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Home Apologies from Utopia

Apologies from Utopia

Apologies, like postcards and encyclopedias, are another of those elements of our past being left behind in the detritus of the old twentieth.

Obama's non-apology apology "I'm sorry that you're unhappy" is typical of the passive aggressive apology of the twenty-first. What was once character has become branding. What was once manners has become damage control.

In the peculiar "I feel" grammar of the twenty-first century, "Sorry" has become ubiquitous and meaningless, it's the new "Eh" or "Is that so." The ubiquitous sorry assumes that everyone else is constantly being subjected to a torrent of grievances and acknowledges that while taking no responsibility for it.

To the millions of Americans kicked out of their health plans, Obama was offering an "Is that so"; not an admission of guilt or a confession of fault.

They had relied on his assurance, he conceded, and he was sorry that they had. But he was not sorry for causing anything. Merely he was sorry that they felt that they had been misled. As he said this, his spokesmen were busily explaining why no one had been misled at all. If any of the victims of ObamaCare were under the impression that they had received an apology, it was instantly withdrawn by a gaggle of talking heads. Like their health plans.

There can be no apology without responsibility. And responsibility is as dead as the fountain pen.

Obama, Hillary and Sebelius all recite formulaic admissions of responsibility without actually taking any. Hillary was happy to take responsibility for Benghazi, as a verbal statement, without actually accepting political or practical responsibility for any of it. Likewise Sebelius and Obama took responsibility for the ObamaCare website without actually accepting it.

Obama took responsibility and then explained that he doesn't really know anything about programming so he isn't responsible.

Go poke your cameras in the faces of some keyboard monkeys in Canada who were working overtime while the top executives were partying with their friends the Obamas at the White House. They're the ones to blame. They know how to do things which means that they are responsible for doing them. Obama, who doesn't know how to do anything is not responsible because he's unskilled.

This is the innocence of incompetence. Obama isn't a programmer; he can't be held responsible for Healthcare.gov. Hillary Clinton isn't a soldier or even a real diplomat. She can't be held responsible for Benghazi. Sebelius is a political appointee whose job is to look into the camera with the baffled incomprehension of the professional civil servant. "I don't know anything. I just work here."

Obama had boasted that he was a better speechwriter than his speechwriters and a better political director than his political directors. But apparently he's not a better programmer than his programmers.

Programming is hard work compared to finding ways to arrange new promises and lies around "Let me be clear" which is the twenty-first century version of "Read my lips". It requires knowing how to do something more than blame the previous programmer or the programming language.

The ideologues are always innocent because it's always the implementation that fails; not their ideas. It's why Communism isn't responsible for the USSR or North Korea going down the tubes. The ideas were solid, but the programmers did a bad job of coding their brilliant economic theories into a working website.

And so we are told once again that Obama is smart. Really, really smart. Despite this fearsome intelligence, there isn't one thing they can point to abroad or at home that he did well on his own. And that very uselessness shows how smart he is. Any idiot can fix a car, build a website or make a foreign policy work. It takes a real genius to come up with the ideas and sigh in disappointment as everyone else screws them up.

Liberal columnists ponder whether Obama is too smart to be president. By that they mean that he's much too elevated a being to sit around trying to make things work. His proper role would be theorizing how things should work and then putting those theories in book form.

That is something the left is undeniably good at. It's like an entire movement of flying car inventors who spend so much time describing why flying cars are the answer that they never bother with the question of whether anyone needs flying cars or how to keep flying cars from crashing into things all the time.

And so Obama has apologized. Not for lying, but for the inability of an idiotic public to understand that he has nothing to apologize for. In apologizing, Obama is really forgiving us for not being as smart as he is. He is condescending to our diminished intelligence by apologizing for our misunderstanding of him. He is sorry for how stupid we are that we actually believed him.

