Then there are the highlights. First:
And then finally.
Trump press conference
1
Monthly Archives: August 2020
The Daniel Andrews cult and the Melbourne Syndrome
I am astonished at the ring of endorsements for Daniel Andrews’ stupendous level of incompetence. Everything he does is filled with massive levels of stupidity which has led to failure at every stage. It is possibly because I have been onto this socialist nitwit from well before the coronavirus arrived. See, for example, Dan Andrews worse than Joan Kirner. From which:
Let’s face it. Daniel Andrews is the worst political leader, the most economically illiterate Premier, we may have ever had in Victoria and I lived through the days of Joan Kirner. When the place goes bankrupt, as it must, we will relive the 1890s collapse and then some.
Victoria is already bankrupt. Has been for a while now. We are dealing with a man of such utter vacuity that it is breathtaking. He started with this $2 billion cancellation of a road that had been proposed by the previous Liberal government for which contracts had been signed, and it has been downhill all the way since then. I can only think everyone is a socialist now and have endorsed Andrews’ policies. His monument will be the other billion dollar plus folly, the train station at The Shrine which no one will ever go to assuming it is ever actually built.
And then there’s the The Melbourne Syndrome.
Feelings of trust or affection felt during a lockdown by its victims towards their most authoritarian political leaders.
I can think of no other reason for others – even those on the supposed right – to give Andrews the pass. Andrews needs to go, and the Liberal Party needs to get a leader in Victoria able to actually present an articulate case in defence of our freedoms along with being able to put in practical policies about the virus that actually make things better and not worse.
IF ONLY I’D KNOWN WHO MIKE BAIRD WAS IT MIGHT HAVE MEANT SOMETHING TO ME: So I looked him up:
Michael Bruce Baird AO is an Australian investment banker and former politician who was the 44th Premier of New South Wales, the Minister for Infrastructure, the Minister for Western Sydney, and the Leader of the New South Wales Liberal Party from April 2014 to January 2017.
And this is what he said:
Dan Andrews and I don’t agree about everything but I know that he loves his state and considers it a privilege to serve as its Premier. I formed a friendship with him during my time at COAG and saw during this period his desire to try to do what was right….
What is happening in Victoria is incredibly challenging and indeed tragic. I don’t know all the details of what has transpired but it is terrible and I think most people across the country are just waiting for some good news to emerge. Almost as if we are willing the virus away.
It is not the time to second-guess or finger point. Yes we need to be agile and learn on the run, but a pile on helps no-one.
When the dust settles, there will be time for reflection. And when mistakes are made, there will be accountability.
But in the fog of this battle, I believe we should choose to stand in support of our leaders and offer our admiration, and our thanks….
And it goes for Dan who I know is working his absolute guts out to save lives.
Let’s support him as he tries to do the impossible.
Daniel Andrews is as thick as two planks. He has not put a foot right since this CV-19 began. Mike Baird is part of the problem and like DA, is in no way part of the solution.
Who is that unmasked man?
Nothing to do with the coronavirus but much to do with the toxic political culture on the American left. It’s a new Donald Trump ad about the greatest political scandal in American history. Maybe charges really are coming.
For more on what may be coming, see It looks as if this fall’s hit show will be called ‘Obamagate’.
The Americanisation of Australian team names needs to be reversed
There is another mania overtaking the US, this in relation to the supposed racist or wrong-think names that have been applied to some of the sporting teams, some of whose names go back for generations. You may know, for example, that the Washington Redskins are in the process of changing its name because the name “Redskins” is for some reason not nice. Since the names represent some kind of totem portraying positive qualities – mostly manly qualities which is perhaps part of the problem – you would hardly think these are intended as insults. But before I get into that, I wish to raise something about that has happened here in Australia which is an Americanisation I wish we could reverse.
My football team in Canada is the Toronto Argonauts. Every North American team is comprised of the name of a city (or a location as with the Texas Rangers) along with a team name. It is perfectly normal to say both together when referring to a team, or separately, as in Toronto which everyone will understand who you mean if you are discussing a particular sport, or the Argonauts on its own. Or you can say The Toronto Argonauts which is a bit longwinded but formally OK and euphonic. But when I came to Australia, a team was referred to either by its civic location – Collingwood, Carlton – OR by its name – The Magpies, The Blues. One never said both at the same time. One never said Carlton Blues. To me it still sounds foreign. They were Hawthorn or The Hawks, Geelong or The Cats, but never both together.
