Fantasy man

If you wondered whether Josh Marshall would ever again publish a worthwhile story, check out this amazing piece by David Seaton on Obama-mania:

"You can't cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump." W.C. Fields

A friend has just sent me an article from The Atlantic that says quickly, fluently and smoothly, what I have long been trying to say with my stuttering tropisms. I really can't blame Obama for using his talents to his own advantage, for letting people project their fantasies, with their sidereal distance from reality, on him or for his assuming that everything will all be "alright on the night". I think that in the best traditions of the republic, he is simply applying on a massive scale, the wise words of W.C. Fields that top this page.

Here are a few lines from that article (or the abstract thereof):

Plenty of candidates attract supporters who disagree with them on some issues. Obama is unusual, however. He attracts supporters who not only disagree with his stated positions but assume he does too. They project their own views onto him and figure he is just saying what other, less discerning voters want to hear.(...)

(Emphasis added.) A case in point: Naomi Klein, who switched from supporting Hillary to Obama.

Klein knows better. She knows that Obi's main economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is a Chicago schooler, a die-hard Milton Friedmanite. And she wrote an entire book decrying Friedmanism.

And yet so potent is the Kool-Aid, so powerful is the urge to sit at the cool kids' table, and so ruthless is the wrath of the progressive mafia, that Klein apparently feels that she has little choice. She must rationalize, rationalize, rationalize. In her Nation piece (newsflash, Naomi: That rag is garbage), she pretends that Bill Clinton was a free market fundamentalist because he (correctly) focused on balancing the budget.

Izzat so? Then why did the real Friedman acolytes mount a non-stop smear campaign against Bill Clinton? The O-Borg later used many of those same smears against Hillary.

Klein begins her piece thus:

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart's most prominent defenders, anointing the company a "progressive success story."

Instead of launching into a full-throated denunciation of Obi -- which would subject her to a non-stop barrage of threats, attacks, denunciaions and lies (because that's how the O-Beasts operate) -- Klein ends her piece by calling for Obama to conduct an "ideological housecleaning."

Wake up, Naomi. It's our house that's about to get cleaned...out.

And once you wake up, speak up. Leftists may listen to you, as they will not listen to me. Show some courage. Try to puncture the Big Trance.

Added note: The Seaton post prompted a longish reader response which switched the subject to -- you guessed it! -- the dreaded DLC. As we've seen in an earlier post, the DLC has become for the left what the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and the Club of Rome are for the right: A fear fantasy, a bogeyman, a scarecrow for the gullible. Although all of these groups originated in the real world, paranoia has transfigured them into Mordors of the Mind.