Pray that President Obama achieves greatness in office. Our overriding concern must always be the country we love, not the success of a party or an ideology.
This is non-sensical. Sydney Brillo Duodenum does not want President Obama to achieve greatness in office, precisely because he loves his country and its founding ideology. There - it's been said. Barack Obama does not love THIS country. He loves a country he has yet to create. He has said it himself in so many words.
Greatness is measurement. How will Barack Obama's greatness be measured by the appointed tailors? It will be against Obama's own benchmarks revealed ever so painfully and banally over the last two years: Colossal social welfare government programs. Communistic egalitarianism. A government-dependent middle class. A command economy. A huge federal bureaucracy. Anthropomorphic Earth worship. Corporatism. Coercive redistribution of wealth. A weakened military. Draft-based militarized community organizer brigades. A curtailed free market. State-ordered scientific endeavor. The final eviction of faith from the public sphere. A Supreme judiciary enforcing social justice. The list goes on. Taken together, they represent a measurement of lost liberty. Tracking in the opposite direction on an upward scale is its evil twin tyranny. Is this exaggeration? Hyperbole? Fantasy?
Another coping mechanism from Mirengoff:
Be loyal in your opposition. As my blog partner Scott Johnson puts it, paraphrasing Steven Decatur: "May he always be in the right; but our president, right or wrong."
Well, if one is to paraphrase, then one must paraphrase, not make shit up. The correct Decatur quote, a toast in fact, is: "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"
Thus, applied to Obama, we have, however inelegant, this: "Our Obama! In his intercourse with foreign nations may he always be in the right; but right or wrong, our Obama." This is quite different than saying, "Our Obama, right or wrong."
Some of us - outlaws as Protein Wisdom's Jeff Goldstein calls us - have spent 20 or so months declaring that Obama is most assuredly wrong on just about everything; that he has hidden his principles, philosophy and values as he has gained attention, but they will fully emerge in time from the cocoon of the Oval Office. The election does not change our analysis, nor causes us to junk our principles; does not direct us to place a man above our reason and our firm beliefs. We outlaws are not loyal to the president. We are loyal to the Constitution and laws of this country and so to the extent that he preserves, protects and defends the Constitution, then he garners respectful opposition as opposed mad derangement.
SBD reads into these goodwill declarations a too hard effort to appear exactly opposite of the left wing nut roots that made an industry of vilifying and attacking President Bush from the day Al Gore reluctantly abandoned his legal effort to wrest the presidency from Bush and which continue to this day as evidenced last week on election night when upon McCain's concession a large crowd of hundreds - college students, federal workers, professional activists - descended on Lafayette Square across from the White House to demand that President Bush immediately resign. Given the chance, they would have stormed the White House Front Lawn and dragged the man to his death.
So, we do not cope with Barack Obama by embracing the rhetoric and the mystery and the enveloping mysticism and by hoping for a strange success because he is simply the president and the president should always be successful and we should always be loyal to his efforts. Rubbish. We cope by doing precisely the opposite.
