Liberal Chickens

[Geee]

National Review:

It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost.

In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11, full of distortions and half-truths, and yet passed off as a documentary — all designed to help swing the election to Democratic challenger John Kerry. Hollywood, the media, and the Left in general did not worry about the film’s inaccuracies or the mythology that the infomercial was a disinterested documentary. Instead, liberals deified Moore. Indeed, he was an honored guest at the Democratic Convention, and liberal luminaries paid him obeisance at various showings of the film.

The goddess Nemesis took note, and this year Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan followed Moore’s model. The result is a blockbuster “documentary,” 2016: Obama’s America, that does more to Barack Obama than Michael Moore once did to George W. Bush. The Left is perturbed, unappreciative that its own methods and objectives have been turned against itself, and in a more sophisticated and far more effective manner than Moore’s buffoonery.

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The Left in the era of Barack Obama established other ends-justify-the-means precedents. In 2008, Obama surmised that no one else would ever raise the sorts of gigantic sums that he was then amassing (in toto nearly $800 million, more than twice the amount raised by John McCain), and so was the first candidate to renounce public financing of a presidential campaign in the general election since the law was passed. But, of course, Obama never imagined that four years later his approval ratings would be less than 50 percent, or that he would be running against a financier who could match his efforts dollar for dollar.