Old
Gadfly: Gentlemen, yesterday, President
Obama took full
credit for reopening the government and saving our nation from
default. Here is what he said: “Well, last night, I
signed legislation to reopen our government and pay America’s bills.
Because Democrats and responsible Republicans came together, the first
government shutdown in 17 years is now over. The first default in more
than 200 years will not happen.”
Based on his desire to speak to the American public in the way he did, how
would you characterize Obama’s vision of a “transformed” America and the logic
of his arguments?
AM
(an American combat aviator with an inquiring mind): Let me start.
If we reflect upon Obama’s strategy over the past few weeks, it clearly
indicates that he is repeating Julius Caesar’s political power overreach in
crossing the Rubicon. The Rubicon
crossing meant that Caesar wanted complete imperial power in defiance of the
established distribution of powers at the time.
In
defiance of the Constitution and the laws of our nation, Obama has indicated he
has absolutely no need for the role Congress plays in his vision of a
transformed America. Incidentally, let’s
recall John Stuart Mill’s arguments in his essay, “The Contest in America,”
that we discussed last month in our conversation, “Beyond
Negotiation.” Both
Democrats, yes even Democrats, and Republicans in both houses of Congress were
mere “human instruments” in the service of master Obama. Democrats and their collaborators in
mainstream media, if they have any reasoning capacity, moral decency, and
respect for the Constitution and its insistence upon the sovereignty of the
people, then they should feel degraded. Republicans
were truly targeted as the enemy of the master, with the firing of canon fire
and thrusting of bayonets “in the service and for the selfish purposes of the
master.” I watched ABC’s World News
with Diane Sawyer yesterday evening and it was clear the mainstream media is
doing Obama’s bidding by employing Saul Alinsky’s rule number 13.
Old
Gadfly: It is unfortunate that the ideal
of a free press advanced in the First Amendment is so blinded by the
progressive ideology. Obama obviously
has achieved a concentration of political power according to prevailing
mainstream media public narratives. AM, aside
from a lot of rhetoric, why do you believe Obama’s behavior justifies being
characterized as crossing the Rubicon?
AM: Obama wants to change the constitutional
process of government and concentrate more power in the executive branch. Here is what he said in today’s speech:
But to all my friends in
Congress, understand that how business is done in this town has to
change. Because we've all got a lot of work to do on behalf of the
American people -- and that includes the hard work of regaining their
trust. Our system of self-government doesn’t function without it.
And now that the government is reopened, and this threat to our economy is
removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists and the bloggers and
the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from
conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do, and
that’s grow this economy; create good jobs; strengthen the middle class;
educate our kids; lay the foundation for broad-based prosperity and get our
fiscal house in order for the long haul. That’s why we're here.
That should be our focus.
Old Gadfly: Despite
the arrogance of telling us where we can or should not get our information on
current affairs, there are a lot of abstractions and rhetorical platitudes in
that quote. How does any of it relate to
actually crossing the Rubicon?
AM: In a nutshell,
Obama wants a single, vanguard party that enables a large, centrally managed
statist administration. That single
party would be a progressive Democrat Party.
That’s what he means when he says Washington must change. While he says he’s open to ideas and is
willing to compromise, Obama refuses to negotiate or compromise in actual
behavior. The past sequester was not a
compromise. It was Obama’s idea,
supposedly in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The “appearance” of compromise was a
deliberate attempt to inflict visible pain presumed to follow the effects of
the sequester. The plan was to use
“human instruments” in service to a master to reinforce a narrative that
Republicans do not care for the people.
This is what Obama and progressives hoped to achieve by shutting down
the government because they knew they could count on the mainstream media to
repeat their logic in shaping the public narrative.
Old Gadfly: So, Obama’s Rubicon is the complete and irreversible
commitment to transforming America, which involves changing the constitutional
logic of governance. IM (an American
citizen with an inquiring mind), let’s hear your thoughts on the logic.
IM: All this transformational action is being
done using Orwell’s “newspeak” and by controlling the public narrative. The logic of Obama’s arguments is designed to
“frame the issue” in order to control the narrative; this logic, by the way, is
also advanced by other members of the progressive caucus.
Old Gadfly: What do you mean by “framing the issue”?
