April 01, 2009

Obama's revenge against GM

By James Lewis

Watching Obama is a psychiatrist's delight. Here we have a middle-aged man with no real-world accomplishments, but with truly astonishing grandiosity and a rock-star following that confirms his Jesus Christ Complex at every opportunity. Obama must have real, ingrained grandiosity, the kind that is anchored deep in the soul. He goes ‘way beyond the usual high-fallutin' rhetoric from presidential speech writers -- because he has just fired the President and CEO of General Motors, something no previous president, including FDR or JFK, would ever have imagined doing.

That's not rhetoric, and it isn't just show. It's a political gamble unprecedented in American history, a throw of the dice so breath-taking that the press, the pundits and the voters haven't yet been able to take it in. It is a sort of political Blitzkrieg, a lightning stroke so sudden that it's hard to even understand, but which will trigger wave upon wave of thunderous echoes in the years to come.

If this were a Hitchcock movie I'd be settling back for a rollicking good time. Unfortunately, it is reality -- and that means we have another four years of this psychodrama to live through. Good luck to us all.

The liberal cliché -- a false one -- is that capitalism follows the slogan, "What's good for General Motors is good for the United States." For the moment it is not relevant that the President of GM never said that during the Eisenhower years. What's important is that Google shows 389,000,000 citations for the phrase "good for General Motors." It's a mental meme gone viral on the Left, and all the liberals think it means that to rich capitalists, GM comes first and everybody else comes later -- or maybe never. It is the leftist accusation that has stuck in the minds of the liberals.

We know that Obama has a very conventional mind. I have not heard a single novel or even interesting idea from the man over all the months that I've listened to him. He clearly has no understanding of classical economics. He doesn't understand, as Bill Clinton did, the real harm and suffering that welfare dependency has inflicted on black people after LBJ's War on Poverty. He does not understand the elementary difference between productive and non-productive investment of scarce resources. He has no conception of the damage inflicted by inflation on the poor, more than even on the rest of the country. He has no real understanding of the dizzying complexities of foreign policy -- nor does his Secretary of State, who was hardly picked for her competence in foreign affairs.

These are not just rank amateurs, they are willfully ignorant amateurs, who also happen to be grandiose narcissists, and who now have free reign over the levers of power in the United States. We are all watching the Titanic steaming full speed ahead right before that diamond-hard iceberg tears off all the steel rivets from her skin. If you're not aghast, you're just not paying attention.

So why did he decide to fire Rick Wagoner, the President and CEO of General Motors?

Was it sound policy? Not likely. But if you think it was, watch the Dow and the economy in the coming months, and then decide.

Was it sound politics? Not likely. The Democrats who are up for election next year are already dancing away from this one just as fast as they can move. That's why they say it was all the White House's doing. Don't look at me! I didn't do it!

(It's up to the GOP and the New Media to hang this one around their necks come election time.)

So why did he do it?

To this completely objective pundit this sure looks like political suicide, and for very simple technological reasons. Obama evidently intends to coerce the car companies into producing "Green" cars for which the technology does not exist. Sorry! But that's reality.

And yet Carol Browner, the Green zealot and now head of the EPA, which just officially declared CO2 to be a poison, is on the "task force" to rejigger the auto industry. So is Steve Rattner, a former New York Times reporter, with everything that implies. Oh, yes, and Tim Geithner will help out when he takes his daily break from saving the financial sector of the United States.

GM's Obamabiles will have to make unavoidable engineering compromises, trading off size, handling, comfort, and crash safety against gas mileage. Americans likely will not buy those cars, even if they are subsidized to do so. And responsible parents should not risk their kids' lives in an undersized death trap anyway. Green fanatics are more than welcome to risk their own lives, of course. (But please leave your kids at home.)

It took a long time for reality to catch up with Bernie Madoff and his suckers. Reality will catch up with Obama a lot faster, because 60 million GOP voters are already looking on with shock and panic. The United States must still have a few million engineers, NASCAR fans and Popular Mechanics readers who still remember their high school physics. So firing Rick Wagoner looks like sure political suicide.

Not for Obama, not at least until 2012. He thinks there's time for everybody to forget it. But for the Democrats in Congress? They are trying to raise campaign cash for the election right now: All of the House and a third of the Senate. Look at socialist Europe to see where our Democrats are going to head, just as fast as their little piggy feet will carry them.

Hmmm... a spectacularly bad decision politically and substantively. One that will haunt Obama and the Democrats for years to come.

So, why did he do it?

After you eliminate all the rational reasons, you're left with the irrational ones.

And what do we know about Obama and his inner circle?

Grandiose. Obsessively hostile toward all the usual demons of the Left. Incapable of thinking ideas that don't follow the Party Line. Ruthless and manipulative. Quite willing for other people to get hurt.

Remember the phrase "What's good for GM?" The one that brings up 389,000,000 Google hits, each hit representing at least one moment in the mind of a human Obot?

I think it is the iconic value of GM -- at least to the brainwashed Left -- that triggered the firing of Rick Wagoner. I don't think it was policy or politics, or even just PR. I think we are seeing Obama's narcissistic personality at play. Rick Wagoner is precisely Obama's fantasy enemy from childhood and adolescence: An old, rich, white guy who runs GM.

Remember Obama's first book title, Dreams from my Father? Well, Rick Wagoner is the nightmare part of those dreams.

Assuming that's true, all you amateur psychoanalysts, it brings us right to the bottom-line question:

What does a true grandiose narcissist do when he begins to fail, openly, visibly and in public, right in front of 300 million people, over and over and over again?

You tell me.

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