The Left’s principia mathematica can be summed up thusly: reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. For these radicals, there’s simply no other way to achieve their utopian vision of universal equality. It’s much easier to hold people back, to drag people down, than to set the bar higher and compel everyone to reach that elevated level. Too much energy would need to be expended to overcome the gravity of reality. Of course, the unstated truth is even the leftists don’t really believe in a society where everyone is perfectly equal and everything is “fair”. There must always be the vanguard, the elites who engineer this ambitious project and who exempt themselves from their social reductionism. The proletarians were consigned to Stalin-era tenements and long bread lines but the Politburo members enjoyed their caviar while vacationing in their dachas.

This was always to be a protracted enterprise. But the leftists have made a good start. They work obsessively and relentlessly to “dumb down” America’s culture, from “values-based” education to revisionist history to multi-culturalism and its fatuous cousin, moral equivalency, to the coarsening—and neutering—of language to “sound bite” news coverage to the State-sponsored and funded “arts” to the trivialization and debasement of entertainment. Even the idea of sports competition, once valued as something good, has been reduced in our schools to the farcical notion that neither team should win because, after all, that wouldn’t be “fair” to the losing—oops, poor choice of words—the other side. And the Juvenile currently occupying the Oval Office has adopted this same puerile thinking—hence, His aversion to using, in the context of foreign policy, the term “victory”. It might damage the bad guys’ self-esteem. Pursuing victory is too close to gloating, I guess.

This perverse moral malaise, however, does not stop at America’s borders. No, it must be exported. The unique, the exceptional, in any form, will always be offensive to leftists because such categories contradict their radical egalitarianism. And so this is why our president is always taking to the world stage to, at every opportunity, denigrate the country He was elected to represent, reminding the rest of the world that the United States is just another nation with no particular moral standing. So, no, it just won’t do to have an America that stands alone as that “shining city on a hill”. We must forget that America has, since the end of World War II, remained the sole Western nation solidly committed to market economics with its attendant freedoms—and unprecedented prosperity—while the Europeans gravitated to social democracies characterized by varying degrees of statism, social and economic stagnation, moral vacuity and the erosion of personal freedoms. Yet, according to Obama, it’s time we drop our airs of superiority along with our yearning for freedom and join our friends on the Continent (even though many of those countries are now beginning to realize the bankruptcy of their own regimented social systems). After all, it’s only “fair”.

Despite claims to the contrary, our health care system is the best in the world. It is exceptional. There certainly are problems that need to be addressed but the system is “hopelessly broken” only because Rahm Emanuel, salivating for another “crisis” to energize his dialectic, deems it so. It turns out the radical Democrats not only want to redistribute the wealth. With ObamaCare, they also plan to redistribute the misery—just to be “fair”. And those EU healthcare systems the liberals love so much? These social democracies are only able to afford their universal health care systems—and then, just barely—because they don’t have to commit large appropriations to their own defense. They’ve let the United States with its exceptional military might take care of that for them for the past six decades. Thank you very much.

But, unfortunately for them—and us—there can no longer be a lone Super Power in Obama’s World—and, yes, it’s His world now. Such lofty status is anathema to Barry’s New World Order. To the relief and joy of the rest of the world, The Messiah has finally come. He’s not, however, the Great Unifier, as advertised. No, He’s the Great Leveler. He’s The Messiah, but an impotent One, Who hasn’t a clue how to lift the masses out of abject poverty; so He’s left with only one option, to emasculate the vitality of prospering nations. (How will the poor be helped when everybody ends up poor?) He’s the Zany Zen Master who speaks in riddles, dispensing nuggets of wisdom like, “If you can’t bring the impoverished, disenfranchised Third World to the “mountain” of Western Civilization, then you must bring that mountain down, leveling it, to the flatlands of a shared mediocrity and misery”. Whatever.

Most folks are familiar with Jesus Loves The Little Children, the classic sing-along hymn tailored for the kiddies’ set. Here's the well-know refrain:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

A new Obama “hymn” has surfaced on YouTube (yet again). Frankly, there are so many of these musical paeans to The One out there, they’re popping up in cyberspace like so many crazed prairie dogs on meth. This particular one debuted at a grade school somewhere in New Jersey. It’s not just a little ditty. It’s almost epic. But one stanza jumped out and clobbered me:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mmm!

