Now we have our own Gargantua.

The MSM is looking at a huge dilemma.

ObamaCare isn’t going to do anything but make health insurance more expensive, the quality of healthcare worse, and the contact of individuals with the federal government more necessary, time-consuming, frustrating, and, yeah, hurtful.

The all-important ‘narrative’ for liberals isn’t going to get better. The longer the website fails to work, the more people will encounter firsthand the incompetence of government. If the website does get fixed, the more people will discover that the government has hurled them into a state of anxiety and unwelcome choices, if not economic ruin.

Liberals like to filibuster about kitchen table issues. You know, they’re the ones who understand what affects ‘working people’ with bills and kids and needs, while the Republicans talk about capitalism and raising yourself by your own bootstraps.

So the MSM have succeeded throughout the Obama administration in supporting the Dear Leader by perpetuating the narrative that Bush is responsible for all our current ills and Obama is doing all he can to help average people by playing golf, doing black tie functions with Hollywood celebrities, refusing to meet with anyone in Congress until there’s some kind of dire deadline, doing endless deals and political job swaps with Wall Street billionaires, and blaming Bush for everything that’s not better.

Undeniably, the MSM has succeeded spectacularly in providing cover for the One. Rotten economic performance has been explained away in a blur of numbers. Scandals have been buried. Corruption has been unreported or yawned away as a transaction over our microcephalic heads. Throughout, the MSM elite has been encouraged by the fact that what they choose not to report at all never gets any traction. That’s how they got him reelected. They had high hopes for the second term.

But that’s all over now. It doesn’t matter what the MSM choose to report or suppress about ObamaCare. This program is so huge that it’s going to affect almost everyone, one way or another.

As it unfolds it will increase the fear and uncertainty throughout the nation of even the most comfortably employed middle class citizens. As the Medicaid sign ups roll up and as employers bail on their traditional coverages, the middle class will see that they, the 80 percent who pay the freight for everything, have been subjected to a huge tax increase and ballooning deficit liability on behalf of some number of uninsured, about 10 percent of the population, many of whom will remain uninsured because of the unintended consequences of the law.

This can’t be blamed on poor economic conditions generally. It can’t be blamed on Republican obstruction because the most outstanding examples of Republican obstructionism have to do with Obamacare. It can only be blamed on the Obama administration. Specifically, blame can be reduced in the ignorant, public mind to the succession of sound bites in which Obama told people that they wouldn’t be negatively affected by government’s sudden massive injection of itself into healthcare. “You can keep your health plan. Period.” How many times did he say these words? The exact number doesn’t matter. What matters is that everyone heard him say it at least once. And it was a deliberate lie.

NO REPORTING WILL BE NEEDED. The MSM can remain utterly silent about the implementation of ObamaCare. All the people who are suddenly thrust face to face into the dumb, unfeeling, hapless jaws of the federal government will have had a personal experience they won’t need Matt Lauer or Scott Pelley to explain to them.

This is an impending disaster of Gargantuan* implications An unnecessary disaster. Maybe Bush got done in by Katrina, as lefties have lately been using as a point of comparison for the threat facing Obama, but Katrina was a natural disaster, an Act of God as insurance companies define it. ObamaCare was an act of man, a completely unforced error with millions more potential victims than Katrina ever had, including insurance companies who have been more reliable to their clients over the decades than the federal government looks like being ever.

A point I’ve made before but will repeat again because it’s so important. This is the kind of monumental, long-term screw-up that will cost people’s lives. Come January 1, some millions of people will have no insurance, having failed to fight through a dead website to enrollment in a plan or, worse, unable to enroll in a plan they can afford. They can still go to an emergency room, sure. But how many of them will have lost access to the doctor who knows their history or the hospital that’s closest? And at the moment, they’re still looking at an IRS penalty for the bureaucratic incompetence that kills them.

Does this mean the Democrats who passed this horror movie of a law will be thrown out of office? No.

