Obama is Bursting the Left's Bubbles
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americanthinker.com
By J.R. Dunn April 23, 2014
Early 2014 will be viewed historically as the period when most of the American left’s bubbles detached themselves completely from reality and wafted off to Unicornland.
In the modern era it has become fashionable to create and fully upholster one’s own bubble out of the rag ends of various ideologies, fads, and daydreams. To in effect attempt to establish an individual reality, more often than not at odds with the world as it actually exists. Such efforts quickly come up against individual limitations, both intellectual and emotional, but that doesn’t seem to discourage people.
Nowhere has this impulse been greater than as involves politics, and nowhere has it been more fervent than on the left. Leftism is a hyperbubble in and of itself, consisting of nearly as many sub-bubbles as there are leftists (it has long been understood that leftism is essentially the politicization of petty personal grievances). Living in leftist bubbles -- whether feminist, racial, academic, communist, or what have you -- amounts to a way of life for millions of Americans.
This is the secret of Obama’s appeal, and the explanation of the long-pondered mystery of what he’s really up to, what his actual goal is. The truth is, there is no goal. Or rather, the goal, the plan, involves simply lighting up all those bereft and chilly bubbles abiding in major urban areas, college towns, and fringes along each coast. That is the ultimate goal, and there is nothing coherent or comprehensible beyond it. A fundamentally stupid man, one who time and again has demonstrated complete lack of understanding of the world as it exists, Obama is as enrapt with illusion as his followers. (Oh, I’ll grant him a kind of feral cleverness, but any con artist has that.) Obama exists in his own bubble, in no way more valid than that of any other American leftist.
To examine a few examples, we’ll start with the military illusion -- namely, that it is U.S. power that causes all wars.
This is derived quite simply from Marxist-Leninist theory: wars are a byproduct of “capitalism.” The U.S., as the premier “capitalist” state, is ipso facto, the cause of war.
This is the primum mobile of the modern American left, the driver of such people as Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Medea Benjamin. There is a list that circulates throughout the left, consisting of the countries “invaded” by the U.S. in the 20th century. The list includes such nations as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Philippines in 1944. The fact that most leftists have no idea what was going in 1944 is beside the point. Those countries were invaded, and the U.S. done it. End of story. The same is true of Grenada, Kuwait, and Iraq in later years.
So Obama’s debasing of the U.S. military was one of the most welcome elements of his ascension to office (long with the introduction of PC into the military, and enforcing feminist and racist dogma). Iraq and Afghanistan have been abandoned, deployment of missile defenses in Central Europe was cancelled, Obama has devoted himself to “leading from behind,” with results more disastrous than any since the 60s. The oafish Chuck Hagel was appointed secretary of defense, announcing recently that the Army would be cut to pre-WW II level (in the midst of ongoing hostilities), the Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles -- the most successful guided missiles in the arsenal of any nation in history -- are to cease production, not to mention contemptuous cuts in military benefits that are somehow not matched by any similar cuts for public-sector unions.
The outcome has been exactly the opposite of left-wing expectations. Collapse of public order in Iraq is the most trivial result. Far more important is wholesale descent into chaos along the North African littoral, a revanchist Russia invading Georgia and Ukraine, still-vague threats from China, and an aggressive and defiant Shi’ite Iran completing its quest for nuclear weapons.
It’s no coincidence that the invasion of Crimea followed only two days after the Hagel’s announcement of deeper military cuts. More recently we have seen the brazen and repeated buzzing of an American warship in international waters. Eastern Ukraine may well have been seized by the time you read this. Such incidents will occur at least once a month or more often from now until Obama leaves office. He can’t do anything about them because he has stripped the country of necessary assets. (e.g., only a single carrier battle group is now on call. The rest are either committed or on “stretched” refitting -- that is, beached to save money.) Furthermore, any attempted ripostes on his part would inevitably fail, because not a single one of his advisors -- Valerie Jarrett, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Hagel, Samantha Power is capable of any strategic insight or grasp of complex planning. Benghazi revealed as much.
Obama has unleashed the hounds of hell across vast swaths of the globe. And what is the left-wing response? There isn’t one. There isn’t one because none of this is happening. Not a single element of it has penetrated into the bubbles.
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