What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  In the modern center-right nation, a far-left presidential candidate could never win a general election, never mind govern from the progressive outer banks. They had tried and failed before with extremists such as Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry, so the Left had to recalibrate. If it were ever to seize the brass ring of the presidency and be able to leverage it into a full transformation of America, the Left needed to go beyond its previous helping of man, ideology, tank, and swift boat. It needed to find the perfect marriage of man and mission.

  It took them decades, but the leftists finally found it in the strange hologram of a man named Barack Hussein Obama.

  Who was he? Nobody really knew. But he came complete with an Etch-A-Sketch history, making him the perfect vessel for the Left. The biracial son of an absentee Kenyan communist father and an absentee Kansan communist mother who spent his youth in Indonesia and Hawaii, attended Occidental College and Columbia and Harvard universities, and who presented in an elegant way that was non-threatening to whites, Obama was almost too good to be true. America was about to meet the Fresh Prince of Chicago.

  What made him even more delectable to the Left was that he was no mere pretender to the throne. Obama was an authentic heir to the radical Left movement of the 1960s, which had been mainstreamed into American politics and culture via academia, Hollywood, and the media. And perhaps even more important, as the first viable black candidate for president, he would benefit from a tsunami of white guilt. A vote for Obama would allow white America to feel they had advanced toward vanquishing racism once and for all. A vote for Obama was a chance for many in white America to give themselves a feel-good moment. Even Joe Biden pronounced him “clean and articulate” during the 2008 Democratic primaries. So many people were consumed with proving their racial tolerance: Look, everybody! No racial complexes here! Just a supremely open-minded, enlightened post-racial voter!

  The emotional pull of the racial element was not to be underestimated. A long conga line of white leftists had been defeated for president. But a biracial leftist would be granted all kinds of passes, excuses, and protections. The race card, played subtly by Obama but boldly by others, would prove to be the most powerful weapon in the Obama/leftist arsenal.

  Obama also had superb leftist street cred, including personal associations with such notable sixties radicals as domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who wanted to get the socialist revolution going by killing their fellow Americans, the anti-American racist preacher Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in whose pews Obama sat for nearly two decades, and the PLO sympathizer Rashid Khalidi. A true Amalgam of Awfulness. The only thing missing was Louis Farrakhan.

  Obama had also apprenticed in the dark arts. And not the cool kind of dark arts they teach at Hogwarts. I mean the dark arts of Saul Alinsky community organizing, which relentlessly stoked class warfare in order to create a pre-revolutionary climate. Obama had never expressed an unadulterated love for America, only deep critiques of its racial divides, social and economic injustices, and bullying ways in the world. His detached persona mirrored a detachment from fundamental American values. The Left tried to smear his critics by saying they were trying to paint him as “Other,” as something other than traditionally American. But in his actions, associations, and words, that was exactly true, and it was precisely the reason the Left knew that in him it had found its deliverance.

  It helped their cause that he was cool in every way. He was cool, as in “hip,” with Nas playing on his iPod and his 2008 campaign sending tweets to his followers at Kanye West concerts. But he was also cool as in “unflappable,” which would come in handy as he led the leftist revolution. He was charismatic and charming, a natural salesman who delivered a spoonful of sugar to make the redistributionist medicine go down. He was also calm, self-possessed, intellectual. How could someone that seemingly rational want to radicalize the United States? Most people would not believe the truth about him and his motives—at least until it was too late.

  The leftists had found their Dreamboat Date to the Big Dance, and, boy, did they get lucky.

  The rest of us, meanwhile, were kidnapped, blindfolded, given roofies, tossed in the trunk, and taken on a $5 trillion bender. When we awoke, we found that our hair was mussed, our skirt was twisted, and our shirt was buttoned wrong. We had a hangover, without first having had any fun, or Bradley Cooper.

  What the @$%&! just happened?

  Americans are generally slow to anger. Because most of us deeply appreciate and exercise our freedom to go about our own business, we will take a lot of punches, abuse, disrespect, and challenges from our own leadership or from abroad. But at some point, even the most patient and understanding American has had enough. And it’s at that point, when Americans are finally roused from their agreeable acquiescence, that our leaders had better check themselves.

  Just as Thomas Jefferson cataloged a long list of abuses of the American people by the British sovereign, many Americans have compiled their own modern list of abuses suffered at the hands of Barack Obama and his congressional toadies:

  We are mad as hell about a nearly trillion-dollar economic “stimulus” that stimulated government but did nothing to excite the private economy.

  We are mad as hell about long-term high unemployment.

  We are mad as hell about taxpayer bailouts of failing businesses and industries.

  We are mad as hell that random TSA agents can now fondle us at the airport.

  We are mad as hell about a president who has regularly ruled by fiat, bypassing Congress and the public by appointing unaccountable policy “czars” and issuing mandates through executive order.