Now for some reason, we have Americanised the names of our sports teams, specially in sports reporting. I wish we would stop and go back to the Australian way.
As for the latest stupidity in the US, almost entirely from amongst people who are the least likely to be interested in professional sport, the desire to rob teams of their ancient names has arisen as some sort of sop to political correctness. This was a letter to the Sports Editor at the Chicago Tribune in which this mania is discussed.
Dear Mr. Page:
I agree with our Native American population. I am highly jilted by the racially charged name of the Washington Redskins. One might argue that to name a professional football team after Native Americans would exalt them as fine warriors, but nay, nay. We must be careful not to offend, and in the spirit of political correctness and courtesy, we must move forward.
Let’s ditch the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians. If your shorts are in a wad because of the reference the name Redskins makes to skin color, then we need to get rid of the Cleveland Browns.
The Carolina Panthers obviously were named to keep the memory of militant Blacks from the 60’s alive. Gone. It’s offensive to us white folk.
The New York Yankees offend the Southern population. Do you see a team named for the Confederacy? No! There is no room for any reference to that tragic war that cost this country so many young men’s lives. I am also offended by the blatant references to the Catholic religion among our sports team names. Totally inappropriate to have the New Orleans Saints, the Los Angeles Angels or the San Diego Padres.
Then there are the team names that glorify criminals who raped and pillaged. We are talking about the horrible Oakland Raiders, the Minnesota Vikings, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburgh Pirates!
Now, let us address those teams that clearly send the wrong message to our children. The San Diego Chargers promote irresponsible fighting or even spending habits. Wrong message to our children.
The New York Giants and the San Francisco Giants promote obesity, a growing childhood epidemic. Wrong message to our children. The Cincinnati Reds promote downers/barbiturates. Wrong message to our children.
The Milwaukee Brewers. Well that goes without saying. Wrong message to our children.
So, there you go. We need to support any legislation that comes out to rectify this travesty, because the government will likely become involved with this issue, as they should. Just the kind of thing the do-nothing Congress loves.
As a die-hard Oregon State fan, my wife and I, with all of this in mind, suggest it might also make some sense to change the name of the Oregon State women’s athletic teams to something other than “the Beavers” (especially when they play Southern California. Do we really want the Trojans sticking it to the Beavers???
I always love your articles and I generally agree with them. As for the Redskins name I would suggest they change the name to the “Foreskins” to better represent their community, paying tribute to the dick heads in Washington DC.
As in, foreskins and seven years ago.
It is what it is
A comment in response to my post on The Australian is now the print version of the ABC.
I disagree Steve. The Australian is by the far the most balanced newspaper in Australia. And I saw the Swan interview of Trump – I think Trump looked like an idiot. He really has lost the plot; moreover he has destroyed the Republican brand and therefore has really been the Manchurian Candidate – the Democrat sleeper agent to tear the GOP apart. This he has done an amazing job – basically he will lead to a left wing Democratic Presidency with a Democrat majority in both the HoR and the Senate. I can’t believe you can support this man. The response to Covid has been appalling and the data shows clearly the excess deaths due to the incompetence of the Trump administration. We have had four years of idiocy and he has achieved none of the promises, which is not surprising since he stood for nothing and has no substance. All those people who wanted to take down the elites in Washington have only managed to cement them in more power thanks to their support of Trump.
You may take this comment as you find it. So far as The Oz being the most balanced of the papers, let me note that this article was in The Age: The economic crisis is still to come, and was written by our very own Sinclair Davidson. As for the C&P, this is the most “cutting edge” of the comments:
When asked, Donald ducked:
Trump: Well what’s your definition of control? Under the circumstances, right now, I think it’s under control.
Swan: How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.
Trump: They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is.
The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon:
It is what it is? You’re the President of the United States. You’re not Paulie Walnuts delivering bad news to Tony Soprano! “Sorry T, things got a little messy and, uh, it is what it is, capiche?”
I suppose what these fools were looking for is an approach along the lines taken by Daniel Andrews, such as by the Governor of New York, who sent individuals who were diagnosed with the coronavirus back into their nursing homes. But the real point is first, no one is arguing against what Trump did do, since he was early on the scene and attempted against all the opposition the Democrats could muster, to stop everything he tried to do. They were the ones inviting people to come along to Chinese New Year celebrations in February or to BLM marches just last month.
