I personally believe it’s a malignant combination of incompetence and deliberate intent.
You might be right. It's possible there's a quadrant of my brain that does not want to accept the possibility of a genuine fifth column in the White House. I'm not the sort of person who ignores ugly realities, but the notion that all the bad moves the president's made were actually designed to hurt the nation feels a little too conspiracy-theory for me.
Maybe it's more the case that he misunderstands the nature of the republic (he wouldn't be the first). It's obvious he's read too much Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, but it's also pretty obvious that he hasn't read enough James Madison, Al Hamilton or Adams (pick an Adams, any Adams). Or, if he read them, he only did so for the chance to apply a postmodern, hard-left critique, and get a pat on the skull from like-minded profs.
It's a common mental deficit these days among college grads - the pretense of having honestly explored and then rejected certain ideas that in reality you were never given a fair accounting of, never intended to seriously consider, and dismissed out of hand. And you can't rule out the Pavlovian feedback loop that goes on in a liberal arts program. Like the rat that gets the pellet when it presses a certain lever, the the student who regurgitates the "correct" reading of various political and social philosophers will go much further, much faster than those who deviate from it.
My guess is President Obama found himself diving deep into that deep end of the ideological pool during his college years, and never had reality (jobs, businesses, military service) to come and slap him in the face later on. He just sort of "ascended" from college to the Senate to the Presidency. He's a president with an interesting background, but no foreground (and, increasingly, no middle ground).
no subject
You might be right. It's possible there's a quadrant of my brain that does not want to accept the possibility of a genuine fifth column in the White House. I'm not the sort of person who ignores ugly realities, but the notion that all the bad moves the president's made were actually designed to hurt the nation feels a little too conspiracy-theory for me.
Maybe it's more the case that he misunderstands the nature of the republic (he wouldn't be the first). It's obvious he's read too much Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, but it's also pretty obvious that he hasn't read enough James Madison, Al Hamilton or Adams (pick an Adams, any Adams). Or, if he read them, he only did so for the chance to apply a postmodern, hard-left critique, and get a pat on the skull from like-minded profs.
It's a common mental deficit these days among college grads - the pretense of having honestly explored and then rejected certain ideas that in reality you were never given a fair accounting of, never intended to seriously consider, and dismissed out of hand. And you can't rule out the Pavlovian feedback loop that goes on in a liberal arts program. Like the rat that gets the pellet when it presses a certain lever, the the student who regurgitates the "correct" reading of various political and social philosophers will go much further, much faster than those who deviate from it.
My guess is President Obama found himself diving deep into that deep end of the ideological pool during his college years, and never had reality (jobs, businesses, military service) to come and slap him in the face later on. He just sort of "ascended" from college to the Senate to the Presidency. He's a president with an interesting background, but no foreground (and, increasingly, no middle ground).