Steve Sailer: “Because Obama could never think of anything interesting to say.”
Comments:
* Every time a liberal says that there shouldn’t be any gender differences, try this: if male, tell them they’re feminized. If female tell them they’re very mannish. Every time they’ll get mad. But why? Because as sick as liberals are, something in most of them wants to conform to the ideals of their sex.
* “Kennedy put a man on the moon. Obama put a man in a woman’s bathroom.” – Michael Savage, on his radio show today.
* The paragraphs you excerpted really aren’t very interesting. Why did Obama bother to write the article at all? Isn’t writing for Glamour magazine a bit beneath the president of the United States? I would think he’d have more worthwhile and important ways to spend his time.
* I wonder how many places he tried to publish it before he wound up at Glamour?
Or maybe his daughters only read Glamour and Tiger Beat, so Glamour was it?
* Do you honestly think he wrote that for his daughters, or that they actually read it? I mean more than in the manner of, “Yeah, that’s great dad,” while they continue texting with their free hand. I’d question whether he wrote it at all, but that’d land me in Crazy Conspiracy Theory Land for some reason.
* My goodness that makes my brain hurt. “When everybody is equal we are more free?” Is this from a Wymen’s Studies 101 syllabus? His head seems to be in some parallel universe that does not exist. Harassment of women when they go online? Huh? Is he talking about Pakistan, or??? He is really out of it; the man who thinks Austrians speak Austrian. I cannot wait until this bloviating bag of gas and hot air is out of the WH, after which I expect he will fade into irrelevance. His last day in office is the end of the road.
* The understatement is what makes this burn so rough. He’s no hero but also no monster. He’s just a pretty ordinary assistant professor who’s been promoted well out of his league.
Unfortunately whatever natural potential talent might have been there wasn’t given an opportunity to grow and mature sustainably when he was always promoted before his time.
* Chris Matthews opens his mailbox to find his copy of Glamour magazine. He smiles and takes it inside. He pours himself a glass of wine, slips into his snuggie, and settles into the couch. His pleasure veers toward ecstasy when he discovers this month’s issue contains an essay penned by Barack Hussein Obama. It’s on feminism, a subject which makes Matthews feel very close to the President.
He nods in agreement as he reads the President’s warning against dated gender roles. “I’m so smart and progressive,” he thinks. “I truly understand the underprivileged.” Matthews looks out the window and sees his Chevy Chase neighborhood. 92% white, he frowns as he remembers the statistics he read. But Nantucket, the site of his vacation home, is only 87% white, he remembers with a smile. His confidence restored, he returns to the President’s essay.
“We need to keep changing the attitude that punishes women for their sexuality,” the President says. As Matthews reads of the President’s pride in watching the video* of his daughter performing the traditional African dance, the Twerk, he feels a familiar thrill up his leg.
* In all fairness, the Obamas do seem like reasonably decent and highly protective parents with predictable upper class (i.e., “talented tenth”) aspirations. What would really be interesting to hear from Obama is what he and Michelle actually expect of and want for their daughters, rather than this recycled feminist flapdoodle.
Interesting fact: the Obama daughters are very tall. Malia (age 18) is 6’1″ and Sasha (age 15) is 5’11″. Michelle Obama is the tallest first lady in history (5’11″).
* Michelle Obama is not very feminist in any tangible sense. She refused all the requests made of her to play basketball in school (her older brother was twice Ivy League basketball player of the year), she didn’t do much with her Harvard law degree, and she dropped in and out of the workforce after she had kids. My guess is that she nagged Barack about him making more money so she wouldn’t have to work and could stay home with the kids.
* What strikes me is how much he has cheapened the office of the President by way of his talk show circuits and then this writing for Glamour garbage.
The idea that a sitting president would go on The Tonight Show/Letterman/The View/etc. was tawdry pre-1990s. Then it became an “only during a presidential election” thing, where a president and his opponent got a “very” special episode of a major talk show to spew their talking points. Bill Clinton on Arsenio was probably the biggest moment from that time–but Arsenio was at least getting a lot of chatter.
But Obama’s popped up talk shows his entire presidency, and not just during an election year; it’s not even special anymore. What’s worse, he’s gone on second-rate talk shows (e.g. The Daily Show) multiple times. His wife, too, has shown up there, and she’s taken part in some empty skits as well. Where they can both field softball questions from a fawning sycophant who doesn’t ask tough questions as a rule and is more interested in cheap laughs (and yes, Stewart and Colbert are just cheap entertainers, not tough interviewers).
Oh, and they’re taped, so any gaffes or bad moments can be edited out.
It’s not special anymore. The presidency is diminished.
Steve got this right: Obama would have been much better suited in life to being a “public intellectual”-type black guy, who wrote middlebrow intellectual books/columns and showed up every year to hawk them. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Malcom what’s-his-name are probably the level Obama would have been most happy with, though in the political realm.
* One suspects there were external players guiding the game as well.
For starters Obama himself strikes me as limited in the self-direction/gumption department. Unlike, say, Miz Rodham.
Barack Hussein Obama didn’t appear at Harvard Law out of the blue. Like the Ph.D. Astrophysicist Without Any Substantive Astrophysics Publications, AKA Half Black Science Guy (Neil De Grasse Tyson), Obama had powerful people tugboating him along.
* After leaving office, Obama can host a lousy cartoon show like “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” about life in racist America.
