Cowboy Confessional

Is Obama nano-thin or jello?

I spent an enjoyable hour chatting with my childhood chum and painfully funny fellow Chris Muir, creator and chief instigator of the Day By Day Cartoon. We share an insatiable appetite for politics and bashing anyone remotely disingenuous.

So naturally we talked a long time about Barack Obama.

I betray no secret in exposing Obama’s gift for reciting lofty teleprompter platitudes. His lighter-than-air oratory now generates complaints from residents in heaven, a plane to which Obama’s speeches have ascended. Jesus is particularly pissed over Obama’s messianic messaging that threatens to steal His thunder in the actual second coming.

Chris claimed that Obama’s policy and character were “nano thin” — so slight as to be transparent and thus impervious to serious assault. Try to spear his position and like morning mist his position separates, engulfs and reforms. My more simplistic take was that Obama is like a fist full of Jello: whenever you squeeze to get a grip on it’s substance, it simply squishes through your fingers.

And oddly a newspaper that is slightly to the left of the American Communist Party agrees.

On the same day Chris and I traded Obama Barbs, the San Francisco Chronicle — a paper with an editorial board manic enough to publish my op/eds — ran a pair of page two Obama stories, the substance of which being that Obama has no substance.

In a single day Obama changed his position on offshore drilling and reneged on his vow to debate McCain in town hall formats, opting instead to swat softballs tossed by mainstream media mates instead of grenade lobbed by agitated voters.

I’m no McCain fan. I wish he at least offered the entertainment value of other candidates. After eight years of presidential preposterousness, McCain may be boring enough to be electable.

Obama offers voters something of which to be wary. When trapped — changing position, playing the race card or side-stepping his notorious acquaintances — he nuances. He attempts to explain away what he did or said by shifting slightly to one side or another, propelled using nearly Orwellian language. His position on anything is as firm as a fist full of Jello.

Obama’s polling slide shows that his act is wearing thin. It is not just libertarian-leaning free thinkers like Chris and myself who believe this. Willie Brown — an icon of the California and San Francisco Democrat machines — was quoted in the same edition of the Chronicle saying (and I edited for brevity):

Right now, Obama still appears overscripted. Too perfect.

When Obama gets off the teleprompter, he is as dull …

But right now, Obama is way too focused on being precise in his presentation. Everything has to appear well thought out.

Remember, the public never really trusts a politician until you make a mistake. They don’t want “perfect” - they want human.

No politician can be trusted without the aide of tar, feathers and loaded shotguns. Obama’s policy and promise shape-shifting makes me want to invest in feather futures.

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Evidently San Francisco is populated entirely by children.

Adults appear to be in short supply given the paternalistic exuberance of the city’s Board of Supervisors. The sups suffer under the odd delusion that they have acquired the power to control the lives of adults and free commerce to boot. Routinely, the Board of Supervisors legislates against a slate of selected sin. Given that bad behavior is a cherished San Francisco Barbary Coast tradition, such protective overdrive is out of character with the city’s very vibe.

Like any weary parent, the self-appointed guardians on the Board of Supervisors have had enough. Frustrated by their failures to ban everything else from plastic bags, to handguns, to parking, the sups have reasserted their non-existent parental authority over their citywide crib. In a display of statism that would make Mao flinch, San Fran supervisors have banned the sale of tobacco in pharmacies.

Gang violence, public defecation and hypodermic litter are secondary concerns.

“When it comes to pharmacies, I feel that our children and our teenagers get a different message,” said Public Health Director Mitch Katz. By “children and teenagers” Katz means adults, the only class of citizens legally enabled to buy tobacco.

Ill content with a single euphemism, Katz noted that San Francisco Supervisors curtailed tobacco sales in pharmacies because drug stores were the “group where the case was the strongest.” More plainly stated, pharmacies are small enough in number, and their tobacco sales are such a tiny part of their total revenue that the city doesn’t expect the pharmacies to put up much of a fight. Costco, Wal-Mart and trade associations that represent mom-and-pop liquor stores would bring out the heavy litigation artillery, so the City Supervisors decided to pick on someone not their size.

This ban on the sales of a recreational drug (nicotine) seems oddly out of sync with San Francisco’s schizophrenic peccancy. The very mantra of The City has long been whatever consenting adults enjoy should be allowed, with the exception of voting Republican which remains a hanging offense. Indeed the San Francisco enables many vices including both the right and the subsidized facilitation of injecting recreational drugs that are a tiny bit more potent than a pack of Marlboros.

Pharmaceutical sales prohibition of shag and snuff are just the beginning. Katz himself foreshadowed this eventuality suggesting the ban could be broadened in the future. The pharmacy prohibition seeks to desensitize San Francisco citizens to submissiveness. America’s new nanny, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, has set his sights beyond San Francisco saying “Whatever we can do to make this country a smoke-free zone, we should do it.”

My friends and family back in tobacco-growing Virginia will decline to participate. Virginians refuse to ban guns so they are equipped to enforce their prerogative.

