THE EMPIRE STATE’S GOVERNOR
STRIKES BACK

Paterson says Obama is going after him because of Obama’s own failures.

Which, he says with a certain catty precision, are similar to the failures for which Obama cut off Paterson at the knees.

Speaking to reporters in New York City on September 22, Gov. David Paterson said he’s not giving up:

I understand the president’s concern and I understand concern of staff members at the White House. If you look at it from their perspective, they haven’t exactly been able to govern in the first year of their administration in the way that other administrations have, where you would have, theoretically, a period in which the new administration is allowed to pass the needed pieces of legislation.

Whoa. Not bad for a fellow who’s been written off as a witless, hopeless loser.

And some New York state legislators are siding with Paterson:

Afterward, the handful of lawmakers who joined Paterson for the announcement—which was about providing $600 million in federal stimulus money for research at various New York universities—tried sounding hopeful.

“There’s no reason to pull the plug on the guy year before the Democratic primary,” said Assemblyman Rory Lancman of Queens.

Lancman also said, “Yeah, I think the president make a mistake,” getting involved in the gubernatorial race. “Andrew Cuomo doesn’t need Barack Obama, a year from the primary, to promote him.”.

“As far as people fall, people can rise,” said State Senator Toby Stavisky, also from Queens.

State Senator Eric Schneiderman tried refocusing the conversation onto policies and away from Paterson’s prospects. “This is not about a horse race 14 months from now,” he said.

You know these pols have a point. To turn Paterson into a humiliated non-entity with a year and a half left in his term seems like a pointlessly destructive thing for Obama to do. It looks like he was just getting carried away by the Chicago in his mind: if someone has become an annoyance to you, you perforate him, you make him swim with the fishes.

Obama thought he could humiliate a man, send out the message that he was worthless, a nothing, and that he should just crawl away and die. Well, no human being is going to accept that. Any person, man or woman, is going to stand up and resist such denigration of himself. That is the one fact of human nature that I believe is truly universal. There is a core of individual dignity within ourselves that we are not going to let others stomp on.

Obama doesn’t understand that. He simply knee-caps anyone—and the “anyone” can be entire nations and races—who becomes a hindrance to himself, or whose kneecapping he thinks will be advantageous to himself. And that may be his downfall. The real Obama is the opposite of what his supporters think. He doesn’t care about humanity. He worships himself, his own smiling, golden-boy godhood.

Comments September 25

Michael S. writes:

You wrote:

“Obama thought he could humiliate a man, send out the message that he was worthless, a nothing, and that he should just crawl away and die. Well, no human being is going to accept that.”

No human being is going to accept that? Seems to me one of the big themes at VFR is that large numbers of people seem perfectly OK with doing just that. [LA replies: on a collective, cultural level, yes; not on an individual level. And the fact that it’s happening on the cultural level is highly abnormal, unprecedented in history.]

Also, you wrote:

“It looks like he was just getting carried away by the Chicago in his mind: if someone has become an annoyance to you, you perforate him, you make him swim with the fishes.”

I wish to remind you that Chicago isn’t the only city with gangsters, mobsters, “tough guys,” thugs, etc.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 24, 2009 02:45 PM | Send