IM: Obama and his progressive cohort are masters
at sophistry.
AM: Define sophistry.
IM: The sophists believed in the power of
rhetoric. Arguments merely need to be
plausible, not necessarily true.
Dictionary.com defines sophistry this way: “a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible,
but generally fallacious method of reasoning.”
AM: That concept nails what we are enduring under
Obama. Sometimes, the approach is not so
subtle. I heard today from one of the
“talking heads” Obama told us to avoid in his speech yesterday, that while
Obama was appearing presidential during the government shutdown, members of his
administration were tweeting followers with pejorative (Mill’s canon fire and
bayonet attacks) comments about Speaker Boehner and the Republicans.
IM: Absolutely.
Let’s get back to the logic.
Obama and his progressive followers use syllogisms to frame issues. This, by the way, is a tactic
George Lakoff had advanced and employed in training progressive
politicians and political activists.
Some of this intellectual indoctrination and training took place through
The
Rockridge Institute before it lost its 501c(3) status. But, the intellectual momentum and activism
continues through Cognitive
Policy Works.
Old Gadfly: Before we get into specific arguments,
explain what you mean by syllogism.
IM: A syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning
that includes a major premise followed by a minor premise that in turn leads to
an apparent conclusion. Here’s an
example: The major premise states: educated people are liberal. The minor premise states: Mary is educated. Therefore, it follows that Mary is a
liberal. The problem with syllogisms is
that oftentimes major premises are not true.
In the example just provided, we know “educated people” are liberal,
conservative, and in between. Thus, the
fact that Mary is educated does not necessarily make her liberal. Yet, there is a prevailing meme
that educated people are liberal.
Old Gadfly: One of the arguments I keep advancing in our
discussions is that many Americans who claim to be liberal, are not. They are progressive. And, as F.A. Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, many who claim to
be “liberal” are really “conservative” in terms of preserving privilege. We discussed evidence of this notion in the
presumption (major premise) that Democrats protect classes of people (unions,
minorities, reproductive rights, illegal immigrants, gays, and so forth).
IM: So, in the “government shutdown,” what
progressives have advanced in terms of a syllogism are the following arguments:
Argument
1:
Major
premise: House
Republicans passed a bill to shut down the government.
Minor
premise: The government
was shut down.
Conclusion: House Republicans shut down the government.
Argument
2:
Major
premise: A government shutdown will hurt people.
Minor
premise: News reports
indicate examples of people who were adversely impacted by the shutdown (e.g.,
WW II vets, furloughed government employees).
Conclusion: The government shutdown did in fact hurt
people.
IM: So, collectively these arguments lead to an
even stronger narrative: House
Republicans shut down the government to hurt people.
AM: Exactly.
This narrative was blatantly obvious in the mainstream news.
Old Gadfly: Let’s correct the logic.
IM: First of all, in his speech yesterday, Obama
lectured Republicans by saying
So let's work together to make government work better, instead of treating
it like an enemy or purposely making it work worse. That’s not what the
founders of this nation envisioned when they gave us the gift of
self-government. You don’t like a particular policy or a particular
president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an
election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what
our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being
faithful to what this country is about.
IM: Our founders envisioned a
limited government, not the Leviathan Obama and progressives want. The Tea Party is not anti-government. The Tea Party represents Americans who fully
understand what our founders had in mind regarding limited government with
appropriate checks and balances. While
Obama presumes to lecture Republicans, he completely ignores the fact that
“self-governing” Americans argued against Obamacare when then did
elect members to represent them in the House of Representatives. Obama and progressives in government and the
media refuse to acknowledge the fact that in 2010, following the partisan
passage of Obamacare, Democrats lost 64 seats to give Republicans a majority
with a 49-seat margin. Granted,
Republicans lost eight seats in the 2012 elections, but this was due to the
Obama Administration via the Internal Revenue Service successfully demonizing
and censoring the Tea Party voice between 2010 and 2012. Yet, despite a majority voice in the House of
Republicans, they are treated as a fringe, extremist minority in one of the
branches of government designed constitutionally to maintain “power of the
purse.” And regarding Obama’s comment,
“don’t break it,” Obamacare has broken the founder’s ideal of
self-government. Obama is a bully with a
pulpit and a legion of Copernican drones repeating his messages.
