A modern day version of Stalin worship.

THOUGHTS FROM THE AMMO LINE

Ammo Grrrl takes a look in the rearview mirror to give us DILETTANTE DEFINED. She writes:

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. … . He knows what a good reader of people he is … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.” 

Last week, my wonderful friend Heather included a longer version of the above Valerie Jarrett quote in a comment. And, since ex-President Obama has reappeared to lecture us disappointing deplorables yet one more time, I thought I would return serve.

The original title I preferred for this piece was “Sociopath Defined.” Almost a textbook definition of a sociopath is a “good reader of people.” A sociopath can be or become anything he or she needs to be to fit the occasion and manipulate others: He was Barack Hussein when bowing nearly prostrate to a Muslim bigshot. In front of an all-black crowd, he sported a lilting, halting Southern Black accent that sounded like a bad combination of William Shatner and Hillary Clinton pretending to be a black poet. He was Proud Slacker Barry Soetoro in the Choom Gang in his elite private school in Hawaii. He could morph seamlessly into the Ivy-educated scholar with the creased pants in a roomful of fawning, awestruck white journalists with Tingly Leg Disorder.

If he’s so freaking smart, Valerie, where are his grades? His transcripts? His SAT scores? Still locked in a vault inside a crypt with Jimmy Hoffa. Why? Not a single one of the trolls who wander our Comments Section will tell me why. I know why. It is because those transcripts show he applied to college as a “foreign-born” student from Kenya. Oh, never fear, I believe he was born in Hawaii. He was the original “birther.” He lied to get another leg up in case just being black might not be enough, and he never thought it would come back to bite him. Am I wrong? Prove it. Release the records. What’s he hiding? W’s grades are out there – he was a “C” student who admits he was mostly partying. Nobody cared.

Being “bored to death” is NOT evidence of superior intelligence after, say, the third grade. Life is endlessly fascinating. Do you think that Victor Davis Hanson or Dr. Thomas Sowell has ever been bored? The list of things Barry knows absolutely nothing about is staggering. Hell, my “wicked-smaht” husband has taught himself both Hebrew and Spanish in his adult lifetime. He also studied Latin and Russian in school. Obama speaks no second language; he can’t even say “The black cat is in the tree” in Spanish. And has freely confessed he doesn’t speak a word of “Austrian.”

Can Obama fix a car? Round up cattle? Does he play a musical instrument? Does he know anything about American History other than the one PC diatribe he memorized where everything American is racist, sexist, imperialist and terrible? Did we even learn of any passion or hobby like model railroading or stamp collecting or gun collecting (Gaia forbid!)? He is clearly bored not because he is so smart. He is bored with anything or anyone that is NOT HIM.

But, perhaps my favorite forehead-smacking sentence in Valerie’s Stalinoid effusion is that “He’s just too talented to do what ‘ordinary’ people do.” Like work, I guess. The arrogance on parade there is cringeworthy. Okay, his Rasputin (Rasputina?) said it about him; he didn’t say it. But his every word, thought and gesture in eight years showed me he sure as heck believed it.

Not to mention that he did tell us he was a better writer than his writers, a better everything than any one of his staff, ad nauseam. Lordy! Again, it’s one of those things that, even if you think it, bereft of evidence, why would you say it aloud? 

But the most obnoxious part of that thought was the notion that there are “ordinary” people. You know, the ones that know a lot of stuff about mining and manufacturing and engineering and running a restaurant. The ones who raise your precious arugula and beef cattle and enlist in the Armed Forces so you don’t have to. They go to work every day and pay taxes and start small businesses only to be taxed and regulated until they cry “Uncle” and then are told that “They didn’t build that.”

The older I get, the more I realize that almost nobody is “ordinary,” with the possible exception of the elite who believe they are So Very Special. People are surprising and delightful with interests and talents and knowledge that is a collective priceless resource for America in the aggregate. I play poker every Tuesday with a veteran who knows every single thing there is to know about every single firearm. I have known several brilliant farmers, one an organic farmer from way back when I was a kid, notwithstanding that I hated eating at their house because the food was so weird. Brown bread, seemingly full of twigs and bark? How is THAT going to “build strong bodies 12 ways” like my Wonder Bread, hmmm? If Agriculture were up to me (or Obama), we would all last until our current groceries ran out. Some “ordinary.”

Several years ago in St. Paul on a lake three miles from my house, the Building Trades volunteered to build an Ice Castle on the frozen lake. It was huge and lit up at night. You could walk in it! Not at all ordinary. Yesterday I drove about an hour each way to have a guy fix my husband’s speaker that connects to his keyboard. We couldn’t fix that. Well, probably if he had had time, Mr. AG could have eventually fixed it with a YouTube video and a lot of swearing. But I would have had to just stare at it like a cat staring at a red laser dot, hoping for some kind of miracle like last year’s Cubs win or Hillary’s defeat.

I am just scratching the surface, of course, of the incredible talents of our extraordinary fellow Americans. In addition to their gainful employment skills, you find out that people you never suspected are painters and photographers, singers and dancers. My produce guy is also an actor. Not to go all kumbaya on you here, but America really does possess a wealth of talent and a communal knowledge base probably unequaled in human history. As Venezuela should prove once and for all – as if humanity did not have to learn this lesson anew amid great pain every few years – socialism will destroy a nation’s material wealth in a heartbeat. 

But intellectual wealth can be squandered and disappear too. And it will, unless we stop criminalizing free speech and independent inquiry, and wiping out our history. The 40-year obsession with identity politics and skin-deep “diversity” is a form of slow national suicide by a thousand tiny cuts.