Laboring on Distored Reality

Timothy Birdnow

This from the Federalist Patriot:

"I see the sadness and worry that's creasing his face. He reads every word, every memo, so he is better prepared than the people briefing him. This man doesn't take a day off."

Michelle Obama

End

For a man who never takes a day off he sure manages to squeeze enough golf into his life. Be that as it may, I am willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of argument, and accept Mooch's premise. What does that tell us?

Jimmy Carter was famous for "reading every word, every memo" and it was well known that Carter read every line of every piece of legislation. It was not uncommon for Carter to be up until three or four a.m. pouring over statistics and documentation.

Does dilligence and strong work ethic make for a great president? Was Jimmy Carter in any way a great president?

In point of fact, Carter and Obama have much in common, and so perhaps this obsessive devotion to detail and minutiae. While hard work and dilligence are praiseworthy virtues to a point, they become a substitute for real ability, the province of the second rate thinker and man of lesser intellect. We've all known them; the straight A student who knows nothing about anything, the manager who has no idea how to actually make things work, although he is big on theoretical models, the teachers bound up in educrat theory who really believes that teaching involves concentric circles on an overhead projector.

Jimmy Carter was such a man. He had an engineering degree, but padded his education and experience because he felt inadequate. He claimed to be a nuclear physicist, when in reality he took a couple of physics classes and worked as a tech on a nuclear sub. He LIED to boost his own ego, because he knew himself for the mediocre that he was. His thinking on policy during his Administration and even today illustrate the shallowness of Carter's mind, of his abilities.

Obama, in my view, is more of the same. He's had great success by just showing up, because he could be exploited as a poster boy for racial justice. He was head of the Law Review at Harvard, yet never wrote anything of substance. He was a lecturer on law, and given a contract to write a book on Constitutional law, yet he turned that into an autobiography, despite having really done very little in his life. Always he was telling the world and himself that he is a man of substance.

Quite frequently those who know themselves to be second tier throw themselves into details and minutiae; it makes them feel like they are actually doing something substantial. Al Gore was famous for such wonkishness, for instance.

And there is a syndrome whereby too many details lead the individual off into fairy land. There is an old adage "can't see the forest for the trees" and liberals frequently find themselves lost in the forbidden jungle of intellectual quicksand. Their inability to see the world for what it is and understand reality stems from their immersion in a sea of theory on the one hand and dizzying detail on the other. They lack PERSPECTIVE. So many of those who become devoted to liberal thinking do so ultimately out of a desire to prove to themselves and the world that they are in fact first rate thinkers, prime intellectuals, and deep in their hearts they know they are not. But the liberal movement promises them respect if they join, and so they jump into the quicksand, eager to remove the doubts that swirl around their brains. Once in, the eternal "doing", the lack of stillness when one should be still, the refusal to just observe takes over, and the person quickly loses sight of reality, so immersed are they in their artificial world.

Anyone who knows a liberal knows they are never still, never at peace, never at rest. They are endlessly battling windmills.

Carter was like that, and if Michelle is to be believed, so is Obama. He labors mightily on things that should be delegated, and ignores the important issues. He is worse than blind; his vision is terribly distorted, twisting things out of shape. And he labors to make things fit this twisted vision.

As a property manager I visit all sorts of unusual places. One house that we have for rent has a shelf built onto the wall. I was puzzled upon seeing it; the board was clearly warped, and the shelf would not hold a marble because it would slide down. I saw what was done; whoever put it up found their board was warped, and so MOVED THE SUPPORT BRACKETS to hold the bent board. At first glance it was fine, but upon closer inspection it was, well, crazy; like something out of a carnival funhouse. Liberals are like that; their ideas seem to make sense if one fails to make a close examination of them. Liberals never see the craziness because they can't see that blasted forest; reality is lost to them. They are the guys who nail up brackets to hold warped boards.

And they nail, nail, nail. Liberals work as if the Devil were behind them with a pitchfork, poking them when they slow down.

Is that the problem with Barack Obama?

Well, SOMETHING is wrong with him!