But the second part I am astonished about is that Trump actually said this:
“They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is.”
This is a comment worthy of Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism in the face of adversity is all that can sustain us.
AND LET ME CONTINUE: I wish to continue with a bit of further research since posting. On Wikipedia, I confess, but since none of this offends modern political agendas, we can probably rely on what I found.
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor from 161 to 180 which happened to coincide with the Antonine Plague.
The Antonine Plague of 165 to 180 AD, also known as the Plague of Galen (after Galen, the physician who described it), was an ancient pandemic brought to the Roman Empire by troops who were returning from campaigns in the Near East. Scholars have suspected it to have been either smallpox or measles. The plague may have claimed the life of a Roman emperor, Lucius Verus, who died in 169 and was the co-regent of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whose family name, Antoninus, has become associated with the pandemic.
Ancient sources agree that the plague appeared first during the Roman siege of the Mesopotamian city Seleucia in the winter of 165–166. Ammianus Marcellinus reported that the plague spread to Gaul and to the legions along the Rhine. Eutropius stated that a large population died throughout the empire. According to the contemporary Roman historian Cassius Dio, the disease broke out again nine years later in 189 AD and caused up to 2,000 deaths a day in Rome, one quarter of those who were affected. The total death count has been estimated at 5 million, and the disease killed as much as one third of the population in some areas and devastated the Roman army.
Australian sinologist and historian Rafe de Crespigny speculates that the plague may have also broken out in Eastern Han China before 166 because of notices of plagues in Chinese records. The plague affected Roman culture and literature and may have severely affected Indo-Roman trade relations in the Indian Ocean.
A number of interesting parallels there, I’m afraid. There is then this on Stoicism:
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC…. According to its teachings, as social beings, the path to eudaimonia (happiness, or blessedness) is found in accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure or fear of pain, by using one’s mind to understand the world and to do one’s part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others fairly and justly.
But beyond that, there is Modern Stoicism where we find this:
“Following nature means following the facts. It means getting the facts about the physical and social world we inhabit, and the facts about our situation in it […] before we deliberate about normative matters. It means facing those facts – accepting them for exactly what they are, no more and no less – before we draw normative conclusions from them. It means doing ethics from the facts constructing normative propositions a posteriori. It means adjusting those normative propositions to fit changes in the facts, and accepting those adjustments for exactly what they are, no more and no less. And it means living within the facts – within the realm of actual rather than hypothetical norm.” Ethical reasoning of a Stoic “cannot begin until all relevant description, representation, and prediction are in hand, […] – until, let us say, the empirical work is done.”
Or to quote another modern political philosopher, “It is as it is”, which will be the only approach for people such as ourselves for getting on with life should Joe Biden become President.
The Australian is now the print version of the ABC
The comments section still carries just enough of the right side balance but the rest of the paper is ideologically just The New York Times. Two days back I took a look at Jonathan Swan’s useless interview with Donald Trump which you can find here. I wrote then:
Hardly wild at all. If you see these posts in the context of the full interview, there is nothing whatsoever noteworthy about these moments to single out. I don’t know how the President puts up with it. Must also say that this Swan is a serious jerk. And so shallow that it is an embarrassment. Rude as well.
And you know why you haven’t heard a thing about this interview? It’s because Donald Trump takes the interviewer apart. It also seems to be truncated from what would have been the full interview so Trump must have done even better with the rest of it.
It has now shown up in Cut&Paste: Trump gets grilled by Aussie Jonathan Swan, son of the ABC’s Norman. Here’s how it ends:
Fran Kelly, RN Breakfast, Thursday:
And, full disclosure, he’s the son of Norman Swan, our Norman Swan, host of the Health Report here on RN and the Coronacast podcast.
Days until the US presidential election:
88.
From the C&P you’d think Trump was completely done over. But if you watch the interview, even the bits they were willing to show, Trump took him to the cleaners. And what will happen in 88 days that the Oz is looking forward to? That Joe Biden will be elected? It’s not just the bias at the Oz that bothers me, but the stupidity.