  We are mad as hell about telephone book–sized bills pushed through, unread, by the Democratic leadership.

  We are mad as hell about the government takeover and destruction of the best health care system in the world.

  We are mad as hell about the multitrillion-dollar price tag to pay for that monstrosity.

  We are mad as hell about the shady, slimy, greasy backroom dirty dealing the Democrats did to cobble it together.

  We are mad as hell about the legislative tricks and straight party-line vote they used to pass it.

  We are mad as hell about multiple annual deficits over $1.3 trillion.

  We are mad as hell about a national debt speeding toward $17 trillion.

  We are mad as hell that this president’s wife goes on late-night burger runs while telling us to graze in her organic garden.

  We are mad as hell about the national humiliation of having our credit downgraded for the first time in U.S. history.

  We are mad as hell about the steadfast refusal by most Democrats—and some Republicans—to cut spending in real and deep ways.

  We are mad as hell about the Democrats’ equally steadfast obsession with raising our taxes.

  We are mad as hell about their weaselly cowardice in their refusal to take on the biggest sources of explosive spending: entitlement programs.

  We are mad as hell that illegal aliens are still streaming into the United States.

  We are mad as hell about a foreign policy that embraces our enemies and makes our friends walk the plank.

  We are mad as hell about the commander in chief apologizing for American power and action.

  We are mad as hell about an arrogant leadership that is bankrupting the nation while empowering itself.

  Above all, we are mad as hell that American exceptionalism is deliberately being turned into unexceptionalism.

  Americans will take a lot, but they will not tolerate the rape and pillage of their nation by the Orwellian forces of a sick and discredited redistributionist ideology. They will reject it even more when they believe their own leadership is hijacking American exceptionalism and deliberately diluting it in order to serve a global redistributionist scheme.

  It’s no coincidence that the movement that developed to push back found its inspiration in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. The original tea party was a sem
inal pre-revolutionary event. It crystallized the colonists’ objections to being ruled and taxed from afar and their desire for the basic human dignity of having a voice in their own affairs. In a significant way, this was the beginning of American exceptionalism: What made these powerless subjects think they could confront the king of the most powerful empire on earth? The courage of those early Americans came when they realized they were not powerless at all. They discovered that their power came not from the barrel of a gun but from their unity around the idea that all men were created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  We were born in revolt: revolt against oppression, revolt against taxation without representation, revolt against those who ruled by royal decree, revolt against tyranny.

  The odds were stacked hugely against us. On one side there was the British army: well trained, well equipped, a professional fighting force in their crisp red coats. On the other side, a bunch of farmers with pitchforks, preachers with muskets, country lawyers with bayonets, rich and poor, fathers and sons, a ragtag bunch of men and boys. Their very unexceptional nature is what made their achievement so exceptional. In that motley collection of early patriots, we see the first American ingenuity, the first American feistiness, that uniquely American combativeness and competitive spirit.

  Most important, the early Americans knew that their demands were not radical. To King George, they constituted treason. But to the patriots, and later for the whole of humanity, they were basic rights that came not from government but from God. They believed, they felt, that they were on the right side of history. Even then, they knew they were part of a grand political and spiritual experiment. They didn’t know how it would end, but they also knew they didn’t have a choice but to fight.

  Several years after the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “The important ends of civil government are the personal securities of life and liberty. I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country, and the least encroachment of those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil.”

  If Franklin were to get a gander at the unlimited power seized by our current arbitrary government, his blood pressure would be off the charts.

  Franklin went on to say: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. But America is too enlightened to be enslaved.”

  Are we still too enlightened to be enslaved? Are we still virtuous?

  Obama and the Democrats have answered those questions with a resounding no, which is why they are forcibly imposing their own version of “virtuous” redistribution, like a bunch of demented Robin Hoods. The majority of Americans are answering those questions with thundering yeses, which is why they’re opposing the Democrats’ madness. It is as basic a conflict as was the one between the British king and the early Americans: Should the United States be a land of individual freedom, truly representative government, and free market prosperity, or should it be a land of an omnipotent state, central economic planning, and, in the words of Obama, “collective salvation”?

  Obama and much of the Democratic Party have answered that pointed question with an emphatic push toward statism. That very anti-American approach has cracked every foundation upon which America has rested, and has led, in turn, to a growing sense of American defeatism, economic crisis and collapse, failed leadership, U.S. impotence abroad, and national malaise. We are watching the sequel to Jimmy Carter unfold, but this time the destruction is much more dangerous and consequential.

  The United States has experienced some extraordinary seminal events: the decision to take up arms against England; the adoption of the Constitution; the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the Great Depression; World Wars I and II; the cold war; the civil rights movement; September 11, 2001. Each event was profoundly jarring to the status quo. The nation was turned inside out, forced to deal with challenges it had never before imagined. And yet, in each case, America managed to find its bearings and ultimately emerge from the test with different national strengths and skills.

