RUSH: I want to get to this Lisa Schiffren piece in the American Thinker. It’s entitled: ”Tiger, Barack, and the Law of Transitivity’ — As a rule, the revelation that a married athlete (or actor, or rock star, or politician) has conducted extramarital affairs with bevy of ‘party girls’ may titillate, but rarely has the power to shock.’ Which was Snerdley’s point when this whole thing started: ‘What’s the big deal? This happens to everybody, athletes, everybody knows they do this.’ That’s what his point was. ‘In those realms, these things happen. Entitled men. Willing women. Deceived wives. What’s new? So what is it about Tiger Woods that makes his cheating so different from the usual that ten days on, the nation is still discussing revelations of conquests, trysts, payoffs, and physical injuries inflicted by a golf club?’ Why after ten days are people still fixated on this?
‘Sure, there’s normal prurience at work. But mostly, we are interested because Tiger Woods, who may legitimately be the best golfer ever, had been turned into an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies. And of course, he was our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation. Who knew that the early reports of his betrayed wife Elin swinging at him with a golf club constituted literal icon-smashing?
‘We are staring because we’ve been had. Betrayed. We see now that the image was all a fraud. The talent was real. But the things that made the public like Tiger personally — the low-key demeanor, manners, and sweet smile of countless sports-page photos, magazine covers, political analogies, and most important, product endorsements, was an act. That would be betrayal enough. But it wasn’t just Woods’ act. The larger lesson here is about how much artifice — sustained, deliberate deception — goes into the construction of a public persona when there is profit to be made or power to be had. Jack Shafer, the Slate media columnist, spells out how this transpired. In the beginning, Shafer notes, Woods was your normal young, single, randy, skirt-chasing, heterosexual athlete.
‘Then, almost overnight, he became a golf phenom, and … for business reasons — Buick, Nike, Gatorade, Gillette, EA Sports, and Accenture being among them — Woods decided to exfoliate from his public image all things base, carnal, and even personal. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. Given how desperately we want to believe in a human god, it didn’t take much peddling from Team Tiger for us to accept Woods as a modern deity.’ You see where this is going? You see where this is ultimately headed? It’s a really good piece.
‘Tiger’s marketers made him a symbol of tolerance and brotherhood, and his father, Earl Woods, spoke gibberish about his son being a creature of destiny,’ claimed he was going to be the next Nelson Mandela, by the way, and you gotta go to jail first for that. ‘Getting married and having children only added to Woods’ marketability. I’m divine and monogamous and the center of a happy nuclear family. And we ate it up. So now that the ‘real’ Woods has been revealed … we’re embarrassed by the gap between who we believed Woods to be and who he really is. The unusually sleazy reality, however true to our darker knowledge of human nature, is especially disappointing because of the wholesome image we’ve been sold for so long. ‘Modern deity’ isn’t much of an overstatement.
‘Even now, the same huge corporate effort that went into creating the billion-dollar nice-guy persona is hard at work trying to keep it alive — because if it dies, too many people stand to lose too much money. Think about the heroic efforts to ‘save’ Woods’ marriage. In addition to her prenup — which only ‘vests’ after a certain amount of time, apparently the much-wronged wife will receive a huge payment — $55 million, according to some reports — to stay with him for another two years.’ She’s leasing herself out to him, which is ‘why she hasn’t exited stage right,’ although we’re hearing that she has, there are reports she’s moved out.
This morning, and you know nothing good ever happens at 2:30 in the morning but that’s especially true for Tiger Woods, because this morning between two and three, ambulances were called to his house again, and a blonde middle-aged woman was spirited away to the hospital. They got pictures of her on the stretcher being wheeled in there. Turns out it’s his mother-in-law. Now, what’s she doing at his house if Elin has moved out? Some of this reporting, you have to question it, but nevertheless it was real that she has a nonlife-threatening stomach ailment that they had to rush her to the hospital for, at 2:30 in the morning. Anyway, the whole thing’s unraveling now. I mean people are starting to ask, will he ever play golf again?
Now this is also fascinating, too. This behavior was known by everybody that knows Tiger except the public. The media knew it, my friends, I knew it. Anybody who knows anybody high up in the golf world, there’s all this and more stories that have gone around about Tiger. I’ve heard all this and more. I’ve heard these stories for two years. But the point is the public. I’m not going to tell you what the ‘more’ is ’cause that’s just rumor. This stuff was not rumor. I’ll wait for the ‘more’ to be confirmed by somebody else.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me finish now with the article here from Lisa Schiffren, because she’s nailed it here. The reason people are still continually focused on this Tiger Woods business is that it’s an act of betrayal, that there was a hoax perpetrated here. He was presented as somebody he’s not, and people knew it all along. They knew it all along, but there was money to be made on both sides of it. There is money hopefully still to be made, so they’re trying to repair it so that it can remain what it was. But I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this now. And where you find a hoax, what do you always have to have to perpetrate it? You have to have a compliant media, be it a global warming hoax, be it a financial crisis hoax, you have to have a compliant media going along with it. And the media in the Tiger Woods thing was also a beneficiary. I mean television ratings, golf tournaments in which he played skyrocketed. And they wanted access to him. A lot of sports media, just groupies that have a computer keyboard or camera and microphone, just groupies. They want access, want to hang around.
