Princess Obama

I suggested in a post a few weeks ago that American Obamania displayed key similarities with Diana Derangement Syndrome, a mass epidemic of which broke out in Britain upon the death of Princess Diana when it was revealed to be the defining disorder of contemporary British society. The main characteristics of DDS are the replacement of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility by credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession. Political icons to which this disorder gives rise achieve instantaneous and unshakeable mass followings of adoring acolytes because they grant permission to the public to suspend the faculty of judgment and avoid making any hard choices, indulging instead in fantasies of turning swords into ploughshares (which have a habit of turning grumbling global problems into murderous crises).

These candidates are quintessentially icons of hope over experience. Such a candidate is Barack Obama. Since he now appears to have the edge over Hillary, it would appear that American Democratic voters, at least, are highly vulnerable to DDS and are going down like flies with the contagion. Hillary’s campaign, which is showing signs of panic and disarray, has been criticised for not having a strategy to counter Obama’s charisma. This is probably an impossible task, for two reasons: 1) Hillary herself has negative charisma, being the embodiment of a particularly unattractive type of experience which voters find actively repellent; and b) since DDS is in essence irrational, the question that is implicit in Hillary’s pitch —‘Do you really want to trust the leadership of this country and the free world at this time of unprecedented peril to the political equivalent of Bambi?’ is likely only to elicit the answer ‘Yes’.

 

A recent article on American Thinker by Ed Lasky indicates where all this may lead America. It suggests that, on the pivotal issue of Israel (pivotal because if politicians get that one wrong, they inevitably get everything else wrong —it’s a moral compass thing) Obama has a troubling record of surrounding himself by people who are hardly on the side of civilisation. Among these are the pastor of his Black Power church who is an ally of the racist and anti-Jewish demagogue Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Israel (and anti-Bush, counter counter-terrorism and anti-drug prohibition) activist George Soros, and advisers from the Carter era (whose most significant legacy to the world was the Islamic Republic of Iran) such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has

publicly defended the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis that the relationship between America and Israel is based not on shared values and common threats but is the product of Jewish pressure;

and from the Clinton era, the Palestinian apologist Robert Malley. Meanwhile, Obama actively opposed the nomination of the great John Bolton as US Ambassador to the United Nations.

In other words, he’s on the wrong side on all the important stuff. The fact that so many in America either don’t know this or are actually cheering for him because they are on the same side should cause those of us who have not fallen victim to DDS more than a shudder of alarm.