But we can hope. Hope that passengers on the boat deck of the Titanic will vote against the crew members who loudly and boastfully lassoed the iceberg and winched it into the hull for the mortal blow. Although who do we expect them to believe? Obama or their lying eyes?

Well, the MSM will obviously have some role to play in people’s perception. They have a decision to make. Keep protecting Obama or start serving the American people after a lapse of five years, or more, or even more years than that. When does the whore discover the heart of gold that makes her the third act heroine? The question is, though, whether they have control of any perception but the one of themselves vis a vis the people. I’m thinking people will decide about Obama and the ObamaCare advocates without their help. A word to the wise. But they’ve ignored my advice many times before.

Somehow, it looks like we all might lose, and all in the worst possible way.

[See the Long View post below.]

**********

*Bakhtin explains that carnival, in Rabelais’ work and age, is associated with the collectivity; for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization (Clark and Holquist 302). According to Bakhtin, “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Bakhtin 10). At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community.

Of course it’s our duty to fight the battles of the present day, protect our nation and our children to the extent we can by opposing each malevolent change and threat.

But we owe a larger debt as well. We have to acknowledge that we are on track for an imminent Dark Age, not only consenting in it as a culture but officially hastening and promoting it.

The supposedly most intelligent, highly educated, and privileged among us are engaged in a relentless assault on the culture that begot their presumed talents for insight and global wisdom. They control and are our future, which means that in the long view we are doomed.

Because there are enemies who desire to sack our cities and undo our achievements, the most notable of which is consciousness itself. They are the primary cowards of life as we have become the secondary ones. They don’t want to be self aware in the first place. We, in all our pseuodo-intellectual vandalism of our own heritage, want to undo the pain of consciousness and become obedient mediocrities, indistinguishable units, equal drones in a global hive (unless, of course, as in all cultures from the beginning of time, we can be one of the “more equal” drones in charge.)

Only one strain of civilization has ever aspired to individuality as an ideal and defined human rights in those terms. All the ascendant rivals have an ideal almost exactly opposite.

Specific discussions of world politics aside, the rivals are poised to win in the near term. We are too civilized to prevail against them because we have forgotten, or chosen deliberately to overlook, what barbarism is. The barbarian does not care about the individual except as a statistic of ergs or casualty totals. If the individual does not submit to the uniformity of the hive, he is a target for extermination or failing that, abject subjugation, cruel punishments, and arbitrary executions.

We have lost the cultural consensus that might enable us to defend ourselves against those who don’t care how many of their own they kill to inflict unequal damage on us. In our silly delusional tower, we are unable to detect the intransigent murder in their eyes and the single-mindedness of automatons with a mission. Instead we kid ourselves that there is some way to placate them, make deals with them, and hope that we can counter malice with benevolence to good effect. And so we make excuses for them and demonize the ones in our own camp who see an avowed enemy as exactly what that enemy avows he is.

Therefore we lose. The nightmare slaughter and oppression will come, and many of our children and their children will not survive, at least in any form we envision. That’s how the odds look right now, anyway. Time to prepare. It needs must be.

What to do?

I have two suggestions. One requiring deep personal commitment and a second requiring deep personal commitment, technical skills, and clever organization.

The first is a kind of proclamation of individuality. For the record. Whoever you are, no matter how mundane you think your life is, get a blog or write a journal. Don’t think in terms of building an audience. Think of documenting the individual experiences of you and your family, what you think about them, what you believe, what you treasure from smallest to most life changing. If you blog, make paper copies. If you do a journal or diary, make photocopies. Think of how you might preserve your record through a long long darkness of barbarian rule.

The second is an adjunct to the first. Think about creating a large population of time capsules. Sink them deep enough into the ground to remain unfound for 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years. Stuff them with the evidence that you existed — your journals, your family photos, your favorite music, the books that contain your beliefs and emotional touchstones, everything from baseball cards to prom corsages, miniatures of Michelangelo or Rodin sculptures, newspapers, jewelry, rosaries and dashboard Jesuses.

