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Derbyshire on Obama

Paeloconservative and NRO’s resident sane person John Derbyshire makes at least a good point or two in his blag post of skepticism towards Obama’s allure. Derb, like me, just doesn’t get Barack Obama’s attraction to the American people.

I dunno, I must be missing a gene or two. Everybody, including even some conservatives, is telling me what a fine uplifting orator Barack Obama is. All I see is great gusts of hot air. When he says something that actually has any semantic content, either it is just false, or else it is naked socialism.

As Jim Ostrowski says, the only “change” Obama has any interest in is the change in your pockets. Neither Ostrowski, nor Derbyshire, nor I have quite caught on to how high taxes, government intrusion, State intervention in vital industries (e.g., medical care), and socialist direction of the economy constitute anything an intelligent person could misconstrue as “change.” The 20th century in the United States and the rest of the world taught us that all those things are terrible ideas and that therefore their endorsement should be left to academics and people who directly benefit from State plunder. Is it “change” because he promises higher taxes and more government intrusion into our economic and social lives? He’s just offering more of the same. I haven’t heard him mention the federal reserve or the fiat money system a single time. But, then again, like Mr. Derbyshire, I found him vacuous and pretentious, so I stopped listening to him.

Derb:

[Quoting Obama] We’re up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government, that they are just part of the system in Washington.

But lobbyists are part of the system in Washington. It says so in the First Amendment: “… to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Obama wants to repeal the First Amendment?

Well, a much better refutation would have been to invoke the sentiment so eloquently expressed by P.J. O’Rourke: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” If you want to remove lobbyists and their targets, politicians, from economic decisions in our lives, then remove the ability of the elected criminals to make those decisions in the first place.

[Quoting Obama] … real leadership is about … the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose, a higher purpose.

Not just cant, but Leninist cant. We are a republic of free people, not the tools of some “leader” pursuing a historical “purpose.” What is your “higher purpose,” Senator? And what happens to those of us who decline to rally around it?

He finishes with a fantastic conclusion:

[Quoting Obama] And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words: Yes, we can.

Cynicism towards the kind of vaporous flapdoodle Obama trades in is fully justified, and ought to be encouraged. Doubt that an Obama administration will be able to do any better with the nation’s issues than a Clinton, McCain, Romney, or Paul administration, is likewise fully justified, given Obama’s lack of executive experience, or of experience in any real job; as is doubt that the things Obama says he wants to do, are desirable. Fear that an Obama administration will just take more of our money to sluice away on bureaucratic extravaganzas, ditto.

The man’s a hard-left socialist, for Heaven’s sake. Anyone falling for this stuff learned nothing from the later 20th century.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, a great conservative writer who I have confidence will come to his senses in three or four years, after Obama (hopefully, and not Klin-Ton) has been president for a while and shown us what a bad idea it was to support anyone other than Ron Paul as a cure for the corporate-state socialism of the last 50 or 60 years.