Red Ed: 'Return to Socialism............'

Now that the comrades’ gobfest is yesterday, we can begin to deconstruct Red Ed’s address to the faithful.

 

His audience received it with something approaching rapture.

 

So should Cameron. Not even he can miss this open goal, surely?

 

Let’s get started.

 

He is going to encourage local councils to expropriate development land on which the owners have not built. Presumably this will be at full market value. That in turn will require an increase in the public borrowing requirement of £billions. If and when the land is owned by Bevindon Borough Council will that guarantee rapid development for council housing or starter homes? Why was the London Docklands Development Corporation was created? Because the land owned by the local councils had lain fallow for ages and they were incapable of making any decisions because of political machinations.

 

And another thing.

 

All major developers need large land banks to meet their needs over a period of years. Development requires long-term forward planning before a single sod is turned; a major delaying factor is the planning authority, which will also become the developer under Ed’s addle-pated plans.

 

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the asset values of the big developers took a hair-cut in the wake of Ed’s ‘return to Socialism’, as he has boasted.

 

Next, the most blatant piece of voter bribery since the Eatanswill election.

 

There will be a freeze on energy prices for 20 months after Ed romps home in 2015. Labour costs it at about a £4.5 billion loss to the providers. Another estimate is £7 billion. If the companies push up prices to counter this, Ed will blame the Tories.

 

It is not explained why that period is the magic bullet that will  fell the profiteers, but two things are certain.

 

The first is that there will be pre-emptive tariff increases before the General Election, so consumers will actually end up paying more than ever during that period.

 

The second is that capital investment will dry up almost completely at a critical time when Britain is running out of generation capacity and coal-fired stations are being closed. One of the ’big six’ energy firms plans to invest £30 billion in nuclear. Fat chance under Ed’s plans. Energy investment is by nature huge, risky and long-term. Political meddling is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Ed says that the reason for these measures is that the customer is being ripped off; tariffs have risen by 30% in the past three years. That looks like profiteering. But it isn’t. Average profits of the power companies are around 4 - 5% tops. There are other reasons for the increases.

 

One is increasing reliance on gas-powered electricity generation; gas is expensive – three times more so than in the US, but then they have fracking! Another, which is rarely mentioned, is the huge cost of compliance with rules about climate change, and we are talking billions here.

 

The oddity about all this is that UK energy prices are well below the EU average, with France, reliant upon cheap hydro and nuclear generation, being a bit cheaper and Germany, Spain and Ireland being much higher.

 

So what would become of this? Energy firms say that this would result in job-losses and black-outs. One of the ’big six’ says that it might relocate elsewhere. Investment in renewable energy means that the greenhouse gas targets would be abandoned by Labour. Lack of investment would mean an energy crisis from 2014. And thus higher prices. Well done, Ed.

 

The puzzle is why Ed chose to launch these two proposals now, around 20 months ahead of the General Election. The Tories and the media have been given all the time they need to rubbish them. It has started already,

 

Why did he not keep these shots in the locker until the campaign proper, when they might have achieved their vote-catching aim? Perhaps it is all about restoring Ed’s approval rating to somewhere above abysmal. The polls suggest a blip in favour of Labour since the speech.

 

The conspiracy theorists hold that it was all  Ball’s, to discredit Ed and open the door to No 10 for the fragrant Yvette Cooper aka Mrs Balls. There might – just - be some credence in this. According to McBeast, the Labour Party exists in a constant state of plotting; they hate each other more than they ever hate the Tories.

 

So ‘Return to Socialism’ Ed proposes land grabs, price controls, and power cuts.

 

Déjà vu all over again!

RIP the Conservative Party........

If I wish to vote for the ‘conservative’ party, where will I find it? Maybe it’s away at the races. It certainly is not the Tory Party, which under David Cameron has morphed into a faux liberal party.

 

The basics of conservatism are ‘moderate’, ‘averse to rapid change’, ‘avoiding extremes’, ‘cautious’.

 

I would add to this dictionary definition ‘small government’, ‘protection of the currency’, ‘defence of the realm’, ‘support for enterprise ‘, ‘avoidance of unnecessary change’, ‘respect for tradition’, ‘freedom of the individual’, ‘support for ancient liberties’, ‘freedom of speech’, ‘adherence to the constitution’, ‘the rule of law’.

 

The list is long. So where will we find a party that adheres to these  principles? And where does the Tory Party stand?

