Presidential power in the twenty first century!!
There has been much discussion across the media in the wake of the defeat of the background check bill in the senate a few days ago about what president Obama’s role should have been in this business. For those who might not know, forty republicans and several democrats voted against a bill that would have required background checks on the internet and at gun shows, something that is not now required in the existing law. As one would expect, the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbied heavily against this bill even though they had once backed something similar to it around 1999.
In the wake of the defeat of the bill, columnists such as the New York Times Maureen Dowd have criticized the president heavily for not using the traditional levers of power. Dowd entitled her first piece on the subject “No bully in the pulpit!” This was an obvious reference to the old phrase coined originally by former president Theodore Roosevelt when he constantly used the term “bully” in his speech and it also refers to the old Roosevelt phrase “walk softly but carry a big stick” The big stick that many presidents have used in the past is the “bully pulpit” which has been employed to shape public opinion on issues that have been important to them and to the nation. In actual point of fact, president Obama has used that pulpit to great advantage to advance his causes. The problem , as Dowd points out in one of her pieces, is the “dunderheaded” congress that will not listen to anyone but their handlers, among those being the NRA.
In the gun debate that led to the defeat of the bill that ninety percent of the American people were in favor of, is the simple fact that these members of congress do not even listen to their own constituents. Ramblings has long pointed out that the current Republican congress, particularly in the house of representatives, resembles a cult more than it does anything else. A cult has a leadership with its own agendas that do not even correspond very closely with the membership of the cult if they took the time to think things through very carefully. In their relationship with the NRA, congressional republicans are so afraid of being opposed by an entrenched opposition several years down the road that they will kowtow to almost anything that this gun crazy organization wants. But the NRA is not the only organization with this kind of hold over the congressional Republicans.
When one looks at an individual such as the NRA’s Wayne Lapiere, one sees a cult of its own in operation each and every time that he speaks. Cults have to have something to hang their existence on, and Lapiere and the NRA hang their very existence and survival on the idea that if any ground of any kind is given on a gun issue, then eventually the government or some other being will come to take its members weaponry away. It is as simple as that! And, it is a feature of a cult because one does not want to make an issue too complicated for the believers or they might begin to think thoughts, which is something that begins the destruction of the cult. Blind obedience and adherence is what cults survive on. Not thinking for ones self.
Cults also exist in a state of isolation, and, physical isolation is not the only type that exists. The Republican party exists in a state of political isolation that revolves around several distinct features. One is a belief that the country is going to come undone due to the level of debt that exists. Another is the rock hard belief that there should never be any tax increases again in the country’s future. Along with that comes this belief that we need small government with the fewest amount of regulations that can be known to mankind. And along with those prior stated beliefs comes a rather nebulous quick silver belief that the country is simply headed in the wrong direction and the Republican are the ones to change the nation’s direction and right the ship, no matter what the cost. What the Republicans would really like to do is return the country to the era of the 1950’s when white people were in positions of power and the rise of women and other minorities such as blacks never happened at all. It was the age of a few Mexicans crossing the border every year to pick fruit. It was the age of Eisenhower before Little Rock.
One of the giant problems with all of these beliefs is the fact that so many voters adhere to them. The Republican party could not do all of what they do without electoral support. And this is where the concept of the cult comes into play. Personalities such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh troll their influence among the faithful each and every day of the year except of weekends when they lead their country club lifestyles far removed from those that hang on their every word and phrase. And then you have the invisible ones such as the Koch brothers who spend their money on elections and especially on the infrastructure that gives the pseudo intellectual basis to what they want the faithful to continue to believe. Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, funded by the brothers Koch, give a safe haven to those who follow their credo. So many who put out the papers that support those beliefs got their start and owe their monetary allegiance to those same organizations, and have for decades. To deviate from the established line would mean a cut off from the financial life blood that funds their comfortable lifestyles.
Cast against this backdrop, one would be hard pressed as a black president whom they all not so secretly hate, to change any of their beliefs. It is difficult for these people to sit in the room with Barack Obama much less take any of his advice or cajoling, or, much less any actual outright threats to their almost automatic reelections in their gerrymandered districts in their supportive red state environments where the only thing that they actually fear is being primaried by someone further to the right of them. This is how the cult maintains order.
It is a big mistake for the liberal media to blame Barack Obama for what has gone on for so many years! The only answer to all of it is a major electoral blowout in which Democrats are returned to power in sufficient numbers to get a progressive agenda through and into law. And then there is the decency factor to consider in all of this.
Barack Obama is a good and decent man who cares about the world that his children may inhabit after they are grown. People like Maureen Dowd are romanced by inside the Washington beltway thinking that does not really always consider what goes on in the rest of the world. And they live in the past. We do not know how many times that we have heard lately the mention of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and how he used the levers of power to get the things that he wanted passed through the congress of the United States. Johnson got some good things passed using his methods but they were disgusting and he also used them to get us into a ruinous war in southeast Asia that killed around fifty eight thousand good and decent young Americans and has left many more with decades of mental and physical problems due to his efforts. Barack Obama has saved countless American lives by ending the Iraq war and powering down the Afghanistan conflict as well as keeping us out of places like Libya and Syria. We will trade a defeat on the gun issue for those things any day of the week.
What Barack Obama faces each and every day that he is in office is a reflection of the America that he tries to govern . It is hard to admit that there is a great portion of this nation that does not like him and the fact that he is black. They have become used to him and his ways but that does not mean for an instant that they like him and it also does not mean that they are going to support willingly anything that he wants to accomplish. To ask them to follow his leadership as they also follow their cult leaders is to ask them to make a choice that they simply are not ready and willing to make. The cult has been around for decades and decades and it is a familiar and comfortable thing. Barack Obama will be gone in three years or so. But it is also true that even a cult of long standing sometimes has to confront some very uncomfortable truths. The deaths of twenty children in Connecticut are chief among those truths. And they are very uncomfortable indeed and they are going to remain on the nations mind for a very long time. More people have fled a cult over the treatment of their children than anything else.
There is a difference between leadership and coercion. Between people like Johnson and the second Bush and people like Barack Obama. It has been said that true leadership is the ability to get people to do for you what they will not do for themselves. The type of leadership that Maureen Dowd and others espouse gets things done despite what the morality of what gets down might be. It is how we blundered into Vietnam and into Iraq as the beaten into submission sheep followed their leader over the cliff into some of history’s greatest tragedies!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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