The only way you’re going to have that access is to go silent on things that you know. If you succeed and are helpful in perpetrating the false image, the hoax, then you’re going to be allowed access. See, the behavior of Tiger Woods was known to everybody except the public. They’re shocked and stunned, and they feel betrayed. ‘This industry-wide cover-up of Woods’ cheating (and apparently his personal nastiness, arrogance, and general non-cuddly nature) is not a small, secret plot by dedicated fanatics. Rather, it is a set of interlocking self-interests manifested in sustaining the pristine image of this one sports icon to keep cash coming in. But enough about Tiger the man, who is, after all, only a golfer. Let’s move on to Tiger the metaphor. Because anyone with four functioning brain cells gets that if this comprehensive a charade can be sustained for a decade as Woods and those around him amassed billions, it can happen elsewhere. It can happen right in front of our eyes.
‘If I were watching the public’s disgust with the newly revealed Tiger Woods from an office in the West Wing, I’d be concerned. Because Barack Obama is about as completely manufactured a political character as this nation has seen. His meteoric rise, without the inconvenience of a public record or accomplishments, and the public’s willing suspension of critical evaluation of his resume allowed his handlers and the media to project whatever they wanted to on his unfurrowed brow. Ironically, the parallels have nothing to do with race. The Obama campaign did explicitly attempt to borrow from the then-universal Tiger Woods appeal to allay any discomfort voters might have had with a mixed-race politician. They constructed a persona that would make the American electorate comfortable with a barely-known, first-term senator with a left wing voting record, a deliberately obscured personal and professional past, and no traditional qualifications for high office.’ Look at what’s happened here. No traditional qualifications, no resume. It was all covered up. And we were all told, ‘Don’t worry about it, this is historic.’
‘After a year in the spotlight, Barack Obama, hailed as a brilliant man and a creature of destiny who would heal us all, is himself falling rapidly to earth.’ His 47% approval number is the lowest at this stage of a presidency, of any president. George W. Bush at this stage was at 86% approval. That was after 9/11. Clinton was at 54% at this stage of his presidency. Obama is at 47% and plummeting. ‘Thankfully, his family life remains above suspicion. The flaws that were airbrushed out of the candidate photos are becoming glaringly obvious under day-to-day scrutiny of his public performance in the White House. And while it doesn’t matter if another athlete is an adulterer, it matters a lot if the president is revealed to be an inexperienced, excessively ideological, and weak man who is naive about the world and uncomfortable exercising American power during a time of war. It matters if nothing in his training would have equipped the president to understand what it takes to stimulate job growth,’ and I guarantee you, she’s exactly right here, he has not been taught that.
He’s been taught that this country sucks, that this country’s unfair, it’s unjust and immoral. He’s been taught that this country has destroyed the world by stealing all the world’s resources. That’s what he’s been taught. That’s what most people his age have been taught, particularly if they have his Ivy League pedigree, and then you add to it the Chicago thuggery and you got quite a package. He has no clue how to end an overseas conflict successfully, not even interested in it. ‘It matters that he is uninterested in the science behind global warming — and wishes to use the issue to amass power and reorder society. It matters that he has no interest in the construction of policy. Ultimately, Woods is an exceptional golfer with a character problem. Barack Obama, by contrast, is not an exceptional, or even particularly competent, leader.’ I’m going to add an asterisk here, because this is an ongoing dilemma. He is naive in the sense that he’s ignorant. He has not been taught the right things about capitalism. That’s why he doesn’t like it. And so that may suffice in defining him as naive.
But I don’t believe for a moment that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And in that sense it’s not naivete that’s going on here, it is pure, 100% deception. It’s identical to what happened to us with Tiger Woods. We have been betrayed, we have been hoaxed. Well, I’m saying ‘we’ in the collective sense, I knew it all along. One of the big themes of the interview as they cut it up — I finally watched the Shatner interview last night, it was pretty good — and one of the themes was I’m not a conformist, and I learned in the second grade when I spent time learning how to paste this is not for me. I hated being cooped up in a prison-like room that had windows where I could see freedom on the other side. Nonconformist, won’t wear jeans, although I got a pair recently to emphasize my new svelte self with the incredible weight loss.
At any rate, I knew it all along, because I know liberals. And to me, the most effective way to expose liberals is to expose liberalism, i.e., use ideology. The Republican Party right now is caught up in massaging policy differences, as though we just have a traditional ebb and flow of power here, well, you got a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress and it’s their turn for a while so we’ll do what we can to slow it down, stop it, or what have you. No! We’ve never had anything like this before, and we were lied to, we were the victims of a hoax in order to get us here. And that’s why he’s at 47% because people realize it. The independents are fleeing this guy in droves, and it’s not because of anything the Republicans are doing to attract them. When I see the Republican generic ballot showing a big and widening lead, somebody tell me what known national Republican Party policy there is that’s attracting people right now. There isn’t one. It is strictly people abandoning Barack Woods, or Tiger Obama. So there’s an opportunity here to pick up even more of it if you come out and announce a national platform of what you as a party believe in.
‘But because so many politicians, interest groups and factions have an interest in his continued presence, no one is ready to reveal the man behind the curtain just yet.’ But believe me, just as there were people who knew the real Tiger, there are people who know the real Barack Obama. And Lisa Schiffren in this piece in the American Thinker is exactly right. They are sweating bullets ’cause they have to know this whole Obama persona is manufactured and presented to us on a teleprompter with a godlike reverb when he speaks. And there was no godlike reverb today at the Brookings Institution and it sounded flat. ‘Many voters from both the center and the far left who believed in the Obama magic are increasingly dismayed by watching the human god fall to earth. This is a major problem because, as Shafer notes, the impulse of the betrayed is to tear their fallen deities to shreds.’ That’s Lisa Schiffren today in the AmericanThinker.com.