Barack Obama: Our Orc-in-Chief

Daniel Greenfield, in his January 20^th Sultan Knish column, observed that "Obama is truly fake. He is authentically unreal. There is absolutely nothing to him. If you take away all the work that was done to make him famous, there would be nothing there. And that is exactly why he is the perfect avatar for the media age."

How true. Of course, a man who is nothing but who seeks to be something by pursuing political power is, root and branch, a nihilist. And that is what Obama is, at core. Down deep, he knows he is nothing. But in the eyes of his worshipping electorate, he is something. He is a leader. A Messiah. A Führer. The Thirteenth Imam. The Mahdi. The Prophet. The savior of the ages, the man on horseback who comes to save a nation from itself. Because he is nothing, he must work miracles, and turn gold into lead. He must prove that he is something.

His identity depends on pulling the wool over his electorate's heads. He is what he imagines himself to be, which is an illusion. As Greenfield notes, remove the illusion, switch off the hologram, strip away the prancing king's clothes, and there is nothing there. The garb seemed to hang in mid-air, held there by invisible strings. Everyone who doubts Obama's "goodness" and values the truth, has Superman's X-ray vision. They can see that there's nothing there. Obama back in 2008 promised the nation "transparency." It's the only promise he kept – for those who choose to take a good, hard look at the nothingness that is there for all to see.

Except that his admiring electorate, egged on and abetted by the MSM, has no X-ray vision. They see what they see, which is nothing garbed in imaginary vestments of sanctimony and the self-righteous. Truth is their enemy, their nemesis. Truth is what they wish it to be. So they wish very hard – call it praying, or banging one's head against a brick wall, or bowing to the Mecca of statism three times a day – and the unreal becomes the truth.

It is the inherent, ineluctable nature of a state of zero in a person that a man who is lacking in character and values must be a destroyer. He becomes something when he is able to demonstrate his capacity for destruction. He must act to sustain the illusion. Destruction is his own proof of power.

He is the secular version of Christ. With a modicum of showmanship, with much assistance from an adoring MSM, he performs "miracles," and turns loaves into fishes, and fishes back into loaves, and water into wine, and wine into Jim Jones's brand of Kool-Aid, and pig pen muck into French pastries. It's all as bogus as a TV reality show, as Greenfield notes.

But, because he can't create anything – to be able to create something, a person must have a measure of what is the good, and Obama is a vacuum, a hollow man with no conception of any life-affirming good – he can only destroy. And when he destroys, to his minions, it passes as proof of his goodness and efficacy. They get free cell phones and Obamacare and bailed-out companies that fail anyway and solicitude and assurances that they have a right to destroy what they never really built but which he assures them they helped to build, anyway.

And that is the leitmotif of Barack Obama, America's first truly nihilist president. Bad as they were, he makes Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton look like hired clown magicians at a children's birthday party, faking finding quarters behind children's ears and making funny creatures from squeaky, multi-colored balloons. Only Obama's quarters are counterfeit ones that are the government's multi-trillion dollar debt pulled from Americans' wallets and savings accounts, and the squeaky balloons are his back-firing foreign policies.

What most people can't grasp is that the debt is deliberately impossible to erase or correct, and that the back-firing policies are going according to plan. They are meant to back-fire.

How else to explain Obama's Mideast policies, which loose countless Tolkien-like Islamic Orcs on that region and on the world? Al Qada, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, the Taliban – all the Islamic jihad groups – they are real-world counterparts of Tolkien's subhuman, flesh-eating brutes, eager to slaughter the good because they are the good. They are slobbering, drooling beasts that are but gross, unsightly clones of Barack Obama's true soul or character, ready to kill for the sake of killing, ready to rip men and women apart and roast their limbs over fires of kindled with the remnants of freedom of speech and the right to property and gun ownership.

Obama is a nihilist at work. He knows what he is doing. As he pretends to saw a woman in half, his believers chuckle and think it's just a trick, and isn't he such a masterful illusionist? What entertainment! But the red spewing from the box isn't Teresa Heinz-Kerry's ketchup, it's real blood, and the screaming victim is but a proxy for everyone in the adulatory audience. They all presume that the woman in the box will go home after the show, coddle her kiddies, and watch "Nature" on PBS while spooning Yoplait and munching on Granola bars.

When the audience gets home and checks its bank accounts and payroll stubs and insurance premiums and tries to devise a personal budget that is in mortal conflict and in a losing race with a limitless federal budget, it represses its screams and consoles itself that it's all for the good. Out of destruction comes construction, isn't that the way things are done? The country is being remade, "reframed."

But, what is being "constructed," what are the constituents of the remaking, in what square is the country being "reframed"? Obama's audience doesn’t want to know. It prefers fairy tales and illusions. It prefers pretty Technicolor pictures of a City on the Hill, with people dancing on cobblestone streets inlaid with gold, and choruses of flowers singing at their passing, and buildings and houses swaying in rhythm under a cloudless sky, and everyone guaranteed a chicken in every pot and an environment-friendly hybrid car in every garage.

Greenfield calls the fakery a "consensual illusion." That, also, is true, and it takes a willingness by both parties, the One at the Podium, and the ones in the audience, to sustain the illusion. It requires a habitual, subconscious, but still volitional desire to "blank out," to evade the knowledge, the truth, and the reality of things. Or it takes a criminal ignorance, which is much the same thing.

The dish-rattling rumble you hear are the hordes of Orcs coming for you and your life. They are advancing from several directions: from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, from Capitol Hill, from the Justice Department, from the Supreme Court, and from their auxiliaries, the EPA, and the AFT, the TSA, and the DEA, the HHS, and other phalanxes of statism.