No, I have no idea what the technical solutions are. What kind of container can preserve paper and other perishables for a millennium, how deep the holes must be, but I keep thinking of the archeologists I have followed all my life. Their like will come again. They do the best they can at decoding the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Maya. Do the hard work of trying to make it easy for them. Make sure your capsules contain English-Arabic dictionaries, English-Persian dictionaries, English-Russian dictionaries, English-Chinese dictionaries. Whatever it takes to communicate to the distant future. Work out how to give them a Rosetta Stone that shows them you and yours and ours.

That’s how we win in the long view. No matter how catastrophically we lose in the next decade or two.

Sorry. A dark rainy day and a recognition that the trench we’re in is filling mighty quickly with foul, death-poisoned water. We’ll be going over the top again in the morning, but for now give some thought to what I’ve said.

Veteran IP/DD reader Tim offered this:

Btw, thought you might be interested to read the comments on a recent anti-Steyn moment from your old pal Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit.

OCTOBER 28, 2013

BUSTING MARK STEYN for doom-mongering. I like Steyn, but more than most, he reminds me of why despair is a sin.

Apparently Glenn loves that same Tamny piece (linked in an earlier comment). Yeah, you had this guy’s number years ago, as do many of his commenters.

I responded:

Good catch. Reynolds is the Henny Youngman of bloggers.

(Don’t be nonplussed. Google and Youtube him. You’ll see what I mean.)

Okay. Don’t hunt. Go here…

Do read the comments at InstaPundit. Maybe the peanut gallery is finally getting tired of him. He’s always been more aggregator than thinker, law professor or no. His wife, Helen Smith, seems more thoughtful and interesting than he is. Cue the Youngman joke, “Take my wife, please!”

Reply ↓

The song that undergirds the soundtrack of the movie.

I watched the Sebelius hearing as long as I could. Rush’s first comment on his show said it all. “Were there any Republicans there? Did anyone ask her, if you can’t build a working website, why should we trust you to run one sixth of the American economy?”

Uh, no. They didn’t.

Why I’m offering up a distraction from the post-hearing commentary, which will undoubtedly be even more wearisome, tedious, and annoying than the hearing itself.

Fly Away Home is playing on the Encore Family Channel tonight and is available elsewhere, I’m sure. Girl raises geese, leads them on their first migration. I won’t direct you to the trailer because it’s designed to make you take your kids to a children’s movie. Except that it’s more than that. Here are a couple of comments from IMDB’s user reviews.

One of the reasons I was sucked into this wonderful family movie was the photography. It is National Geographic quality. In fact I was so impressed with the cinematography that I had to look up who did it: Caleb Deschanel. The setting, a farm in Southern Ontario, allowed him to become intimate with the geese and the natural setting. Another reason I couldn’t stop watching the movie was the stunning performance by Anna Paquin, the 16-year old girl who played Amy…

The story, ‘Fly Away Home’ is touching because she’s not the kind of Hollywood-trained child actor you find in most movies. A surprising thing happened as I watched Amy and her geese. I could sense a startling serenity from her as the bond had developed between them. I wondered how she could manage that. She was only a 16-year old actress then but she conveyed a mothering instinct that goes back to the ageless beginnings of life on this planet. When the goslings were following her around, much of the photography was from ground level. Later when they were all flying, the photography was right there in the flying formation. You were seeing the birds, in flight, right next to you. The beauty of motion was unbelievable.

And this one:

I don’t have much in the way of feelings so usually stick to science.

An engineer by trade I used to subscribe to a “tecchie” aviation magazine. One issue had this incredible story by some kindly if eccentric Canadian folks who had raised a gaggle of baby geese, and you know the rest. Details of aviation aside, the story warmed my heart. Most Unusual.

A year or so later I took my kids to see “Flyaway Home” expecting a mildly entertaining nature documentary, like Disney’s old “Prairie Dog Town” with an aviation twist.

