Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
A member of Republicans Overseas responds to the questions of Europe 1's Wendy Bouchard.
Soutien de Donald Trump, Erik Svane, membre de Republicans Overseas, a décrypté le discours d'investiture du nouveau président des Etats-Unis.
Invité(s) : Erik Svane, membre de Republicans Overseas
Trump est-il un danger pour la France ? Le débat @ErikSvane / @durpaire dans #RTLMatin à 8h25 > https://t.co/r32D2MQBdR pic.twitter.com/PekfzUge7F— RTL France (@RTLFrance) January 19, 2017
What is the point about these questions? The point is as follows: Make no mistake about it. Should Obama win the election, the hand-wringing and wild charges about American racism — both at home and abroad — will at best cease temporarily. Any opposition to President Obama's policies will be construed as racism "rearing its ugly head" again.Watch the video, Erik Explains Racism in the 2008 Election to His Cat
And at best (at best, according to the — non-thinking — bean-counters, that is), in the faraway future, we will be told by the snickerers and the snorters: "Well yeah, a black American was elected in 2008 (even reelected in 2012), but that was a one-time travesty!"
Or they will say that oh, sure there is an African-Americans (there are African-Americans) whom Americans have elected president, but… his (but their) skin color wasn't dark enough. "Would they ever" — insert knowing ironic smile here — "elect a really dark Negro?"
… Why does this come up? Because Americans — or certainly, conservative Americans from small town America — must be accused of something sinister. If it isn't racism, it's fascism. If it isn't fascism, it's something else. Americans must be treacherous, they must be greedy, they must be warmongers, they must be reactionary, they must be clueless. And… they must be racist.
… the basic truth about racism is as follows: racism is far less an accurate description of an attitude prevalent in a given society, in a given individual, than it is a weapon that is wielded to demonize one's opponents while making oneself appear heroic by parroting (and by doing nothing else than parroting) politically correct platitudes. More often than not, in other words, the fight against alleged pockets of racism is nothing more noble than a self-serving act of self-praise.
A look back: Back during the 2008 campaign, one of the two contestants was not taken to account by the media for imitating, for mocking, a handicapped man — indeed, the wounded war veteran who proved to be his opponent.It's one thing (one which is bad enough), as Jonah Goldberg points out, that Barack Obama and his campaign staff do not realize thatOh, and by the way: while we're wallowing in the past and the good ol' times, do you remember this one?
One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain's injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious.(Jonah Goldberg goes on to ask: "what does it say about his supposedly 'cybersavvy' staffers that they don't know how to conduct a five-minute Google search?", adding that "by this logic [incidentally], Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.")
It's another thing, as Christopher Cook points out, that Barack Obama seems to intentionally mock McCain's war wounds (at 12:20 in the video).
And by the way… Let's not even go into the subject about what this says about the left's alleged undying respect for servicemen and veterans…
…The gesture was clearly an imitation of McCain—the context makes that plain. Obama makes no other such bodily gestures EXCEPT when he's creating a picture of McCain in the windmill commercial.
Obama may not have been directly saying "ha, ha, you got your arms broken and a bayonet plunged into your groin and I didn't." It doesn't matter. His way of imitating John McCain is by imitating the man's physical stance.
Barack Obama is a puerile, emotionally under-developed little man. It's appalling to think that he could be this close to the presidency.
You have heard about the Republican candidate's stooping to negative ads and hateful campaigns, haven't you? Disgusting, scandalous, going down into the gutter, etc… Well, it so turns out that the McCain campaign was doing little more than using Obama's own comparison to Paris Hilton! And that, from a Washingon Post article of three and a half years ago (merci à Arnaud) [from February… 2005!]…
"Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame," [quipped Barack Obama in February 2005]. "I've already had an hour and a half. I mean, I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse."
… after two terms of the Obama presidency, the Democratic Party is weaker than it has been since the 1920swrites Peter Wehner in the New York Times.
