Are Obama’s Advisers Unhinged?

Are Obama’s Advisers Unhinged?

July 9, 2014 5:10 am

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Surely reports that President Obama is going down to Texas at the height of the Katrina-like border debacle to raise money at the home of the popular but often polarizing filmmaker and Quentin Tarantino–collaborator Robert Rodriguez are the stuff of right-wing mythology?

No one could be so politically dense as to head south in the direction of this catastrophe only to pull up short to huckster campaign funds — while under a lingering cloud that such special-interest money solicitation in the past typically has taken precedence over national security (cf. the need to retire early on the night of Benghazi in order to prep for an important fundraiser the next day in Las Vegas, where the selfish go to blow their kids’ tuition money).


That the Obama money-raiser is purportedly being hosted by filmmaker Robert Rodriguez also cannot be true. The latter is famous for ultra-violent exploitation films of just the sort that gun-control liberals have insisted glorify (true) assault-weapon violence for profit and influence the deranged to translate such violent fiction into murderous fact.

More disturbing at this volatile time of national tensions on the border is the fact that Rodriguez directed the Machete andMachete Kills movies, which offered cheap exploitation about the immigration debate, caricaturing any who disagreed with the present policy of non-enforcement as more or less evil, Neanderthal-like racists and demented militiamen worthy of death (cf. the pseudo/spoof racist trailer for one of the films that envisioned killing border-enforcement politicians).

What would the media have thought if George W. Bush went to Louisiana during Katrina only to avoid New Orleans and the devastation, instead raising campaign cash (at $32,000 a head) at the home of a right-wing filmmaker of violent films that tended to glorify gunplay and to reduce controversies over disaster relief into caricatures of culpable dependents?

In short, it would be impossible to dream up a worse mercenary presidential trip — in terms of morally indifferent omission and self-interested commission — at this critical time than what Obama supposedly now intends.

Surely, the junket will be canceled out of embarrassment or quietly recalibrated — or perhaps the entire story about the trip is simply an urban legend.