Backlash

Victor Davis Hanson articulates conservative (or more broadly, non-leftist) frustration and outrage at Obama's Pajama Boy Nation.

Pajama Boy is the bookend to vero possumus, the faux-Greek columns, the Obama rainbow logo, cooling the planet and lowering the seas, hope and change, Forward!, “Yes, we can!”, the Nate Silver infatuation, Barbara Walters' "Messiah", David Brooks’ crease, Chris Matthews’ tingle, and the army of Silicon techies who can mobilize for Obama but not for Obamacare.

If I were to focus on just two of the many characteristics of Pajama Boy nation in the Age of Obama, one would be that the consequences of one’s ideology apply always to someone else. Obama obsesses on inequality, but cannot even go through the populist motions of avoiding Martha’s Vineyard, or not dressing like a nerd for golf at the latest tony course.
He is an arugula-eating man of the people who tries to bowl only during election season. Michelle rags on the 1%, but still hits Costa del Sol and Aspen. Obamacare for us; for congressional staffers and insiders something quite different. A Nobel Prize and a half a billion dollars for guru Al Gore; and dumping Current TV on a fossil-fuelled, anti-Semitic, authoritarian Middle Eastern regime to fund more good work of our green Elmer Gantry. Amnesty for illegal aliens, but private academies for liberal kids far from the ensuing chaos of the public schools.  Pajama Boys are fiercely liberal so that they can fiercely avoid the people they so champion and are so afraid to live among.

Second, the architects of Pajama Boy nation always expect others to go on despite rather than because of them. The frackers must frack so that Obama can brag about their productivity, while he bites his lip and looks pained to billionaire coastal benefactors about pumping liquid into the bowels of their Mother Earth.
On Friday, Barack Obama was back out to again brag about his three supposed accomplishments: One, the deficit is shrinking; two, the gas and oil picture is brightening; and three, we are not witnessing anymore shut-downs of government over the debt ceiling. He should have added — “We do best when no one listens to me.”
Savings accrued from the sequester that was forced upon Obama by those Tea Party nuts in the House. Gas prices are dropping despite the efforts of Obama to stop fracking and horizontal drilling on federal lands.  Senator Obama himself voted to shut down the government under George W. Bush, rather than to raise the debt ceiling — having once passionately adopted the very stance that he now demonizes others for.

Half the country may have already tuned Pajama Boy nation out. Millions more or less don’t watch TV other than older movies and a few episodes of some serial like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. Most expect just three things of today’s Hollywood celebrities: they are mostly spoiled and uneducated; they are very rich; and in their boredom they will find a way to annoy those without their money.
We also find the grating nasal-twanged voices of our young talking heads on the news shows a tip-off that all their over-clever rhetoric is never grounded in reality. We have no idea whom MTV is awarding, or why, and couldn’t care less. We are sick of slick slightly pornographic commercials, and sicker still of the crude left-wing Victorians who push sex down our throats, but can’t handle a caricatured hick talking just as graphically as they do — but about sodomy in a way they don’t appreciate. Which is the cruder: to see a three-quarters naked Miley Cyrus on national television stick a huge foam finger toward the anus of one of her performers or to read that a bearded reality star in overalls finds vaginal sex preferable to anal sex — and then tells us why?
Most don’t watch Oprah. Rap is a sort of occasional bothersome grate overheard at the service station or parking lot. No one goes to the movies to watch another tired Hollywood script of a courageous liberal maverick who fights the cancer-causing, stream-polluting, CIA-intriguing [fill in the blanks] corporation — as the actor is paid millions by the corporation producing the movie for his few hours of mediocre work. Company men and women don’t play renegades well anymore.

There is a growing tiredness with Pajama Boy nation. Millions are sick of being lectured, caricatured, and slandered for their supposed pathologies by the Sandra Flukes of the age and those in their pajamas who still grasp with two hands their hot chocolate. Add all their annoying Stalinist efforts up — to selectively going after Chick-fil-A or the Washington Redskins or Duck Dynasty — and the public is becoming tired of the shrill nerdocracy.
How many are revolting against Pajama Boy nation and his bunch, no one quite knows. But I’m beginning to think for the first time since 2009 that the rage and numbers of the disengaged have not crested yet, not quite yet.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/pajama-boy-nation/?singlepage=true

Kevin Williamson again thinking and writing brilliantly, explains the chaotic insanity of Obama's ACA revisions. A case of political ambition and arrogance trampling free market efficiency and humanity.

The belief that markets are cold and inhumane is one of the great errors of our time, and it leads to a great deal of public stupidity, from British unionist Len McCluskey’s declaration that “there are some things too important to be left to the market” to endless Democratic demands that we put “people over profits.” Mitt Romney was mocked for maintaining that “corporations are people,” but that mockery is only one more piece of evidence that Mr. Romney is a good deal more intelligent than his critics: Of course corporations are people. That is what the word “corporation” means — a group of people acting as one body (corpus) toward some shared end. “Corporation” assumes “people” the way “hive” assumes “bees.” Profits accrue to people. Scratch an evil corporation and a retired teacher bleeds: Government pension and benefits funds such as CalPERS are among the largest shareholders in the United States, and the world. Two-thirds of Chevron shares are held by mutual funds, which are in turn held by what Mr. Romney recognizes, seemingly alone, as people.

...When somebody says that a market is not rational, what he really means is that people are making choices other than the ones he would make for them. It is not irrational that the market for reality television programming is many, many times the size of the market for productions of Shakespeare plays — people prefer Duck Dynasty. If the purpose of an economy is to help people get what they want, then the economics of reality television are not irrational. They’re only irrational if you believe that the purpose of an economy is to help people get what you think they should want.

...Those who deplore the element of self-interest in free markets reliably forget the fact that politicians have self-interest, too, meaning that the alternative to having millions or billions of people individually pursuing their self-interest in a free and voluntary fashion is to have a few hundred people — or, in the case of the health-care law, one man — pursue their own self-interest with the force of law at their disposal.

Williamson quotes Hillary Clinton early in the article paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, “The market knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

That Clinton believes that is conclusive proof that she should not be allowed anywhere near a position wielding policy making power.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366951/our-self-interested-president-kevin-d-williamson/page/0/1

And I was right about Mark Steyn, (previous post), though he discusses Pajama Boy in conjunction with the ado over Duck Dynasty.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366896/age-intolerance-mark-steyn