Barack obama

In the '80s and early '90s, there was perhaps no greater cinematic hate figure for liberals than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since his first big hit in the politically dubious Conan the Barbarian (Roger Ebert wrote of the film's James Earl Jones-decapitating ending, “I found myself thinking that Leni Riefenstahl could have directed the scene, and that Goebbels might have applauded it”) he became a Reaganite fantasy, disposing of foreign-accented villains who threatened the good ol’ United States of America with little more than automatic weaponry and an Austrian-accented quip. Never mind that his father Gustav was a leading light of the Nazi party.

Remember when Donald Trump crowded illegal immigrants into cages? What a brute! But what could you expect from a man who was, when you came down to it, indistinguishable from that diminutive Austrian house painter with the funny mustache and a fondness for leather? The problem was, it was the anointed one, Barack Obama Himself, who built the cages and crammed them full of illegal immigrants. (Really they were large areas secured with chain-link fences, but “cages” sounds scarier.) And those dismal photographs depicting the huddled masses? The media splashed them everywhere as yet more evidence of Trump’s perfidy. But, wouldn’t you know it, the photographs too were from the Obama era. Even the Snopes Fact Manipulator, no friend to Trump, had to acknowledge that.

Barack Obama returned to the White House this week, and his presence was a straight up blast from the past. The 2010s might not be our most culturally defined decade, but surely the Age of Barry still has a few touchstones worth recalling. That was back when it was cool to say “there’s an app for that,” all the way back when the Speaker of the House was...actually it was still Nancy Pelosi. And it was back when everyone, and I do mean everyone, could not shut up about Obamacare. Sure enough, Obama was back in Washington to once again revel in the passage of his signature health law, even if it had just undergone yet another round of tweaks to make it work this time for real.

A few months ago, I saw an intelligent and fairly prominent conservative writer lionizing Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter. My reply was something along the lines of, “Come on. Do better. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a moron.” In response, this writer told me I was being elitist and engaging in snobbish respectability politics. MTG was a brave patriot who has done far more good than the establishment GOP, he said. I would just have to lower my standards. Maybe I am a snob. I want leaders who enjoy intellectual pursuits and conversations. Construction workers probably want a president they could have a beer with and who looks like he did a real day’s work at some point in his life. Businessmen respect a savvy dealmaker.

Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers issued last September, has been praised to high heavens by Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Naomi Klein, and reviewers at NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. This ought to be enough to warn any sensible reader to stay far away from its pages and to resign promptly from any reading group that nominates it for collective perusal. But I am not always sensible. The title lured me, for what better word to describe our Zeitgeist?

After two years of nonsense messaging on masks, some liberal politicians are ready to hang up their KN95s. Numerous blue states such as California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Oregon have announced wind-down plans for their mask mandates this week. All this comes on the tail of a spate of Democratic politicians being pictured unmasked with masked schoolchildren or workers. A complete coincidence, I am sure. Some of the recent images seem tailored to piss voters off. Last week, Stacey Abrams tweeted out a photo with a group of masked school children in Georgia. The Democratic candidate for governor posed proudly without a mask. The image was so blatantly callous, it almost made you wonder if she was trying to rub her hypocrisy in people’s faces.

The adults are back in charge! The State Department and its secretary Antony Blinken are tweeting out Spotify playlists! Spokesman Ned Price is sending hashtags and emojis in support of Ukraine! Meanwhile, nonessential American personnel have been ordered to evacuate their posts in Kiev. But surely they'll find a good hashtag to use on their way to the helicopters and airports. In all seriousness, this is a dangerously unserious administration that appears to be attempting to TikTok their way out of a crisis. Here’s hoping Vladimir Putin is checking his Snapchat for updates from Jen Psaki and the Jonas Brothers. What the Biden administration is trying to do is to recreate the wonder of the Obama years and their way-too-online Millennial social media strategy.

Some people say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Nonsense. There is also the certainty that in America circa 2021 anti-black racist events are hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing whites or, more often, by blacks themselves. Right now, the world is mesmerized by the case of Jussie Smollett. Until he faked the “racist” attack on himself back in 2019, no one you knew had heard of Smollett. Now he is famous, not for being an actor, but for being a race-baiting hate monger. The fake-news, enemy-of-the-people, Trump-hating media slobbered all over that story. So did the slimy Democratic politicians sup daily on fifty-seven varieties of “racism” because they think it buys votes.