The Audacity of Idiocy: Obama Lectures Americans on Trump

Obama lectures Americans who support Donald Trump. Warning: the following quotes of our president may generate nausea, migraines or other undesirable physical or emotional symptoms. Try to read on anyway, because there’s a point to make here.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday said voters have a responsibility to promote civility in politics by not voting for “somebody who is just popping off” or “just being controversial for the sake of it,” implicitly referring to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“If you want more civility, then you vote for folks who are civil and who are making arguments and using logic and presenting evidence, not just somebody who is popping off,” Obama said at a PBS town hall in Elkhart, Indiana. “And that’s true whether it’s on the left or the right. If you are voting for somebody who is just being controversial for the sake of it, or helping you vent, then you only have yourself to blame if it turns out that the political debate starts getting more and more crazy.”

“What happens is that politicians get the most attention the more outrageous they sound. And so, if you’re civil and quiet and polite, nobody covers you,” he said. “But if you say something crazy or rude, you’re all over the news. That has fed, I think, this kind of arms race of insults and controversy that doesn’t shine a lot of light, even though it generates a lot of heat.”

You’ve heard the metaphor of the fox guarding the chicken coop. This is more like the fox lecturing the chickens stuck in the coop.

Americans have a responsibility, Obama says. Responsibility to whom, or to what? To themselves? That’s valid. But that’s not what he implies. He implies it’s a responsibility to some sort of abstract, invisible, floating ideal known (without any definition) as “civility.” What’s he really opposing here? Dissension.

Obama claims to uphold civility and reason. But what supports and promotes civility and reason? The unintelligible mandates of Obamacare? Executive orders rescinding and altering immigration law without the input of millions of Americans, the ones who primarily fueled Trump’s candidacy? Threats to use executive orders to raise taxes, outlaw guns, or go after people who question climate change or Islam with criminal charges?

It’s impossible to articulate how unjust, illogical and downright absurd it is to hear Obama lecturing people on a lack of reason and civility. His entire political ideology is based on the opposite of reason. What is reason, anyway? Reason is a process whereby human beings calmly, civilly and intelligently gather facts and form logical conclusions based on those facts. Reason requires individualism, and freedom. A mind cannot think under the threat of a Communist or Nazi government gun; nor can a mind think under the constant barrage of government red tape, politically targeted mandates, arbitrarily applied, nonobjective regulations and initiative-crushing taxes we know today.

Nothing subverts reason more than the power of government outside its proper boundaries. While reason could not function in a state of anarchy, where anyone could do whatever they wished to anyone else, reason cannot function any better in a welfare state where most economic decisions, decisions about education, health care, self-protection and virtually everything else are left to the government. Increasingly, especially under Obama’s terms, Americans are told what to think and threatened with legal retaliation if they stray from the politically correct line. And he wonders why so many Americans are angry?

Obama claims to wonder why reason has exited politics completely. He is the biggest single factor for that development over the past eight years. How ignorant does he think most people are? Is he really this stupid himself?

All of the things people claim will be true of Donald Trump as president are already true of Barack Obama as president. Executive orders without legislative action; threats by his attorney general to suppress speech; claims of his own vice president that people who opposed his socialized medicine bill are “economic terrorists.” If Trump is the antithesis of civility, then on what basis do we claim that Obama has been its embodiment? Does this man have no remotely objective perspective about what he does, says and thinks every single day of his time in office?

Obama has made the imposition of force on bakers who don’t wish to bake gay wedding cakes and the installation of transgendered bathrooms a national priority. He ignores and even guts our national defense and has applied a regulatory wrecking ball to our already throttled economy. When Muslims repeatedly attack our troops and civilians in the name of Islam, he dares anyone to criticize Islam and implicitly (sometimes explicitly) blames the attacks on Americans themselves. And he wonders why so many people are angry?

Anger is a healthy response to injustice. Without anger, there would never have been an American Revolution. Without anger, no force for evil or injustice would ever have been defeated.

It’s not Trump or the lack of civility which Obama and his ilk oppose. It’s dissension, criticism and opposition they cannot stand, and increasingly will not tolerate.