The Lessons Never Learned

Trey Smith

What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war, thereby converting hordes of his admirers from war opponents into war supporters. This dynamic has repeated itself over and over in other contexts, and has indeed been of great value to the guardians of the status quo in placating growing public discontent about their economic insecurity and increasingly unequal distribution of power and wealth.
~ from Obama's Terrorism Speech: Seeing What You Want to See by Glenn Greenwald ~

I find it sad that many liberal parents don't seem willing to learn the lessons they teach their own children! Two of these lessons are:

1. Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.
2. People should be judged more by their actions than by their words.

Barack Obama has repeatedly said one thing, then goes off in a completely different direction and yet each time he delivers some sort of important speech, these same people latch onto his words like manna from heaven! We've gotten to the point in which the first adage above needs a modern rewrite: Fool me once, twice, thrice or 100 times, shame on you. Fool me one thousand times, shame on me.

Look, this isn't solely an "Obama problem." People have been duped for centuries by those who are masters of oratory. However, in the olden days, it was a lot more difficult to know when an orator was being truthful or not. For one thing, most peasants had no idea whatsoever as to what the powers that be were up to inside their palaces and castles. For another thing, there was no media to speak of and there certainly wasn't this thing called the internet.

These days you can get assessments on what any politician says almost in real time. You can look up his or her record. You can rather easily compare what they say with what they tend to do. In Obama's case, what he says and does often are diametrically opposed. So, why do these folks still believe him?

His biggest rah, rah supporters -- those who christen everything he says with two big thumbs up -- have turned into some of the most embarrassing dupes in recent history. This man can violate progressive principles at will and these people cheer him ever more loudly. In the end, it doesn't say as much about him as it does about them.

Without realizing it, they have become the butt of an oft quoted line [incorrectly] attributed to P.T. Barnum: There's a sucker born every minute.