  The current seminal moment is one of those unprecedented events. The economic meltdown, which began in late 2007—accelerated in the autumn of 2008 and continuing through today—gave rise to two levels of anxiety. The first level is immediate and urgent economic fear: Will I lose my job? Will I ever find another job? Will the bank foreclose on my home? Will I soon be homeless, living in Kenya like Barack’s half brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama?

  The second percolates under the first and is far more profound and transformative. It is the feeder notion of an America in decline. It’s the fear that the very nature of America is changing—or perhaps has already been irrevocably changed. It’s the fear that the America of our Founders and of days past—of limited government, individual freedom, free markets, of innocent youth and prosperous adulthood—is disappearing. It’s the fear that what made America great—liberty that led to creativity, innovation, risk and reward, and natural optimism—is slipping away. Who can be optimistic when the government micro-manages us all down to the lowest common denominator, from breast exams to bottled water, from sodium intake to central air? It’s the fear that the once-fearless Frontier Nation is becoming regressively European in its policies and sensibilities.

  It is the fear that America the Exceptional is becoming America the Ordinary. Or worse, that it’s becoming America the Weak and Passé, the twenty-first-century Sick Man of the World.

  The tangible effects of this era can eventually pass if we change leaders and policies. But the intangible effects will be more insidiously persistent because they stem from a kind of faltering faith. And that is much harder to restore than a healthy job market.

  There has been a weird vibe in America for a few years. It has left, in the words of the Grateful Dead, a “smoking crater” in our individual and collective psyches. But just as we have during every other seminal moment, we will turn a crisis of confidence and fear into an opportunity for fight and renewal. And we will succeed because we are not about to be the first generation to drop the “exceptional” ball.

  Fortunately, the United States is still a nation of, by, and for the people. Despite the most strenuous exertions of Obama and his dour band of leftists, the country is NOT of, by, and for the federal government. At least it isn’t yet. No matter how many times Dennis Kucinich attempts to lure you into his spaceship, remember that you do not work for him. We still have time to reverse their grand statist experiment, but only if we make the right decisions going forward. No nation is guaranteed primacy. It’s up to the people, who are generally far more rational and grounded than their leaders, to do the hard work of keeping us number one. To stay number one, we’re going to need a president who does more than just wake up at noon and play Xbox 360 in between destroying our exceptionalism.

  The United States is not yet ready for the toe tag. America is like those people who are declared dead, wheeled into the morgue, and three days later, sit bolt upright and scream, “I’m alive! What the hell? And how did Jar Jar Binks get into the White House?”

  The vast majority of Americans are now sitting bolt upright. It took a while for the country to become hip to what Team Obama was up to, because nobody wanted to believe that any president, administration, or political party was capable of such deliberate destruction. What is this, a Metallica concert? The great awakening began in the summer of 2009, when polling began to show a creeping sense among the American people that the new administration’s policies were veering dramatically off the usual American course. We began to notice that something just might be awry when skateboarding champion Tony Hawk was given permission to skateboard through the White House. Yes, that actually happened. Many were still willing to give Obama and his agenda the benefit of the doubt, but as he do
ubled down on his redistributive agenda even as it not only failed to produce results but began to make things worse, the dissatisfaction became more widespread.

  Conservatives who insisted that Barack Obama is a socialist and anti-American radical have often been dismissed as cranks and conspiracists due to a lack of explicit statements on his part to this effect. Of course, Obama and his allies are smart enough not to openly declare their agenda. They don’t run around wearing Carrie Bradshaw–esque nameplate necklaces that say “Redistributionist.” They don’t broadcast an intent to downgrade America at home and abroad by weakening her economically, militarily, and philosophically. In fact they would vociferously deny this if asked. But if you take a hard look at their actions, the choices they’ve made, the people Obama surrounds himself with, you can’t help but conclude, as I have done, that their true objectives are not what they claim. Their words may be moderate, but everything I’ve seen and heard points to their truly radical intentions. Moreover, this is a conclusion that millions of other Americans have also drawn. They have awakened to the threat. And they are increasingly alarmed and indignant.

  That alarm expressed itself in the Tea Party movement, the 2009 election of Republican governors in the deep blue state of New Jersey and the purple one of Virginia, the January 2010 election of a Republican to succeed leftist demigod senator Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, and the near rout of congressional Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It expressed itself in the outrage over ObamaCare in town halls across the nation. It expressed itself in the election of additional Republican governors and state legislatures who, despite the rancorous pushback from government unions and their allies, effected fiscal reforms to stave off their own states’ declines. It expressed itself in plummeting job approval numbers for Obama and Congress, as well as sustained opposition to his signature legislation, from the “stimulus” to ObamaCare to the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill. It expressed itself in a growing backlash against his administration’s war on business. And most important, it has expressed itself in a national soul-searching over what America has been, what it is, and what it should be.