What I saw was a superbly crafted and deeply touching little masterpiece. I was in tears by the end.

Metaphors of kindness aside, this film will touch any heart however hardened or scarred.

And the kids liked it too.

A few klunky plot twists aside, it’s a breath of fresh air and a fine escape from the poisoned atmosphere of our national political climate. If there’s no way you can get hold of the movie tonight, here’s a lengthy trailer of the kind I normally despise because it gives away so much of the movie. But there’s no narration, just a sequence of cinematography highlights.

Best I can offer today. Though I recognize the possibility nobody’s up to it. My better half just texted me, “Not in a feel-good kind of mood.”

Raebert’s all growly and grumpy too.

Uplifting cinematography can only do so much.

Go listen to his Top Ten songs. My own favorite is shown above.

I won’t make up stuff about what a great guy he was. He probably wasn’t. But when a large, bright candle goes out, there’s an odor of burning wax in the air. I smell it now.

Enjoy your new dirty boulevard, Lou. We’ll be there with you, soon enough.

Her parents’ daughter, a bored and sullen autocrat. President Malia.

Let’s see how it’s going to go. First, Hillary, 70-something at her inauguration. Then Michelle. She’ll be a peach. Then Chelsea. (Face it. The Bushes are the Plantagenets in this story, and the Kennedys might as well be Aelfric the Obsolete. All those penises and things.) After Chelsea has finished turning the United States into the Politically Correct States of Ghana, Malia can become the new Madonna of Argentina. It’s going to be great.

After she marries Chris Brown and gets beaten to a pulp, the country will rally around her and she can sing…

It will probably replace the Star Splattered Banner at games of the national pastime, girls’ soccerbasket.

By then, thankfully, I’ll be dead as a fucking doornail. Can you make the same boast?

I am in a state of fury. I may be resorting to old tools of humor and satire, but that’s only to dilute the bile and spleen in my gut.

What is happening in the nation now is a crime of earthshaking moment. This administration has committed so many impeachable offenses their best defense is that no one could agree on which ones should lead the bill of indictment.

This is not politics as usual, not business as usual. This is an atrocity, a hate crime against the people who built and maintain this country.

Turning away is no answer. Silence is no statement. I post and post and post, and post some more, because those of us who know how bad it is must speak. If you can’t speak here, speak somewhere, and be loud. Even if it’s only to the twerp across the table from you in the break room.

We are losing it all. Everything we’ve ever been. Fight for us. Fight for yourselves and your children. Time to be a Furyan.

My wife is especially fond of Furyans. She thinks she married one. which is convenient, because she’s one too.

As is Raebert. Don’t mess with us. The eyes have it. His middle name begins with an R.

In case you forgot.

Furyan.

I understand.

Unfortunately with respect to my conversations with Barbara, what set him off was a Krauthammer interview in which Charles claimed he didn’t know who Obama was until his first state of the union speech. Rush finds this incomprehensible, unspeakable, unforgivable.

Well, I could be just as angry. Here’s what I wrote all the way back in February 2008, long before he got the nomination:

Down to earth. If the Clintons can’t make a dent in the campaign of a coolly ambitious, non-African-American, Ivy League Chicago machine politician, what will any of of us be able to do if he turns out to be inept, short-sighted, vengeful, corrupt, or actively seditious? If some clumsy American politician accidentally says something to offend his 300K-a-year Princetonian executive wife, for example, will we all have to apologize — or pay in some other coin? If he violates his vow to uphold the Constitution, will we have the recourse we would have with mere politicians? Or will every voice — in politics and the press — fall silent, because raising an objection of any kind is tantamount to a hate crime?

What stories will not be pursued by the already horrifyingly cowardly PC media? What legitimate policy objections will not be posed by senators and congressmen who are already living in daily fear that their most inadvertent verbal slip will bring down 400 years worth of resentment on their heads?

