A Curious Insularity

by Victor Davis Hanson - June 15th, 2011 - National Review

In the world of Barack Obama, inflating tires and “tuning up” modern car engines precludes off-shore drilling. Four-dollar-a-gallon gas prices can be ameliorated by having the average consumer trade in his 8-mpg clunker. Medical bills soar because doctors unnecessarily rip out tonsils and lop off limbs. “Skyrocketing” power bills and bankrupt coal companies are abstractions, and do not involve personal tragedies. One third of the border fenced means that the fence is “basically” completed. Nine percent unemployment is due in part to automation like ATMs, which apparently first came on the scene during the Obama administration to eliminate jobs. Shovel-ready jobs were not so shovel-ready. Criticism is dismissed as “enemies” deserving “punishment” or opponents relegated to the “back seat” or adversaries caricatured with “moats and alligators.” And so on.

Two themes predominate: a cluelessness about how things work outside the Ivy League–Chicago–D.C. political nexus, and a sense that nothing is ever Barack Obama’s fault.

There is little chance that anything will change as long as Barack Hussein Obama remains our President. He does not understand our country at all. He does not understand freedom at all. He does not understand the advantages of free enterprise at all. He does not understand why those who love America and love freedom despise him with a passion that is palpable. He has as little awareness of the gulf that separates him from most Americans as he has of why he is ridiculed for his 57 states gaffe. Born into a red diaper family, raised in a foreign country first, then tutored by a communist pervert who hated our nation in a state, Hawaii, where half the citizens want to break free from America, finally coddled in a culture of radicals and extremists during his entire schooling, Barack Obama is not American. He never will be.