hubris (ˈhyü-brəs): n. exaggerated pride or self-confidence. From the Greek ὕβρις (hybris).
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
What better explanation is there?
Post-election Thoughts
By Victor Davis Hansen
Works and Days…
What Did They Expect?
Now that the voters of Massachusetts have splashed our hypnotized young god back into his own reflecting pool, it is almost surreal to follow the left’s sudden petulance and occasional hysteria — akin to the climate of 2005-6 among some of the right when the once pro-Iraq War neocons began bailing and heading for the exits.
Then some of the most vehement pro-war sounding zealots suddenly swore that they had never supported the invasion at all. I think I called it at the time “my victory; your defeat” to explain their chameleonism between 2003 and 2006.
This present liberal bloodletting will continue, as Obama’s polls dip even more, and the next liberal Coakley appears in the political cross-hairs. The left neither quite understands the populist outrage nor would have a clue how to deflate it if it did. (One of the most painful things to watch was Obama’s anti-Scott Brown stump speech: a perfect storm of gaffes in which he showed no knowledge of Brown’s record, slipped into his faux-black-pulpit cadences, did the old “Bush did it” whine, made silly jokes about pick-up trucks [can one imagine Obama driving up and down Illinois in one?], and reflected once again the Obama brand of thinking that the people are deluded and must be warned by a philosopher-king not to do what is not good for them.)
There is a pent-up fury that is a dividend of a year’s bad economic news, the constant presidential condescension, and the hubris of false hope and change — and we have not seen the extent of it yet. The people are weary of being talked down to as if they don’t understand climate change, as if they don’t get the inside scoop on deficit spending, as if they can’t appreciate the brilliance of massive new government entitlements, as if they need moral sermons hourly on their race/class/and gender shortcomings, and as if they can’t quite fathom why KSM, the terrorist warrior who planned the killing of 3,000 Americans and declared al-Qaeda at war with us, must be tried like a bank robber in New York. (Perhaps during the Battle of the Bulge we should have shipped back captured German saboteurs to New York for trials.)
We, the Ignorant
Meanwhile on planet earth I was thinking of Secretary’s Chu’s warning that our farms in California would “dry up and blow away” as today I chained sawed limbs from a week of horrific storms and flooding, and prepare tomorrow to go to Huntington Lake to dig out 10 feet of snow from the house.
Our populists seem to be shouting back at Washington, “We’re tired of you – at least we don’t cheat on our taxes, at least we pay our bills and don’t call maxing out the charge card ‘stimulus,’ and at least when we say we are going to do something, we do it.”
Republicans must be gleeful as an inept Obama in some sort of delusion now claims that the prairie-fire pushback dovetails with his own Ascension in 2008. Oh yes, Barack — those who voted for a conservative in Massachusetts surely are the same sort of angry voters who turned out in droves for your hope and change mantra.
I somehow doubt The One has internalized the message, and further suspect that Nemesis‘ work is not yet done.
