Skepticism

One of the initial reasons I was so wary of Obama is overly enthusiastic and messianic claptrap his core supporters babble. These people have bought into the idea that Obama is different, and like most devotees are quite put-off when evidence shows up that their man is exactly that, a man, a mortal.

Mark Morford writes a gushing love letter about Obama that shows exactly the kind of thing that makes me wary of Obama.

Nicely, he starts of with a fair warning:

Warning: If you are a rigid pragmatist/literalist, itchingly evangelical, a scowler, a doubter, a burned-out former '60s radical with no hope left, or are otherwise unable or unwilling to parse alternative New Age speak, click away right now, because you ain't gonna like this one little bit.

Emphasis added.

He's not speaking to a fence-sitter or someone not into Obama yet. No, he's speaking to the converted. And you better not be someone who pragmatically values every politician before voting for them, that seems too rigid.

He's also got a nice excuse lined up if you "don't get it".

Consider the mentality of a person that feels that a "doubter" is a bad thing. It is easier to "preach to the choir" than to try to convince someone to change their view point.

No, it's not merely his youthful vigor, or handsomeness, or even inspiring rhetoric. It is not fresh ideas or cool charisma or the fact that a black president will be historic and revolutionary in about a thousand different ways. It is something more. Even Bill Clinton, with all his effortless, winking charm, didn't have what Obama has, which is a sort of powerful luminosity, a unique high-vibration integrity.

Emphasis added. And fresh ideas? What is new about his ideas? They seemed pretty standard to me. What policy differences did he have with Hillary? Durring the primaries they seemed to have identical ideas. Does that mean she's got "fresh ideas" too?

Then there's the creepy idea of seeing a politician with " powerful luminosity" and a " high-vibration integrity". Is that the kind of integrity that has you spend 20 years worshiping under the preaching of a paranoid racist, donating thousands to his church, using one of his speeches to title you book, and having him marry you to your wife?

So is this the new type of integrity? Where one week you say you can no more disavow him than "the black community" and another say "Well, I may not know him as well as I thought."

Here's where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

Emphasis HIS.

Boy is he right, this is gooey (as opposed to the firm Boolean logic he used earlier in the article?). I have laughed out loud a few times reading this. It's just amazing.

This is the type of soppy thinking we're dealing with. "Spiritual" people are what will give us a new way, and have us evolve. I guess because these people don't have an organized theology, their religious style rhetoric is supposed to be okay.

How would Mark feel if a McCain supporter said that McCain would help us "evolve" and "lead to a new way of being."

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Emphasis Added. You see Obama is a "Lightworker" because of what he says he will do, not what he has done. Mark believes Obama is one, therefore he is.
Isn't faith great?

Now, Obama. The next step. Another try. And perhaps, as Bush laid waste to the land and embarrassed the country and pummeled our national spirit into disenchanted pulp and yet ironically, in so doing has helped set the stage for an even larger and more fascinating evolutionary burp, we are finally truly ready for another Lightworker to step up.

And you can't have a good religious con without a redemption angle. In this mythology Bush is the devil, and Obama is the spiritual son of JFK. "Another try" at the peacemaker and Lightworker.

After he gives a bit of a boilerplate saying that " I'm not saying the man's going to swoop in like a superhero messiah and stop all wars and make the flowers grow and birds sing and solve world hunger and bring puppies to schoolchildren. Please. I'm also certainly not saying he's perfect, that his presidency will be free of compromise, or slimy insiders, or great heaps of politics-as-usual."

You can infer the pity in his voice that his god-man has to set down to our level, to allow himself to be brutalized and demeaned by our poltics and that he will have to compromise to get what he wants.

The devotee has a defense mechanism. This keeps him from losing faith when he sees his messiah working with "slimy insiders" and doling out "great heaps of politics-as-usual".

But that's required. While Obama may not be a god, he's close enough to make some real change. Not a messiah, but different from you or me.

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it's not even about Obama, per se. There's a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that's been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama's candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically drawn to him. It's exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

Emphasis added.

Recall the list of Wright, Rezko, Ayres, Pfleger. Are these the people "automatically drawn to him"?

Let's have a more level-headed article.
Victor Davis Hanson speaks on Obama's associates


Back to Mark

I suppose it's futile to try to logic out the thinking of a man that believes that Bush et al have dammed-up "vast amounts of positive energy swirling about".

Don't buy any of it? Think that's all a bunch of tofu-sucking New Agey bulls-- and Obama is really a dangerously elitist political salesman whose inexperience will lead us further into darkness because, when you're talking national politics, nothing, really, ever changes? I understand. I get it. I often believe it myself.
Not this time.

Really? So Obama isn't going to make everything perfect but he'll come as close as he can, because that's just what an amazing guy he is. Mark, this is called a personality cult. You assign values and powers to this man, that he does not have.

Well he's correct. This article was not for anyone not already tithing to the "Church of Obama". If anything it makes Obama seem like an empty suit, who's only virtue is that he's not Bush (but term limits... so.. isn't everyone in the race that?)...

Obama also has the ability to tap into those that attribute supernatural evil to the Bush administration, and those that put great stock in the views of "spiritualists".

Therefore, the total lack of evidence about how Obama would fix things, or what he has cone is totally congruent.

If you can read the article again. Mark does not list what Obama has actually done and only has the vaguest notion of actual policy when Obama gets in (Universal Healthcare, losing in Iraq). Yet he's one step removed from saying how Obama will save us all.

Hat tip Glen Reynolds
He started that post with this: YOU CAN SPOT A BUBBLE by irrational exuberance, and pronouncements that the usual rules no longer apply.

One hopes that this bubble will pop before November. Not sure Mark could believe in that change.

Sorry.

Kate Woodbury notes the type of "reasoning" that Mark has.

When in my master's program, I would refer to this attitude--"whatever I say is tolerant no matter how intolerant it sounds because what I'm saying is de facto tolerant"--as Calvinism although maybe that's unfair to Calvinists. Still, the approaches bear a similarity: rather than behaving a certain way, one adopts certain attitudes or positions. If I gain a conviction that I am saved, I must be saved.

Given this thinking, if people have the conviction that Obama is this great leader then he is one. Facts are just something that "rigid pragmatist/literalists" cling to.

And they call people on the right the dogmatic ones?
It's also interesting who becomes labeled a "Right Winger"

If you look at the policies of people like Rachel Lucas, Rand Simberg, or Glen Reynolds to name a few... they are only "right wing" in the sense that skeptism for Progressivism and the Far Left is right wing.

That's a very collective notion of politics. "You're either with us or against us."

Speaking of Rachel Lucas, she links to an article by Jon Bolton

Read it to see how well Obama strikes up when you dig deeper than merely saying Obama will be a messiah-lite.

Executive Summary: Obama really needs to brush up on his history skills.

People should be skeptical of their politicians. Even the ones of the same party as yours, even ones you think you agree with.

That's what the voter should do.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating:

If you have a politician that you totally agree with and think is a wonderful guy and someone unique and special, then there are two options.

1) You are a truly lucky person to be living in a singular time in history and have found a perfect leader.

2) You're a gullible rube that got taken in by a smooth-talking conman (IE a skilled politician)

Which do you think is more likely?