Prologue
The 1951 Caddy.
In 1958, my Dad gave me the keys to his favorite hot ride. A 1951 green two door Series 61 Cadillac with a 160hp V8 engine and dual exhaust pipes, that sang the song of power and the road, for me to get around and keep running for him. About three months later I blew that magnificent engine up on Shirley Highway heading north into Washington, at the Glebe Road interchange. That night Dad disgusted came out and he pulled it home behind his 57 Ford Fairlane. After an evaluation of it, and me, he sold the car for its junk value, and it ended up in Bank’s Auto Parts, then on Telegraph Road and Duke Street.
It was a victim of an enthusiastic, if ignorant, driver who never once from the day he received the keys to the day he turned them back ever put one quart of oil into that powerful hot machine. I didn’t even know it needed oil!
My next car was a $100.00 1950 Nash Rambler convertible on its last legs picked up on Dog Row in Bailey's Crossroads. It was a car from which I would learn much about automobile owner ship and operation before it too headed for Banks.
In the 1970's it became popular to denigrate the "old dead white guys" who had created and built and maintained the United States to become the most powerful Nation in the modern World. More representation and democracy was needed. Minorities had to be up-lifted and Whites needed to step back and share the wealth of the Nation with all of its citizens.
Over the intervening period to 2013, we have seen social changes only dreamt of in the wildest of drug induced fantasies before 1970. Women in the military. Homosexuals with a special status under the law. Foreign minorities demanding respect and greater tolerance of their inability to speak English as a currency of being a citizen of the United States. A welfare system which once was specifically to protect the elderly in their old age against poverty now a swarm with every conceivable illness and disability regardless of age entitled by benefit of their existence to the same benefits as people who have worked all their lives supporting the system
And we recently have been told that it is now safe to say that the "old white guys" no longer control the Nation, and in the Near future will not be players in the decisions about who runs the Nation. Republicans and Conservatives take notice your time is running out! Now consider this.
The Failed Presidency of Barry Obama
What can you say when you look at the Washington Post day in and day out and the same story continues to run, over and over and over. The National intelligence community is proving to be as serious a threat to the Constitution as ever were the S.S in Germany or the KGB in the Soviet Union. The economy is in a shambles. The military is in exhaustion of over extension with an internal crisis caused by sexual predation. The N. Koreans are running amok. The Chinese are laughing at us as they daily steal our secrets and grow steadily more powerful. The Russians disdain us. The U.N. stands aside in polite silence. Our foreign allies squirm uncomfortably in the background not willing to even give us lip service in any of our messes since the debacle in the middle east begun under the Obama Administration.
In all of it there is the putrid odor of incompetence.
For myself I have long felt that getting fresh blood into the Nation’s leadership, people from the heartland who had no ties or obligations to the establishment already there was important to cleaning up this mess. Strangely I opposed Mr. Obama’s candidacy for the presidency, not for the very quality which I had thought would be good for the Country, but for the lack of any ability other than to give a rousing speech and run a campaign for office. Obama was fresh blood, but he had no ability to do the job and it was this inability which forced me to oppose my own long hoped for dream.
He had made his way to the front by crabbing his way to the back.
His whole career in its few episodes, student in Hawaii, social worker in Chicago, back bench legislator in the Illinois legislature, and then Senator in the Congress all had one commonality. They were positions which his racial background factored heavily in the mix, and where that background had encouraged well meaning people to direct his path toward the Presidency. Probably it is the consequence of random acts of kindness interspersed with seeming isolated brilliant communications skills which kept him on course when a critical look at his actual accomplishments would have forced the examiner to admit there is nothing behind the suit. But he was in the armor of being what David Ehrenstein termed, “the Magic Negro.”
None who were better qualified dared to expose him. To quote Ehrenstein at the time, Obama was; “the magical Negro is a non threatening black hero in the popular media, usually the cinema, who was invented to ease feelings of white guilt over slavery and racial injustice. He is noble and devoid of sexual motives, and appears suddenly, out of nowhere, to magically solve the problems of white people.”
American voters and the World didn’t need to know who he was, what he believed or what his qualifications for the office were. They could get that feel good sense just by voting for him!
Just an Empty Promise.
