Why do you like Obama?

[WhyteRain]

You have to understand the anti-rationality and pure emotionalism of the Left's leading lights.

Jonathan Chait, the leftwing extremist and Obamabot, said it best in The New Republic in 2003.  In essence, liberals like Chait hate conservatives like Bush because they remind them, painfully, of the boys who got all the girls in high school.  Basically, it's the same reason why many liberal women hate Sarah Palin.

Mad About You
The case for Bush hatred.

    Jonathan Chait
    September 29, 2003 | 12:00 am

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too.... He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang. [Note that Chait thinks Bush's Southern accent is fake -- the way Hillary faked it at a speech in Mississippi in 2007.  Liberals are forever projecting their own dishonorable traits on to others.]  I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert Novak described it as a "hatred … that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching."

Yet, for all its pervasiveness, Bush hatred is described almost exclusively as a sort of incomprehensible mental affliction. James Traub, writing last June in The New York Times Magazine, dismissed the "hysteria" of Bush haters. Conservatives have taken a special interest in the subject. "Democrats are seized with a loathing for President Bush--a contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological--unlike any since they had Richard Nixon to kick around," writes Charles Krauthammer in Time magazine. "The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from." Even writers like David Brooks and Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard--the sorts of conservatives who have plenty of liberal friends--seem to regard it from the standpoint of total incomprehension. "Democrats have been driven into a frenzy of illogic by their dislike of George W. Bush," explains Caldwell....

Have Bush haters lost their minds? Certainly some have....  But, although Bush hatred can result in irrationality, it's not the product of irrationality. Indeed, for those not ideologically or personally committed to Bush's success, hatred for Bush is a logical response to the events of the last few years. It is not the slightest bit mystifying that liberals despise Bush. It would be mystifying if we did not.

[emphasis added]
http://www.tnr.com/article/mad-about-you

Other than cutting tax rates (resulting in increased tax revenues), what had Bush done in 2001-03 that would drive liberals crazy?  He let Teddy Kennedy write his education bill ("No Child Left Behind"); he signed McCain-Feingold as he promised he would; he continued the race-based house mortgage preferences of the Clinton Administration.  Oh, he invaded Iraq?  Criminy, anyone with an IQ above 92 knows that Clinton would've had Saddam in a spiderhole before the smoke cleared over Brooklyn -- and without bothering with any U.N. resolutions (when was the last time any Democrat got U.N. permission before bombing and invading other countries?)

That leaves the leftover high-school hatreds of "the kids who seemed to have it all -- who seemed to succeed effortlessly, without realizing their advantages".

This is why liberals fail so disastrously in government.  They base so many of their decisions on emotions of hate and fear that normal people left behind before age 25.

[WhyteRain]

You have to understand the anti-rationality and pure emotionalism of the Left's leading lights.

Jonathan Chait, the leftwing extremist and Obamabot, said it best in The New Republic in 2003.  In essence, liberals like Chait hate conservatives like Bush because they remind them, painfully, of the boys who got all the girls in high school.  Basically, it's the same reason why many liberal women hate Sarah Palin.

This is why liberals fail so disastrously in government.  They base so many of their decisions on emotions of hate and fear that normal people left behind before age 25.

Whats that got to do with Liberals liking a good looking cool guy like Obama?

You're right.  I realized a few minutes after posting it that I was describing just the "Bush hatred", not the "Obama love".  The "Obama love" stems from the same source though.  Liberals read Obama's biographies and loved what they saw -- a mixed-race guy who rejected the heritage of the white American people who succored him, but not a guy with a scary "Ebonics" accent like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.  Liberals loved to read that Obama

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

White liberals eat this sh**t up.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints.We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure.We were alienated.

For liberals, this stuff was Obama's best feature -- "He totally rejected white Christian civilization -- he's one of us!"  To the rest of Americans (the 80%), this stuff was a bug.  Liberals were pissed to discover this.  It's why they've gone from quoting Obama's books to despising anyone who does.

[WhyteRain]

We've had, what, five Ivy Leaguer presidents in a row?  And none of them holds a candle to the guy from Eureka College.