Say what you like 2+2 really is 4
It is as much a puzzle as an irritation that no one on the left ever wishes to discuss any of their absolute conclusions about the world, whether it is socialism, open borders, global warming or the deadly potential of the CoronaV. Since each of these seems empty and without merit, there is no doubt that in entering any of these topics it is the start of a discussion about the relative merits of our different points of view. Since all of these issues seem clear as a bell to me, as they also seem to be to them, you would think that it might at least lead to each of us clarifying our own points of view for ourselves. At least I might learn something, and you never know – actually you do know – I might change my mind. Still, there was a time when discussion was just interesting in and for itself.
The reality now is and has been for some time that no one is interested in engaging. The last time I had such a discussion was over why this woman, who was a guest in our house, was voting for Obama over Romney (ie 2012). We have virtually not spoken to each other since, nor to her husband. And all she would say is that since she is not an American, she doesn’t vote in the American election which was insulting and stupid and of course, since neither do I, was of no relevance to the question why she would prefer Obama to Romney. Since then, there is no one who has been open to what used to be part of life’s entertainment. Discussing with others our particular political points of view.
So perhaps this article by James Lindsay will provide the answer: No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why. All should be read, but here is a part of it.
I often get asked specifically if there’s some paper or book out there in the Critical Social Justice literature that prohibits or discourages debate and conversation with people who don’t already agree with them. I honestly don’t know. I’ve looked in a cursory fashion and haven’t found one, but, then, Critical Social Justice scholars are also rather incredibly prolific (an undeniable benefit of having no rigorous standards to meet and a surplus of ideological zeal, as it happens). That is to say, there’s a lot of Woke literature out there, and maybe someone has explained it very clearly and at length with a lot of specificity, but if so, I haven’t seen it. So far as I know, there’s not some specific piece of scholarship that closes the Woke off to debate, like a single paper or book explaining why they don’t do it. It’s just part of the Woke mindset not to do it, and the view of the world that informs that mindset can be read throughout their scholarship.
To me, the answer is that the modern left has abandoned argument because they cannot find one that will even begin to convince anyone else. They might end up winning the political wars within our own societies but they will only surrender the gates to others who will enslave them.
Lindsay’s argument is also summarised here by John Sexton. I will merely repeat two quotes from Lindsay which are well selected. First
There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.
And then there’s this.
Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms.
I don’t take any of this seriously since the people who spout such nonsense are the least worldly, knowledgeable people around. They know nothing that adds value to a conversation. If all you know, surrounded by modern technology is that sometimes what people have believed has turned out to be untrue then you know nothing worth knowing at all.
Also by Lindsay is this: The Complex Relationship between Marxism and Wokeness.
And another by Sexton on Lindsay is found here: Does 2+2=4? Woke Academics Say Not Necessarily.
Amazingly for some, 2+2=4 is an open question. The absolute certainty is there is nothing to learn from these people whatsoever, other than to do what you can not to allow these people to make the political rules where you live.
The Melbourne Syndrome
The Covid pandemic has brought on our modern version of The Stockholm Syndrome: “feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.” We now have the Melbourne Syndrome, which I come across versions of every day:
Feelings of trust or affection felt during a lockdown by its victims towards their most authoritarian political leaders.
Since Melbourne has now implemented the hardest lockdown at the hands of the dumbest and most incompetent political leader in the world, I believe that Melbourne should have the honour of bearing the name of this widely observed form of insanity.
And just for contrast, let me note what is simultaneously going on in Stockholm: Destroying Western Media’s “Swedish Public Health Disaster” Narrative In Two Simple Charts
In the top chart, when we compare the mortality rates of covid19 in Sweden v. the US, including all data until the end of July, the US’s mortality rate of covid 19 in the age group of less than 39 years of age was 0.58%, more than 1,230 times greater than the 0.00047% mortality rate of Sweden. Furthermore, in the age demographics of 40-59 and 59-69, the death rate in the US from covid19 versus Sweden was respectively 215 times and 211 times greater than Sweden.
In the bottom chart, I compared Sweden’s mortality rate for different age demographics compared to the US mortality rate for the common flu. For the comprehensive age group of all ages less than 60 years of age, the Swedish mortality rate of covid19 is less than 1/3rd of the American mortality rate for the common flu. Clearly, as can be easily observed in the bottom chart, the overall covid19 mortality rate forSweden’s population was greatly skewed by nearly all covid19 deaths occurring in the above 70 year old demographic, with the majority of Sweden’s covid19 deaths occurring in those older than 80 and 90 years of age!
