Next Stop for Barack and Michelle: Rancho Mirage

An article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times Business section says that the Obamas are in escrow on a compound (yes, a compound, not a house) in a gated community in Rancho Mirage, listed at $4.25 million. Here are a few features of the property: 

• the main house is 8,232 square feet
• the property is adjacent to a bighorn sheep preserve on a 3.29 acre hilltop with panoramic views
• the custom-built house is designed for entertaining, and includes a gym, four bedrooms, and 4.5 bathrooms
• There's also a 2,000 square foot "casita" (Spanish for "little house") on the property that has three bedrooms and three bathrooms. 
• The compound also includes a pool with a 20-foot waterfall, a rock lagoon, two spas, a misting system, and a putting green with a sand trap. 

A slide show with 15 more images can be found here. 

There are so many things of a sarcastic nature one wants to say. 

This story would be much less offensive to me if it weren't for the fact that Barack Obama owes his political fortunes to his countless diatribes against millionaires and billionaires. Indeed, the "defining challenge" of his generation (he says) is the "widening income disparity" between the rich and the poor.

Yes, class warfare is what got Mr. Obama re-elected in 2012. With no mention of the countless millionaires and a handful of billionaires who donated to his re-election campaign, Obama and the lapdog media demonized Mitt Romney and hamstrung conservative political organizations by means of a thoroughly corrupt IRS (Google "Lois Lerner" if you don't want to take my word for it). 

What's so despicable about him is the extent of his cynical manipulation of public opinion. There he sits, right up there among the 1%, lambasting the 1%, and the "little people," even people I know and am related to, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he's among the 1%, fawn over him. Are they really that obtuse?  

So, yes, I'm pretty disgusted by this story. 

Give it all away, Mr. and Mrs. Obama, or donate the property to a good cause, and maybe I'll take a second look at your character. For now, though, I have nothing but contempt for either of you.

Update (September 1, 2014): An item in yesterday's Business section of the LA Times says the Obamas did not purchase the Rancho Mirage property. My views, stated above, remain the same. 

Thinking a Second Time: Recommended Reading

Just finished this book by Dennis Prager, Think a Second Time, a collection of essays published in 1995. Though dated (wish he'd consider updating), it's still worth a look-see. I especially appreciated the selections in Part Three, dealing with questions related to good and evil, ethical monotheism, and belief in God after the Holocaust. 

A section in Part Two focuses on how idealists can be dangerous, and one chapter in particular was very good, "When Religion Makes People Cruel." Here he speaks to cruelty found in each of the major religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, and summarizes by quoting the 18th century rabbi Elija ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer (the Gaon of Vilna), who said, "Religion is like rain: it brings forth both beautiful flowers and poisonous weeds."

The last section of the book is devoted in its entirety to the case of Baby Richard, the young boy who was adopted at birth by a loving family, but was later returned to his birth father at age four and a half when the Illinois Supreme Court, by a vote of 5 to 1 (the majority all men, the dissenter, a woman), overturned lower court decisions and decided that the adoption was illegal. 

The story is a tragedy on many levels, the most poignant being that the court did not order that the child be permitted to have continued interaction with his adoptive family. Prager is particularly incensed about the issue of blood (i.e., genetics) taking precedence over family bonds, the societal trend towards the rights of the birth father ("the inseminator") over the rights of the child. He reserves his strongest vitriol for the five judges whom he refers to as evil men,  justifying the use of the word "evil" by recalling Hannah Arendt's use of phrase, "the banality of evil," the sub-title of her book about Adolf Eichmann. As Prager sees it, the evil perpetrated by the Illinois justices was not a deliberate, malicious evil but rather a "combination of mediocrity, willful ignorance of the consequences of one's actions, and an overriding...belief, " in this case, the belief in the inviolability of blood.

Baby Richard, whose real name is Danny Warburton (Warburton is the name of his adoptive family), is now presumably in his early 20's. This would be another good reason to update Prager's book. At the time of writing, the story was big news, and though there was some attempt by the media to report that Danny was doing very well, was adjusting to his new family, was happy, etc., it's obvious (to me) that there's no way this could have been determined so soon. Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune was the journalist who covered the story at the time, and I don't know if he's done a follow-up story on the case. I see here that he's had some personal and professional issues in the last decade. 

I guess my next non-fiction book will be the text I've adopted for my fall English 50 class, The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, by Thomas Cooley. If Prager would update Think a Second Time, I'd seriously consider adopting that as a text. Thinking a second time could do these millennials a bit of good.