Think about it. If the “First Black President” has already been made to look a bigot for daring to promote his wife’s candidacy over Obama’s, what chance do the rest of us have in the next four or eight years if we start to see in Obama a Carter, a Ferrakhan, or Quisling? No matter what he does, he could never be impeached. It’s debatable whether he could ever be criticized. Let alone mauled and mocked and belittled day after day like a Bush or a, uh, Bush.

The first black President must be a politican, not a messiah. We’ve already seen what happens when teflon meets a halo. The halo wins. Without even being responsive. The truth is — and this is not racist, but statistically valid — that the first black president really can’t coast unexamined into office; he has an absolute moral obligation to demonstrate with full candor and understanding that he isn’t Marion Barry, Alcee Hastings, William Jefferson, Ray Nagin, or all the mayors of Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia who have ridden the horse of jury nullification into sinecures of power only to abuse that power in systematic ways while branding all who objected to their corruption as bigots.

What we cannot afford at this time in our history is a sainted Jimmy Carter, a well educated Huey Long, or a closet Castro..

Inquire of yourselves — again and again — how did a neophyte take down the Clintons?

So. I was right, well in time for the calamity to be prevented. I spelled it out in pitiless detail. In print. (Maybe you should buy a copy and send it to an Obama voter. Just a thought.) Am I screaming now like Limbaugh?

Yes. Silently. Or at least nobody can hear me. Remember the promos for the release of the movie Alien? “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Where I am.

Where Rush is too.

Sorry, Rush. Not suggesting you look like the Predator. Just that you’re equivalently armed. Screaming isn’t quitting. Sometimes it’s attacking.

Speaking of Valerie Jarrett…

I keep seeing cartoons, and Raebert sees, well, mostly dogs.

So who’s right? This time I think I am. It just seems to fit somehow.

HOWEVER… It’s possible that we’re both right. As it turns out, in the very first Betty Boop cartoon, she was actually a dog.

(About 2 1/2 minutes in.)

Not that Betty, or Valerie, was, you know, a dog. Both cute as a button. So, I guess I’m right after all. As usual.

ALTHOUGH (Pipe down, Raebert, I’m getting to it!)… Valerie did go to the University of Michigan Law School, which would make her technically less humanoid than wolverine.

Hmmm. What do you think? (No, I’m not asking who has bigger pecs.)

Quit laughing, Raebert.

I mean it.

Whatever you say, Boss.

Daffy’s not happy.

Some required reading. Let’s do the technical piece first and get it out of the way.

Healthcare.gov has a significant data problem that won’t be fixed simply. That means no patches or rewrites are likely to fix it. Reports are emerging that focus on these ‘834’ forms. These forms are used in the process of direct enrollment, and it appears that they are filled with incorrect information, making purchasing plans for many impossible. The data that is coming to insurers from healthcare.gov is corrupted or sending ‘questionable’ data.

“The data’s pretty bad,” the executive said. And even if the data was not corrupted, the number of enrollments the insurers are getting from HealthCare.gov is “pretty low.”

The data is pretty bad. How can that be? The answer is clear if you consider the role of the site in the first place. At its core the most fundamental function of the site is to access and manage data from a variety of massive databases, from sources like the IRS, Veterans Administration, insurance carriers, the DHS, and Medicare. We are talking about a lot of incongruent and varied information that has to be extracted, transformed and analyzed, ideally on the fly. Does that sound like anything? To our dedicated readers, that’s a classic Big Data use case. So where has this gone wrong?
Creating and imposing the required data structuring onto this variety of sizable databases means a tremendous, effective effort should have taken place. Data from these systems needs to be identified, correlated, and processed in accordance with the target system. It would be nice if that was automated, but the truth is that many, many data points would have had to been manually evaluated, then categorized. It is quite likely that there are massive variations from one database to the next, from one instance to the next, even from within the same system. Differences in syntax, standards, data types, the list of information has got to be tremendously long.

