The Smiling Demagogue of the Age
By James Lewis
American Thinker
A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain," wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet. That is even truer today, in the age of mass media, when demagogues can be elected president on the strength of their nice smiles and sucker-tailored sales pitches.
Every age gets the demagogues it deserves. The Nineties had Bill Clinton, the first Boomer socialist to become President of the United States, with Hillary as an extra added attraction. Bill was proclaimed "a really good liar" by a fellow Democrat politician, Bob Kerrey. Two years later, enough voters were shocked by the Clinton White House to elect the first Republican Congress in forty years. Bill Clinton ended up with Monica kneeling on the floor of the Oval Office, DNA tests on the blue dress, and Bill finally becoming the first US president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson.
Then we had Al Gore, the most corrupt Nobel Peace Prize winner in the history of that dubious award. The media mob needed another distraction, another hero to worship. So they built up Barack Obama (Demagogue, Chicago). For our sins.
Haven't we seen this soap opera before? Obama's numbers are crashing right now for exactly the same reason that Hillary and Bill went down in 1993. The Demagogues can't stop themselves from grabbing more and more power, so eventually they expose themselves for who they really are. But they are truly, deeply dangerous to this country and to the world -- because it's not just our own skins that are at stake here. America is the world's cop, and once we go down, who's going to protect the weak and self-indulgent democracies of this dangerous world?
American democracy is teetering on the edge, and has been ever since the Clintons got elected in 1992. So far we've been lucky -- but not smart. Millions of empty-headed voters fell for the Clintons twice in a row, suckered by the media and a pair of sleazocrats. Last year they did it again.
At some point America's luck is going to run out.
It might happen in the next few weeks, when Obama and the Demagogues mount another Blitzkrieg to gain control over one-sixth of the US economy. Even if we squeak by that one, the voters seem to have a death wish to elect even more demagogues as soon as they get hoisted on the shoulders of the media mob. It can't last; at some point we will end up like Europe, with a completely phony democracy run by a permanent Ruling Class. The Kennedys are an example of that; they have run a consistent fraud since JFK got the Pulitzer Prize for a book he didn't write. It's just Machine Politics with the media in the bag to the politicians. If this whole country follows Massachusetts, we will become another France or Russia. The Left will become our permanent power elite, which has been their goal since Karl Marx in 1848. They now control our education system and colleges, they run the Big Media, but they have an endless need for more and more power. They can never get enough of it. Only American voters stand in their way.
We now know what Barack Obama was doing during those 20 years of sitting at the feet of Jeremiah Wright. He was learning the craft of the demagogue. A mob agitator like Wright whips up the worst in people: Envy, rage, slander, phony piety, greed, false pride. Everything he says is a lie. The skill of demagogy is in plotting and delivering the most effective lie. Obama learned well.
A mob agitator -- aka "community organizer" -- is the very essence of demagogy. Think of the Obama election campaign, which was totally phony from beginning to end, with the media in full-throated mob cry. All of Obama's personal heroes were demagogues. Lenin was a famous one. Karl Marx was, too. All the Communist heroes of the past were mob agitators, because they figured out how to appeal to the most ignorant, the most alienated, the angriest and most resentful, the most easily cowed and intimidated, and the most hate-filled sections of the population. Fear and hatred are the working clay for demagogues. Hitler, needless to say, was a world-class demagogue. The Dixiecrats were skilled demagogues. Mob leaders always are.
Barack Obama has been a model demagogue so far. He is now whipping up the mob against American insurance companies. He started with the car companies, the banks, any industry that uses oil and coal, big business, small business, and practically any other productive enterprise in America. The goal is to suck the biggest amount of juice out of productive enterprises. There's nothing new there. It's just the same things anti-Semitic demagogues used on Alinsky's own family in Russia. Obama's slick racial demagogy is just a return to the Dixiecrats. That's why old Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd has been a Great Liberal Senator for decades. He just flipped enemies, and kept doing exactly the same thing.
Obama will undoubtedly go on being a demagogue, because all his personal heroes rose to power that way. Any criticism of the 1000-page Centralized Medicine bill in the House is taken to be a personal attack on the man himself -- and if you criticize the man, you must be a racist hater. This is the very lowest level of human discourse. Obama himself is thin-skinned, manipulative and intolerant. A couple of weeks ago the White House started to push the line that the rising tide of criticism is a threat to Obama's life. That could be an insight: The Left may experience free speech as murderous, because they secretly know their idol is hollow and made of clay. The solution is more free speech.
Jeremiah Wright is a classic lynch-mob leader. Just remember his voice rising to a scream in "God Daaaaaammmnnn America!" There's your demagogue. The most important thing about Wright, however, is the even bigger roars of approval from his audience, when he delivers another hate-Whitey zinger. It's the mob response that makes the demagogue.
And there was Barack Obama sitting in the front pew every Sunday for twenty years taking notes. Nothing could be more revealing.
Louis Farrakhan, another close ally in Chicago, is a big, dangerous demagogue with a strong sadistic touch. So is Father Pfleger. Saul Alinsky, Obama's mentor and model, was a demagogue and a mentor of demagogues. Nancy Pelosi called Centralized Medicine critics "un-American" -- a classic demagogue move. Harry Reid labeled the critics "evil-mongers." It's all just "a high-tech lynching," as Clarence Thomas called his persecutors. Clarence Thomas has lived long enough to remember both the Dixiecrats demagogues and the neo-Dixiecrats we see today.
But the most cynical manipulators today run the media. The Washington Post made up the new racial insult "macaca" and hung it around George Allen neck. Allen didn't know what it meant. George said Macaca was just a term his African born mom used to admonish her kid's disruptive behavior. Such a man is unlikely to have allowed the use of the term macaca in his home if he had any notion of its being racist. George Allen is a good and decent man. The WaPo just sleaze-bombed his senatorial campaign with its slanderous and demagogic attacks until at the end nobody could see the real man anymore. That was deliberately destructive of a man: All for the sake of another Demagogue seat in the Senate. There has never been worse media abuse in American history, because there has never been a bigger ideological monopoly.
In the last eight years the demagogues of the media whipped up lynch-mob hatred for George W. Bush, who devoted his whole presidency to making the American people safe from terror attacks. It was amazingly sleazy. The Leftist media are filled with demagogues, all trying to out-do each other. It is their specialty.
Free speech is the only protection we have. The Demagogues attack freedom of speech because they can't tolerate criticism. In his eight years in the White House George W. Bush never tried to control the Internet. Today, Obama is trying to do it.
I'm pessimistic. Even if we survive this dangerous man Obama and his mob followers, the voters are risking the end of America as a democratic nation. We're trying to be Evil Knievil, jumping our motorbike over bigger and bigger obstacles. Knievel's luck didn't last, and neither will ours. It can't, in the long run.
Americans who believe in this country and its Constitution are constantly playing catch-up. Maybe we'll find another Ronald Reagan and win another Cold War against the totalitarian Left. Maybe another Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul are waiting in the wings. But just hoping for luck and more bloopers on the Left does not add up to a winning strategy.
Somehow we need to build for the future as well as the Founders did. Today's situation is just as dangerous as it was in the worst days of the Cold War. This is Valley Forge and Gettysburg, the Battle of Midway and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Greeks lost Athenian democracy and the Romans lost their Republic. Today the Brits have lost their sovereignty as a nation, and their electoral rights as a people. British Conservatives today are not the heirs of Margaret Thatcher. They are flabby losers.
We need to build a better and stronger conservative tradition. America is not immune to the power grabbers. We're constantly teetering on the edge.
There must be a better way.
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