Go to the link and have a closer look. [THE LINK HAS BEEN FIXED.]
Only when it’s all over and years from now will we reach some kind of consensus on what ought to have been the right approach. As for the worst approach, we here in Melbourne have been able to observe it for ourselves. But the thanks Daniel Andrews and the rest of them are getting for this disgusting botch needs to be memorialised even as so many amongst us bless him for his efforts.
Was it worth it? How many lives did we save?
Letters from friends.
Of the first one, I can see how that might be true if things are looked at from within the United States. Looking at things from within Victoria, it doesn’t stand up, mostly because I think Daniel Andrews is too stupid to get to that conclusion. And I mean really dumb, not just that he is a fool. There are plenty of fools everywhere. The universities are filled with people who are high-IQ morons. They can reason and read. They can research and write. They can do a crossword and a sudoku. That is the kind of conclusion one of them might reach. But not DA. He is a union thug who just likes to push people around. He never discusses. He never debates. He never explains. And I think it’s because he works on some low-grade principle of capitalists-bad, workers-good. Lockdowns simply reflect his nature and intellect. Force is something he understands.
I will, however, say now that he has postponed the results of his Inquiry to November 6, I am beginning to see some reason to believe what you see below may be true, since the results of the Inquiry will be released following the end of the election in the United States. After that, according to this note, what happens to the Corona Virus will no longer matter. Almost certainly just a coincidence.
Speaking for myself, from very early on I have entirely thought of the Covid-19 “pandemic” as a hoax that has been seized upon by the left in the United States as a means to engineer the Democrats to a win in the election in November. The origins were in China and occurred either by chance or design, but once it had occurred, the dangers were seized on and amplified by the left to create the panic we now see. Everything else the left has tried had come up a bust, the American economy has performed better than possibly at any time in anyone’s memory, the Deep State and its media cohort have been exposed, and at long last there has been some kind of border protection put in place. Trump was in an unloseable position whereas now it is no better than 50-50.
As for conspiracy theories, that is all there are in politics. Every political strategy requires all kinds of people to do their part with no scripting or instructions required. Every so often there are lone players, such as Lee Harvey Oswald. The rest of the time, however, there is a general theme that is played out where everyone on both sides understand the agenda, with those promoting the agenda all making up their own means of contributing towards its fulfilment, and those on the other side doing what they can to push back. So the theme on the left was – We must do everything we can to limit the spread of death and destruction from this deadly virus. For Trump, there was no serious choice but to take this hysteria seriously, and whatever he may have personally believed, to do all he could to limit the spread of the virus. So he stopped the borders, supported lockdowns and put Dr Fauci out in front to call the shots. The rest of the world, either because they too had no choice but to play along, which in all cases required them to do something, or because they were on the left and understood the game in play, amplified the horrors by working out their own response to highlight how bad things were and how Donald Trump had screwed up the response. Meanwhile in Democrat states, everything was done to make the pandemic appear as dangerous as possible. The actions taken in New York by Andrew Cuomo were not errors of judgement but undertaken to raise as much concern as possible.
In Australia, for whatever reason, nothing happened. No major pandemic, no deaths beyond the normal seasonal total for the flu, and no real contribution to add to the hysteria other than to suggest there was no need for it.
Which brings me to Daniel Andrews who has not for nothing been called the Andrew Cuomo of Australia. It’s not as if he blundered. Everything he has done has been deliberately aimed at creating as much media-driven alarm as possible in the midst of absolutely nothing statistically of significance. But the media are also playing along to the fullest extent they can as one would expect so you would think we were back to the Spanish flu once again.
I cannot therefore promise you that you will survive the Covid panic without some kind of damage to yourselves or families, but that is far far more likely than that you or anyone you know should come to any serious harm. The harm you should worry about, and this is much more serious than anything else that might happen, is that Joe Biden should become President. That you have had the possibility you might die within the next twelve months raised by 0.005% is hardly worthy of a moment’s thought.
And this is the second letter. This is about the cost and benefits of the efforts made to contain the CV-19. Was it worth it? he asks. How will we even be able to tell and by what date can we know? Lives interrupted everywhere.