IT wasn’t supposed to end this way for Democrats.Eight years ago, Barack Obama won the presidency promising to transform America. A supremely self-confident politician, Mr. Obama was the object of extravagant hopes that he nurtured and encouraged.
… The man who seemed to hold such promise for his party ended up taking a scythe to it.
What happened?For some of the president’s admirers, the answer is that America has become benighted and bigoted. For others, the culprit is the Republican Party, which obstructed Mr. Obama at every turn. And for still others, like Mr. Obama, the problem is that his administration didn’t do enough to advertise its greatness.Even if you believe there are elements of truth in these explanations, they still amount to excuses. The same country that twice elected Mr. Obama did not suddenly become a nation of deplorables. In his first two years, with Democrats firmly in control of the House and Senate, Mr. Obama won the passage of his sweeping legislative agenda, including the Affordable Care Act, the stimulus package, financial regulations, the extension of jobless benefits and more. As for selling his policies, President Obama was constantly making his case.The decimation of the Democratic Party came because Mr. Obama turned out to be great at poetry and bad at prose.
Start with the economy. … the Obama presidency has been characterized by injurious incompetence, in particular with regard to his signature achievement, Obamacare.
… Overseas, the Obama years have been defined by spreading disorder and chaos, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, with nations collapsing and borders dissolving. More terrorist safe havens have been established than ever before. Russia and China have become more aggressive and significantly increased their geopolitical influence. America is now held in brazen contempt by our enemies and mistrusted by many of our allies.
Yet in some respects the greatest failure of the Obama years is in the area where many people thought he would excel. Mr. Obama made the centerpiece of his 2008 campaign a promise to end a politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” In February of that year, I praised him for “a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment.” Yet he leaves office with America more conflicted and cynical than when he took office. More than 70 percent of Americans say the country is either more divided or no more united than it was in 2009. Race relations are the worst in decades, and our nation is as polarized as it has been in the modern era.It would be silly to lay all the blame for this at the feet of Mr. Obama. Republicans have been rhetorically reckless at times, and President-elect Donald Trump has coarsened public discourse and set Americans against one another in ways that were once unimaginable. But Mr. Obama came first, and he played a role in where we are.In his farewell address last week, President Obama said that for the sake of our democracy we need to heed the advice of the fictional character Atticus Finch, who said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.”
Yet Mr. Obama never seemed to consider things from a different point of view from his own. He has shown withering disdain for his opponents, constantlyimpugning their motives even as he testified to the purity of his own. It was his arrogance that proved to be Mr. Obama’s undoing. (Even leaders of his own party felt Mr. Obama’s derision, as if dealing with them was somehow beneath him.) Mr. Obama dismissed those who disagreed with him like a professor forced to deal with simple-minded, wayward students. He warned us against retreating into our bubbles, but he was never able to escape his own.
During the Obama presidency, many people felt unheard and alienated. They are the kind of Americans Mr. Obama had in mind in 2008 when he talked about “bitter” people clinging to their “guns or religion.”Barack Obama is among the most talented campaigners we have ever seen. But as president, he failed in a manner and on a scale that damaged his party, undermined faith in the institutions of government and left the nation more riven than he found it. For most Americans, the economy has been listless. All this helped create the conditions that allowed a cynical demagogue to rise up and succeed him, one who will undo the achievements he most prizes.In many ways Barack Obama and Donald Trump could not be more different. Mr. Obama is equable and graceful; Mr. Trump is erratic and graceless. Yet one cannot make sense of the incoming presidency without understanding the failures of the outgoing one.
