The cancer infecting the political Left

[pbrower2a]

(12-09-2020, 02:33 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Obama had a personality cult behind him. What's wrong with your eyes and mind because the two don't seem to be working as well as mine?

Personality cults are covers for leaders of moral and intellectual inadequacy. Example:



Puppet leaders don't have it easy. They must create the myth that they are independent actors while compelled or tricked into doing horrible things on behalf of the overlord. Think of the much-despised King Herod of the New Testament. In the case of Petain one has a leader who was no longer up to the job, someone often derided as senile, depending upon his glories of his past to redeem what he did in what was then the present - like consigning French workers to be cheap labor in the Workers' Hell that was Nazi Germany, stripping refugees from Franco of protection, and acquiescing to the deportation of Jews from France to their deaths in the Holocaust. Other people did worse things than he did, but they were able to cajole him into him into countersigning criminal orders. 

Petain might have been an adequate leader of France in the 1920's... but definitely not in the 1940's.

Senility is not yet accepted as a mitigating factor in a criminal sentence as 'diminished responsibility'. 

Soulless, overmatched political figures, especially those who have a thinly-covered evil beneath the surface are prone to the cult of personality.  

......................

Trump obviously isn't Petain... but he certainly has gross inadequacies as a leader while posing as an exemplar of greatness.  He was a neophyte as a political figure, so he had no idea of how the American political system operates. Contrast Barack Obama, who recognized the complexity of the American political system and of electoral politics, and made his adjustments accordingly. Obama could draw upon history for symbolism and practical solutions. He could even exploit the lore of Chicago gangsters; accounts of the assassination of Osama bin Laden (who of course deserved his end) suggest a gangland hit with more sophistication -- and full recognition of the international optics. 

Bill Clinton had a rakish sex life... but even he recognized it as something to push as much as possible into the background. Trump uses his serial adultery as proof of his manhood. (Gee, how could Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino, or Angela Merkel get away with failing at that!) Trump had an affair with a porn star... a porn star! Considering how unreal pornography is, that affair reflects that Trump is out of touch with the sexual norms of most Americans.  Most people in America's economic elites (and for that matter the middle class) want nothing to do with mobsters... but Trump has had plenty of sordid dealings with the Russian Mafia, which has the viciousness of the old Neapolitan or Sicilian Mafia... and more brains.  Trump is not smart enough to recognize the complexity of political discourse. Can you imagine screeds like those of Donald Trump coming from Twitter  from the Obama Administration? Hardly. Before something got released by Obama as an official communication, he had others read the draft for grammatical flaws, logical gaps, spelling errors, typos, and ambiguities. That is exactly what a good attorney does because any one of those can create an opening for something unwelcome. Words have rigid meanings in legal documents... 

Trump's achievements are slight, on the whole. His biggest achievement (for which a servile Republican party is culpable) is for forcing the nomination and appointment of judicial figures, including three Justices of the US Supreme Court, who believe in an arcane theory of law that fits the idea that, to put it bluntly, "He who owns the gold makes the rules". Maybe it is a good thing, in view of his support of ideas that a majority of voters thought objectionable in November 2020, that he wasn't effective.