Desolve the People

For John, BLUF:  Governments sometimes forget that the People are sovereign.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Obama – Just Too Good for Us

From The Old Gray Lady, by Columnist Maureen Dowd, 2 June 2018.

The beginning of last week's column:

It was a moment of peak Spock.

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes:  “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare:  “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

As president, Obama always found us wanting.  We were constantly disappointing him.  He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book,  “The World as It Is,” Obama asked his aides, “What if we were wrong?”

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was:  What if we were wrong in being so right?  What if we were too good for these people?

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued.  “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought.  He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.

Which reminds me of East German Poet and Playwright Bertolt Brecht and his poem, after the 1953 East German uprising, The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.  Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff