#76: Logic, Morals, and Mosques

Leftists love to “reason” morally. If you say or do something that Leftists don’t like, they proceed to “argue” with you, accusing you of logical “inconsistency.” Their patter is simple:

You’re doing X, but X is bad. It’s bad because doing X implies not-Y and, as you’ll be the first to admit, not-Y is very bad indeed. Since you believe that Y, the opposite of not-Y, is good, and X is incompatible with Y, just stop doing X. If you don’t, then you’re being inconsistent. Yada yada yada, blah.

First, as I’ve argued more than once before, morals are a matter of preference and there is no such thing as inconsistency or incompatibility between preferences. Liking both sweet deserts and sour ones is not a logical inconsistency; and neither is liking one batch of humans and not another; killing one batch, but not another; helping one batch and not another. Turning all of these preferences into exercises in logic is a strategy to compel people to do things they prefer not to do. There are two ways of responding to such a campaign.

The first is simply to deny the generalization being used by the moral “reasoner” to argue for inconsistency. When he argues that you must be against all kinds of killing of people because you are against the killing of your family members, you just repeat that you are not against the first, but definitely against the second. Just refuse to generalize your preferences beyond your chosen range. Point out to him that since you are firmly not against the former and firmly in favor of the latter, there must be something wrong with his generalization. In this response, you do not give any reason for denying the generalization other than that it leads to an unacceptable conclusion: whatever leads to inconsistency must be false.

The second is to challenge the forming of the generalization as a non-sequitur. That is, to point out to the moral “reasoner” that his generalization is the result of an unwarranted inference for the sole dishonest purpose of creating a straw man in not-Y, the bad implication of your action. A so-called straw man is a weak position that one’s opponent does not hold, but which we attempt to pass off as his position in order to demolish it. The current controversy over the Ground Zero mosque presents an excellent example.

I have just heard a representative of some evangelical group arguing in favor of the mosque. His argument was that we must draw a distinction between the evil 9/11 Muslims and the “good” American Muslims. Denying the mosque, he says, would be, in effect, to paint the good Muslims with the same brush as the bad ones.

Hence, the argument goes: You’re resisting the mosque being built (X), but this is bad. It is bad because resisting the mosque (X) implies treating the whole of American Muslims as terrorists (not-Y) and, as you’ll be the first to admit, that is very bad indeed. Since you believe we should never blame a whole group for what a small number have done (Y) is good, and resisting the mosque (X) is incompatible with that (Y), just stop resisting the mosque.

The problem lies in the move from X, resisting the mosque, to not-Y, treating all American Muslims as terrorists.

The “you’re painting all Muslims as terrorists” argument is an instance of a straw man argument. The person who objects to the building of a mosque at Ground Zero has in fact made no claim at all about “all American Muslims.” At the most, he may have made a claim about the Muslims who are backing the building of the mosque. Thus, the claim that one is violating the principle that one should not blame everyone in a group for the actions of a few is a prime example here of a straw man. The claim that anyone who resists the building of the mosque is violating a “basic moral principle,” (that one should not blame everyone in a population for what a few do), is simply false and just one more instance of pretentious Leftist specious “reasoning.”

The “you’re painting all Muslims as terrorists” is not the only straw man being erected by the Left on the mosque issue.

President Obama recently inserted himself ambiguously in the mosque debate. First, he seemed to be arguing in favor of the mosque on the grounds that resisting it would be inconsistent with the U.S. constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion; later, as is his habit, he told us that he hadn’t. First he voted for it, then he voted against it. It’s all about consistency for the Left, isn’t it.

In any case, others have also argued that the issue at hand is that of freedom of religion.

It’s informative to look at freedom of religion as addressed in the Bill of Rights. The relevant text is the first amendment and it reads as follows:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

“Congress shall make no law”? Well, gee, who’s been talking about passing a law, anyway? Appealing to the Constitution would seem seriously besides the point.

But even if we pass over this, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who has suggested that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to worship as they please. Hey, this isn’t Iran or Saudi Arabia, is it? So, if there is a constitutional issue here it can’t be freedom of religion or the first Amendment. Maybe it’s that lesser known Amendment, the one that guarantees “freedom of location.” Oh, wait, there is no such Amendment.

There are thus two things we want to say to a moral “reasoner.”

