While Michelle Obama was spinning yarns with half-truths to adoring idiots in tears and roaring approval at the Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party spent last week trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist. Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus told me that, "this race is going to come down to some fundamental things: Are people better off today than they were four years ago and did the president fulfill the mission of his presidency? Forget the bullshit excuses and the whinnying that 'I need more time to fix the mess George Bush handed to me.'" He also added, "People are forgiving and generally filled with a fair amount of grace when it comes to politicians. However, if you can't point to some of your most basic promises and show that the missions have been completed, I can't imagine how anybody's going to go for four more years of this misery. I guess only if you have shit-for-brains!"Obama's acceptance speech on Thursday conveyed a sort of fantasy-land rendition of where we are in this country -- and it was undone on Friday with the disclosure of the national unemployment rate of 8.1% for August. Only 96,000 jobs were added last month and the overall rate fell from 8.3% in July only because more people stopped looking for work. People who are out of work are counted as unemployed only if they are searching for a job. Priebus elaborates, "What it shows is that the Democrats aren't living on Earth. Only 63.5% of people who are eligible to work are actively looking for work. That's the lowest number in decades. And of that number 8.1% can't find work. Chronic unemployment in America is at a level not seen since the Great Depression. And this is why the president must not be re-elected!"
The next 6o days will no doubt bring out the Democrats and their vile leftist media hacks to couch their rhetoric against Romney and Evans with half-truths and lies. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto reminds us: ''Obama's journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician's actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn't say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: "We don't like black people." It's television manufacturing a virtual reality, which is to say unreality; a dangerous state of affairs.''
Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it's also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. In this fantasy land Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along through peer pressure.There are many people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and are aware of realities that don't go away when the talking heads begin jabbering about the ideals of Big Government. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble. When all the bubbles of rhetoric pop, there are still the hard unpleasant realities to deal with. Welfare handouts, bailouts and big money debts can stay buried in them for so long. Government sending money to banks and swapping worthless commodities can only work as long as people believe in them.
Even an unreal economy reported on by an unrealistic media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream and the fake consensus is over. This is referred to by Professor Glenn Reynolds as the "preference cascade''. He thinks the insanity of the lame-stream media lately is triggered by their sense that a preference cascade is building up in the U.S. which will wash them and their political clients out to sea.
What is a preference cascade? It is a phenomenon that occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. In a totalitarian society, the doubter knows that if he speaks up, his will be the lone voice, easily squashed by the enforcers of the regime. When doubters become dissenters and realize they are not alone and the true strength of their numbers becomes apparent, "invincible'' regimes vanish with astonishing speed.
The Way I See It....the same effect can occur without brutal oppression, when fear of ostracism and ridicule cause people to suppress their own doubts. This kind of preference falsification requires strict discipline from the makers of opinion. Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus, even laced with lies and half-truths, is very fragile in the competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty to switch. Has the media's manufactured consensus begun unraveling and the cascade beginning?
I see signs of it everywhere. There was the 2010 wipeout of the Democrats in Congress and statehouses. There was the massive consumer Chick-fil-A response to the leftist boycott movement, Obama's campaign staff has had a hard time meeting fund raising goals and filling stands for his appearances. Last week -- expecting a crowd to hear his speech at the DNC convention -- they were even resorting to giving tickets to the event away Free in bars. The cascade is coming and should make our "'dear leader" (oh yes, Saint), sweat for the next 60 days when he can then be shown the Exit door.
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