Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,
by Barack Obama (Review by Brian Wright, originally posted March 2007)

Editor’s Note: My thoughts today are I should at least rename this review as ‘The Naivete of a Dope,’ but I’m putting this old review up in the new format with a mixture of reluctance and astonishment… that I ever truly held these mostly benign opinions and judgments of perhaps one of the most vile and sadistic sociopaths the world has ever seen in such high office—and there have been several, presidents especially, as Obama’s predecessor. What particularly galls me is that I failed to see how Obama was cherry-picked by the same Imperial Globalist Junta as the Dubya crowd. [In fact, I actually believed Obama lay on the outside of Intelligence operations and the New World Order machinery.]

The ‘I Have a Drone’ President

On the positive side, what the book review shows is that reasonably intelligent people seeking the truth can correct and amend initial, radical, and deep misunderstandings QUICKLY. Roughly nine years after writing the original review—which is nothing in intellectual history years—I’ve come to a fundamentally new grasp of the nature of world politics. I assure you my personality has not shifted, nor my desire and vision for liberty. So without further ado, here’s the original. Comments in dark red.

People from the freedom movement wonder what the Barack Obama phenomenon is about, as do naturally curious regular citizens on all strands of the political spectrum.

Most of us are aware of Obama’s oratorical skills. He galvanized many Americans at the 2004 Democratic Nominating Convention with phrases like:

People don’t expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.

[No one in history could read a teleprompter better than Barry Soweto.]

Anyone watching that stirring speech can appreciate how the man has the aura to capture the imagination of voters from all walks of life. Many say American politics hasn’t seen such excitement, especially on college campuses and in high schools, since Kennedy ran for president in 1960.

[Aura, my ass. He’s a show business performer, completely manufactured by Hollywood.]

The Queen of Demean, Ann Coulter now in self-destruct mode—whose every other sentence these days accuses someone of being gay—claims Obama’s speeches sound like Hallmark greeting cards. [Obama never did make Coulter look good to me, but I have to agree with that assessment.] But political speeches are necessarily rife with platitudes. How about this one:

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. — Barry Goldwater, 1964

Now that’s a greeting card with a kick!

Back to Barack. Forget about speeches. The man can write:
[Actually, someone else can write. Obama was actually a horrible writer.]

“It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth….

“No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance of rough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.”

Barack can transport his readers into the realm of BIG THAWTS, ideas we all have but often lack the words for. His writing shows an independent, broadly conscious mind at work accompanied by an unpretentious depth of feeling for his country and its people… and everyone else.

He’s a natural.

[Wow, how could I have been so taken in and bamboozled?! Big thoughts?! Geez.]

So what about Obama’s positions and the details? Here’s my ranking (please understand I’m grading on a curve. The Bushoviks get an F- in each category and Ron Paul, my favorite presidential candidate, would receive an A+ in each category, with the exception of a potential major downgrade on civil liberties because of his anti-choice predilections):

Foreign policy: B
Civil liberties: B
Economics: C to D

[All F-minuses, just like the Bushoviks, only worse because he is a literal communist.]

Please read the final chapters for confirmation he knows what he’s about in foreign affairs. [!!!] He would insist on having an actual, worked out, consistent foreign policy.

On civil liberties I feel he’s going to be good [!!!]; he taught constitutional law [!!! Nothing even suggests he attended classes, much less taught any; he’s a complete myth when it comes to his past], and I cannot see him standing in the way of the cascading drug freedom (i.e. freedom) movements.

[Now my original review is taking on the dimensions of dark comedy.]

The major fly in the ointment is economics, in which he persists in the liberal worldview that government can do good things there, i.e. aside from getting out of the way. Still, I do not sense in him the Hillaryesque-liberal arrogance of what Thomas Sowell calls “The Conceit of the Anointed.”

For example, I feel it might be possible to convince Obama that Minimum Wage is, as Walter Williams says, the “black teenager unemployment” act. Hillary and 97% of other Democrats are arrogantly impervious to reason along these lines.

So the jury is out on economics.

[The jury sure came in like the plague.]

Finally, he doesn’t explicitly take on the power-elite, but as a fundamentally honest man,[!!!] he represents a huge threat to them. Until the Pathocracy[1] is overturned I think he will be the target of its assassination, either character or literal. I wish it weren’t so, but I feel that malignancy goes very, very deep.

A good book worth reading. Bama-Bama Obama is not perfect but he’s the real deal. And yes I believe his presidency would provide a much-needed ray of hope.

[Delusional. But by the same token you had to be there while Bush was on the rampage.]

[1] Someone—please refer to this link from Carolyn Baker about Andrew M. Lobaczewski’s book, Political Ponerology—has come up with a study of evil (ponerology) and a term for “a small pathological minority taking over a society of normal people:” pathocracy.

The editor of Political Ponerology, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, in her footnotes names Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, under the intellectual sway of Leo Strauss, as linchpins in America’s twenty-first century pathocracy. I’m using the initial capital “Pathocracy” to mean the power-elite, from the beginning of the 20th century through now, and their operational minions.