The Tao of Obama

In the week that the stock market ignored the prospect of the sequester but fell out of bed at the hint that the Fed might stop printing money, let us meditate on the Dao of Obama.

Dao, or Tao, means The Way, the unthought, unplanned Way of the person that is beyond being nice, beyond doing the right thing, beyond doing the just thing.  It is just The Way.

So let us run the Dao Chapter 38 in review.

The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.

It is easy to think of President George W. Bush as a man that always sought to do good.  Maybe he never become goodness, but he certainly tried.  But Obama?

The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.

Boy, doesn't that tell it like it is about Obama and the administrative welfare state.

The kind person acts from the heart,
and accomplishes a multitude of things.
The righteous person acts out of pity,
yet leaves many things undone.

The one thing we know about President Obama is that he always acts out of strategy.  After all, that's what "fundamental transformation" is all about, making, molding, forcing America into a different social, economic and political pattern.  Because of the superior righteousness of the progressive program.

The upshot to all this is the great peroration in Dao 38.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

In the Tao of Obama, what is there other than the Tao of community activism, the instinctive practice of Alinskyism, the manipulation of the rage of the mob?

And notice what is implied with the idea that, when justice is lost, there is ritual.  It means that people are reduced to enacting the old forms without any faith that they will achieve anything.

In fact we are talking about people mumbling the old forms as the great tidal wave of force, of power lying in the street and taken up by young men with guns, gathers strength and sweeps over them, engulfing and destroying everything and everyone with its blind and heedless power.

In these times, when the old Tao of the American Way is lost, we hope for goodness.  But goodness, in the Chicago Way of the Obamis is lost, and so we hope for kindness.  But kindness does not apply to a ruling class that believes in hitting back twice as hard.  And so we hope for justice.

Justice? What hope of that when the supporters of the president get to cop all kinds of special carveouts and privileges?  When the insider rich get new privileges in the same bill that raised taxes on the rich overall?  So we hope for ritual.

Ritual?  Why in the Obama years we don't even do the budget resolutions and "regular order" appropriations.  In fact, we don't really even do the replacement ritual for regular order appropriations any more, the "continuing resolutions."  Because now we lurch from debt crisis to fiscal cliff to sequester.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

What do you think, America?  

Are we into the beginning of confusion, or right in the middle of it?