They can have a recurring character who gets shot by police in every episode but mysteriously returns, like Kenny in SouthPark.
They can call it “Skinny-A– Barak and the Kids Who Look Like Trayvon.”
* “They killed Treyvon! White muthafucka’s!!!”
There is so much you could do with that premise. It could be produced and released on Youtube very economically. If I had the skill to animate it, I don’t know if I’d have the balls to upload it. It would be a life-changing upload, if the author was identified, and not the good kind.
* The central irony of Obama’s life story is that what made him was acing the LSAT when he was about 26.
His college GPA was good but not great (about 3.5 according to Obama). According to Alan R. Lockwood’s clever research on Harvard LS admittees who were Columbia grads, his LSAT score was in the 94th to 98th percentile:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/obamas-lsat-score/
He only applied to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford (i.e., no safety schools). When he got to Harvard he was competitive — not brilliant but good enough — e.g., miles above Michelle who had just graduated from HLS — that suddenly he was being talked about as The First Black President.
It’s pretty funny that Obama’s career is a vindication of the early IQ test guys like Sir Cyril Burt.
* Obama’s problem with the public intellectual career path was that he’s not as interesting as the black public intellectuals you’ve heard of. For good or bad, his mind is averse to originality.
He was a perfectly good law school lecturer, but not original enough to do the kind of original work usually needed for tenure. But he’s also smart enough to know he’s not original.
* Of all recent presidents, President Obama is the only one I can think of who publicly avoids much discussion of economics or economic policy.
This is unusual for a President whose terms spanned the aftermath of the most significant economic event in our history since the Depression. His predecessors at least had some publicly expressed views on how the economy or financial markets work, even if they were incorrect on detail, or worse, fallacious or self-contradictory to trained to the ears of trained economists. But President Obama never ventures there.
As I recall, either just before taking office or soon after, President Obama expressed an admiration for Wall Street high finance bankers, opining something along the lines of “those guys are smart, really smart.”
This, while the financial world had melted down and the rescue package was being put into effect. He has also mentioned that he got a job in banking (at Goldman Sachs after graduate school?) but turned his back on that world.
So in that area at least, there is considerable intellectual diffidence, but it hasn’t been probed much by observers of the Presidency. He is smart enough to know that he doesn’t know anything about finance and economics, but perhaps uncharacteristically, is humble and quiet about it.
* BHO strikes me as too lazy even to be a Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He has said himself that he is a blank slate onto which others project, and he has been only too happy to let the GoodWhites promote his clean articulate self to the presidency, where he has not done much more than golf, lecture his fellow countryman on their sins, and use Air Force One to take vacations.
* Remember that this is a president who chews gum and plays with his Blackberry while in cabinet meetings. His job is to be front man, with suitably grave demeanor, of the US deep state.
* BO set a new record for paucity of productive work during his affirmative action tenure on the Harvard Law Review; a harbinger of things to come.
* I think the career of writer and politician are at cross purposes. The goal of a politician is to get people to do things that you want them to do, and that means being as uncontroversial as possible en route to your goal. As a result, you never have anything unusual or interesting to say, because you don’t want to offend or alienate anyone.
Professional writers, on the other hand, write for pay. That means they write to be read. Nobody wants to read stuff like that Glamour article (the only reason it was published was because Obama is POTUS). They want to read something that is interesting; which means, new, attitudinal (satiric, vituperative, strident), educational, intriguing, inside baseball, funny, etc. This almost demands making controversial statements (even if in jest), and politicians are very hard at doing that.
As for the substance of the article, whatever. Most men and women want to have sex with each other and want to have children and a stable life together. So women have to advertise fertility, sexuality, nurturing, and a willingness to submit, while men have to advertise virility, social standing, earning power, dependability, and a willingness to take charge. It’s not like anyone wrote a rule book that says this is how you are supposed to be. It’s that way because it has been found to be the most effective way for men and women to achieve their goals. The 10% that deviates from the norm can find their own strategies, they don’t need broad social movements.
* As a life long resident of Obama’s adopted home town, I was relatively familiar with him going back to the late 1990′s. I even briefly met him at a north suburban community event in the summer of 2003 when he was gearing up to run for Senate. He was kind of a joke to us in my circle. In the late ’90′s/early 2000′s, I used to make a point of listening to WVON radio (voice of the negro) where one of the hosts, Lu Palmer, would regularly berate Obama as a tool of the University of Chicago/Hyde Park Jewish power structure. He was despised for running against Congressman (former Black Panther) Bobby Rush.
From time to time, he would appear on the local PBS news show Chicago Tonight being the go to telegenic black face of progressive Illinois politics. We always remarked on his carefully crafted “earnest, scrubbed negro” image. He would often appear wearing a dress shirt and plain conservative tie, sans jacket. But beneath the image, you could always glimpse the radical just beneath the surface. Hell, even his name seemed contrived for effect. Like I said, we considered him a joke. Funny how first impression are usually correct.
* If you want to know why the Trump is yuuuge among righties and why the alt-right emerged and why National Review is in the toilet, note than in 25 years the Establishment Right has failed to win any battle on the cultural levels. On economic levels, has only won a modification to welfare and minor reductions in taxes for most Americans.
The Establishment Right have been the Washington Generals since the fall of communism. We’re sick of backing this job squad.
Trump scares many cucks because he’s what winning looks like. The cucks aren’t used to winning.