Let’s set aside the troubling aspect of this smacking of a blatant attempt to brainwash our impressionable little ones. Or that, curiously, this lovely little chant doesn’t seem to violate the Left’s sacrosanct—and largely fictional, distorted—principle of “separation of church and state”; at least, one could thus conclude since, in this instance, the ACLU is AWOL. We can argue the issue of church and state, but it seems to me Eric Holder should at least be prosecuting somebody for copyright infringement.

What interests me is that while Jesus sees all children—and, by inference, all people—as precious, a perception born out of deep abiding Love, today’s ersatz Messiah sees everybody as equal. Equality is, evidently, the Highest Good, trumping even Love.

Of course, Jesus, too, is color-blind. In his sight, red and yellow, black and white—all are equal. But Jesus recognizes an organic equality. All humans share the metaphysical distinction of being molded in the very “image” of God, all are inherently stamped with a Holy Imprimatur which sanctions human beings to be pale expressions of—and imperfect reflections of—The Divine’s attributes. So our common humanity and intrinsic equality is ontological, rooted in our very bed-rock nature.

But Barack Obama has something else in mind. Despite empirical evidence to the contrary, He champions a pure moral equivalence in the name of “diversity”. He believes in an experiential, worldly equality that must be finessed and compelled and which wars against human freedom, the expression of which can never be homogenous. In truth, such immanent equality can only perfectly exist in the abstract.

This reveals one of many contradictions in leftist thinking. Liberals believe that Man is perfectible through evolution and by humanist enterprise yet deny any real inherent value to human life. This attitude is manifested in the Left’s addiction to abortion, its penchant for euthanasia in some form or another, its promotion of perverse, dehumanized culture devoid of transcendent meaning and by its conviction that Homo sapiens have no more intrinsic value than a titmouse. Radical ideology, lofty rhetoric and idealism notwithstanding, has no genuine love for people; human beings are inevitably seen as expendable (to wit, the mass slaughters of the last century).

Jesus declared, “the poor you will always have with you.” But isn’t this a tacit admission that perfect plenary equality in a free-will Universe is an impossibility? It’s one thing to strive to promote and effect equality by removing impediments to opportunities for all; it’s another to impose it through artifice at the expense of freedom.

That’s the difference between Jesus and the Latter-Day Messiah we happen to be stuck with. Jesus of Nazareth loves each of us and has ordained our moral freedom to make our way in this world and to make the most of our lives (with inevitable mixed results). Barry of Hyde Park loves Himself but promises us the illusion that we’re all equal—or will be—He’s still working on it.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think I’ll stick with Jesus Loves The Little Children.

Historically, excluding the obligatory State of the Union speech, a president summoning a joint session of Congress has been a relatively rare occurrence and generally presupposes some momentous crisis or the fact that the nation finds itself at some historic crossroad. It was appropriate for George W. Bush to address the Congress and the American people in the aftermath of the devastating attacks of September 11^th, 2001. Our country’s future was uncertain and its economic vitality threatened. And it was not entirely inappropriate for President Obama to address a joint session of Congress this past February as the world economy teetered on the brink of the abyss. I disagreed with His approach, the bloated and dubious Stimulus Plan, to meeting this crisis head-on. But it was a crisis.

Now our president has decided to, again, call for a joint session of Congress. This time the “crisis” is health care. This is simply fear-mongering, a tenant of the Left whose entire agenda is underpinned by a need for chaos and crisis to effect change. Go back through the annals of radicalism’s history and the concept “out of chaos, order” is there. It’s in the New Left’s Port Huron Statement and it’s in Alinsky’s writings. Its more contemporary expression can be found in Rahm Emanuel who famously remarked that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The Democrats, true to form, have consistently been chronic whiners hysterically inflating every conceivable social ill into a full-blown “crisis”. What a humorless, morose lot.

The only genuine crisis that compels Obama to address the Congress this time is His own, both political and personal. His popularity is flagging, His credibility—not that He ever had much—is eroding and He’s lost control of the debate over the defining centerpiece of His domestic agenda. The clock’s ticking and it’s time for that Hail Mary pass. As usual, this is all about Barry, juvenile narcissist. (During His much awaited—and disingenuous—speech to the young’uns, our Obamacentric president referred to himself with words like “I”, “me” or “mine” no less than 56 times.) ObamaCare has never been about health or caring. It’s about an intrusive and bullying government hijacking a significant and strategic chunk of the private sector. It’s about manufacturing Obama’s synthetic legacy as a “great” president. And it’s about securing Obama’s place forever in the pantheon of radical luminaries who’ve all worked tirelessly to actualize Marx’s utopian dream.

