Her secret torment.

I have to agree with this comment:

As difficult and delusional a person as Joni Mitchell is — and as little desire as I have to actually meet her — I find it extremely hard to harbor any personal animosity towards the person who wrote “The Urge for Going”, “That Song About the Midway”, “All I Want”, “California”, “River”, “A Case of You”, “Free Man in Paris”, “Refuge of the Roads” and numerous other brilliant pop songs, and who also recorded the definitive — indeed, timeless — versions of most of them.

Yes, she was an amazingly talented young woman. I’ve never been able to figure out what she does on guitar, with the weird and haunting tunings. Beautiful voice, beautiful melodies, poetic lyrics, great piano and guitar.

Thoughts on Obama’s failing credibility:

On a deeper level, Obama habitually says untrue things because he has never been called on them before. He has been able throughout his career to appear iconic to his auditors. In the crudity of liberals like Harry Reid and Joe Biden, Obama ancestry and diction gave reassurance that he was not representative of the black lower classes and thus was the receptacle of all sorts of liberal dreams and investments. According to certain liberals, he was like a god, our smartest president, and of such exquisite sartorial taste that he must become a successful president. In other words, on the superficial basis of looks, dress, and patois, Obama was reassuring to a particular class of white guilt-ridden grandees and to such a degree that what he actually had done in the past or promised to do in the future was of no particular importance.

Then there is the media, the supposed public watchdog that keeps our politicians honest. In truth, Obama winks and nods to journalists, in the sense that as a good progressive Obama is about as liberal a president as we have ever had — or will have. Obama sees cross-examination as a sort of betrayal from journalists, who, for reasons of some abstract adherence to “journalistic integrity,” would by their own reporting subvert a rare chance of a progressive agenda. Obama’s anger is not just directed at Fox News and talk radio, but rather reflects a sense of betrayal that even slight fact checking by liberal journalists exists: why must Obama tell the truth when he never had to in any of his earlier incarnations?

In A Face in the Crowd, the charismatic Andy Griffith character could more or less get anything he wished by saying anything he wanted, largely because he said it mellifluously and in cracker-barrel fashion of an us-versus-them populism. His admirers knew that they were being lied to, but also knew that Lonesome knew that they did not mind. Lonesome had contempt for hoi polloi, largely because of his own easy ability to manipulate them for whatever particular careerist cause he embraced.

So Obama has disdain for those who passed out at his lectures, who put up the Greek columns at his speeches, who came up with his Latin mottoes, and who gushed at his teleprompted eloquence. He knows that we know he is not telling the truth, but likewise he knows that we don’t care all that much — at least until now. The secret to Lonesome’s success was to hide his contempt for those he lied to. When he is caught ridiculing his clueless listeners, he finally crashes and burns — sort of like Barack Obama serially vacationing with the 1% whom he so publicly scorns, or golfing in the aristocratic fashion of those who, he assures us, did not build their businesses.

It’s a little appalling, and frightening, that almost 40% still take him seriously.