Monday, March 27, 2017

Trump vs. Obama, by Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield runs a site called the Sultan of Knish. Greenfield writes everything over there at Sultan of Knish. This article, Trump vs Obama, is the third article down from the top presently. If you search "Trump vs Obama" you'll see the article cited all over the place. So it's a well-circulated piece, while from my point of view Sultan of Knish is what happens when you rifle the blog rolls of sites that you got from rifling previous blog rolls. I forget how I got there, it's a couple of blog rolls removed from the original blog roll rifling.

Greenfield begins his essay, "Obama is a coward."

Bang! Right off the bat we're given the thesis. It's the kind of opening that occurs at the end, after the whole thing is written, and you go, "Okay, what do I have here?"

But even with that strong a signal, a shot sent off immediately, there's still a chance the writer is disinterested and apolitical. It could happen.
Trump will call someone a name while Obama will anonymously source a smear through three levels of staffers, political allies and reporters. Trump called CNN “Fake News” on camera. Obama sourced Operation Rushbo, targeting Rush Limbaugh, through a variety of White House people and left-wing allies. Trump will boot reporters he doesn’t like. Obama authorized secretly hacking the emails of a FOX News reporter. Trump had an openly hostile conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. When Obama wanted to call Netanyahu “chickens__t”, he did it by having one of his people anonymously plant it with a reliable media sycophant, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before later having a spokesman disavow it.
Greenfield says that Obama launches dirty attacks carful not to get his hands dirty. Instead Obama prefers using the bureaucracy and that allows him to protect his popularity. His team considers their dishonesty to be their superpower.  They even brag about it as Ben Rhodes did. Obama pretends decency while preparing to undermine Trump however possible legally and illegally. Greenfield says that Trump's killer instinct lies in understanding hypocrisy conceals weakness and his instinct is to grapple directly with a target. This is a source of his popularity. While Obama's popularity is hollow. Likable only because he is too cowardly to say what he really thinks.

When Trump is attacked his response is to go directly for the attacker. That's what he did by calling out Obama's eavesdropping. Obama situated layers of insulation between himself and involvement in the attack, the media, the staffers who gave information to media and government loyalists who provided information to staffers. Trump made a mockery of Obama's bravado.

There's much more to like and to agree with in the article.  Greenfield insists that Obama is obsessed with being liked while Trump doesn't care, preferring instead to grapple directly with opponents, rivals, and enemies. Trump won the election by forcing opponent after opponent to either fight him on his own terms or back away. Including all media. The Obama machine, a massive propaganda matrix that alternates between lying and gaslighting, is not built to handle Trump. And Obama isn't built to handle Trump either.

As Greenfield continues describing Trump's style and Obama's traps and chaos creation and fake scandal creation, and the administrative disruptions intended to have Trump lunging from scandal to scandal, and Obama's use of proxies while avoiding direct conflict with Trump, and as Greenfield cites Mike Tyson, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" and then says flatly that Obama had a plan and Trump punched him in the mouth, I found myself thinking, yes, we know that already. We know all that already, along with torrents of other straight knowns that we accept as facts. But we didn't isolate them and collect them together like this for these specific conclusions and for this stark comparison in personal styles, to say at the beginning what is concluded throughout, Obama is a coward and comparison with Trump is stark.

Greenfield concludes, "The battle for America has only just begun."

Who is this guy, Greenfield, who says all these things that we think?

Greenfield's "About Me" page.

Finally my writing philosophy can be gathered from the following quote:

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." George Orwell

Well, there you go. Read the whole thing, you'll enjoy it.

9 comments:

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

I was not familiar with this quote. It rings true.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Thanks Chip. I added him to my blogroll. I also liked his other recent articles.

edutcher said...

I've said for years Pissy is a punk, only tough when he has a gang around him. and I've always used the example of Benjamin Netanyahu eating Little Zero's lunch on national TV infront of the global press.

Greenfield is one of the best writers in the blogosphere. Much more verbose than, say, Surber, but they're in the same league in terms of perspicacity and, it's nice to see, on the same page.

ndspinelli said...

I have been saying for years, Obama is a girly man. He was raised w/o a father and fights like a woman.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

The left have turned corruption into a grand money-grubbing art.

ricpic said...

It hardly matters whether Obama is or is not a coward. From the very start there was a gentleman's agreement not to seriously take the first black president to task for any action he took. Fast & Furious; Benghazi; the blatantly unconstitutional changes made to Obamacare after it was a law; the use of the IRS as a weapon; instigating race riots. Just for starters. With nary a consequence. And he knew there would be no consequences. Lawless from first day to last day eight years later. Because he knew he was untouchable. So who were the real cowards?

Methadras said...

Obama is really the first testosteroneless president. He's a male in name only. I think his wife has enough for the both of them.

Amartel said...

If Clinton was the first black president, does that make Obama was the first female president?
No wonder few people outside the die-hards felt the need to elect another one. Or maybe the first gay president - even and despite his initial express resistance to gay marriage he somehow overcame and evolved and magicked us up some gay marriage. Well, the Supreme Court did anyway. On his watch! And he made them light up the White House in the rainbow colors. So, gay.
Except that's insulting to half the population, a very sizeable minority of whom voted for Trump and don't need the stinkin' gummint and its functionaries in the press to protect them.

Chip Ahoy said...

Great point, ricpic.

A commenter over there said, "Now with your first picture you publish photographic evidence of Trump actually grabbing a pussy." They did no such thing. I scroll back to the top to see, I suppose everyone does, and It's Trump with his Sasquatch hands grabbing Obama's much smaller much thinner, delicate piano-playing lady hands. Ha ha. Very funny. And I realized that nobody mentions that. Here is a direct comparison, one hand over the other, that belies the joke about Trump's hands and exposes the protected embarrassing truth about Obama's hands.