1) There is no disputing about tastes (de gustibus non est disputandum); and

2) If you are going to insist on reasoning about moral matters, don’t cheat.

After you shake hands with a Leftist, count your fingers! (and wash your hands)

#75: Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” Reconsidered

After a hiatus of some five decades, I’ve been revisiting Popper’s remarkable two-volume study entitled The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). I remembered that I was impressed by the work way back then, but little else of its detailed argumentation. Reading it now, I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate then just what an important work it really is. It is important not only for the light that Popper sheds on matters of older history, but for the light that Popper’s own presuppositions shed on our own very recent history.

This post will not be a review of the work in any sense, it will be focused just on making a few historical points. However, for those not familiar with the book, let me only say that it is concerned with identifying the two main intellectual sources of totalitarian ideology. Volume I is devoted to revising the then current “liberal” reading of Plato, whom Popper identifies as the “open society’s” first enemy. Volume II is devoted to Hegel and Marx, both of whom together count as its second enemy. All things considered, v. I is the more important, since seeing Marx, the main subject of v. II, as an enemy of individual freedom was scarcely ground shaking news. But calling Plato, the darling of academic leftists everywhere, a totalitarian, now that was indeed news. Because the effect of v. I was far larger than that of v. II, I will concentrate on it in this discussion.

Now, under the influence of Edmund Wilson I have generally traced modern socialism and communism back to the French revolution. On my own bat, I have extended this natural history back into the 17^th c, where the Enlightenment began and evolved into the worship of science and reason. But Popper had a larger view and found the roots of modern totalitarianism in a period as early as the third century b.c., in the thinking of one of philosophy’s most revered founding fathers, Aristocles, son of Aristides, better known to you as Plato.

Popper charges that Plato, contrary to popular belief, was a totalitarian in his theory and in his practical objectives, and that he was a propagandist for the creation of a totalitarian state. So far, so good. But, as one reads Popper from a 21^st c. point of view, one is constantly puzzled by his remarks. He is clearly against totalitarianism, but the contemporary reader has difficulty, I think, in identifying what he is for. The reason is this: the fact that he attacks Platonic as well has Marxist totalitarianism suggests that he must be for something like Classical Free Market Liberalism.

This guess falls afoul, however, of the fact that he also argues for social engineering (he tells us that the best statesman will approach his task like an engineer); that he is clearly hostile to religion (he considers it a primitive hold-over); and that he is committed to “social justice” (though it is admittedly unclear exactly what he means by this). All of this and more in Popper is incompatible with Free Market Liberalism. In addition, he believes in progress from less civilized societies to more, with “tribalism” specified as the low end of the continuum. Now, while tribalism usually implies loyalty to a person, rather than to codified laws, it also implies nationalism, the bogey of mid-century progressives. Thus, he is hostile to nationalism. In fact, as I’ve argued before, the post WW II progressives were united in blaming the war on Germany’s nationalism, rather than its Socialism. These are all marks of what we think of today as “Liberalism” or “Progressivism”, which is quite the opposite of Free Market Liberalism, and, finally, he explicitly identifies himself as a “Progressive”.

There is therefore a puzzle here. He likes neither Plato nor Marx, but his likes seem to exclude the only obvious alternative, namely Classical Free Market Liberalism. What is Popper for?

Popper obviously does not mean by “Progressive” what we mean by it today. Precisely what he means by “Progressive” becomes clearer when we look at the other word he uses to describe Plato and his philosophy, the word “Collectivist.”

The precise character of Plato’s philosophy that Popper objects to is that in it, the individual exists for the sake of the state, while in his “Progressivism,” the state exists for the sake of the individual!

We have become so accustomed to our current Progressivism that we assume quite automatically that any “Progressivism” will make the individual subordinate to the state, but this is clearly an unwarranted assumption. What Popper’s discussion suggests is that there is no necessary incompatibility between respecting the individual and having progressive objectives like the ones I listed earlier. It also suggests that there were actually two progressive streams in competition until at least the end of World War II, one of which accepted progressive values but rejected Collectivism, and one which accepted progressive values (ostensibly) and accepted Collectivism. Popper clearly rejected the latter stream in both its Nazi-style and its Stalinist incarnations. What Popper represented was an offshoot of Enlightenment Rationalism that is rarely seen today, an offshoot that used to be called “Humanism.” What he wanted, for the sake of a more informative name, was an “Individualist Progressivism” (or “Individualism,” for short).

This calls for a couple of critical remarks.

First, and perhaps less important, when Popper describes the difference between Collectivism and Individualist Progressivism, he invokes the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. He says that Collectivism does not respect the individual, but that Kant’s ethics does. His choice, however, is an interesting one, since Kant can equally be blamed for the later successes of collectivism. After all, there would have been no Hegel without Kant, and there would have been no Marx without Hegel.

Popper focuses exclusively on one of the versions of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Treat each man as an end in himself (not as a means to an end) as proof that Kant was an Individualist Progressive. The example often given of this principle is that of the life-boat conundrum: is it right to dump the person with the least hope of survival overboard so that the chances of those remaining be improved. The Kantian answer to this is clearly “no.” But this is really a bit of a red herring. If this is the whole meaning of this version of the Categorical Imperative, then Kant is certainly not giving the Individualist what he wants.

What the Individualist wants is that every man have his idiosyncratic needs and wants respected, regardless of how useful it might be to others to ignore them. Now, this would indeed be an Individualistic ethic. But can we derive this kind of ethic from the Categorical Imperative? I don’t know, but the answer becomes tediously uninteresting once we remember that Kant’s ethic is the ethic of a fictional individual, the “moral agent,” who does not exist and has never existed. This Kantian “moral agent” is supposedly purely rational and has no needs or wants. This creature’s ethic is supposed to be an expression of its rationality, which is its essence.

This means that emotions and physical wants and needs are not counted as “parts” of a moral agent, they are rather forces acting against the agent’s true self, they are actually enemies of his rationality. The implication of this is that if the world consisted only of Kantian moral agents, these agents would all be identical, they would be indistinguishable from each other, for one purely rational being is exactly the same as any other, just as any calculator will give identical results on identical sums. Thus, the “respect for individuality” that Popper discovers in the Categorical Imperative loses most, if not all, of its moral usefulness. For if we are really like Kant’s moral agents, then we don’t actually have any wants and needs, nor do we have an individuality to respect (other than purely numerical), and if we are not like them, then the principle applies only to beings who don’t exist.

I suppose it’s hard for Popper to admit this since he shares Kant’s and the Enlightenment’s blind confidence in the power of human reason.

Second, while there may be no necessary incompatibility between Individualism and progressive objectives, there does seem to be a powerful, if not inexorable, inclination for any Progressivism to evolve in the direction of Collectivism. The U.S., for example, seems currently to be in an ambiguous posture vis a vis Collectivism, and its ongoing health care debate illustrates the kind of drift of which I speak. While the U.S. actually incorporates respect for the individual very strongly in its constitution, the existence of a nascent government controlled health care system has already evoked arguments in which the individual’s needs and wants are subordinated to that of “the community.” As soon as the community pays for services, the community acquires a dominant voice in the setting of policy. Thus, for example, if you, the individual, want to be a fat, lazy, smoker, then either your medical benefits will have to be adjusted down or you will have to be penalized with higher payments. After all, your decisions affect the community, and the community comes first! My point is that the only way that even Individualism can move towards its progressive goals is that of social engineering, that social engineering involves state intervention, and that state intervention inevitably makes the interests of the collective trump the interests of the individual.

So, the first point I have been interested in making is that there used to exist a distinct species of Progressivism that existed side by side with Collectivism and that differed from Collectivism by its commitment to a respect for the complete individual, needs, wants, and idiosyncrasies included. Interestingly, this species seems to have lost to Collectivism in the evolutionary competition of political doctrines. The only representative I can still find of Individualistic Progressivism is the writer Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Socialist. One suspects that his rejection of Socialism might well have been based on his recognition that Collectivism does not respect the individual.

This is a form of Progressivism with which one could agree to disagree, a member, as it were, of a loyal opposition; a loyal opposition that is naïve, but well intentioned. Collectivism, on the other hand, is an attack on values that are so fundamental that its advocates can only be seen as hostile to the state, and they must be fought with any means available.

The second point involved the two criticisms that seemed to me might aid a reader in coming to terms with Popper’s text.

One can only speculate why it is that Collectivism has emerged the victor in this fatal struggle between Individualism and Collectivism, but the most obvious reason might also very well be the right one. Collectivism might be better in the survival game precisely because it does not respect the individual, for this means that there are no limits to what it can do in order to win. Respect for the individual may be something that we in Western democracies value, but in the street brawl of “isms” through the decades and centuries, it is nothing more than a handicap. As many a romantic and idealist has discovered, it is very easy to be “in the right” and yet wind up dead.

#74: Secretary General Obama

Let me return again to the topic of Obama’s plans.

It is fascinating to watch the many different “explanations” of Obama’s various behaviours. What makes them interesting is that their proliferation indicates just how puzzling people are finding this president. Some come to the conclusion that he’s just completely out of his depth, others that he’s a radical, maniacal Marxist. I suspect there is truth in both of these views, they’re not incompatible. But, as I’ve written in a recent post, and it warrants repeating, I think there is a third factor at play: Obama want to be the next Secretary General of the UN! Clinton tried for it after his presidency, but failed. Tony Blain tried for it, and failed. Obama believes that what catapulted him into the presidency can also give him entrance to this holy grail of charlatans: he is half-black! All he has to do is convince the power brokers of the UN that he is black in the right way. This hypothesis is the only one that explains the erratic and careless behavior of this president.

I believe that at this point, that two things are clear: 1) he has given up any idea of running for another term, and 2) whatever his administration does is aimed not at the improvement of the U.S., but rather at establishing his bona fides for the electors of the Secretary Generalship.

His plan involves doing enough locally to convince the Dem party hacks that he’s still interested in getting them elected (which he is, but to a minimal extent) and keeping his cabinet persuaded that he’s actually trying to govern.

People have often commented that he seems to be campaigning most of the time, rather than governing; but they have failed to identify precisely what it is he is campaigning for. It is not another term as president of the U.S.; it is not to give the Democrat party another majority; it is not to improve the lot of the “African-American community”; it is not to redistribute the wealth of the U.S..

Or, rather, it is all of these things, but as instruments of achieving his post-presidential ambitions, not for their own sakes.

I am not saying that his sympathies don’t lie with these objectives, but, when the chips are down, what he’s after is more power, more wealth, and more influence, and on a larger stage.

What people refer to as his political “tone deafness”, his being “aloof”, his being “out of touch” with the American people all evidence, not a lack of ability, but merely that he has utterly ceased caring about re-election or anything political within the American framework. He vacations constantly, he vacations away from the Gulf at exactly the time when support from him would help, he pisses on Israel, he pisses on Arizona. All of this has to be understood as reflecting not political ignorance or ineptitude, but that they are aimed, to the degree that they are aimed at all, at a larger and external audience.

Like all politicians, Obama panders, but he’s no longer pandering to the American electorate: he’s pandering to the electorate that will make him the King of the U.N.!

Obama has stopped governing, if he ever did, he is now campaigning, and not campaigning in and for an office in the U.S.A..

#73: A Poem I Wrote in High School

I found this while culling accumulated household debris, and thought that it showed that even in the 1950s, I was already showing signs of contempt for liberalism.

The Rotten and the Mad

Nothing stands to evil

as conscience stands to good;

the mad and rotten act,

and act together,

in the earliest brotherhood.

And while the mad and rotten act,

the good pursue The Good;

with conscience and with time,

they trace a trembling line

between the good and bad.

But while they mull,

The fine placing of that line,

The only ones who act,

in fact,

are the rotten and the mad.

#72: Maybe Nietzsche Was Right About Power, After All

And yet another episode in my ongoing fascination with the inner workings of the Leftist mind. As always, I caution that most phenomena in nature are multiply caused, so whatever I say here, it is just another small aspect of this complex and stinky feature of the modern world.

It’s tempting, and many succumb to the temptation, to locate Leftism is what has been called “white guilt.” I’m skeptical. If there are white people who actually say their politics are determined by their feelings of guilt, I haven’t come across them. And if the claim is that they’re secretly or unconsciously dealing with their feelings of guilt, well, that doesn’t seem to be a falsifiable claim. And the whole “feelings of white guilt” thing is such a self-serving piece of manure anyway. “We’re just so morally sensitive that the evil in the world makes us just crazy!”

