No America In Sight...Only Third World As Far As the Eye Can See

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts. _Peter Hitchens

Actully, Hitchens is going easy on the crowing flocks of Obamaworld enthusiasts. He does have a way with words that can be instructive at times. Here is what he thinks of Obama madness:

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to. _DailyMail

It is the triumph of political extravaganza over human logic. The defeat of rational thought by information control and selectively metered access to news.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue. _DM

But then there is no need to be naive here. True and untrue is obviously whatever the gatekeepers decide is true and untrue. Reality simply does not signify.

...among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy. They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world. _DM

For a long time America's foundations have been cracking, settling, sinking into a dysfunctional way of thinking that defines the third world, and an increasingly decadent and corrupt Europe and Latin America. With the election of Obama, the distinction is without a difference.

And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth? _Peter Hitchens

The mistake, of course, is to look for a government of any kind as a last best hope of Earth. As Obamanation settles over the US like a shroud, the distinction between the government and the country may become more clear to those still capable of seeing and understanding. With that insight comes a choice.