Liberalism in Ruins…Obama’s hubristic promises have been followed by a total discrediting of his ideology.

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Victor Davis Hanson:

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Obama’s immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don’t think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

The burdens of the attempt to grant federal exemption to millions of foreign nationals who have never followed U.S. immigration law inevitably fall on the middle-class taxpayer and the entry-level worker. We will also soon learn that over 11 million illegal aliens are not all Dream Actors. Rather, there is a huge minority of millions of illegal residents who have broken all sorts of U.S. laws, have not worked and are on public assistance, and have no record of sustained residence in the United States. When a guest chooses to break the laws of his host by entering his home illegally, that is usually the beginning, not the end, of illegality — a mindset and pattern of behavior that in many cases is not ended by simply erasing federal immigration law. The demand for immediate action for those who would qualify for Obama’s amnesties begs the question of whether there would be commensurately quick deportations of those who do not.

Take also global warming — for Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s greatest challenge. Once the planet did not heat up in the last 18 years, and once the ice of the polar caps did not melt away, global warming begat climate change. The new nomenclature was a clever effort to link all occasional weather extremities to some underlying and fundamental climate disruption. Brilliant though the strategy was — the opposites of cold/hot, drought/deluges, and calm/storms could now all be used as proof of permanent climate change — global warming finally was hoist on its own petard: If it caused everything, then it caused nothing.

So, in the end, what was global warming? It seems to have grown up largely as a late-20th-century critique of global-market capitalism by elites who had done so well by it that they had won the luxury of caricaturing the very source of their privilege. Global warming proved a near secular religion that filled a deep psychological longing for some sort of transcendent meaning among mostly secular Western grandees. In reality, the global-warming creed had scant effect on the lifestyles of the high priests who promulgated it. Al Gore did not cut back on his jet-fueled and lucrative proselytizing. Obama did not become the first president who, on principle, traveled with a reduced and green entourage. Solyndra did not run a model transparent company as proof of the nobility of the cause. As in the case of illegal immigration, the losers from the global-warming fad are the working and middle classes, who do not have the capital to be unharmed by the restrictions on cheap, carbon-based fuels.

The natural outcome of the reactionary approach to race relations — identity politics, the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot, the effusions of trillions of dollars over the last half-century into Great Society dependencies — is Ferguson. We are left with the movement’s slogan, “Hands up; don’t shoot!” which now joins a growing historical corpus of racial mythography — “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ferguson illustrated many of the problems of postmodern liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that the facts of the shooting of Michael Brown did not matter much; critical legal theory, which ignored the time-honored role of a disinterested grand jury; the tolerance of illegality as some sort of acceptable protest against the system; and the liberal media’s hyping a crisis on the understanding that the ramifications of the violence were safely distant from their own schools, neighborhoods, and restaurants.

The bitter truth is that Barack Obama himself is a figure who has always trafficked — albeit far more brilliantly and subtly than the buffoonish Sharpton and Jackson — in racial divisiveness, from his candid admissions in his memoir and his acknowledged dutiful discipleship at the feet of the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright to “typical white person,” the clingers speech, “punish our enemies,” and the racially charged spin on the ongoing Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown cases. A sign of his brilliant racial contortionism is the current canard that losing 6 percent of the black vote is proof of diversity while winning only 40 percent of the white vote is an ominous sign of a new racism.

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What would you expect for a continues pot header with additional side of cocaine

But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

It greatly angers citzens when people are rewarded for their illegal behavior at the expense of legal immigrants and natural citizens.

So, in the end, what was global warming?

It was the creation of a fanatic eco-religion.

This administration can be directly and in parallel compared to Hitler’s Nazi Germany. No, I don’t mean Obama is going to genocide anyone; I mean in the way the two regimes came to being, how they operated and what their legacies are/will be.

Both achieved power by throwing whatever lie at the people that would work, often conflicting with other lies. Both rose to power by concealing what they really intended to do, though both published books detailing how they thought and what, if given the opportunity and power, they would do.

Both replaced a democratic government with totalitarianism, though Hitler was more successful… in the short term. However, both then functioned on almost identical terms. Both used the government to punish political opponents, both had a propaganda machine that would keep governmental failures from the public eye, both dealt with political enemies by vilifying and fomenting hate. Both sought ideologues rather than capable administrators. Ideologically loyal bodies were preferable to free-thinking, capable experts. Both surrounded themselves with yes-men and nodding donkeys to prevent ever hearing a discouraging word from those that might foresee problems with enacting dangerous policies. Both eventually descended into micromanagemental disaster.

When the final chapter on this administration is written, the looks on the faces of those faithful Obama followers will resemble those on the tear-streaked, dirt smudged faces of the Hitler Youth members of the Volksstrum; dazed disbelief that they ever followed such a liar.

@MOS+#8541: My frat brother W went straight from the booze to the coke