I have to confess that before I read this devastating piece by Bruce Bawer, I had never heard of Greg Mortensen. So I guess his self promotion wasn’t universally effective.

In recent days many commentators have lamented that it is dismaying to know that Mortenson’s a phony. No, what’s dismaying is that so many people were taken in in the first place. What’s dismaying is that so many people don’t seem to recognize a huckster, a con artist, a flimflam man when they see one — and, by the same token, don’t seem to recognize authentic virtue, selflessness, and humility either. Have we become so coarsened by celebrity culture, so accustomed to slick showbiz packaging and self-promotion, so habituated to feeding the ravenous narcissism of the famous, that we’re no longer capable of detecting what Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof called “a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity”? Hemingway said that the one thing a writer needed most of all was a foolproof “bullshit detector”; are twenty-first-century Americans’ bullshit detectors hopelessly out of whack? Have the glossy, streamlined, highly polished and tidily ordered versions of human reality served up on all too many “reality” programs and Oprah-type talk shows destroyed our very ability to separate the genuine from the bogus, the real article from the counterfeit, and even caused us to turn our noses at the imperfect, unprocessed, clunky, smudged, and pockmarked real thing? Do we want to be fooled?

Like Bawer, I think it explains why Barack Obama is president as well.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from Mark Steyn.

[Another update]

This seems related. Despite appearances, the administration isn’t deliberately trying to destroy the nation, it is simply ignorant and stupid:

With academia, mass media, most of the publishing industry, and Hollywood on their side, how would these policymakers know any better? Their professors told them they were brilliant; the books they read all tell them they’re right. Nobody corrects or criticizes them except those who they can rationalize are opponents — and evil people, too! — and thus these are partisan carpings to be disregarded.

If the critics can be described as conservatives, their views are discounted. If you are proven to be correct, that seems to have no effect on the powerful institutions and elite opinions.

In fact, the very fact of being a critic is used to disqualify criticism. When I wrote a detailed critique of Obama’s policies in a prestigious policy journal, the prestigious authors responded that what I said should be discounted — and my specific arguments need not be persuasively countered — because…I was critical of Obama’s policies!

I cannot imagine any other time in modern Western intellectual history when this kind of thing has happened.

So the usual corrective institutions aren’t functioning. If no one tells the emperor and his courtiers that they are under-dressed, such people are going to keep peeling off clothes confident of the fact that nobody (or at least anyone who counts) will tell them that they are naked. With so much insulation, they don’t feel the chill.

Those certain that Obama and his government — and I only speak of foreign policy here — must be acting deliberately out of malice generally have one thing in common: they have never actually dealt with high-level politicians and decisionmakers.

As someone who has, I have to agree. For instance, I know it looks like there’s been a massive government conspiracy to keep us from conquering space for the past half century, but there really isn’t. Ignorance and stupidity, in combination with public choice in the face of a topic of so little national importance, is a sufficient explanation. On the other hand, as J. Porter Clark noted (in reference to spammers), any sufficiently high level of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malevolence. It’s the other Clarke’s Law.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/truth-or-tea/238065/
[Update a couple minutes later]

I will note, and agree with, commenters at Rubin’s piece, with which he ends up agreeing himself, that the ideology at work is objectively anti-American. But in their warped view, it is good for America to weaken its power in the world.

[Update a while later]

Truth, or tea? That’s why they call it the “reality-based community.”

I’ve read this story twice now, and I can’t find any heroes in it. And of course, it comes from the most “transparent” administration in history.

They keep using that word. I don’t think it means what they think it means.

Why not debate it?

Were Obama a magnificent president in all respects, Trump’s charge would have little resonance. Who cares how Obama got into Harvard Law? In 2008, it was obvious enough to voters that he might have benefitted from preferences. He won a national majority anyway. But it turns out there are some ropes Obama doesn’t seem to have learned in his turbo-boosted ascent up the political hierarchy. He hasn’t been alert to some ingrained bureaucratic pathologies–he told Jon Alter he learned as president that “one of the biggest lies in government is the idea of ’shovel-ready’ projects.” Wish he hadn’t had to learn that! Nor does he appear to have acquired the skill–that someone like Bill Clinton would need to acquire to survive several terms as a governor–of making a policy sale. And would a leader versed in effectively wielding power declare that, say, the leader of the sovereign nation of Libya “needs to go” if he wasn’t willing to do what was necessary to make him go? Rookie mistake? The synecdoche–Obama himself as Exhibit A in the broader race preference policy debate–works now in a way it didn’t in the Fall of 2008.

I hope that next year, the people will decide that it was a mistake to make someone president just so they could feel like they aren’t racist.

[Update a few minutes later]

Obama’s problem(s):

Time and again the President angers one side without conciliating the other. His public demand that Israel agree to a complete settlement freeze as a condition for peace talks alienated Israelis (and not just supporters of Prime Minister Netanyahu); his subsequent back peddling humiliated and angered the Palestinians. He pleased no one, fumbled what he had once proclaimed a crucial priority of his administration, and is left with reduced influence with both sides.

At home the President’s hedging has antagonized and energized the right without delivering the goods to his base on the left. The health care bill was so watered down from what candidate Obama proposed on the stump that key constituencies on the left were dismayed; the change was so large that the right was energized; the legislation so compromised and misshapen that it failed to satisfy. The stimulus was the same: large enough to stir up the deficit hawks but too small (and too poorly constructed) to launch a “V” shaped recovery. In the Middle East he has been too cautious and slow in siding with the revolutionaries to dent American unpopularity in the region — but by dropping US support for longtime ally Hosni Mubarak he antagonized and alarmed the Saudis.

Neither the Middle East despots nor the populists think President Obama is a reliable friend. In Afghanistan also he appears to have found a policy that is too robust to please the doves who want out no matter what — yet his hesitancy and announcement of withdrawal dates has not convinced either the Pakistanis or the Taliban that the US will remain until its basic conditions are met.

This repeated lunge for the sour spot — the place where costs are high and benefits are low — now seems to be a trademark of the President’s decision-making style. On the left it is earning him Carter comparisons from people like Eric Alterman; on the right it means that despite his compromises and yielding of significant ground he continues to feed the incandescent hostility of his bitterest foes. Worst of all, it suggests to people abroad and at home that the way to manipulate this “split the difference”, consensus-seeking President is to raise your demands. If you are going to get something like 50 percent of what you ask for, ask for twice as much as you really want. And with this Presidential style, the squeaking wheel gets the grease. Not surprisingly, all the wheels have begun to squeak.

The bad thing (or good thing, from the perspective of those who hope for a single term) is that he doesn’t seem capable of learning, or changing.

Dear Mr. President: what took you so long?

Here’s why he waited: “…there was no immaculate conception!”

It is a shocker.

[Update late morning]

OK, so why is the birth certificate in layers?

[Bumped]

[Update just before noon]

More analysis. And the Freepers are discussing it. Many think that it’s an artifact of Adobe Illustrator.

…is a little authoritarian dying to get out. Harold Pollack channels his inner Tom Friedman.