Christ, maybe, was motivated by something like “global guilt,” since, we are told, he took the world’s sins upon his own shoulders. Why would he have done this, if he didn’t think that in some way, he was really responsible for mankind’s sins. But, other than Christ and perhaps the Apostles and the saints, I’m inclined to think that people generally are motivated by things that please them, not things that make them feel bad..

A better story is that Lefties are motivated by sanctimony, the feeling of being holier-than-thou. It’s true that most Libs do feel holier than conservatives and that they seem to take pleasure in stimulating that feeling in themselves. But, it is also true that a lot of conservatives also feel much holier than their Leftie counterparts. So, I don’t think we can easily use sanctimony, as attractive as it is initially, to identify the mental state peculiar to the Leftie. But sanctimony is still a good clue.

Sanctimony is species of a genus, a genus which doesn’t have a name, but which I’ll dub for the moment, the feeling being “better-than-thou.” Being religiously more observant and sincere is certainly one way of being better than the next person, but it isn’t the only way. It’s also a way that isn’t available to the atheistic Lefties, so, if they want to feel better than the next guy, they have to find something other than being “religiously better.” And so they do.

The Lefties have two dimensions of “being better” than conservatives that complement each other. The first is that they are smarter than conservatives (their favorite insult is “stupid”), and the second is that they are morally better precisely because they are smarter. They have bought, hook, line, and sinker, into the Socratic linkage of morality and reason that has polluted philosophy since the third century BC.

Now, while the English idiom of “know-it-all” is available, it doesn’t quite capture the Leftie’s haughty attitude. The Germans, perhaps because their culture has produced the type for longer, has an expression that’s right on target: besserwisser. Because German is an agglutinative language, it has very many words that are simply constructions out of simpler words, and besserwisser is one of those. It is just a compostion of besser, “better,” and wisser, “knower.”

A know-it-all is just a person who is always lecturing others in an effort to display the amount she knows or thinks she knows. A besserwisser, on the other hand, is a person who is always making an effort to trump the knowledge or beliefs of another. The besserwisser wants to feel intellectually superior to the other. Thus, the besserwisser wants to feel smarter-than-thou.

As I”ve argued many times before, the Leftie’s historical orgins in the Enlightenment and its commitment to Reason (with a capital “R”, as you’ll notice) have quite naturally provided him with this avenue for feeling better than the other. In particular, the fact that science quite often produces theories (and apparent facts) that run counter to our common intuitions has encouraged the adoption of the scientific cloak for Leftie pronouncements. More specifically, reflections on man and society were transformed from being mere personal effulgences into “objective social scientific” theories. And who can argue with a “science,” eh?

So, what we’ve got in the Leftie is an Enlightenment descendant, usually quite ignorant of his own origins and of the physical sciences the apes, who attempts to feel good by producing counter-intuitive pronouncements to demonstrate his superiority over the common man.

Why does the Leftie do this?

Answering this risks descending to his level, which I am loath to do.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll indulge myself just this once.

Back before social science, when people opined about man’s “nature” rather than playing pseudo science psychology, they offered “large” hypotheses about man’s single motivational mainspring. Famously, Freud said the mainspring was sex, “libidinal energy,” and Nietzsche said it was the “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht). Freud, however, thought he was actually doing science, being a true child of the Enlightenment and a trained neurologist. He wasn’t.

While scarcely scientific, and a bit of a poseur, I think Nietzsche may have been right: it’s all about power. Powerful people exercise power because they enjoy it; inadequate people seek power because they want it. The whole thing is captured quite nicely in Swift’s nice poem:

"The Vermin only teaze and pinch

Their Foes superior by an Inch.

So Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum."

He does it because he feels inadequate and inadequate people always attempt to feel better at someone else’s expense, the smaller fleas below him.

As I said at the beginning, things are really never this simple. Hume might have been right when he wrote:

"It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." (David Hume An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals)

Even given that, however, I suppose it is sufficient for our present purpose to allow that at least one powerful, dominant drive in human beings is to assuage their feelings of impotence and inadequacy by finding some basis for feeling contempt for some of their fellows, however frail that basis might be.

