--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> This author could have made some good points, but his article is so
filled with hate that its just a pseudo-Republican screed. He's
ranting to the choir so they can have a delightful political circle-
jerk.
>
> --- On Sun, 11/9/08, shempmcgurk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: shempmcgurk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [FairfieldLife] P. Hitchens: Obama-mania is a cult like
the Moonies and Scientology
> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, November 9, 2008, 2:12 AM
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The night we waved goodbye to America... our last best hope on Earth
> Last updated at 9:52 PM on 08th November 2008
>
>
> Add to My Stories
> Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful
replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell or
that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
>
> The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of
the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-
deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced
civilisation. At least Mandela-worship its nearest equivalent is
focused on a man who actually did something.
>
> I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock
the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been
abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up
around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.
>
>
> Scroll down for more
> The night America changed: Barack and Michelle Obama in Chicago
>
> It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which
recorded Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy
Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a
children's picture version of his story, there soon will be.
>
> Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting
record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted
abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard
to find.
>
> If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally
Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you
can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His
cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly
from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd
promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.
>
> He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of
America's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill
Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to
collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do,
which is what he is used to.
>
>
>
>
> Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really
did talk about a `new dawn', and a `timeless creed' (which was `yes,
we can'). He proclaimed that `change has come'. He revealed that,
despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what
`enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even
plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the
arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once
more toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home).
>
> I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse
Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get
away with this sort of stuff.
>
> And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his
admiring audience by repeated but rather hesitant invocations of
the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against
his will `Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder `Yes, we
can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we
can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my
advice. He'd have been better off bursting into `I'd like to teach
the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same
message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.
>
> Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that
52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the
obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political
machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close
associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has
been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.
>
> They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin
Luther King in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in
its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The
difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than
by law.
>
> If Mr Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good
white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain,
or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the
now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and
denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive
private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of
useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so
many young black men of his generation.
>
> If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then
every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people
into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith.
Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably
be more of them.
>
> And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist
nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't
vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is
obviously untrue.
>
>
> Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change
>
>
> I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America's
beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially
divided city in the world, with 15th Street which runs due north
from the White House the unofficial frontier between black and
white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division,
and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an
election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was
staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where
Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues
from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
> As I walked, I crossed another of Washington's secret frontiers.
There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as
the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the
other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
> They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it
meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural
war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States,
having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now
just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined
so much of the rest of the world.
> Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes,
totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty,
unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim,
suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.
> These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly
controlled mass immigration and to the march of political
correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America's
conservative party the Republicans to fight on the cultural and
moral fronts.
> They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting
Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could
order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And
now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent
into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on
Earth?
>
The author just seems to be a bit jealous of all the joy and
attention.
He is a dour chap, has no belief in any type of higher power, so it
is not a leap to see where he is coming from. He just had to write
something negative, like a knee-jerk response.
Who did he suggest would be better for the Empire?
And why do we want to be an Empire?
R.G.