President Obama started with an outstretched hand,remembers Eric Cantor in the New York Times,
but pulled it back with a policy lurch leftward to a place we could not go
… News outlets, along with the Democrats, labeled us the “Party of No.” But that didn’t reflect the reality. Our goal was to offer a viable alternative to every major piece of legislation the Democratic majority put forward. We wondered if the president would embrace our efforts to bridge the policy divide, and if he did, what that might mean for Republicans in Washington.A few weeks later, John and I, along with the other congressional leaders, met with President Obama at the White House to discuss our plan as well as his proposed stimulus bill. Bringing along a one-page outline of our working group’s recommendations, I rather brazenly asked the president if I could hand it out at the meeting. The president agreed, and after glancing at it, he said to me, “Eric, I don’t see anything crazy in here.”I was hopeful. But later in the meeting, when I mentioned that a stimulus package built around government spending would be too much like “old Washington,” the president’s tone changed. He said:
“Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won. So I think on that one I trump you.”It wasn’t long afterward that we learned that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, were well on their way to having a final stimulus package drafted, and they weren’t really interested in any of our ideas.
… As Americans witness the swearing in of a new president this week, it’s another reminder that our founding fathers wanted elections to have consequences, but they also created a system that requires factions to work together even after a decisive election. It is my hope that the new president and leaders in Congress live up to our founders’ expectations.
When Barack Obama became our president eight years agoremembers a wistful and dewy-eyed Benny Huang,
the entertainment community welcomed his ascendancy with a video in which they pledged “to be a servant to our president.”
It was one of those creepy montages in which a diverse group of famous people repeat the same thing over and over again. You know the ones I’m talking about. In this case they kept saying “I pledge” to do this or that good deed, but mostly just to be good Obama-bots. I think it was intended to be inspirational, which it was in its own warped way. It inspired me to puke a little in the back of my mouth.
Two terms later and the jet set is back with an administration-produced video in which they recount their favorite moments from the Obama years. This time it didn’t just feature stars and starlets but also a diverse group of regular folks as well.
Their favorite moments were predictable. Leonardo DiCaprio said that his favorite moment was when President Obama declared at the UN that climate change is the most important issue facing this generation and all generations to come. DiCaprio is really, really concerned about “climate change” (which I think used to be called global warming), though not concerned enough to change his hypocritical lifestyle. John Legend claimed that “I never cried before from an election result.” Yeah, lots of us have shed tears in the Obama years though not necessarily from joy. One guy, who I think is a regular Joe, said that his favorite moment was when Barack Obama finally showed his support for same-sex marriage. Yes, we were all relieved when Obama decided to stop lying about that. It was getting really awkward hearing him try to explain his deep Christian faith.
These people are truly, deeply demented.
But I have good news for the celebrities and non-celebrities who appeared in those agitprop films—the best is yet to come! Yes, Barack Obama’s finest moment will occur about noontime on the 20th of January, 2017, when he gets his sorry butt out of the White House. It can’t come fast enough.
I too have my “favorite” moments. And by “favorite” I mean those moments that are seared into my mind for their hypocrisy, incompetence, narcissism, racism, criminality, and/or idiocy. I’m sure my readers have theirs as well and so I invite them to leave those cherished memories in the comments section.You are invited to leave those cherished memories of yours in the blog's comments section.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane together.
Remember that time that Obama appointed all of those tax cheats to important positions in his administration? Yeah, me too! Liberals like taxes because they don’t pay them. One of those tax cheats, Tim Geithner, was even appointed Secretary of the Treasury. You know, the guy who oversees the IRS?
And who could forget the time someone put a Chairman Mao ornament on the White House Christmas tree? (Oops, I mean the “holiday tree.”) Seriously, were they sold out of Pol Pot ornaments? Mao Zedong is literally the greatest murderer in world history. Not to be outdone, White House communications director Anita Dunn praised the bloodthirsty tyrant as one “of [her] favorite philosophers”—alongside Mother Teresa!
Then there was that time that Barack won the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than being a real cool cat. At the time the award was announced he’d been in office for just twelve days. That was before he took his fleet of drones on a killing spree and before he flooded North Africa with guns that were impossible to account for the moment they were distributed. Apparently, the Nobel panel had some misgivings later in the Obama years that perhaps they had given the prize to an unworthy recipient. Ya think? I wonder what their first clue was? Could it have been the Libyan teenagers in Toyota pickup trucks driving around shooting people with American-furnished weapons? Or was it when those weapons seeped into neighboring Mali and helped al-Qaeda-linked Islamists foment a rebellion?
