Obama: Hey, In Lieu of Accepting Birthday or Wedding Gifts, Why Don't You Instruct Your Family To Donate to My Re-Election Campaign?

Shocking? Only if you haven't been paying attention.

Instapundit points to some fun people had on Twitter, suggesting further Obama Gift Registry Slogan ideas.

This is weird, right? The creepy emails pretending the Obama's are your bosom pals who desperately want to have dinner with you, the newest one suggesting Obama is essentially your husband... It's a very weird and very Stalinist conception of the president not as a worker you hire (and, sometimes, fire) but as a member of your family -- the most important member of your family, of course.

Meanwhile, another bit of similar creepiness -- ads have been on blogs (including this one!) noting that it's Elizabeth Warren's birthday, and won't you sign her birthday card?

Why would I do that? Why would a supporter do that? We don't know her. When did Elizabeth Warren join the family?

The GOP had some fun with this. They sent her a paid account with Ancestry.com, so she can find some documentation for her "family lore" about her sometimes on sometimes off Cherokee background.

This strikes me as similar to stalking. Stalkers believe they have a personal connection with people they often haven't even met. There's a strange hallucination of some deep relationship with the target.

In this case, the "targets" are actively encouraging such a false belief, and the attention they seek is a positive one, rather than the typical stalker's negative one. ( Though most stalkers do start out sounding rather positive, too. It's only when their targets fail to respond that they become menacing.)

This just seems very weird to me, and worth some kind of sociological study. What sorts of lonely people are being targeted here, to imagine they have some kind of personal, nearly familial connection with politicians they've never met?

And-- is it fair to target the sort of people who'd actually fall for this? It's like a steeply progressive tax on desperation for human contact.

I suppose the targets here are the Bitter Enders, those who really believed Obama was a Lightworker, an actually religious figure, and so in a real way their fortunes (and the world's, and all the souls on earth) are tied to Obama.

As Obama's political career comes to a painful end, I find old angers being replaced by pity. Pity for this man, whose legacy will be of catastrophic failure, and pity for those who sought something like the transcendence afforded by God Himself, and thought they would find it by voting for a shifty Chicago politician.

Thanks to Dr. Spank.

"God is dead." -- Friedrich Nietsche, 1882

"Mitt Romney has won Wisconsin." -- CNN, election night, November 7, 2012

Many people are naturally religious. They have an attraction for the supernatural (or supernal) and religious transcendence.

The thing is, this is true even of many people who describe themselves as non-religious or barely religious or even atheist. They still have the urge for some kind of Great Cosmic Transcendental Experience; they just neglect the general satisfaction for that urge (God, conventional religion).

This urge doesn't go away; it just gets redirected towards something... absurd.

Obama is absurd. This cult is absurd. People believing that their lives will somehow be better if a Stuttering Cluster***k of a Miserable Failure gets re-elected is absurd.

It's all absurd.

Lies often prevail, but the absurd never does.

posted by Ace at 07:30 PM

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