Accepting responsibility has become a learned behavior from countless movies. But once you accept it, then you don't have to actually do anything about it, like resigning or giving up any vacation days. The buck always gets passed down the ladder until it ends up back in the hands of the people who aren't responsible for any of it, but always have to pay the bill for it anyway.

Up top we have government without responsibility. We have people who are expert at knowing how things should work, but not how they do work. How they do work doesn't interest them. Tangible reality is a preexisting condition that they inherited from the Bush Administration and the racist Founding Fathers and Western colonialism.

This state of affairs is presumed to be so terrible that any change would be an improvement. Like trying to fix a thoroughly beat up car, the left doesn't care what it breaks when it start fixing health care or immigration or foreign policy. No matter how big a mess it makes, it is sure that things must be better now because before the Republicans were in charge.

The left always assumes that it is starting from zero. That the interregnum before it came to power, men were little more than beasts, brawling in the mud, raising their children in the dirt and visiting whatever doctors it pleased them. It sees no reason to apologize since even when it falls short, it has uplifted us from barbarism to a better way of living.

What then should it apologize for? Its apologies are really apologetics. Even while it mumbles a little regret, it is launching a new wave of passive aggressive attacks against an ungrateful public that fails to realize that it should appreciate losing its coverage because the new more expensive coverage is so much better.

The left never really apologizes. Not for the millions dead under Communism or for pretending that Michael Moore was a documentary filmmaker. It passively aggressively doubles down on its original premise. "You didn't understand what I was really getting at."

Sincere apologies are for people who do things. Insincere apologies are for people who refuse to accept that the real world doesn't live up to the expectations of the imaginary world in their heads and that their fantasies end up hurting people.

As with drug addicts or schizophrenics, the real world is unreal to the left. It's a world that denies them their fantasies. It's a world they hate and want to destroy.

And so Obama is sorry. He is sorry that we in the real world failed to live up to the expectations that he and his comrades worked out in their imaginary world. It's not his fault that we weren't good enough for the people's health care revolution. It's our fault. In the imaginary world of the policy experts, everything worked. The bottleneck must be us.

And that's true.

In the imaginary world, only six people visited the website at a time. In the imaginary world,
everyone cheerfully accepted their new health insurance lot. In the imaginary world, all the bad ideas worked because the left was writing the script for the hero, who gave health insurance to the masses, and the grateful damsel in distress of the public who thanked the hero for her abortion coverage.

The real world has been much more disappointing. But the real world is an intermittent place. No one really lives anymore. At least no one who matters.

The smarter people have gone off into their imaginary worlds and step out only to pick up a few buckets of Chinese food before they go back in again. And the rest of us are left living with a system that doesn't work because it was designed for an imaginary world. Not the real world.

And the people behind it are sorry. They're sorry that we don't recite our lines on schedule. They're sorry that we're a sullen and stupid folk. They're sorry that their imaginary world is wasted on us.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11/11/13

    The leftards always have good intentions.
    We know where that road leads, and we're almost there now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've noticed the media gives very little coverage to how screwed up the system is and how it is destroying lives. I guess it's like the swineflu vaccine back in 76. One-hundred people died in America from the vaccine for a disease that didn't exist anywhere in the world. But according to the government and drug companies, it was worth the cost. In reality, they had a useless vaccine and had to sell it to the government to keep rich people losses down. The same with ObamaCare. It's totally useless, will never work, and will sacrifice the working class so the rich can just keep getting richer. Five hundred million for a website that doesn't work. Someone should be facing a firing squad for such robbery. And it is robbery. No matter what anyone in government says. Someone walked away with a few hundred million, I can guarantee you. Just like the 4 billion dollars on pallets that disappeared in Iraq. No one will ever be made responsible, and no one will ever be responsible for ObamaCare. But if you owe them a penny, they will have the IRS haunt you forever.

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  3. The condition goes back at least as far as Atty. Gen. Janet Reno in the wake of Waco, when she accepted "responsibility" for the massacre at Waco, but suffered none of the consequences.

