The Obama Rorschach Test
Ben Shapiro Edition
They just keep getting crazier and crazier.
Here's a link to a screed by that famously abstinent elf Ben Shapiro--it's at Townhall...so, y'know, you may not really want to click on that...
Although it turns out that Obama loves radicals--radical Muslims, "radical homosexuals," and so forth--the real point here is the the Obama-is-a-narcissist bit.
There is, as you may have ascertained, absolutely no evidence that Obama is a narcissist. So how did this meme get started? Hard to say, but we can hypothesize. First, he's obviously a lot smarter than his critics; they can't accuse him of being dumb, so their only obvious recourse is to admit his intelligence, but then assert that he's arrogant about it--and it's a short hop from there to narcissism. Second, narcissism and arrogance are easy charges to level; you can fling them at anyone, and they're hard to defend against. Third, Obama's critics are obsessed with him, and they're champions of projection...etc. Fourth, one has to suspect the (to use John Cole's phrase) "uppity negro" phenomenon; that is, the irritation his critics feel at Obama's intelligence is exacerbated by...well, you see where this is going. I tend to reject most racial interpretations of Obama-hatred, since he's really getting pretty much the same treatment that Clinton got. But I do suspect that there's a racial component to the narcissism charge.
In the end, the sort of wild, groundless flailing about that we see in the Shapiro piece is pretty much par for the course among the BDS crowd, and it tells us way more about them than it does about him. When you've got a smart, honest, competent, reasonable guy, and radical, whacko reactions to him, the powerful motives behind the extreme reactions are to be looked for in those who are reacting, not in the object to which they react. Obama acts as an inkblot for these people, and their wild interpretations of him give us a window into minds that we might delicately describe as...unusual...
[via BalloonJuice]
Ben Shapiro Edition
They just keep getting crazier and crazier.
Here's a link to a screed by that famously abstinent elf Ben Shapiro--it's at Townhall...so, y'know, you may not really want to click on that...
Although it turns out that Obama loves radicals--radical Muslims, "radical homosexuals," and so forth--the real point here is the the Obama-is-a-narcissist bit.
There is, as you may have ascertained, absolutely no evidence that Obama is a narcissist. So how did this meme get started? Hard to say, but we can hypothesize. First, he's obviously a lot smarter than his critics; they can't accuse him of being dumb, so their only obvious recourse is to admit his intelligence, but then assert that he's arrogant about it--and it's a short hop from there to narcissism. Second, narcissism and arrogance are easy charges to level; you can fling them at anyone, and they're hard to defend against. Third, Obama's critics are obsessed with him, and they're champions of projection...etc. Fourth, one has to suspect the (to use John Cole's phrase) "uppity negro" phenomenon; that is, the irritation his critics feel at Obama's intelligence is exacerbated by...well, you see where this is going. I tend to reject most racial interpretations of Obama-hatred, since he's really getting pretty much the same treatment that Clinton got. But I do suspect that there's a racial component to the narcissism charge.
In the end, the sort of wild, groundless flailing about that we see in the Shapiro piece is pretty much par for the course among the BDS crowd, and it tells us way more about them than it does about him. When you've got a smart, honest, competent, reasonable guy, and radical, whacko reactions to him, the powerful motives behind the extreme reactions are to be looked for in those who are reacting, not in the object to which they react. Obama acts as an inkblot for these people, and their wild interpretations of him give us a window into minds that we might delicately describe as...unusual...
[via BalloonJuice]
posted by Winston Smith at
9:10 AM
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