Another challenge, these databases – who knows how dated they are. Government systems are famously several revisions behind all the time as they are always awaiting security validation and certification or believe it or not ($634 Billion), behind revisions because of budget. In light of all those challenges – given what we know about CGI Federal and CMS that was running this thing, the misinformation that purposely was put on display so that the public and congress would believe this site was ready to go, does anybody really think this crew would be able to pull this off? Or that we’re a couple of handful of patches away from fixing this thing?

Let me paraphrase this – bad data mapping leads to this exact problem – error-filled code and bad end data. That’s your 834 issue. Hacks and workarounds can only stack so high. There is a foundational flaw with the entire thing, and as we can all see the website was just the beginning…

Now for a pair of cultural essays that make more sense of the bits and bytes above. First, from Mark Steyn, an account of the development effort from inside:

“We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced.”

Wow. Think of the magic that Madison, Hamilton, and the rest of those schlubs could have produced if they’d only had pizza and Mountain Dew and been willing to pull a few all-nighters at Philadelphia in 1787. Somewhere between the idealism and the curling slice of last night’s pepperoni, Macon Phillips, the administration’s director of new media, happened to come across a tweet by Edward Mullen of Jersey City in which he twitpiced his design for what a health-insurance exchange could look like. So Phillips printed it out to show his fellow administration officials: “Look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there,” he said. “One thing led to another and he left Jersey City to come to D.C. and helped push us through an information architectural process.”

Don’t you just love it! This is way cooler than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: The only “architectural process” they had was crumbling viaducts. I think we can all agree that Barack Obama is hipper than all other government leaders anywhere, ever, combined. Unfortunately, the dogs bark and the pizza-delivery bike moves on, and, in the cold grey morning after of the grease-stained cardboard box with the rubberized cheese stuck to it, Obamacare wound up somewhat less hipper…

Next up, Virginia Postrel, the country’s leading expert on glamour. Huh?, you say. No, I assure you it’s relevant.

We imagine that software is a kind of magic — all the more so if it’s software we’ve never actually experienced. We expect it to be effortless. We don’t think about how it got there or what its limitations might be. Instead of imagining future technologies as works in progress, improving over time, we picture them as perfect from day one.

The most successful companies encourage that illusion. “We feel our job is to try to solve tough, difficult problems,” Jony Ive, head of design for Apple Inc., said in a recent interview, “but we don’t make the complexity of the problem apparent in its resolution.” His company regularly describes its products as “magic,” and the illusion of ease is essential to their glamour. They promise a world in which, contrary to the frustrations of everyday experience, computers “just work.”

Freed from real-world technical constraints, Hollywood amplifies that promise. “The police on the CBS show ‘Hawaii Five-O’ have these amazing computer databases at their disposal where images … can be digitally thrown from a digital table onto a giant wall screen with the flick of the officer’s hand into space,” says Tom Simon, a special agent with the FBI in Honolulu. In real life, “we work in a Microsoft Windows environment with all its benefits and limitations.”

Glamorous Hollywood visions make us forget that effortlessly informative, endlessly flexible databases represent the world as we wish it were — or fear it might be — not as it actually is. “TV computer hackers, especially those employed by the police, can instantly tap into any video feed, satellite imagery, internal database, or record ever created by man, even though the record exists only on paper and has never been digitized,” retired police officer Tim Dees wrote on a Quora thread about ludicrous crime-show conventions.

And much easier is the political dish that explains (maybe) why the president is such an ignorant outsider in his own government.

(Valerie) Jarrett, an old Chicago friend of both Barack and Michelle Obama, appears to exercise such extraordinary influence she is sometimes quietly referred to as “Rasputin” on Capitol Hill, a reference to the mystical monk who held sway over Russia’s Czar Nicholas as he increasingly lost touch with reality during World War I.