Old Gadfly: Excellent analysis, IM. Let’s get back to some corrected logic.
IM: The arguments should look like this:
Argument
1:
Major
premise: As
2010 elections arrived, the majority of Americans had concerns about the effect
of Obamacare on the economy and individual freedoms.
Minor
premise: Democrats lost 64
seats to Republicans, giving Republicans a 49-seat margin as the majority
party.
Conclusion: Self-governing Americans wanted to repeal Obamacare.
Argument
2 (aside
from over 40 House-passed bills to repeal, defund, or delay Obamacare or
various provisions, none (that is zero) were sent to committee or presented to
the Senate for an up or down vote):
Major
premise: In the current
crisis, House Republicans passed a bill to fund the federal government with the
exception of Obamacare (representing the will and intent of those who elected
them).
Minor
premise: Senate majority
leader Reid refused to allow a vote on the bill, claiming Obamacare must be
fully funded.
Conclusion: Reid (not House Republicans) would not allow
the federal government to be funded.
Argument
3:
Major
premise: In a
spirit of compromise, House
Republicans passed a bill to completely refund the federal government and included
a one-year delay on implementing the individual mandate (despite the President already
granting numerous exemptions or delays, in violation of the law he pushed and
approved).
Minor
premise: Senate majority
leader Reid refused to present the bill the bill for a vote, claiming Obamacare
must be fully funded.
Conclusion: Reid
(not House Republicans) would not allow the federal government to be
funded. Thus, the government was allowed
to be shut down by Reid with the full support of Obama (who had blatantly
indicated he would not negotiate).
Old Gadfly: So, Obama’s idea of compromise is really
capitulation or surrender.
AM: That’s exactly right. And after nearly five years of perverting the
idea of what the founders had in mind in combination with an abysmal economy
with millions either unemployed or underemployed, lower incomes, and fears of
additional costs for Obamacare, he is even more confident in crossing the
Rubicon. Add to this his ability to
completely dodge, for now, scandals such as Benghazi and the IRS harassment of
the Tea Party that are far more egregious than Watergate, strengthen his
resolve to further exploit obvious mendacity, complicity, and duplicity among
those who control the public narrative.
Old
Gadfly: As we discussed
just prior to national elections this past year, Walter Cronkite foresaw 30 years ago what is
currently playing out in the lives of Americans. Cronkite said the following in the Preface to
a 1983 edition of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984:
Seldom has a book
provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to
follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power. How is that?
Because they were so useful, and because the features of the world he
drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar. . . . We’ve met Big Brother
in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini. We
hear Newspeak in every use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh
realities with the soft snow of euphemism [George Lakoff demonstrates this in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think when
he metaphorically classifies liberals as nurturing parents and conservatives as
strict fathers]. And every time a
political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience
that mental process Orwell called doublethink. . . . If not prophecy, what was 1984?
It was, as many have noticed, a warning:
a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political
organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have
stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.[1]
AM: Obama is a seasoned
community organizer and he has surrounded himself with communications experts
who are experts in the use of social media technology. I have
often wondered what symbolic role Obama’s personal logo has
played since he started campaigning for president. I visited his website Organizing for Action. Here is an example of how the logo has been
used in organizing followers:
IM: This is eerie. In the movie, 1984, a logo also plays a key
role. Here’s a snapshot from one of the
scenes:
AM: What does INGSOC represent?
IM: INGSOC is Newspeak for “English Socialism,” a
political ideology advanced by the political party that had power over
society. Obama’s logo signifies a rising
sun within a circle that represents “O” in Obama. The sun represents hope over the “changed”
landscape of America as symbolized in the complete restructuring of the
elements of the American flag. The
change is the fundamental change Obama keeps promising and pushing in violation
of the “self-governing” ideal “gifted” to us by our founders. AM, I agree with your notion that Obama has crossed
the Rubicon.
AM: Sad . . . so very sad.
Old Gadfly: Yes, but I think the situation is still redeemable. We’ll discuss such a strategy during our next
conversation.
[1] George Orwell, 1984,
(New York: Signet Classic, 1983), pp.
1-2
