The Obama effect

...
Belmont Club has a piece up on the signs of dispair to the point of depression showing up in comments on some of the most recent Belmont Club posts. For the most part, the comments he refers to stem from what I refer to as the "Obama effect," on reality-based Americans - the realization that the country has elected a rank amateur as POTUS, whose policies are going to have a devastating and lasting effect on the nation for years to come. And among those comments I found Scott Johnson's personal source of malaise to be the closest of those mentioned to my own: "The pits" (emphasis mine):

...

...
Comments in some of the most recent Belmont Club posts have been haunted by what Scott Johnson and Victor Davis Hanson have called depression. No longer do people put forward solutions as much as despair of solutions until the prevailing conditions change or the national mood shifts. Afghanistan? Well it's no good discussing it until someone serious is in office. The economy? We're all doomed so let's just measure the rate of our decline. Dr. Hanson attributes the gloom to the loss of the old certainties. The world has been turned upside down by recent crises, and things no longer work in predictable ways. The present only seems to confirm the worst suspicions of some and they await the rest of the sentence with a kind of masochistic glee. In contrast to VDH's focus on zeitgeist as the source of passivity, Scott Johnson puts his personal source of malaise down to one thing: Barack Obama. "I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention." (More)

That "infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity" goes a long way toward describing what we now have in the White House. Personally, I only hope that we as a nation can survive the next four years, somehow, without permanently damning America to being a nation that more resembles a communist nation than the America our founders foresaw. Unfortunately, unless the Democratic majority in Congress changes significantly in 2010 to Republician control in either the House or Senate -preferably both, the "Obama effect" is likely to last generations from now. .

...

http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2009/03/the_obama_effec.php

...