And, no, I'm not jealous.  I went to a flagship state university on the G.I. Bill and my twin sister's son just graduated from Harvard Law last year.  But one thing I've learned about highly-credentialed people (and as a newspaper reporter, I had an exclusive four-hour interview with then candidate George H.W. Bush who made a point to tell me that he was Phi Beta Kappa), is that they often think they are smarter than they are.

In my experience, leaders who think they are the smartest people in the room usually aren't very good leaders.

[WhyteRain]

You have to understand the anti-rationality and pure emotionalism of the Left's leading lights.

Jonathan Chait, the leftwing extremist and Obamabot, said it best in The New Republic in 2003.  In essence, liberals like Chait hate conservatives like Bush because they remind them, painfully, of the boys who got all the girls in high school.  Basically, it's the same reason why many liberal women hate Sarah Palin.

This is why liberals fail so disastrously in government.  They base so many of their decisions on emotions of hate and fear that normal people left behind before age 25.

Whats that got to do with Liberals liking a good looking cool guy like Obama?

You're right.  I realized a few minutes after posting it that I was describing just the "Bush hatred", not the "Obama love".  The "Obama love" stems from the same source though.  Liberals read Obama's biographies and loved what they saw -- a mixed-race guy who rejected the heritage of the white American people who succored him, but not a guy with a scary "Ebonics" accent like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.  Liberals loved to read that Obama

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

White liberals eat this sh**t up.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints.We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure.We were alienated.[/i]

For liberals, this stuff was Obama's best feature -- "He totally rejected white Christian civilization -- he's one of us!"  To the rest of Americans (the 80%), this stuff was a bug.  Liberals were pissed to discover this.  It's why they've gone from quoting Obama's books to despising anyone who does.

You realize he is being ironic in this passage? Its clearly written tongue in cheek.

Oh.... Then what did he really mean? 

[WhyteRain]

You have to understand the anti-rationality and pure emotionalism of the Left's leading lights.

Jonathan Chait, the leftwing extremist and Obamabot, said it best in The New Republic in 2003.  In essence, liberals like Chait hate conservatives like Bush because they remind them, painfully, of the boys who got all the girls in high school.  Basically, it's the same reason why many liberal women hate Sarah Palin.

This is why liberals fail so disastrously in government.  They base so many of their decisions on emotions of hate and fear that normal people left behind before age 25.

Whats that got to do with Liberals liking a good looking cool guy like Obama?

You're right.  I realized a few minutes after posting it that I was describing just the "Bush hatred", not the "Obama love".  The "Obama love" stems from the same source though.  Liberals read Obama's biographies and loved what they saw -- a mixed-race guy who rejected the heritage of the white American people who succored him, but not a guy with a scary "Ebonics" accent like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.  Liberals loved to read that Obama

"I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

White liberals eat this sh**t up.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints.We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure.We were alienated.[/i]

For liberals, this stuff was Obama's best feature -- "He totally rejected white Christian civilization -- he's one of us!"  To the rest of Americans (the 80%), this stuff was a bug.  Liberals were pissed to discover this.  It's why they've gone from quoting Obama's books to despising anyone who does.

You realize he is being ironic in this passage? Its clearly written tongue in cheek.

Oh.... Then what did he really mean? 

Presumably that that had, indeed, been his attitude in college, as college students who feel marginalized are wont to have. Why should there be any indication that that has any effect whatsoever on the charmingly pedestrian and wholesome domestic life that the Obamas by all indications currently lead?

He said he did these things "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout".  So what you're saying is he's now doing the opposite so to be mistaken for a sellout?  That makes sense.  Otherwise we have to suppose that he's actually sold out and become an adherent to upper-class white American male cultural conventions.  Which would be worse -- that he's actually sold out his college-age principles or that he's merely pretending to?  I'm really not sure.

[WhyteRain]

If some Obama supporter were to say that "the investor class is deliberately not investing because they want to punish Obama and elect a replacement", I would not be able to disagree.  (I think that makes more sense than the idea that the Republicans in Congress won't pass bills due to the same motivation -- after all, a bad economy hurts all elected officials, not just the ones at the very top.  Besides, the GOPers have passed lots of bills only to see them personally killed by Harry Reid who, when he's not busy not passing a federal budget, won't permit votes on them in the Senate.)

If you go back and watch that "Rick Santelli rant" that launched the Tea Party (or at least named it), you'll see that Rick was standing in a trading pit and the traders were cheering him.