Former President Obama took to the midterm campaign trail to do something he showed he’s pretty good at: campaigning. Unfortunately for the former Campaigner in Chief, he continued what he constantly did in speeches around the world during his 8-year occupancy of the White House: he took credit for things he did not do and deflected any responsibility for negative results of presidential actions taken during his administration that he was solely responsible for.
Obama spoke in Chicago at the University of Illinois where he went to receive the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government. In the eyes of millions in the U.S., that an award given to him for any type of ethics was not just the irony of all ironies, but was an oxymoron. The veil of deception for the horrors perpetrated by his government is just now being pulled back to the revelations of it all. We will not waste your time to chronicle them, but it is safe to draw a few conclusions from his speech in Chicago Friday for receiving an ethics award beg a response:
- Even though he several times while President claimed his administration was free from any scandal, his administration was rife with scandals. His claiming there were none illustrates not only how untruthful he was and is, but shows his disdain for Americans that recognize the evils he authorized as scandals;
- Once again Obama took credit for the Trump economy. His doing so is a process not unfamiliar to Americans. For the entire 8 years of his tenure as president, he assigned responsibility for everything negative that happened in the U.S. from 2008 to 2016 as the responsibility of George W. Bush. But Obama always took credit for any of the good that happened, never assigning even partial credit to HIS predecessor. Those who watched closely understood his actions were not unusual: after all, narcissistic people doing such things is commonplace. In his Chicago speech, he referred to himself 102 times;
- Obama still rejects any notion that his actions as president and the devastating results they brought to middle-class Americans were the reasons Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the White House — that and the fact that Americans outside of those from the coastal states despised her. He often showed his disdain for Hillary and made very few attempts to help her during her campaign.
- Shown below is a segment of Obama’s 1 hour + speech at his first “Anti-Trump” campaign rally. Watch it below (or simply listen on the Podcast). This segment is about 2 minutes long. But before you do, it is very important that as you watch or listen, you notice these: As a candidate and president, Obama mastered the art of “speech deflection.” He reveals what it is exactly in this speech. Listen to the allegations he makes against Republicans and President Trump. “Speech deflection” is the art of blaming others for things that you yourself are guilty of. If a speaker in a matter-of-fact way accuses another of perpetrating some atrocity, most times it is an effort of the speaker to hide the reality — that the speaker is the actual perpetrator! Watch and listen as Obama shows that art he has perfected:
What were his “Speech Deflections?”
- He first stated he was about to attack Trump as a citizen and not a former President. He repeats that. Why? To prevent any listener from assuming he is “just another politician.” He tricks listeners into believing what he is saying comes from a regular person.
- Trump is a symptom and not the cause. The cause is people who “wrongly” fight against good policies because they want to keep the status quo.
- “We” — everyday Americans — stand against bullies and “certainly call bad people what they are. How can we not say Nazis are bad?”
His tactics parrot others on the Left who keep calling Trump a bully. How? By stating lies as facts and calling facts lies. President Trump never endorsed Nazis or White Supremacy or totalitarianism. I could play multiple soundbites hear in which he clearly denigrates any and all people who denigrate others on racial, economic, sexual, or religious basis. Obama used “speech deflections” in attacking Trump.
Obama’s claims about that while president he stood up to bullies is an exact illustration of this. Obama NEVER stood up to Putin — a former KGB (and Russian President) bully. Remember Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary taking that reset button to Russia, opening the door to Russia and the Obama U.S. working closely together? Remember Obama’s open microphone message to Putin given through the former Russian President to give Putin a message? In it, Americans heard Obama promise that after his U.S. re-election he would be in a better spot to work “more closely” with Russia?
Remember Obama’s famous Syria red line? He threatened Bashar Assad — the Syrian president — that if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, the U.S. under Obama would take action. Assad ignored Obama’s threat and moved forward using chemical weapons to kill thousands of Syrian innocents. What did Obama do for that bully crossing that “fake” redline? Nothing.
While Iranian leaders were crafting nuclear weapons, starving their own citizens to death, holding numbers of Americans hostage, funding Middle Eastern terror attacks that killed Israelis and other Middle Eastern innocents, Obama paid Iran $150 Billion and signed a deal that allows Iran to continue nuclear proliferation with no international checks in place.
How ridiculous is Obama callingTrump a bully! Trump no doubt is sometimes rude and abrasive, but he has NO record of bullying. Obama may have not bullied while in office, but he certainly did NOT stand up to bullies.
“Speech Deflections:” Symbolism over Substance.