Anticipating His prime-time address to the Congress, the silver-tongued snake oil huckster is hoping—gambling, really—that He’s got His mojo back. If He doesn’t—if it’s just another long-winded boiler plate speech—the Democrats will have a real crisis on their hands.

Maybe there’s something to be said for decadence. The same pop culture that created and, to some degree, still sustains Obama’s cult of personality may, in the end, turn out to be His public relations Waterloo (to borrow a phrase from Senator Demint). Thank God—the real one, that is—for all those insipid Americans that suffer from an attention span so short it sometimes needs to be measured in nanoseconds.

Obama continues to play to His strength: His much-vaunted, “extraordinary” ability to make great speeches that stir the soul of America, eloquent calls to action to effect the Change We’ve All Been Waiting For (whatever that means). We’ve discovered, though, there’s a caveat. Without David Axelrod’s speechwriting, the ever-present teleprompter and the networks’ stellar production values, Barry can often be underwhelming, at times even giving W a run for his money in the sputtering, stumbling and bumbling department.

So, while there’s a calculated risk, they keep putting Barack out there for mass consumption. He’s everywhere. He must hold the record for the most times a president’s mug has graced magazine covers. CNN and MSNBC have entire wings in their retail shops devoted to nothing but Obamabilia. In just the first few months of His tenure, our young, charismatic president has held more prime-time press conferences than you can shake a stick at—and much to the annoyance of American Idol fans. And now, in unprecedented Orwellian fashion, President Maximus plans to address all our school children at one time in one big coast-to-coast general assembly, filling their little skulls full of mush with who knows what palatable bromides. Obama will also be throwing a Hail Marry to save the languishing health care reform initiative by addressing a joint session of Congress during prime-time. This will be the second “state of the union” speech He’s given before actually giving the real State Of The Union in January.

One gets the impression The First Egoist loves to hear Himself talk. Frankly, I’ve grown weary of His melodious yet droning meter. (Rush Limbaugh came up with a palliative for this by cycling Obama’s audio clips at a higher rate, thereby rendering an Alvin The Chipmunk effect—it helps.) Especially irksome is Obama’s robot-like, well-timed turns to the left followed, with the precision of a fine Swiss watch, turns to the right. When He’s addressing an audience He’s like a zombie watching slow-motion ping-pong. He’s become predictable. The pixie dust has finally begun to settle and the magic has gone out of His glorious speech which sounds more and more programmed and inauthentic. And Barry’s propensity to tell whoppers while earnestly pleading His case hasn’t helped. He’s developed a nasty credibility problem.

Barack Hussein Obama, deep-thinker, profound intellect, brilliant Man of vision, has embarrassingly committed a pop culture faux pas: He’s allowed Himself to become oversaturated. And, in the Video Age, where titillation and instant gratification are paramount, where tweeting the latest meme or craze is the norm, that’s a no-no. Morally vacuous Americans, especially young people, have little appreciation for transcendent, enduring values. Instead they love fads—and celebrities. Obama is both. That’s why so many of the shallow, unthinking and gullible jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Rather than being embarrassed by the adoration, Obama has promoted it. Remember, He wrote two autobiographies before He ever accomplished anything of note.

But the problem is fads and celebs are transient, like quarks constantly bubbling up from the Quantum Field only to instantly disappear, being absorbed back into the subatomic soup of endless possibilities. Okay, Obama has shown more staying power than that; but this shooting star is gradually burning out as the plummeting poll figures reveal. Thankfully, there’s a natural limit to America’s stupidity. So come on America, it’s about time to redirect your worship to the latest Britney Spears or Zack Efron.

People watch the Super Bowl as much for the clever, innovative ad campaigns that are debuted as for the football contest itself. Yet a few months later those same viewers will tune out those same ads which have become commonplace, having lost their novelty and luster. Obama’s brand has been over-sold. The Obama cult of personality is just another bubble which the laws of physics dictate must burst sooner or later.

While there is much to critique about American pop culture, the irony is this: pop culture’s Zeitgeist of superficiality which propelled Obama to superhuman heights, coupled with the ennui of that same fickle culture, may just, in the end, save the Union from this ubiquitous, ambitious and dangerous Wizard of O.