Complicit in denying adults the right to commit decelerated suicide is the American Lung Association of California. Their policy director opined “It changes the conversation from something where people of conscience act to one where a city says, ‘You know what, we support healthier lifestyles in our city’”

Her slogan clearly demarks the line of contention. On one side are the citizens of San Francisco — people of conscience who routinely demand to live their personal lives with little restriction — and the city government, hell-bent on keeping them from doing so.

Perhaps San Francisco’s true children are confined to the Board of Supervisors.

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Barack Obama is playing the race canard … again.

Responding to a reporter, Obama claimed that the McCain camp was “… going to try to … make you scared of me … you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”‘

This is not the first time that Obama has accused his opposition of being racist without any proof thereof. This particular form of falsehood is not new but it is clever. Race has always been an issue in this campaign, primarily because Obama and the media make such a fuss about it (frankly, who cares if an unrepentant socialist is black, white, half-toned, or purple with pink polka dots — his authoritarian tendencies are the issue). The interesting aspect is Obama’s externalization.

For anyone fortunate enough to have not delved into the pseudoscience of Freudian psychology, externalization is the process whereby a person projects their own self loathing onto other people, perhaps the only principle that fraud Freud developed. This defense mechanism makes it possible for weak minded people to deal with what they dislike most about themselves by perceiving the same fault in others.

We do not have to look far to find the origins of Obama’s externalization. In his own book he relates tales of being at odds with his own identities and his difficulty with selecting one. The process was greatly slowed by his admitted narcotic abuse. Being uncertain of his race (either one), drugged out of his skull, inflicted by the insane logic of an openly racist reverend … it is little wonder that Obama has a certain sense of self hatred or that he would rapidly externalize it upon his opponents.

Undecided voters will decide this election. Analysis of independents throughout recent history shows they research more deeply than the average voter and that they base much of their decision on their gut instinct about the integrity (or lack thereof) of the candidate. Obama’s externalizations will be his undoing as independent voters evaluate who is the true racist in this race.

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Well, I’m evidently not the only cowboy in San Francisco these days, but I am the one with his clothing on and not in trouble with the law.

Robert Burck has ample New York notoriety for being the “Naked Cowboy”.  He roams around Times Square in his tighty-whities, strumming on a guitar and posing for photos.  It’s an odd living, but I won’t begrudge a busker who makes an honest buck.

Burck made his way here to San Francisco and was quickly arrested.  His Frisco rap sheet gives you an idea about what constitutes offensive behavior in San Fran.  Burck was not busted for bearing his bum - public nudity is practically mandatory in the Modern Sodom.  Nor was he arrested for singing badly which is offensive to anyone.

Burck was cited for “violating a posted sign” which informed people with reading skills that soliciting and playing musical instruments is unforgivable in Union Square and thus disturbing the downtown retail trade.

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The ability to laugh remove can remove pain … mainly by preventing us from telling people what we really think about them.

A book I’m peddling to publishers titled Catalog of Canards describes how political lies are created and spread. My tongue-in-cheek prose help mollify the reader who otherwise would self-destruct from anger inflicted by the realization of how thoroughly hoodwinked they have been. In outlining the book I was reasonably sure that I described nearly every form of fib in the dirty dregs of democracy.

I may be wrong.

Attending a meeting of the American Constitution Society — a conclave of left-wing people interested in rigging the judiciary to defeat the will of the people — I heard a form of lie that I am uncertain how to codify. The panel composed of law professors and civil rights litigators (including a lone libertarian from the Pacific Legal Foundation) opened their review of the 2007/2008 Supreme Court season with a discussion of D.C. v. Heller, the now famous gun ban case.

The discussion was academic, which was entertaining for a constitutional autodidact like myself (incidentally, never use the word autodidact when speaking to your congressional representative … I did that to mine and his limited intellect kept him from understanding the concept). Most commentators conducted light ridicule of the majority decision in the case, disliking a ruling that said the Second Amendment does secure an individual right.

A seeming sane legal strumpet from Stanford lobbed a lie which I’m still struggling to classify. In referring to the Heller decision she claimed the court “created a new right.”

If I wanted to torture my readers, I could wax for hours on the nature of reserved rights, preexisting rights, 10th Amendment prerogative and any number of conlaw constructions confirming that everything in the Bill of Rights was purposefully composed and ratified to document sacrosanct individual rights jealously guarded by “the people.” It is mechanically impossible for a judge to create a new right since the basic theory of the American legal system is that all rights are reserved by the people and that we grant government select powers in order to maintain a more-or-less civil society.

That someone so clueless teaches law should scare everyone.

So I’m stuck. Throughout my book I cite the various forms of falsehoods as the lie of … For example, when the media omits pertinent information from a news story it is called The Lie of Context. The Stanford professor’s perjury is difficult to classify. It is in essence Orwellian but defies even George’s subterfuge schema.

Suggestions for a codification are welcome.

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