Sometimes great men work their way into the lime light by their achievements and through them earn their chance at becoming president. People like Washington, Jefferson, the Adams, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan come to mind as these types of presidents. Sometimes great men work their way up by being a good soldier and working to support others who are more celebrated, until a seeming accident or succession pulls them onto the stage as the President. They are fewer, but no less great for all of that and include Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. But in every case of greatness, the man behind the suit was in and of himself and individual who had his own achievements and skills which he had developed over a career of working at a job and making meaningful decisions about whatever he was working at or for. Barack Hussein Obama had no such background from the time he was a boy to the day he entered the Oval Office as President of the United States he was a promise for the future without a history or past.
A Tell Tale Award
The dust of the parades in Washington hadn’t settled two weeks after Obama’s inauguration before the first vote of the people of the World arrived. Obama had won of all things, the Nobel Peace Prize!
The only response any thinking person could have had at that was, “What the Hell is going on in Stockholm? Are they high on marijuana or what? It wasn’t marijuana, it was the rapture of Obama’s having full filled the promise that every loving American mother had uttered to herself and her son, “One day you could be President!” The dream of the World’s masses, the promise of the American’s Constitution. With it the joy reverberated into the halls of the Nobel Committee and they voted , YES. The future is finally at hand, Peace will soon follow. Sort of the Second Coming award.
When asked after the amazement had settled down, the head of the committee could only lamely say and I take the liberty of paraphrasing several of his statements as he tried to talk his way out of the mess; “We made the award in an Anticipatory Gesture that the President will prove to be the peace maker of our time.” Whatever the reason, the Committee had glanced over the other 204 candidates for the prize which included the Chinese dissident Hu Jia who might have been called a Neighborhood Block Organizer in China. But Hu unlike Barack got himself a long jail sentence and won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought while as had Nelson Mandela he bounced in and out of Chinese jails for his anti-government writings and speeches.
It turns out as Rush Limbaugh demonstrated in 2007 when a friend of his nominated him to counter the nomination of Al Gore, Jr. Anyone in Government, or a head of a University, along with a host of other people is entitled to nominate a person of their choice for the award. In the end, the 2007 award might be considered the John the Baptist forerunner of Mr. Obama’s ascension to that vaunted World important award.
The Nobel Committee claimed in its 2009 award “ The award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world.”
“The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on!" Ted Kennedy’s last speech to a Presidential Convention when he energized the Nation and the World too.
What President Obama did with all this remarkable potential was to sink under the weight of expectation and allow himself to become a tool of equally unqualified Idealists. His Administration got swept up in the policies of the Democratic Liberal-Progressive catechism. It became the inept political class leading the inept leader in control of the most powerful Nation in the modern World.
Ted Kennedy had put Obama in the White House in the belief that he’d found the tool for continuing his own agenda. And with the Presidency under his rule, the control of both houses of Congress, and a huge effort of legislative bullying, he got his dream. The Affordable Healthcare Act, popularly called Obama Care. If anyone should have been the titled author of it, it should have been called the Kennedy Care. But history isn’t always kind to deserving people.
A Nobel Peace Laureate with a Hit List!
After that, came the important stuff. War. And here we have the crux of this discussion. Obama has a love of war, actually of war games. The kind where the looser gets zapped out of existence with great sound effects and flashes of light.
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libya, pop pop pop! He took them on, declared them won and moved on. Until the Arab Spring when muslims all over the place finally became totally disenchanted with the promise of an Obama peace.
The Cadillac of Nations brought to its End?
So, here we sit. The economy is in a shambles. Our overseas presence is now the province of NSA, CIA, etc. and their plethora of drones flying over any Nation too weak to challenge them.
The mark of the empty suit amateur adventurer is on the whole thing. A leader who can’t lead. Who relies on agencies he can’t and doesn’t control to replace a military, to which he is naturally hostile, whose strength and global power he can’t fathom. He makes statements and policy positions just as he has always done in the belief that not enough people are paying attention or will notice to interfere with his limited abilities.
The Nation and as a result, the World is in need of a leader. Sadly, Obama isn’t it. Worse, there aren’t any on the horizon. The "old white guys" who set it all up have been replaced by a clamoring mob which can’t decide what is truly important as it rushes from fad cause to fad cause. None who currently operates the Nation's structure, nor who is on the Horizon has a clue of how to do the job!
So the news in the Post will continue to go from bad to worse until someone finally steps forward to get control and turn us back to being a true super power.
Unless it is too late and our great nation's engine is out of the oil of competence to operate it. People generally end up with the automobile and government that they deserve.