End of an Era
We should turn a page in history together. The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Obama receiving an award for ethics, his speech in which he took at least partial credit for the U.S. dramatic economic improvements under Trump, all illustrate that American politics as were lived by our parents, by their parents, and even in our early adulthood are gone. The millennials are showing Generation X-ers and Baby Boomers that there’s a new group of Americans assuming political might in the nation. And they don’t do things the same way. We live in a new world — economically, politically, and socially. “Things are a-changing!”
Remember how radical it was when you made and/or received your first cell phone call? Who thought such things would ever happen or COULD ever happen outside of the Jetsons cartoon show? Today our adult kids don’t remember a time that to make or receive phone calls, we had to stop at our office, a pay phone, or run home in a hurry — and then we used a rotary-dial phone to make that call! We NEVER considered being able to make a call from our car.
And what about the internet? The internet has changed almost every aspect of our lives. There would be no “online” purchasing, banking, texting, surfing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, eBay, or Amazon without it. What would our world be without those?
During one very short period of time, I flew from Louisiana through Dallas and London to Switzerland. From Switzerland, I flew through Muscat, Oman to Malaysia. From Malaysia, I flew back to Louisiana with a stop in Hong Kong and another in Dallas. I circled the globe on that trip — a trip my parents could never have taken or even envisioned in the 50’s!
Transition
We ARE in a new era — or at least we are on the threshold of another. And the transition is from era-to-era is difficult at best. Extremism in pretty much every part of our lives is becoming more and more normal daily. We seem to push to the limits in every area.
No doubt the U.S. after WWII became a country whose citizens grew together around one common cause: to excel, exploit individual and collective opportunity in the American marketplace of ideas, and make the U.S. the greatest and most respected country on Earth. Then the Generation X children grew up. That drive for excellence relaxed and those young adults started living the “going with the flow” and “fly by the seat of your pants” methodology of living in America. Millennials relaxed it to an even lower level.
In this “new” America, the objective no longer seems to be that of building and working together. It, at least on its surface, appears to be a hodge-podge of ideas, policies, plans, and objectives of individualism — of becoming all that “I” can become, achieving all that “I” can achieve, and getting out of the World all that “I” want. The unifying cry of becoming better, smarter and stronger as a nation have seemingly disappeared.
Obviously, the transition America is experiencing is not all good. Politicians have learned many different ways to impact the political process to achieve objectives that often are not those expected by the people who elect them. Obama saw an opportunity to take advantage of the change in younger Americans’ thinking and initiated a plan that he promised would “fundamentally change our nation.” He knew it would be virtually impossible to fool Americans to change governmental structure without amending the Consititution — which is virtually impossible. How could they move the lawmaking process toward their side of the scale? Obama figured out that if politicians cannot control Congress and trust for the normal legislative process to give them political results they want, they could turn to the judiciary.
Obama appointed several hundred federal judges in his eight years. Although the norm in nominating judges has long been to ignore political leanings of judicial candidates, Obama implemented a process of choosing judges who possessed a known political bias toward liberalism and away from conservatism. He loaded federal courts to accomplish one thing: thwart the lawmaking process of a conservative Congress even when it has a conservative majority. How? Simply use those and other judges to attack laws that liberals opposed and to uphold laws liberals embraced, thus giving liberal policies green lights while holding conservative policies in check. And it worked: his fundamental change of America got wheels and raced forward toward full-blown Socialism.
Enter Donald Trump. Transition made a sharp turn to the right.
Summary
We live in a scary time. We have open violence playing out daily all across the nation. Our national politicians accomplish very little in the way of meaningful legislation while wasting trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Government leaders ignore the tenets of the U.S. Consitution spending huge national resources to find ways to skirt duly passed laws. Our re-shaped judiciary has implemented a process in which Americans sadly watch as judges become lawmakers, choosing to tell lawmakers what laws SHOULD say rather than doing ONLY as the Consitution provided — determining if existing laws are legal or not.
Obama claims to be a uniter. Once again, “speech deflection” becomes front and center. NOTHING about anything he said or did was ever designed or implemented to unite Americans. His purpose — though otherwise stated — has always been to divide the country into economic, racial, religious and social groups. He perfected the art of using political class warfare to do it.
And he’s taken to the campaign trail to once again sow his seeds of division, watering those seeds with political class warfare and elitism.
He along with his compadres on the Left still believe that Middle Americans are too ignorant to understand that methodology. They believe that will fuel a mid-term and 2020 victory. They thought the same thing in 2016. Hillary Clinton revealed just how deep and bitter their disdain for anyone and everyone who do not subscribe to the beliefs of the Left really is. And that remains today.
Middle Americans showed them just how ignorant they are with a real trouncing at the ballot box in 2016. Will those same people remain engaged to repeat that message in November? Or have the Lapdogs of the Left — the Mainstream Media — been successful in carrying out the mandate of their masters and convinced those Americans that conservatism is dead?
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