 

Well, for starters, it wasted an inordinate amount of time and public money on changing the constitution so that the first-born becomes heir-apparent regardless of sex. Since this will not kick-in for at least another 70 years, that was all a farce, although it did provide a lot of freebies, since every Commonwealth country with Her Maj as Head of State had to be consulted.

 

Then there was the mess and muddle over ‘gay’ marriage which involved changing not just the law but the English language, since ‘marriage’ by definition is the legal union of a man and woman. Dave managed to divide his party and the country on a legal fiction; many voters were strongly against the notion; even more could care less. The adverse reaction of many Tory backbenchers gave a taste for rebellion, which is being indulged increasingly.

 

It is depressing to look back on these and many other time-wasting diversions when the country seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket.

 

Defence of the realm? We now have a navy that can muster 19 ships. This is the smallest since the days of Henry VIII. Unfriendly counties can now disrupt our trading routes at will. Even Somali pirates can safely ignore us. One day we will get an aircraft carrier, HMS Prince of Wales. It might even get some planes to go with it. But since the Nimrod squadrons were vandalised,  there is no radar top-cover, so in action the PoW would last about as long as its predecessor

 

The army is at its smallest since before the Napoleonic Wars, even though the UK is still engaged in the longest continuous war in history. The RAF has been forced to stand-down fighters because the technicians who keep them flying have been made redundant.

 

Never mind, at least the foreign aid programme is so cash-rich, with its 37% budget increase, that it has difficulty in spending the money. And despite the burgeoning budget deficit and national debt, Dave can still, in true socialist style chuck £600 million at free meals for tiny tots regardless of need, and umpteen billions at the HSR2 Gravy-train.

 

Civil liberties? Blair/Brown created over 3000 new imprisonable offences, so that now you can land in the Bridewell for suggesting that a petty official should take to sex and travel. And there is the European Arrest Warrant, which arrived under the pretext of nabbing terrorists and has never been used for that but which can result in you being hauled off to a stinking jail in Bulgaria to wait 3 years to be tried for something that is not an offence in the UK.

 

What have the ‘Conservatives’ done to restore our (relative) freedoms? That’s right!

 

In fact what have they done to further a single one of the basic principles of conservatism? Do I hear just an echo?

Bagels and bhajis....

We need cheering up during this dismal week post Nairobi, so here’s a ‘feel-good’ story that has had very little coverage outside the area .

 

Remember how the Muswell Hill mosque was destroyed (allegedly by the EDL)after the murder of a soldier ?

 

Where does the local Muslim-Somali community pray now?

 

Why, in the local synagogue.

 

Almost immediately after the outrage, the Rabbi offered  to share the building with them. More than that, they invited them to Sukkot.

 

Here is what the local paper had to say:

 

‘Sukkot remembers the way Jewish people lived wandering in the desert for 40 years, building tents to give them temporary shelter - a message all the more poignant for the two communities this year.

 

 

Rabbi Berger said: “I couldn’t stand idly by when I heard they didn’t have anywhere to pray. We wanted to do this as a public display of solidarity and in it, we’ve actually formed a unique friendship. At a time when there’s animosity between the two religions, we are trying to show people we are neighbouring communities who have a lot in common’.

 

 

The synagogue was used for prayer during Ramadan, and Jews and Muslims celebrated Eid together; bagles and bhajis; kosher and halal.

 

 

And when I was devilling this story I was surprised to see that in the US it is becoming increasingly common for the local synagogue to be used by both Jews and Muslims.

 

McBride the Party Pooper...

What impeccable timing!

 

Just when the comrades were about to mumble through ‘The Red Flag’, Damian McBeast dumps a whole load of ordure right  over the party.

 

His confessions, widely trailed to coincide with the Labour Party conference, reveal the rottenness of the Blair/Brown regime.

 

His main task (at the tax-payers’ expense) was to ‘brief’ against anyone who might be a threat to the Dear Leader; that is, to spread rumours, lies, false accusations, and personal scandal with the main objective of destroying the careers of whomsoever he chose.

 

He would send out toxic e-mails to his toadying hacks containing slurs and innuendos against leading Tories. He targeted Cameron and his wife, George Osborne’s wife, Nadine Norris and others. Perhaps the story about William Hague spending a night in a hotel room with another man came from this source; the implication was clear enough.

 

But the most bizarre aspect was that most of his venom appears to have been directed against leading members of the Labour Party. He pretty well did for John Reid by spreading stories about drunken escapades many years previously. He tried hard to stitch up Charles Clark when he was Home Secretary. The ‘News of the World’ did a splash about a junior Minister and a female civil servant, planted by McBeast.

