the two world wars.

Post WWI Europe suffered through great spasms of apathy, loss of national faith, breakdowns in social cohesion, and decadence in ways that America hadn't...Until the perfect storm of progressive fortune brought us Obama.

The promise of a transcendent cohesion and transformative reordering by those who trade in Gleichschaltung was/is a pretty heady and addictive narcotic for any society that suffers through chaos and uncertainty. Therein lies danger.

We live in interesting times to say the least and the American polity -in all its now hyphenated and chastened glory- is faced with an acid test of its commitment to the foundational principles upon which this [divisible] nation under God was built. Are we to be a citizenry organized around respect for the individual, or are we to become mere cells within the greater body of a State that presumes to displace and assume the powers of God?

Shall we reassert our birthrights and cleave to our Liberties, or will we slouch our collective way into the dusk of calibrated tyranny?

I'm generally hopeful that Americans haven't given up the better angels of their foundation as yet but today...Damn! Today I was confronted by the pure lunatic zeal of a HopeChange fanboy trying to convince me to ignore reality. To gaslight me with the expectation that I would just disregard what I've seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears because the mere existence of an authentic bit of reality threatened the core of his worldview and thus couldn't 'really' exist. He had seen and heard the same as I but had so bought into the incestuous dialectic narrative of his political tribe that the maintenance of its fiction need trump objective reality itself. It's one thing to read the splatterings of this spun crap on the net but to watch it in the full blush of its manifestation in meat space is astounding and surreal.

This is a man whose very mind, body, and soul has been entirely subsumed into the being of his tribe. This is a man who has lost the desire to reason; In fact reason is inimical to his constructed self.

There is some seriously dangerous cognitive dissonance at play in America today.

Posted by: monkeyfan at October 24, 2009 10:19 AM

As usual misreading Marxism leads to thoseconclusions, hasn't he figured out that the oligarchs, the ones who didn't fund his campaign, all knuckled under, only the petit, bourgeoisie, and the Tea Party goers, as well as a few other figures, like a certain snowmobile riding gal
with a laptop and a Ffacebook page, have been his main opponenr. BTW, Gerald, you were really were prophetic with your comments last winter, sometimes disturbingly dead on, as the example of NY's 23rd
district prove

Posted by: narciso at October 24, 2009 12:20 PM

Which comments were those? My brain is getting smaller by the day.

Posted by: vanderleun at October 24, 2009 1:22 PM

My brain is getting smaller by the day.

See? It's not that alcohol kills brains cells as much as it dehydrates the brain and shrinks it, causing larger gaps in the wrinkly parts where information has to jump across. Moving the goalposts, so to speak. . . at least, that's my excuse.

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at October 24, 2009 4:13 PM

Well it was more a series of refrains, that you coined after the November election. 'Republicans
they thirst for Death" and better dead (than led
by Palin") Haven't seen much signs of synaptic misfires quite the opposite, My grandfather used
to say the same thing, but he knew more than a dozen people had forgotten.

Posted by: narciso at October 24, 2009 7:12 PM