The timeless hysteria of the history-challenged multitudes

This image of you-know-who giving the sieg heil salute to a mob of rock concert fans near the "take-down-this-wall" site of President Reagan's June 12, 1987 remarks at the Brandenburg Gate made our blood run cold. All those mostly pink forearms raised in a cascading lambda of mindless "yes-we-can" bandwagonism called to mind the wizened limbs of the victims of the holocaust. Obama's flip-flopping political antics are par for the course, of course -- we've had his number since December of 2006, when he gratuitously called us a racist -- but there are two things now that haunt us: 1. The timeless hysteria of the history-challenged multitudes and 2. The fellow travelership of the still so-called mainstream media.

“My opponent, of course, is traveling in Europe, and tomorrow his tour takes him to France … a throng of adoring fans awaits Senator Obama in Paris — and that’s just the American press,” quipped John McCain the other day. We'd missed those bon mots at the time but stumbled upon them in our Site Meter stats this morning at Democracy Project. McCain has always been what's termed "problematic" for us, from McCain-Feingold on down to pandering to the anthropogenic-global-warming crowd. At the same time, in years gone by when we were still able to stomach Imus in the Morning on MSNBC, McCain's quick-on-the-uptake sense of humor was always a hoot, something you'd never get from the Obamessiah. As we blogged awhile back, given the alternatives, in "How I learned to stop worrying and love John McCain":

"Nothing in America is inevitable. We are the captains of our fate. We can overcome any challenge as long as we keep our courage and stand by our principles," Super-Duper Tuesday's Republican man of the hour John McCain told supporters and the immediate universe in his Victory Party speech last night [via A Second Hand Conjecture]. The words were what we disaffected freedom-loving, small-government-embracing, invisible-hand-holding types thought we'd never hear from the free-speech-restricting, anthropogenic-global-warming-proseletyzing, economics-challenged frontrunner who is enjoying what Shepard Smith is calling a "monster lead" over rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Who knew the proprietor of the Fast-Talking Straight Talk Express had principles?

"And when I came to the room with shoes, nothing but empty shoes, I broke down," wrote Jeff Jarvis of his epipany at the Holocaust Museum in DC a few years back. We blogged about it in our post "The city upon a hill shines through."

That sea of mostly pink forearms raised in support of Barack Obama's dreamy "yes we can" chimera echoed ironically the ocean of empty shoes pictured poignantly at the Holocaust Museum in DC.

Comments

[goomp]

Yes We Can! But, only if we depend on moral fortitude and belief in hard effort to achieve our goals.

[Anti Obama.net]

I'm wondering what the point of having a huge speech in Germany is?

[Nameless]

Feh: doesn't even need a knowledge of History. Needs only an Attention Span. Obama's motto totally reflects Sarkozy's (Ensemble Tout es Possible) which strikingly resembles our current Governor's Together We Can...

Whether the speech be held in Germany or Anywhere Else, it doesn't matter. It's all about Marketing.