The Contextualizer In Chief

"They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog...Clearly there was only one escape for them - into stupidity...It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions....What is to be expected of them is..stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing...Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in."

Orwell on the "ruling class" (1941)

Last week Barack Obama said that some Israelis are "suspicious" of him, because his middle name is "Hussein".

He said this with a straight face. It's a Jewish variation of Obama's Bitter Clinger axiom, but not an unusual construction for Obama (He "thinks" this way automatically) as do all leftists and most liberals.

For that matter, most of us do, to some extent. It's a valid and essential way to reduce and classify our own and someone else's assumptions and beliefs - contextualize them, to evaluate the influence of the "context" in which they're made.

The context, however, should never establish itself as the argument in the mind of the investigator...which it does to a shocking degree in the presumably well-educated brain of Barack Obama. The assumption that in the context of an embattled Israel, any or even a significant number of Israelis, are suspicious of the self-dignifying Obama because of his middle name is so - stupid - in so many ways, that it can't be ignored.

First,the claim is impossible to prove or disprove, and an expansive mind would reject it, off the bat, as incredible . Second - and not surprisingly - it portrays Obama as the honest, correct, post facto injured party in his Israeli policies, and Israeli opposition to them as simple-minded. Third, it's cruel, arrogant and clever, in the "do you still beat your wife" fashion. It exposes some of the poison in Obama's heart toward Jews and Israel, his inability to contain it, and the lengths to which "educated" liberals will go to avoid considering opposing arguments.

Contextualizing opposition to himself as the act of stupid, name-reactive Jews is happening here, but also in every other pre-judged social group (Racist Tea Partiers, bitter clingers, non-union members, xenophobic Southwesterners, health-care hating Republicans) contextualizing is the means of condemnation. It's more delicate than outright stereotyping because it's very surgical.

Obama is "bright" in the facile, glib, phony erudite style so important to liberals - that is, in the ways liberals recognize each other in crowds, mate-select and differentiate themselves from mere homo sapiens, but he is neither smart, learned nor honest. He never seems to have analyzed any of the liberal swill pumped into his head by family or mentors, except in his anticipation of objections to it. Obama is only "bright" like a male cardinal, or bright in the John Kerry fashion: how to sound like an intellectual with the brain power of an eggplant.

Kerry was a great contextualizer, too. Like Obama, his meager but vile intellect would establish the context of an opinion, belief or human pattern as the basis for its validity, and all Big Lies depend upon this scheme. This line of thinking isn't so much deduced from statist ideologies as it is impossible under any other kind of of ideology. When honesty, efficiency, justice, liberty, law and truth have to be dumped to establish authority and hold political power, they're drawing up plans for an authoritarian madhouse, with you as a permanent inmate.

I don't plan to show up and neither should you. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make stupid.