By Robin of Berkeley

November 17, 2009
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/obamas_mind_game.html
 
We're playing those mind games together
Pushing the barriers, 
Planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the mantra, peace on earth
 -John Lennon

It's a chilling moment when the light goes out in someone's eyes. A once-radiant child hardens from abuse. A woman's heart shrinks after her husband's abandonment.
 
The person looks the same, maybe acts the same. But something is gone, and what's lost is irretrievable. It's like when a person dies: in a heartbeat, the soul vanishes.
 
I witnessed this alteration recently when I visited my goddaughter, a radiant girl. Her mom, a hardcore progressive, has started exposing her to the darkest elements of the left. And the last time I looked in the girl's eyes, the light had gone out. Disappeared. Just like that.
 
I see this phenomenon every day: a light dimming. The friendly shopkeeper snaps at me. My cheerful neighbor seems flattened.
 
And you hear it in the news: people acting strangely, going off the deep end. The most bizarre behavior becoming the new normal. 
 
A thug bites off a finger. Sarah Palin's church is torched. Bullies intimidate voters.
 
Last week, an esteemed Columbia University black architecture professor punched a white female coworker in the eye for not doing more about white privilege.  
 
He has no history of violence. So why now?
 
Why now? This may be the most important question of our time. Why are some people reaching the boiling point? Why do many others look vacant, like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The shootings at military bases, from Little Rock to Fort Hood -- why now?
 
It's Obama, of course.
 
Liberals will excoriate me for writing this. They'll insist that bad behavior is not Obama's fault. He's a man of peace.  
 
But study the phenomenon of cults, and the dynamics are always the same. The leader can incite violence without ever getting his hands dirty. Obama is controlling the marionette of the masses.
 
If Obamamania is a cult, then Obama is the cult leader. Cult leaders routinely pull the strings of their followers. The most extreme example is Charles Manson. He rots in prison for murders he never committed. He didn't have to do the dirty work. His brainwashed charges did his bidding.
 
I'm not saying Obama is a Charles Manson. There are varying degrees of manipulation, from using sexy blondes to entice men to buy cars all the way to hypnotizing them to drink poisoned Kool Aid. But there's a common denominator in all mind control: manipulating people through mind games.
 
As soon as Obama came on the scene, the programming began. His face was plastered everywhere like Mao. In his speeches, Obama lulled audiences with a melodious voice and feel-good phrases repeated over and over. And he began inciting people with his charming smile.
 
First, the vultures starting swooping down on Hillary. Obama chose not to call off the dogs.
 
Then thugs invaded caucuses. Again, silence.
 
Which led to vicious misogyny against Sarah Palin and threats on her life. From Obama: not a peep.
 
We even saw armed thugs at polling places. Ignored and not prosecuted by Obama's Attorney General. 
 
The moment Obama became president, he upped the signals. At the swearing in, the entire family eerily chose to wear black and red, colors associated with communism and black nationalism. Obama's first radio address was broadcast in the Arab world.  
 
Obama returned Britain's gift of a Winston Churchill statue while embracing dictators. He gave a white police officer a dressing down for doing his job, in effect calling him a racist. 
 
Obama's greatest magic trick? Brainwashing the masses to believe that racism is a greater danger than radical Islam, and that Obama himself is in constant peril.  
 
Opposing health care means you oppose Obama. Oppose Obama and you're part of a vast right-wing racist conspiracy.  
 
Thus, more and more people are finding themselves on the receiving end of a fist, figurative or literal. After the White House released a directive for his followers to strike back hard, a frail, diabetic black man at a Town Hall was beaten up.  
 
Even women can get slugged in the face. Obama signaled during the primary that women were fair game.
 
Obama and the Left are making sure that there ia an increasing number of persuadable people. By displacing workers, panicking business owners with Draconian laws, and whipping up rage and paranoia, they amass more lackeys.   
 
The American Hard Left knows how to create a cult because it is a cult, one with a violent history. The Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, Weathermen, Black Muslims -- all nefarious cults.   
 
Members of the Weathermen, for instance, had their spirits broken through forced wickedness, such as animal abuse.  Patty Hearst morphed into bank robber Tania after weeks of isolation, rape, and beatings by the SLA.   Huey P. Newton sent his Black Panthers to the hospital or to the grave if they didn't practice total obedience.
 
So what's the end game here?   
 
The first goal is power. The Left has an insatiable need to control every aspect of our lives.  
 
But there's a deeper reason, one much more insidious.   
 
The Left wants to tear Americans down. Just as the Weatherman did to those naïve lost kids, they want to break our spirits. This goal of degradation is more crucial than their one-world government. 
 
The progressives want to turn us into them, to make us feel as deprived and depraved and deadened. It's the only way that they can silence the roar of shame and self-loathing.   
 
What they don't understand is this: it's not going to happen. There are too many of us who won't be hypnotized.  
 
We can see right through them. We know who they are: the most piteous of human beings, and the most dangerous. Men without a country, orphans far from home. The forsaken and disowned.  
 
They're "hungry ghosts," to use a Tibetan phrase: tormented beings who are starving to death from their inner nothingness.
 
Mother Teresa was once asked how she coped with serving the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. She responded that what she saw in the cities of the United States was much more disturbing, because it was a "poverty of the spirit."
 
Poverty of the spirit.  No truer words can be spoken of the progressive Left.
 
A frequent AmericanThinker contributor, Robin is a psychotherapist and a recovering liberal in Berkeley.