(Posted 11/07/08 www.RemnantNewspaper.com) Barack Hussein Obama, staunch defender of a form of infanticide that Caligula would have found appalling, is now President of the United States of America, thanks to the votes of 63 million Americans. Why is it that despite my months-long dread of the impending Obama presidency, at the moment I feel nothing but an urge to suppress a howl of laughter at this absurd development?

During Obama’s long campaign for the White House no one was allowed to see his original doctor-generated Hawaiian birth certificate (if there is one), his applications to Occidental College and Columbia, his Harvard Law School application and his application to the Illinois bar (all of which would provide clues as to his origins), his college transcripts, his law school transcript, anything he ever wrote in law school, a list of the clients he has represented, or even his medical records.

He admits to habitual cocaine use in high school, and his associates include an unrepentant terrorist bomber and a convicted felon who gave him a sweetheart real estate deal before going to jail. One of his half-brothers lives in a hut in Kenya. His father had three wives, six sons and a daughter, about whom we know nothing.  His aunt, whom he depicts lovingly in his memoir, is an illegal alien defying a deportation order while living in a public housing project in Boston. Obama claims he had no idea of his aunt’s immigration status, and he has returned the illegal campaign contributions she gave him. It appears his campaign received thousands of illegal donations from anonymous or pseudonymous foreigners.

Although no one is allowed to see his baptismal certificate (if there is one), this Muslim-named man of mystery, who had a Muslim father and a Muslim stepfather, was registered as a Muslim at his Indonesian elementary school, was instructed in the Koran and attended a local Indonesian mosque as a boy, now claims to be a follower of Jesus.  That is, the customizable American Jesus who approves of abortion on demand throughout the nine months of pregnancy, which Obama has vowed to impose by federal law. In the nation of Kenya, Muslims are dancing in the streets to celebrate America’s election of this “Christian” as President, and the Kenyan government has declared a national holiday.

Small wonder. Only two years ago Obama traveled to Kenya to campaign for Raila Odinga, the Marxist radical who was seeking the presidency of Kenya with the support of its Muslim community after having spent eight years in prison for his role in a bloody coup d'état attempt in 1982. Odinga’s and Obama’s fathers came from the Luo tribe, the second-largest tribe in Kenya, and Odinga identifies Obama as his cousin.

In 2007 Odinga signed a memorandum of understanding with Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, in which Odinga promised, if elected, to impose Islam as the state religion, to give Islamic leaders the right “to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original]” to prohibit public preaching by Christians, and to establish Sharia courts throughout the country. (Washington Times, October 12, 2008).

During one of his many appearances with Odinga, Obama sounded a familiar theme: “Kenyans are now yearning for change.” They were also yearning for blood. After Obama’s cousin lost by 230,000 votes, his Muslim supporters went on a genocidal rampage, murdering some 1500 people, including 50 congregants of an Assembly of God church that was burned to the ground after they were locked inside.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama as President is, of course, a monstrous joke, as is the nation that accorded him its highest office. This bizarre election bears out, perhaps more than any other in history, the famous simile of Plato’s Socrates, who compares the mass of voters in a democracy—the worst form of government—to a wild beast the Sophist politician tames by learning “how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame or fierce…” Having studied the reactions of the beast, the Sophist pronounces good “that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which it dislikes…”  (Republic, 496 b-c).

Like the Sophists of Athens, Barrack Hussein Obama has mastered the art of manipulating the beast with words and gestures having no connection to the reality of the Good.  The boobish mass mind that elected him operated much like the mind of Lockean epistemology, assembling what Locke called “simple modes” into “mixed modes” comprising his version of human reason: “economy” + “bad” + “fix” + “need” + “change” + {“Obama” + “the change we need”} = “I-must-vote-for-Obama.” A man who said absolutely nothing of substance, but said it with consummate skill, has been elected on the basis of voter deliberations that were little more than animalic stimulus and response.

A few days before the election The New York Times quoted a retired Italian-American steelworker, age 71, who declared that “the economy now, it’s terrible” and “I’ve got to vote for him [Obama]. I can’t be stupid.”  On the contrary, if he voted for Obama then he most certainly was stupid, and spectacularly so. For what could be stupider than a 71-year-old man who stands at the cusp of eternity, and is very probably a Catholic, voting for a slick-talking barbarian in a custom tailored suit because he has some vague instinct that the barbarian will do something or other to improve the conditions of his transitory retirement?

As for the Republicans, they were unable to overcome the powerful negative stimuli, brilliantly managed by Obama, that drove the beast in his direction. There was, first of all, Bush’s insane war in Iraq, which this newspaper was condemning six months before it began, but which the beast, then under the prodding of neocon Sophists, viewed favorably at the time. Only when the war was revealed even to the most obtuse Americans as a fraud and a debacle did the beast begin to kick against the goad—an aversion deftly exploited by Obama, who was able to make the beast forget that the war was, and is, a bipartisan effort.

But the most powerful stimulus that delivered the beast into Obama’s hands was the hocus-pocus of a suspiciously timed economic “collapse.” This collapse is largely the reverberating digitized impact of a loss of confidence in those illusory digital assets known as default credit swaps, invented and digitally traded by the “free market” in the interstices between government securities regulations. Never mind that it was the Democrats, led by Barney Frank, who unleashed Fannie Mae’s reckless lending in the 1990s—producing much of the low-grade debt that fueled the credit swaps—and that it was Frank who later insisted that Fannie Mae was a rock-solid institution and opposed any attempt to regulate its lending practices. Details, details. The beast has no memory beyond the last sophistical stimulus, supplied by Obama, who persuaded the beast that the “failed policies of the Bush administration” were somehow responsible.

And the pro-life issue? The beast did not care about the real world fates of real world infants slaughtered by the millions in their own mothers’ wombs. Abortion ranks very low on the stimulus meter since it happens inside abortion mills and is not shown on television. The 63 million members of the beast responded instead to the images on the screens of their plasma TVs, like the denizens of Plato’s cave, who gape at the shadows of puppets cast by a fire on the rock wall in front of them, oblivious to the sun outside. The beast fretted, not about the gravest of evils ever committed by a so-called civilized society, or the total negation of goodness, truth and basic Christian decency represented by the defender of infanticide they have made their leader, but rather the declining balances of their retirement accounts, the future of social security, and the amount of their weekly take-home pay. Removing the next tray of Nachos from their microwaves, they proceeded to their Barco-Loungers to watch The Game; and during the commercial breaks their reflexes were conditioned by Obama the Animal Trainer, who induced them to move toward his cage with various Pavlovian stimuli, including “The Change We Need” and “Yes, We Can!”

Obama is a consummate Sophist whose feigned sincerity is so accomplished that he actually is sincere. He really believes in his product, which is himself—an inspiring, transnational, metrosexual charismatic of a New World Order in which almost every male is a contracepted capon and a watcher of the screens that tell him what to think. 

McCain, on the other hand, is a tired old Republican Party hack, a residual Christian of some sort who still recalls the days when people could follow a syllogism and even Democrats considered abortion unthinkable, but who, in the twilight of his own life, lacked confidence in what he was trying to sell, which is the fading memory of a nation whose electoral majority once exhibited a semblance of Christian morality. Today, if there were a national referendum on a one-day moratorium on abortion in exchange for canceling the season finale of “Dancing with the Stars,” it would be defeated by a sizeable margin. The unborn never really had a chance.  And this is so not only because the system that rules the beast is rotten, but also because the beast itself is amoral. Indeed, every measure at the state level to limit abortion in this election was voted down.

The time for outrage and fear will come soon enough, as the Obama administration takes shape and we are able to assess the full extent of his ability to do evil. Perhaps unforeseen circumstances will limit the harm, for which outcome we can only pray. For now, however, I can only laugh at the spectacle of 63 million fools electing this man based on the rhetorical equivalent of tinted steam, and this laughingstock of a nation that clownish patriots will continue to insist is the greatest in human history.

“But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them: thou shalt bring all the nations to nothing.” (Ps. 59:8).  If we may say that God laughs at human folly, then we may say that He is laughing at the results of Election 2008. But God’s derision is inevitably followed by His chastisement.  Like all the nations that have mocked Him and defied His will, this one will be brought to nothing. The current economic crisis is only a foretaste of what is coming. Unless it undergoes a miraculous metanoia for which every Catholic must pray, America, mass slayer of the unborn and exporter of “freedom” at the point of a gun, will pay the ultimate penalty for the divine contempt it has earned so many times over. And the longer God withholds that punishment, the greater it will be when it finally arrives.