Monday, August 19, 2013

Abject hypocrite

Victor Davis Hanson asks,

Why are Obama’s polls plummeting again despite a successful reelection, a still obsequious press, and a perennial campaign of demonizing his opponents? Scandals like the IRS mess, the NSA embarrassment, the Benghazi disaster, and the AP monitoring certainly account for much of his current unpopularity. Yet some of the dislike is also due to a growing anger at Obama’s hypocrisy — one of the strongest of all human emotions that affects us as no other paradox.

No one begrudges Obama his Martha’s Vineyard annual getaway, or his incessant golfing in his yuppyish get-up, or sending his family by separate plane to Aspen, Vail, or Costa del Sol. But why would someone so wish to rub shoulders with the very one percent who, he has so incessantly assured the country, are mostly the source of our problems?

Other paradoxes encourage such hypocrisy. Why weigh in personally on white/black controversial interaction — the Professor Gates psychodrama or the Trayvon Martin death — when the expectation will only arise that such a racially sensitive president will comment on all such public faultlines? That becomes a dilemma when white/black crime occurs at one-eighth the frequency of black on white crime. Most American do not want sermons on the history of race relations, only simple answers as to why their president focuses on some interracial controversies and not far more frequent others. That sense of parity is also human nature, and so entirely missed by Obama.

In almost every policy debacle — subsidizing money-losing wind and solar while ignoring profitable fracking, trashing the previous administration’s anti-terrorism protocols while vastly expanding drones, or lecturing on civil liberties and transparency while overseeing the Benghazi IRS, AP, and NSA scandals — Obama has no sense of the very natural reaction of all-too-human Americans.

Such wisdom about what makes average people tick is not necessarily found in prep school in Hawaii, the Ivy League, politics in Washington, or Martha’s Vineyard — and after five years that fact is all too apparent.

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