As Americans, increasingly more connected to the world through the network of networks that is the Internet, with more means of accessing the Internet than ever before, absorb the news of the day through whatever means they prefer (which, more often than not, is now through the Internet in some fashion, as traditional leftist newspapers struggle with plummeting subscription rates), there is one face that is unavoidable. There is one voice that is incessant. There is one person who is omnipresent, seemingly everywhere and always, forever looming in the random access memory of the nation's collective conscience.
That person is Barack Hussein Obama.
As the Glorious Leader Obama (called "Caesar Obama" by one radio talk-show host) exerts his best efforts to place his Orwellian visage on the telescreens of the nation's media outlets, both traditional and Internet-based, citizens are inundated with the inevitability of Obama's increasingly statist rule. Already, Obama has called for tremendous expenditures of your money for his ill-conceived stimulus plan(s), lied about his knowledge of bonuses to be paid to companies receiving these tax dollars, advocated the creation of what would be, essentially, fascist brownshirts to enforce his rule, and generally proven to be every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare in his willingness to embrace invasive government controls on your life, in every venue of human endeavor. If that sounds too sweeping, too general for you, do a simple news search for various policies advocated, facilitated, encouraged, or otherwise endorsed by Barack Obama or operatives within his scandal-ridden and corrupt Cabinet. What you find should give you pause, if you value the ideals of liberty and personal responsibility on which this nation was based.
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This staggering power-grab on the part of the fledgling Obama administration is accompanied by a full-court media press that has Obama appearing – as a sitting president – on everything from "60 Minutes" (where he cackled about the poor state of the economy) to Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" (where he insulted the mentally handicapped), somehow finding time along the way to hold numerous prime-time television speeches and conferences. At some point, the American people should wonder why their president, who famously refused to give up his Blackberry (a very real potential security risk) is, in every area of their lives, using the power of technology to hector them relentlessly. Everywhere one turns, Obama is reading from a teleprompter or stumbling through extemporaneous comments in an effort to convince the American people that his policies are what is best for them (even though he acknowledges many of these policies to be imperfect).
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Michael Friedenberg wrote in Computerworld that Obama has demonstrated, in certain key ways, that he understands the power of today's information technology and is using it to good effect. The president has, as reported by Friedenberg, appointed a chief information officer (a post that sounds disturbingly similar to some form of propaganda ministry, in title if not in fact), allocated significant tax dollars in his stimulus package for establishing electronic health records (the dangers of which we have discussed in this column), and issued a memorandum on "Transparency and Open Government," which presumably, in demanding that government be made "transparent, participatory and collaborative," must of necessity make use of information technology to do so.
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What we are witnessing is nothing short of the establishment of a technologically based dictatorship. The drive to build such a regime began during the election cycle, when Obama was anointed president-to-be long before the actual election, his victory all but taken for granted by virtually every outlet of the popular press. Old or new media, the prediction was the same: There was no way McCain could win, and Obama was to be the next president. Lauded for his brilliant oratory skills and feted for being the first black president, Barack (formerly "Barry") Obama wasted no time throwing under the bus every individual he claimed he could not denounce. Be it his racist pastor of years or his own grandmother, there was no one over whom Obama would not step in his climb to the Oval Office – and there was no relevant piece of information technology that was not telecommunicating, almost presciently, his rise to power.
Obama's prime-time overexposure is a function of his understanding of information technology. Our modern society is built on IT. Technology is interwoven in every minute of our daily lives. It runs our ATMs; it reports the plummet of our 401K investments; it allows us to send text messages, photos, video and code to our family, peers and coworkers; it enables government functionaries to compile extensive databases of our vital statistics, purchases, activities and identities; it connects us and enables us and empowers us and imprisons us. Modern technology is the fabric of the matrix in which we all live and breathe. It is inescapable, unavoidable and ultimately invaluable.
President George W. Bush was famous for his lack of technological knowledge. Obama, by stark contrast, is the most technologically savvy president we have ever had. He has become ever-present and all-encompassing in our media outlets and through the technological vessels that carry these outlets' product to our eyes, our hearts and our minds. Barack Hussein Obama is, in word and deed, quickly becoming our first technological dictator. As he Twitters his daily enemies list through his Blackberry while waiting for his latest firearms prohibitions to be uploaded to iTunes as podcasts, we can expect Caesar Obama to record a series of YouTube videos in which he explains why government price controls and salary caps are what's best for a formerly free America.
We can then take to our blogs to complain about the erosion of personal freedom in a nation that once boasted a free market – until, of course, government spies using Web-crawling search engines identify our seditious speech and order us, via e-mail, to be taken to the re-education camps. We may then all update our MySpace page moods accordingly, to "oppressed."
