sic semper tyrannis

The ever-interesting Spengler has shredded Barack and Michelle Obama with his Obama’s women reveal his secret. We should, by now, know that with Obama there’s no there, there. Spengler suggests that we can best read who Obama is through the prism of his women:

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

For Obama’s white mother, Spengler believes that the problem lies with her being an America-hating leftist, who dealt with the world as an anthropologist: studying, but not a part of the United States.

Michelle Obama is painted as an America-hater from her college days. Her recent unfortunate comment about never having been proud of America, her with an extremely well-paying job and the best education available, hates my country. As for Obama himself, well, Spengler has his thesis:

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

I wish I could dispute this diatribe about the man who has a better-than-even chance to become our next president. But Spengler has captured what I’d been thinking — that huge grin, that oh-so-smooth exterior, the glibness, the messianic fervor — that’s Elmer Gantry, right enough.

I wish Spengler was wrong. Wrong about the influence of Mean Michelle and Obama’s communist fellow-traveler mother. But wishing does not change what appears to be a solid analysis of what few facts we are presented about Obama. Surely we can do better as a nation than this empty suit.