Wednesday, October 7, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 06 Oct 2009 07:40 PM PDT

The loss of the Chicago Olympics should not have been
particularly embarrassing to Obama. Previous administrations were not
tarnished by lost Olympic bids for the simple reason that they did not get
involved in them. Bush did not jump on board New York City's ill fated
2012 Olympic bid. He did not fly out to make a personal appearance, spread
his charisma and press the flesh on behalf of a bid being waged by a
single city. And there was no reason for him to do so. That is because for
all the criticisms directed at Bush by the left and the far-right, he
understood his duties and the limits of his power in a way that Obama does
not.

Obama's Copenhagen trip made at a cost of at least a million
taxpayer dollars not only failed to achieve anything, but embarrassingly
emphasized his inability to draw the line between the duties of his office
and his sense of political omnipotence. Throughout his campaign and term
in office, Obama has acted as if an application of his charisma can solve
any problem. And he has yet to grasp not only that it can't, but that his
job is in the White House, rather than the endless global Miss America
competition he has chosen to embark on.

Obama made Chicago's
Olympic bid his first priority, only squeezing in a half-hour session with
General McChrystal who is in charge of the Afghan front that he had
promised to commit all his efforts to on the campaign trail, after
McChrystal embarrassed him by revealing that he had only talked once with
Obama. Would anyone care to make a guess how many times Obama had spoken
to those in charge of Chicago's Olympic bid? Somehow I suspect it's more
than once. Or twice.

Is he the leader of Chicago, the United States
or the Free World? Obama himself can't seem to decide that because he
doesn't think in terms of national duties or obligations, only of himself.
His speeches filled with the constant egotistical refrain of "I's" and
"Me's" are the product of a man who does not see himself in terms of his
country, but sees his country in terms of himself.

Obama cannot
draw the line between his legitimate duties and random publicity, just as
neither of the Obamas seem to have any concept of the dignity of their
office. To them there is no dignity, only privilege and entitlement. They
recognize that they have power, but they recognize no limitations on that
power and treat it as an extension of their egos. The royal couple have a
boundless appetite for flattery and none at all for self-discipline. The
concept of "Doing Your Duty" is wholly foreign to people who never worked
legitimately for anything, who got plum positions thanks to a combination
of political connections, racial huckstering and personal charm.

Any position that they hold in their minds is an extension of
themselves. That is why Obama does not see himself in terms of the
Presidency or wonder whether he is up to the job. He sees the Presidency
and all the privileges that come with it as part of his aura. Any problem
he comes across, he treats as something that can be resolved with enough
exposure to that aura. And when that doesn't work, the Obama toolbox turns
up shockingly empty.

The media which has been well trained to feed
the boundless egos of celebrities have found their perfect political match
in Obama. They lavished their love on him. They depicted him with halos
over his head. They lost any concept of the boundary between bias and
worship, in the process coming to resemble the slavish doggy adoration of
a state controlled press corps. And now some of them are slowly waking up
to the realization that simply because you can manufacture image does not
mean that you can manufacture reality. Like Obama the media had lost track
of the limits of their power, the boundaries at which their control end
and real life begins.

The media, particularly on the television end
of things, shares with Hollywood a boundless faith in the ability to
create and recreate images, to make of reality what they will. To control
the vertical and the horizontal, to change the focus and deluge your mind
with a thousand images. And the audience, in the words of the famous Outer
Limits opening theme was expected to, sit quietly and let the broadcasters
control all that you see and hear. But that power fantasy, like all of the
power fantasies that come out of Hollywood's studios of fiction and New
York's studios of fact, was incomplete. Controlling image does not control
reality. The media helped shape Obama's image, but can do very little to
improve his reality.

Propaganda has traditionally served to create an echo
chamber effect with dictatorships as a state controlled press fed back the
message that the rulers of the state wanted to hear, back to the state.
The problem with the echo chamber is that it is also a mirage. Repeated
Soviet dictators had no idea how bad their economic, agricultural and
military problems were, because there was no one to tell them. A healthy
free press serves as a useful warning bell. A slavish media mutt who licks
politician's boots full time blinds those same politicians to their own
incompetence and the scale of the problems they must address. It leaves
them unaware of and unable to address even simple problems in an organized
fashion.

Obama's love affair with himself, and the media's love
affair with him, overlapping with the viral craze of a generation that had
come to believe that digital reality had superseded physical reality,
created a distortion cloud of images, fonts, symbols and myths that are
now imploding on themselves. Brutal force sustained the cults of
personality of Communist rulers, but Obama relied on manufacturing the
social charisma of rock stars and celebrities. And while that impressed
far many Americans, it cannot change the nature of reality.

Obama's cult of personality made him king, but it could not make
him competent. And that should not surprise his media backers at all.
Celebrity when applied to practical tasks is nothing more than vapor. It
can sell a product, but it can't make it work. Obama's America is a failed
product, a myth built on iconic logos and plagiarized sound bites, on hope
for people too young to remember that the only thing most politicians
really hope for is to get into office and stay there.

Every
egotist is a king inside his own head, lost in a narcissistic vision of
his own genius. Kings of course have no defined limits to the powers. They
accomplish things by simply saying so. Their will is everyone's law. No
one refuses them. No one resists them. In their own minds anyway. Obama
has made his own power fantasy real enough, but he cannot make himself
omnipotent. And his cult of personality impresses few outside the United
States.

The leaders of Russia and China who wield their own cults
of personality are not about to be impressed by an imported cult of
personality. And European leaders who do not have to live under a media
regime that insists on lecturing them on the greatness of Obama, are free
to disregard the lunacy as well. That is why Obama's repeated foreign
trips have done nothing except enable Michelle Obama to pick up more
souvenirs in every airport. Because the only thing that Obama really
brings on those trips is a dose of teleprompter charisma and the
expectation that his own importance should be enough to awe all
participants into getting things done, his way.

Unsurprisingly the
worst policies of the Carter and Clinton administrations, applied by a new
generation that is just as unable to detach image from reality as their
own boss, are not producing spectacular results. And Obama's eagerness to
get out in front to promote them has only wasted his own influence and
demonstrated his incompetence.

Incapable of understanding the limits of the
borrowed power of his office, Obama has blindly stumbled smack dab into
them anyway. Because charisma cannot solve Afghanistan. Charisma cannot
nationalize health care. Charisma cannot create jobs, except those
involving makeup and photography. Charisma cannot reduce the national
debt. Charisma cannot bring peace to the Middle East, create alternative
energy sources or accomplish anything useful that does not involve selling
magazines.

The Obama who would be King has wasted truly spectacular
amounts of money on behalf of his corporate and union backers. He has
alienated America's allies, alienated independent voters and sabotaged
every one of his own agendas. He has put himself outside the law, tried to
govern through a government of Czars and in the process created a
scattershot administration in which every other official is scrambling for
power. And while Obama himself is incapable of realizing any of this, his
liberal backers are increasingly becoming aware that the worst threat to
their agenda is also the means they used to sell America on that agenda.
Obama himself.

When his ability to "fool all the people some of
the time" runs out, Obama will officially go from being an asset to
becoming a liability. And that time is quickly running out.