Fake

I have on numerous occasions suggested that this president and his supporters on the Left have adopted a fantasy ideology. Their world view as it relates to international relations relies predominantly on fantasy. Talk and broad abstractions will somehow cause hard and violent men to change their ways. The administration's domestic agenda again relies on ever-increasing spending and debt, both supported by the fantasy that taxpayer resources are unlimited.

Richard Fernandez summarizes this rather nicely when he writes:

The Left is contemptuous of costs because they don’t believe it matters. With the certainty of those who are devoted to magic, like those who burned the library of Alexandria, costs don’t matter because the government will pay for it. Like barbarians they don’t really see the connection between Truth — or God if you prefer — and consequences. Goodies are simply there. Arithmetic is only useful for convincing people, for making the spell work. Peace comes if you want it hard enough. Healthcare can be made universal by spending Other People’s Money. Science is but a persuasive device, but it’s the wanting, it’s the will that makes things happen. How simple can it be? The Republicans are denying poor people medical care because the states won’t expand Medicaid. Medicaid is subsidized, don’t you see? It’s just free government money.

We are watching the collision of fantasy with reality. In foreign policy, all we need do is look at the wreckage in the Middle East. Wreckage that has occurred in large past because fantasy (as expressed in grand speeches in Cairo) is no substitute for a realistic strategy along with harsh tactics focused on the hard men who populate the region. In domestic policy, all we need do is look at the wreckage (partially hidden by spin and delays) of Obamacare (still another fantasy) as an exemplar of the president's policies. Yesterday, Forbes reported:

... the Manhattan Institute published the most comprehensive study yet on the topic [Obamacare premium costs], analyzing premium data from 3,137 U.S. counties, and finding an average rate hike of 49 percent. In response, left-wing bloggers are trying out a new talking point: that rate shock doesn’t matter, because taxpayer-funded subsidies will bear the higher costs.

Hmmmm -- 49 percent! But I thought the president told us in 2010 that rates would go down? Oh, well, it's all subsidized. And I wonder, who funds these magical subsidies? It's taxpayers, of course, including millions of middle class folks who the Left professes to care so much about.

In the Middle East, we watch, horrified, as Islamists begin a relentless takeover in Iraq, Syria, and even on the border of Jordan. But wait, I thought Islamists were on the run, "decimated," and all of that. That's what I was told just before the 2012 presidential election, when Benghazi was a movie review gone violent.

Again, Richard Fernandez comments:

That would make it [Benghazi] a non-terrorist attack because the Secretary of State said so. If this account is accurate, it corroborates the administration’s tendency to view al-Qaeda in terms of magic. The Telegraph says the Kurds repeatedly warned Washington of the impending disaster. “I have completely lost hope in America after listening to President Barack Obama,” the head of Kurdish intelligence, Lahur Talabani, said. But they were just facts, and facts are trumped by narrative.

How could Obama admit to error, when having built his power on sorcery he must now cling to infallibility? The power of magicians to command the weather is destroyed once the magician is exposed as fake. For a sorcerer a mistake is not mere error but catastrophe. So the idea that reality can be trumped by perception is now the ultimate in modern sophistication, a necessary device to support the world of magic. In actuality this viewpoint is a reversion to the mentality of the cave-man, a return to the days when nature was an incomprehensible mystery to pacified by a witch-doctor.

Indeed, the magician and his ideology have been exposed as fake.