Most of the decline in output from COVID is from shutting down the economy, not from the disease itself. What would have been the economic impact of C0VID if governments had not shut down our economies? Well, we have to make some simplifying assumptions – lets try …
- With no government shutdowns, half the population gets covid over a period of about a year, half of those are asymptomatic. I’ve seen the asymptomatic ratio ranging from 40% to 80%.
- Of the symptomatic quarter of the population, assume mortality is 5% (Worldometer.info estimates New York State mortality rate from verified and estimated infection is only about 1.4%. It was higher in Europe).
- Of those deaths, most occur in the elderly cohorts. So labour force mortality (18-65 years) is less, lets say 2.5% (18-65 years). (New York State estimate would make labour force mortality under 2%). Impact on labour input is 50% infection rate x 2.5%mortality = 1.3%.
- The symptomatic but recovered portion of the labour force, is off work for a month on average, worth 1/12 x 50% infection rate x 50% symptomatic ratio = 2.1% of labour input.
- So total reduction in labour input is only about 2.1 +1.3 = 3.4% for a year (assuming full employment).
- There would be some substitution of capital for labour – about 0.5 elasticity in the long run (Knoblach et al, Oxford 2019) and less but still positive in the short run. Also some overtime and informal work accommodation.
- On a micro/sectorial level, high mortality among the elderly would generate actuarial gains for defined benefit pension funds and actuarial losses for life insurance companies. For health plans there would be short-term losses and long term gains. Hard to say what the overall impact would be. There would be stress (even higher output) on health systems.
- Another imponderable would be the impact on risk premia and liquidity in financial markets if there was a pandemic panic.
Bottom line: its hard to see an impact on global GDP of more than about -3% from the disease itself (-3.4% labour input with some capital and technology offsets). The forecast decline in world GDP of –5.2% this year (World Bank) means a total gap of about 8.5% (+3.3% potential growth less WB’s –5.2% forecast 2020). The global GDP decline is mostly the result of shutting down much of the global economy. Was it worth it? How many lives did we save?
Obama’s literary fraud
Obama is no better at writing than he was at governing. A fantastic fraud in every way, which the left insisted on electing and then re-electing. And that he cannot write is no minor issue since he was elected more or less on his autobiography supposedly personally detailed in his Dreams from My Father. The man who exposed all of this was Jack Cashill in his Deconstructing Obama.
How did Barack Obama, a man who had previously written little else, suddenly pen what Time magazine calls “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician”? Here, in Deconstructing Obama, political scholar and author Jack Cashill analyzes and pieces together Obama’s statements about his life to get at the truth behind the man.
Cashill’s “eureka” moment came when he realized that the structure of Dreams of My Father loosely mirrors that of Homer’s Odyssey. From the moment of that revelation, Cashill researched, read, and examined interviews, writings, and statements about the President’s life story, focusing especially on a poem written when Obama was nineteen. According to the facts, in conjunction with Obama’s statements and writings, Cashill’s conclusion is that the stories don’t add up—and for the nearly 2 million people who read and accepted the story about Obama’s life—the truth is that it may be more myth than history.
That is putting it mildly. With Obama, there is no there there. And he has returned to the scene of Obama’s literary crime of the century discussing the memoir Obama is owed to his publisher, now at least three years late. This one even involves Donald Trump who apparently had seen through Obama’s literary pretensions right from the start: Why the Media Chose Not to Hear When Trump Called Obama a Literary Fraud. Here are the last paras, but read it all since it’s short.
the media wanted nothing to do with the idea that Ayers was Obama’s muse, no matter who made the claim. At least fifty publications reviewed his book, and not a one mentioned the six pages he spent on the book’s most newsworthy revelation.
Relentless Obama-defender Chris Matthews interviewed Andersen on MSNBC’s Hardball and did not address the authorship issue. Said Matthews at the end of the interview, “You’re amazing, successful guy. You have a winning streak here.” If Matthews did not read the book, which is likely, someone on his staff surely must have but chose not to notice the damning Ayers revelation.
To accuse Obama of being a literary fraud opens one up to the charge of racism. This I can verify from experience. There is only one reason, then, that the mainstream media passed on the opportunity to call out Trump: the deep-seated fear that he was right.
Trump was right. If you count on the media to understand what is going on, you will hardly know a thing about the times in which you live.
Law of Markets 