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  4. Anonymous11/11/13

    The only preexisting value I know of that the Left values and even worships is loyalty. That they hold up at every level. Fawning students for professors, fawning professors for politicians and fawning politicians for tyrants.

    The only growth job under Obama is webtroll. These people spew hate at anyone who wants to live in a place that feels like home to themselves. It is a major crime. Do these webtrolls dream of having big titles and serving on important committees of other webtrolls where they decide what a true webtroll sounds like? Probably.

    They can't build the websites though so if they get their totalitarian society they'll have to discuss webtrolling right wing websites that don't actually exist. Then they'll all get purged when everyone realizes their use has expired.

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  5. Anonymous11/11/13

    As usual, Mr. Greenfield nails this one.

    As far as I can remember, the Left has never admitted any blame for the policies they pushed. If anything, there might be a very short period of naval gazing and then it's off for the next crusade. And that's only if they can't deflect blame somewhere else.

    Johnson's Great Society was an expensive failure and we live with the societal consequences even today. The Left's agitation on Vietnam left millions dead and millions more permanently displaced. But it's their good intentions that counted and they feel they can't be blamed because it's not their fault that their good intentions didn't pan out, even when their ideological opponents predicted the exact eventual outcomes.

    Mr. Latham's comment comment on the Swine Flu scare in 1976 reminded me of a joke by Dick Gregory at the time: "The United States is the greatest country in the world. We can find a cure for which there is no disease."

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  6. DenisO11/11/13

    The uninformed voter is puzzled. How did this happen to him? He voted for the candidate the MSM loved, and the Union members did what they were told. Is there more to being a voter? For some, the fog is clearing, and hopefully, those worker ants, in the Media, who support the Royal family of the Left,will see they have not been protected from the policies they praised. But politicians have!
    There are small "cracks" in their unity appearing, and some even seem shocked at the magnitude of this healthcare debacle. Soon, they may take a look at the sad economy, the lack of jobs, and the mess that's been created in foreign policy.
    A short and sweet article that puts it all in one place, that can be widely circulated, should be the goal. Maybe a short, clever video might work better, but nothing speaks louder than the letters cancelling health care plans.
    Regards,

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous11/11/13

    Proposal 1. Monarchy
    'The person of the King is inviolable and shall not be subject to liability'
    King Obama of the Americas, how does it sound?
    Proposal 2. Outlaw mathematics on grounds of far right extremism and racism

    ReplyDelete
  8. I may not have it right word for word, but as Goldfinger said to James Bond, 'Once is accidental, twice is suspicious, and three times is enemy action.' Obama hates America and (many more times than three) has done everything possible to destroy our free country by turning it into a bankrupt, third world, socialist slave state such as Cuba, Venezuela, or Greece.
    That he apologizes and apparently gets away with it is symptomatic of both an intellectually and morally brain dead, left wing media and many members of the American public who, being of basically good nature, assume that his apologies actually mean something.

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  9. Anonymous11/11/13

    Daniel, you sum up things nicely. We do live in a world where only the Japanese seem to still believe one is responsible for their own acts.

    But it isn't surprising that no one is responsible for anything they do and thus suffer no consequences of their acts when our society doesn't believe there are any objective truths and morality is relative.

    The left believes in collectivism, except in the case of granting a woman the sole right to exterminate the child she did not create herself, so there never can be individuals held accountable for anything. And of course, the left is never wrong about anything so why should they apologize let alone be held accountable for the destruction they cause?

    Elaine

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  10. Anonymous11/11/13

    The company hired to build the website and the online system is French Canadian. They are the same company that designed the Canadian firearm registry, twice, at a cost of over 2 billion dollars. It was finally abandoned as unworkable. The same company won the contract to bring E-health to the province of Ontario. Again, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent, and there is no product. My guess is that a majority of the employees of this company in Quebec are not even functionally literate in English. Also, Quebec is by far the most left wing jurisdiction in North America. They make Kerryland look like rednecks. Nobody is as anti American as the Quebecois.

