Arrogant Obama


 
Long, long ago, when my father was deeply into Christian spirituality, serving for years as a Methodist minister, he asked his bishop if it would be okay to smoke while he prayed.

The Bishop was firm. Of course not. Prayer should be thought of as a deeply religious expression of faith, a conversation with God. Smoking would be out of place.

My father was considered a bit of a gadfly in the early 1950s. As pastor to a rural conservative church, he preached a sermon against McCarthyism. The Bishop resisted the tsunami of outraged demands that this troublesome preacher be rid of.

A couple of years later, after the outcry diminished, my dad was quietly transferred to a small town. It was there that he objected to a cherished annual event, a minstrel show in blackface.

The outcry became deafening when he preached about it in a sermon entitled:

Know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick.

I think the title was taken from something written by noted liberal crusader Norman Cousins, which wouldn’t have gone over well.

A minister who wanted to smoke during prayer had to be low on the Bishop’s Maslow pyramid. Still, he said no.

Several months later, figuring the Bishop might have forgotten the conversation, my dad tried again. This time, he asked in a slightly different way:

Would it be okay if he prayed while he smoked?

The Bishop seemed surprised by the question. Of course it was okay. Prayer was the universal contact with God. It should be encouraged at any and all times.

I do try to imagine the reaction of this weary Bishop toward the end. Was he relieved when this controversy-hound of a pastor finally asked to be released from the ministry?

I think of my long departed and deeply missed father when I consider some of the rhetorical attacks on President Obama. I am intrigued by the word “arrogant.” Of course, he is not the only politician described that way.

The way, way conservative site PJMedia had it right back in 2015:

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant…

Welcome to the club, Ted.

Pretty much anyone has to be possessed by hubris when running for the top spot. Everyone’s one-time favorite conservative William F. Buckley once ruminated on every candidate’s run for President. He pointed out that it is faintly ridiculous to imagine anyone as President who is not President.

Ed Kilgore once recalled Buckley applying that to Nelson Rockefeller. New York’s governor ran in 1968, under a simple banner, replicated in bumper stickers and yard signs: “Rocky!” with an exclamation point. Kilgore recalls:

At the time William F. Buckley suggested that a mere “Rocky” wasn’t enough to convey the intended excitement of a Rockefeller candidacy, while “Rocky! Ahhhh!” might be a bit much.

I remember Ed Muskie running in 1972. He clearly overplayed it.

President Muskie! (Don’t you feel better already?)

Amused opponents answered it simply: No.

President Muskie was a silly thought because, well, only Presidents can be thought of that way.

In describing Ted Cruz, PJMedia did not stop with their criticism. They also included a President.

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor.

But then they reveal their real feelings about President Reagan – and about Senator Cruz. Reagan was not self-important. He was truly great because he believed he could accomplish great things. He was arrogant in the same sense as another President:

One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism.

See what they did there with Lincoln? Good old Arrogant Abe? Thinking he could wipe out slavery?

They go on to suggest that Ted’s arrogance is not what everyone thinks. It is, in fact, an ambition to do great things on behalf of a grateful humanity. Like, you know, real Presidents.

Our common use of the word “arrogant” is pretty close to the dictionary definition.

An exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.

Pretty much any candidate for the most powerful position in the world can be thought of as arrogant. That is because they are. They can actually think of themselves as President.

President Muskie! (Don’t you feel better already?)

Tee-hee.

Once in office, the importance of a President is hard to exaggerate. His ability needs no amplification. He can actually blow up the world.

Presidents are criticized. That is what a free press and, more important, a free citizenry does. But arrogance is usually not what we think about presidents we don’t like.

Quinnipiac University released a poll. Respondents were asked to describe Donald Trump. The top ten words used were as follows:

  1. idiot
  2. incompetent
  3. liar
  4. leader – – that’s not a bad one
  5. unqualified
  6. president – – that’s obvious
  7. strong – – that’s okay
  8. businessman – – yup
  9. ignorant – – oh well
  10. egotistical

Arrogant was so far down the list you’d have to drill for it. Presidents are not arrogant, but they do get criticized. It’s what we do.

Ron Paul retrospectively criticized President Reagan for spending without taxing:

I remember when Reagan asked us to raise the debt limit by 50 billion dollars in the first year he was in office.

He says “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to raise the debt limit.”

Before he was out of office he had us raise the debt limit five hundred billion dollars.

George Herbert Walker Bush was excoriated for this:

Read my lips! No new taxes!

His son, George W. Bush was criticized on the Iraq invasion by liberals, then increasingly by conservatives like Laura Ingraham:

The mishandling, I would say, the PR on the war, and the actual strategy on the ground during Bush.

And by pretty much everyone on Katrina:

George Bush doesn’t care about black people!

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a Traitor to His Class. Herbert Hoover was hated for the Great Depression and Hoovervilles – the popular name for tent cities that provided thin shelter for the suddenly homeless.

Lots of criticism. Pretty much every President.

But the moment President Obama took office, a new standard was reached. The vitiol began before he had formulated a single program, before he had performed a single action.

Death threats, threats reaching the level of concern for the Secret Service, went up by multiples. Racist signs and chants became the norm in some conservative areas.

There were, of course, adults roaming through conservative hallways. Among more responsible critics, a new word was introduced. The one meaning an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.

Joe Scarborough reacted when President Obama talked about how to change the hearts and minds of those who denigrated those in poverty:

the arrogance

Michelle Malkin disagreed with Obama’s policy in Syria:

He is so flippant and arrogant

Tea party conservative Wayne Allyn Root got personal:

the arrogance and stupidity of Barack Hussein Obama

Nice.

One of the milder of many ham-handed parodies, put out by a now defunct internet group, survives on youtube.com

The most arrogant man in the world.

Knee slapper, there.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, December 6, 2009 (From Obama Photographer Pete Souza via Instagram)
I recall a photograph of the new President in the White House. He leaned back head resting against a wall, listening thoughtfully to Vice President Joe Biden, standing in front of him. A friend showed me the photograph.

So arrogant.

Perhaps it was the slight upward positioning of the chin. How else to rest one’s head against a flat surface? Or maybe it was something more obvious.

In 2009, the new and easy use of that word, arrogant, became of some interest to me. I looked it up. Sure enough, the definition was the same:

An exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities.

I think again of my father when he dwelt among the living as a cigarette smoking Man-of-God.

Can I smoke when I’m praying?
has a different ring than words with identical meaning
Can I pray when I’m smoking?

So how does that work with an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities? The word is relative, a comparison of what he think of himself with what we think of him. And all comparisons can translate to their reverse. I am taller and she is shorter. He is lighter, I am – – okay never mind.

He is arrogant translates to something a little less antiseptic.

He is less than he thinks.
or
He is inferior to his self image.
or even
He is inferior.

When I was a kid, parents occasionally noticed an attitude not fitting our position in the hierarchy of things as they ought to be. “You must think you’re grown” would be the preface to a very precise scolding.

When we heard that scolding applied to adults, we knew the words were demeaning.

Boy, know your place!

Yeah.
Arrogant.


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3 thoughts on “Arrogant Obama”

    1. With a Black man in the White House, the Obama haters had to settle for “arrogant” because their other descriptor would be that “N” word. They needed a term more acceptable in public. Arrogant=Uppity, after all. And we know what word comes after uppity, don’t we?

      1. I don’t like to speculate. The language used about Obama was rather transparent in its intent in some cases, though.

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