Darrell Delamaide, a columnist for Dow Jones’s MarketWatch, says that “what has baffled many observers is how Jarrett, a former cog in the Chicago political machine and a real-estate executive, can exert such influence on policy despite her lack of qualifications in national security, foreign policy, economics, legislation or any of the other myriad specialties the president needs in an adviser.”

Delamaide believes the term “vacuous cipher” that was applied to Jarrett stung so much because it could be used as a metaphor for the administration in general. He writes that what “has remained consistent about the Obama administration is that vacuity — the slow response in a crisis, the hesitant and contradictory communication, a lack of conviction and engagement amid constant political calculation.” The stunning revelation that President Obama wasn’t kept properly apprised of problems with Obamacare’s website is just the latest example of how dysfunctional Obama World can be.

Whether Jarrett’s influence is all too real or exaggerated is unknowable. What is known is the extent to which she has long been a peerless enabler of Barack Obama’s inflated opinion of himself. Consider this quote from New Yorker editor David Remnick’s interview with her for his 2010 book The Bridge.

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. . . . He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. . . . So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. . . . He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Up against a court flatterer of that caliber it’s no surprise that Jarrett has outlasted almost everyone who was in Obama’s original White House team — from chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to political guru David Axelrod to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. All are known to have crossed her, and all are gone. As one former Obama aide once told me: “Valerie is ‘She Who Must Not be Challenged.’”

Finally, a horrifying bit of context that illustrates why all of this is such an unmitigated catastrophe.

Waving the bloody shirt is not only about making an emotional appeal — it’s a strategy for distraction. It became a bitter joke in the Soviet Union — whether the issue was the crimes of Stalin or the fact that the Lada was a piece of junk, the answer was always the same: A u vas negrov linchuyut. The same principle is at work in today’s Democratic commentariat: As Americans start to notice what a fiasco Obamacare is . . . Oh, look! A Confederate flag! There is really nothing more satisfying to liberals than a Confederate flag sighting, though I wonder what they’d make of the fact that in my corner of Texas it is not unheard-of to see black men wearing Dixie belt buckles or T-shirts. (All of our necks are just different shades of red.) When Brad Paisley sings about the Confederate flag, it’s like Christmas morning for Touré. Yet, despite the daft insistence of Joan Walsh and the Affiliated Suburban Pearl-Clutchers of America, there is no neo-Confederate revanche just around the corner. The idea is, however, a useful distraction. But a distraction from what?

From $4,955.

Fifty years into the Democrats’ declaration of a war on poverty and President Kennedy’s first executive order for affirmative action, while spending $300 million a year on worthless diversity workshops and singing endless verses of “We Shall Overcome,” after enduring endless posturing from Barack Obama and the moral preening of his admirers, that is what black American families have to show for themselves: an average household net worth of $4,955. The average white household in these United States has a net worth of $110,729. Black Americans’ median net worth is less than 5 percent that of white Americans.

By way of comparison, black South Africans under apartheid had a median net worth about 6.8 percent that of white South Africans. Repeating: Black Americans are worse off relative to their white countrymen than black South Africans under apartheid were to theirs, a fact to which former Washington Post reporter Jon Jeter has drawn attention and from which he has drawn all the wrong conclusions. (Muppet News Flash: Washington Post straight-news reporter turns out to be a garden-variety liberal.) Philadelphia mayor John Street used to brag that “the brothers and sisters are running the city,” which would be more of a boast in a city with less criminal governance. Mayor Ray Nagin, whose fraud/conspiracy/money-laundering/bribery/tax-evasion trial should be getting under way any moment now, liked to promise that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city.” A generation of one-party rule based on racial politics was enough to doom Detroit. Outside of the womb, the most dangerous place for a black American to be is in a city run by Democrats.

This is the bottom line of the ongoing sick tragedy called liberalism. It’s not about helping people because it doesn’t. It’s about power, and, yes, glamour, and the moral midgets who seek them at the cost of their souls and our freedom.

Is he small? Or tinier than that?