Lest I be accused of harboring such feelings of contempt for Lefties, let me say this. Would be so surprising if I did? If I am correct, then this is a feature of the human being, and am I not human as well? But, quite apart from this, it behooves us to distinguish despising a philosophy, a theory, or a manner of life, on the one hand, and despising individual people, on the other.

I confess that I have despised individual people, and am I not human? But I also confess that I do despise Leftism and everything associated with it, and do so, finally, without a trace of regret.

#71: Obama’s Undeclared War

Recently, Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican party, opined that Afghanistan was a "war of Obama's choosing," and this has raised an acrimonious debate that spans the parties. If we go by Obama’s campaign rhetoric, there’s hardly any question – he said time and again that America should be fighting in Afghanistan. But there’s another Obama war-question that seems more important, all things considered:

Is Obama actually at war with the American people?

He hasn’t actually said so, but there’s reason to think that he’s been fighting an undeclared war ever since he got into office. There was, of course, the economy- breaking health care plan that he crammed through congress in the face of popular majority resistance. In addition, there’s his “cap and tax” enviro-Nazi plan in the offing, another economy killer. And let us not forget the always attractive “card-check” union law, a device for further increasing the power of Chicago-style union gangsters.

But, more recently and more revealingly, he has launched law suits against two American states. He is suing Arizona over its new immigration law and he’s continuing legal action against the state of Louisiana over his failed attempt to place a moratorium on off-shore drilling.

What is fascinating in the first case is that he is willing to use the might of the federal government against the victim, Arizona, while he has made it clear that he will not only do nothing against the aggressors, Mexican illegals, he will actually block any efforts on the part of the victims to defend themselves. He appears, therefore, to be siding with an external enemy against the American people.

This should not be entirely surprising. Israel is in exactly the same situation as Arizona, with Arabs taking the places of Mexicans, and, characteristically, Obama is clearly more sympathetic to the aggressors than to the victims. When he tries to “make nice” with Netanyahu, it is transparently obvious that he is gritting his teeth and going through the charade for purely political reasons.

I suppose that his non-support of the Iranian freedom protestors might even be invoked here, though that was probably a mix of not knowing what to do, on the one hand, and passivity, on the other.

In the case of Louisiana, Obama and his administration have done everything in their power to make the catastrophe worse than it might have been. They dragged their heels for months about allowing foreign ships come in to help. Having already seen to it that the oil spill does as much damage as possible to the environment, to Louisiana’s already damaged economy, and to the U.S. economy as whole, he has gone on to try to block any possibility of recovery by banning offshore drilling.

It sure looks like he’s fighting a war against America.

But why?

I think it comes down to a couple of converging reasons.

1) He wants to cripple the American economy, and

2) He is using the office of the presidency to wage a campaign to become Secretary General of the U.N. after he leaves office.

He wants to cripple the U.S. economy because he is ideologically a “one-world” Marxist. He hates American power and he hates American wealth. It’s hard to tell whether he despises Israel simple because it has always been an American client-state or for the usual black Revrnd Wright and Farrakhan rabid anti-Semitism. Probably a mix of both.It is an axiom among Marxists that in order to take over a state, one must first cripple its economy. Thus, what many people see as inexplicably stupid policies, are actually policies well designed to accomplish their goal. To Obama and his toads, the more unemployment, the better, the higher the deficit, the better, the more misery among the little people, the better. And, among all of these, the more black and Hispanic rioting in the streets, the better. Economic despair and chaos in the streets leads straight to Marxist socialism. Just ask Saul Alinsky. These are the methods of Chicago “community organizer” (or “commie street agitator”).

But even he knows that presiding over the crippling of the U.S. economy will ensure his defeat, should he run for a second term. However, this is a problem only if his planning includes a second term. I suggest that he has no intention of even running for a second term, that, instead, his actions in the presidency are intended to serve the dual purpose of destroying the U.S. and displaying his bona fides to the U.N. king makers, the leaders of the ever-outraged “third world.” The more he “fails” as president of the U.S., the better he looks to the Euro-Lefties, the African dictators, and the Muslims. Win-win for the affirmative action president.

There are a little over three months to go till the November congressional elections. In the time that remains, expect a legislative suicide charge from the congressional Left as they attempt to do as much damage to the body politic and economic before they are shot down. If the country manages to take back congress, many of the teeth in this Manchurian Candidate’s mouth will be gone and there will once again be hope for the future.