I'm an Obamaholic and I'm powerless - New 12 Step cult emerges in print

Submitted by JR Harris on Fri, 08/24/2012 - 07:28

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The newest craze is applying the 12 Commandments of Bill Wilson, commonly called the 12 Steps, to everything and writing a book about it. With the US presidential election coming up and Texas Judge Tom Head claiming that if Obama is re-elected a civil war will happen in the Lone Star State (i.e. http://www.myfoxlubbock.com/news/local/story/Lubbock-tom-head-tax-rates-...) a 12 Step approach was soon to follow.

Given that the 12 Steps are based on the musings of an adulterous Bill Wilson, I do not know why it is not called Clintonaholics Anonymous. - I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Helen Wynn....

PRUDEN: A 12-step cure for Obamaholics

By Wesley Pruden - The Washington Times
Friday, August 24, 2012
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a 12-step program, patterned after the program that has rescued thousands of town drunks.

He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for the addiction to the messiah from the South Side of Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz already.

“My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line of “The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter,” published by HarperCollins’ Broadside Books.

“I’m an Obamaholic. Welcome to what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault — it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”

Though the collective stupor induced by Mr. Obama’s speechifying four years ago is finally dissolving, little by little, there’s still a lot of stupor out there. Gallup only this week said Mitt Romney has edged ahead of the president in a national poll of voters, but what is remarkable to the sober observer is that Mr. Obama is keeping it close, given the unholy mess he has made of the economy.

The president offers words, pretty enough but not much consolation to someone desperate for a job. He correctly figured in 2008 that since few voters in his left-wing base had ever been to church or heard good preaching, his own skill with words would be taken for seductive eloquence. He adopted the pitch and cadence of the black pulpit, and though there are hundreds of black (and white) pulpitmasters who can preach rings around him, the swindle worked. Addiction, particularly among those who imagine themselves the elite, blossomed like the deadly nightshade.

Only a 12-step program, writes Mr. Karpel, can free the naive and clueless from an imprisoned mind. Mr. Karpel is no right-wing zealot. His book is neither rave nor rant. He was once, like the president, a left-wing community organizer. He once wrote speeches for Abbie Hoffman. He mocks the soft, gooey language of quackery, of the frauds who have turned once-sturdy verbs into the soggy language of academics, therapists and charlatans. “We urgently need to embark on a 12-step program that will enable us to heal.”

He argues that the election of Mr. Obama was the triumph of biography over achievement, of empty promise over performance, the result of aspiring to elitism.

“Outside of technical fields, proverbially brain surgery and rocket science,” he says, “academic credentials are an indication not of achievement, but of promise.” Mr. Obama posed as a Harvard scholar, but since he has resolutely refused to release any evidence of student prowess, we don’t know whether he was the academic genius he assures us he was or a fraud laughing at how easy it was to fool so many people.