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  11. "I'm sorry that you are ...." is the narcissist's response to their fucking someone over. It shifts/negates the blame, and removes their responsibility from the field of action.

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  12. A few years back, the Labour government was found to have an in-house smear team,led by an arsehole called Damian McBride, a buddy of the psychologically challenged then PM, Gordon Brown. This team was planning sexual smears and worst against opposition figures and their spouses.

    Outed by bloggers, McBride had to go. Here's what (the psychologically challenged PN, Brown - McBride's boss) said.

    "I take full responsibility for what happened, and have sacked the person responsible"

    A little self awareness goes a long way...

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  13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USG_gjaEYak


    Hitler's health insurance is cancelled


    Daniel,

    I made the above parody video not knowing German or having watched this movie with English subtitles. Earlier today I found myself curious what the Hitler character was saying, so I watched. He is informed that his defenses have collapsed, and that the counter attack he ordered was not carried out by his Generals.

    He then goes on to attack his generals demeaning them for their failure to carry out his brilliant plan and questioning their competency.

    The failure was in the implementation!

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  14. Shlomo ben Shmuel11/11/13

    Hussein Obama is an excellent example of the greatness of American democracy. He is clear proof that even an idiot is capable of becomming president.

    ReplyDelete
  15. He apologized for nothing. His precise words were that it was unfortunate that Americans misunderstood the complexities and subtleties of Obamacare and that what they lost was nothing more than what should have been lost. He essentially non-apologized that his administration failed to convey its own brilliance.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Yep, Oblabla is appallingly obtuse.

    Congrats, Daniel. http://directorblue.blogspot.ca/2013/11/the-top-150-conservative-websites.html

    ReplyDelete
  17. Anonymous12/11/13

    Someone worked long and hard on that "apology" in order to make it a non-apology. He is a coward of the first order and he has the gall to go around crowing about how he likes to kill using drones. What a clown. If Barry was really interested and truly a better speechwriter than his writers, he would compose a real apology based on some simple rules. I reference this link:
    http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/08/23/how-to-apologize-like-a-man/

    Anonymous - I disagree with your assessment that the Japanese are the last people to believe that people are responsible for their own actions. The Japanese have never apologized for what they did in WWII. At least the Germans did. I reference the book "The Forgotten Highlander" by Alistair Urquhart.

    Also, I have never understood how so many came to believe that Barry is so damn smart. I can speak circles around him, extemporaneously and teleprompter-free. I have know so many people in business and technology, black, white, or any other color who put this guy to shame, so I guess it goes to show what a bunch of idiots most of the voting public are who put this guy in office. That is the real downfall of America. The lies started in the education system many decades ago.

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  18. stephanie eyre12/11/13

    Very.true.and may I say eloquently put Susan long but worth the read

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  19. I see no point in making distinctions between "left" and "right", Democrat and Republican. They are all rulers.

    BTW remember how Janet Reno took "responsibility" for the murdered Branch Davidians? Another meaningless exercise.

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  20. Anonymous12/11/13

    funny - libs all think believing in God and heaven is foolish, but believing in utopia here on earth only shows what thoughtful intelligent person you really are.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Anonymous14/11/13

    "I see no point in making distinctions between "left" and "right", Democrat and Republican. They are all rulers."

    Are you able to make a distinction between 'Left' and 'non-Left'?

    Mike James

    ReplyDelete
  22. Earlybird16/11/13

    A relevant quote from Thomas Stowell:

    "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

    ReplyDelete
  23. Anonymous19/11/13

    "Nobody is as anti American as the Quebecois."

    French-France-Europe so it makes sense:(

    Keliata



    ReplyDelete
  24. nightspore7/12/13

    This is the way the Left ends,
    First a crash then a simper

    ReplyDelete

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