There are so many good gun-related memories from the Obama years. Operation Fast & Furious (F&F) was when Eric Holder’s Department of Justice purposely allowed weapons to “walk” from Arizona gun stores across the border to the Mexican underworld, allegedly so that they could be tracked by their serial numbers. The whole operation spun out of control and the DOJ lost track of the guns. One of those guns was used to kill Brian Terry, a US Border Patrol agent and Marine Corps veteran. An F&F .50 caliber rifle was found at the criminal hideout of notorious narco-gangster El Chapo when he was arrested last year. A third F&F gun was found in the possession of an Islamic terrorist bent on shooting up the “Draw Mohammad” contest in Garland, Texas, and a possible fourth was used in the November 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris.
Another classic Obama moment was when he released five top Taliban commanders, which he did not have the legal authority to do, in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who was supposedly being held captive in Afghanistan. Except he kind of wasn’t. Bergdahl deserted his post and went straight to the Taliban. Subsequent attempts to locate and rescue him got good soldiers killed or wounded. National Security Advisor Susan Rice claimed that Sergeant Dirtbag “served with honor and distinction.” She later clarified that she meant only that his original decision to enlist was honorable if not the circumstances of his, um, “capture.” But in any case, “serving” is what soldiers do every day in the military, while enlisting is what they do on their first day. By her definition of the word there’s never been a soldier who didn’t serve with honor and distinction because they all enlisted at some point. Rice’s original comment was not misunderstood, it was a lie.
And let’s not forget all the great work Obama has done on the behalf of convicted felons.
In 2015, President Obama decreed that federal agencies would be prohibited from asking prospective employees if they had ever been convicted of a felony because not hiring felons is raaaaacist! Gee, I wonder if a person could get a job at the White House with a criminal record? But at very least this action was within the president’s legitimate authority. Then the Administration warned landlords that asking a prospective tenant about his criminal background is also illegal. This move was dressed up as a new but wholly legitimate interpretation of the already existing Fair Housing Act. In reality, it was a complete re-write of the law that bans discrimination based on race, not criminal history. So now you have to rent a room in your home to someone who might be a murderer or a rapist. You’ll never know because you can’t ask.
I’m getting a little misty-eyed recalling all of these great times we’ve shared together. There was that time—who could forget it?—when the full force of the federal government was brought to bear on the Little Sisters of the Poor in order to force them to provide birth control to their employees. Then there was that other time that Obama’s Secretary of the Navy named a ship after the pedophile Harvey Milk, as well as the time that the DOJ dismissed all charges against the New Black Panthers after they stood outside of a polling place in Philadelphia threatening voters with a billy club and saying that they were about to “be ruled by the black man, cracker!”
But I’ve saved my absolute favorite Obama memory for last. My favorite moment, bar none, was when Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documents related to the Fast & Furious debacle and the US Attorney refused to prosecute! That’s right, the department which Holder headed excused its boss. Poor Eric Holder, that innocent lamb, the one who dealt death to Mexicans (and some Americans, Frenchmen, etc), then lied about it, then blew off subpoenas, got off without so much as a slap on the wrist. That, ladies and gentleman, was the quintessential moment of the Obama Administration. It was all there, all on display—the arrogance, the deceit, the reckless disregard for people and processes.
So what are your favorite memories? Do tell. Some day we might need to remind ourselves of why we can never allow a Marxist ideologue in the Oval Office ever again.
Related: • Obama had Scandals Aplenty — The media just pretended they didn't existIt's liberating to know that you can tell whatever lies are politically useful without consequence. The Obama administration could almost always count on the media to back it, regardless of the contortions necessary.• Obama's 'Scandal-Free' Administration Was Actually Riddled with Scandals