 

It comes as no surprise to learn that one of his cronies was Tom Watson, Miliband’s minder until he flounced out over the UNITE election rigging rumpus, which makes it difficult to accept that Ed didn’t know what was going on.

 

‘All water under the bridge’, is the Labour’s response. Only it isn’t. It is common knowledge how Ed shafted his own brother to get the top job; he was part of the inner circle when the briefing scandal was at its worst; he has just appointed a close buddy of McBeast as his assistant press secretary.

 

The relationship between Ed and Balls is beginning to look like a repeat of the Blair and Brown show. ‘Wallace and Grommet’ is being heard to describe the pair.

 

And yet….we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that the Tories are innocent of this sort  of malarkey. UKIP is increasingly the target of Tory ‘briefings’. Maggie had Sir Bernard Ingham as her press secretary, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman of integrity. Dave appointed a Red Top hack, that diamond geezer from Essex, Andy Coulson.

 

 

Stand by for more ‘revelations’ about Nigel Farage and UKIP MEPs.

A famous victory.......Assad's!

There’s no doubt about it; when Obama set out to drain the Syrian swamp, he quickly found himself up to his arse in alligators.

 

He shouldn’t be let out without a teleprompter; his ‘red lines’ off-the-cuff gaffe was quickly met by Assad crossing them, a masterstroke of two-finger diplomacy.

 

To get off the hook, he followed David Cameron by taking the war-question to the Tribunes of the people (quite unnecessarily because the power of decision rested with the two leaders),  knowing that he would lose. With one bound Barack would be free.

 

The chattering classes called him ‘weak’, ‘indecisive’, ‘vacillating’, ‘dithering’ – you get the idea.

 

According to them, he was shafted by Vlad the Impaler who even had the chutzpah to publish a condescending piece in America’s newspaper of record, the NYT. Putin had placed himself as the arbiter of events in the MENA by getting Assad to  reveal the dispositions of his WMD and get rid of them. He became a world statesman, showing the callow occupant of the White House how the grown-ups do it. Russia is now King of the Midden; America has been humiliated.

 

Except that this analysis is completely wrong.

 

What has happened is that Obama has handed the smoking petard to Putin. Like the loser in ‘pass the parcel’, Putin has nowhere to put it. Putin has given Obama a ‘get out of jail, free’  card. Syria is now Russia’s problem, not America’s. Obama has fallen with his bum in butter, to use the old expression.

 

And the present outcome?

 

A win-win-win-win one.

 

Cameron was able to tell Obama ‘It wasn’t me, guv’.

 

Obama has dumped the problem.

 

Putin can now swagger and strut the world’ having reset Russia as a super-power.

 

And Assad? Well, he’s the real winner.

 

He was not losing the shooting war, although he wasn’t winning it just yet. Once the West started to think about the aftermath when the last bomb had fallen, it began to have visions of a replay of the aftermath of Gulf 2. No acceptable political alternative was in view, but the likely future was brought into focus when rebel groups began to execute harmless Christians. Toppling Assad without there being an acceptable successor seemed like the madness it truly was. An Al Qaeda regime in our backyard?

 

So Assad has to stay. Game, set, match.

 

‘And what became of it at last?’ quoth Little Peterkin.

‘Why, that I cannot tell’ said he ‘ but ‘twas a famous victory’.

So farewell, then, plain English.............

Have you noticed how  we have been acquiring  parallel versions and perversions of the English language?

 

There is ‘Namspeak’ deriving from the US adventures in SE Asia and migrated with American mercenaries to Rhodesia. It gave us ‘floppy’ (a dead body),

‘collateral damage’ (sh*t, I just bombed the school), terr (‘freedom fighter’), ‘casevac’ – removing the wounded, ‘taking the gap’ - scarpering. One of my all-time favourites is a sign on the boundary fence of the Chisholm Ranch in Texas. ‘Trespassers will be terminated with extreme prejudice’!

 

There’s ‘medspeak’, the daily garbage spouted by doctors, scientists, and assorted wowsers out to scare us. This makes us malleable. Everything is a ‘condition’ or a ’disorder’. We have ‘attention deficit disorder’ for very lively and disobedient kids. They are drugged into conformity when all that is needed is a clip around the ear. We have ‘personality disorder’ meaning ’raving bonkers’. The list is endless.

 

Then we have ‘Sir Humphreyspeak’ named after the slippery Permanent Secretary in’ Yes, Minister’ (which, take it from me, was documentary, not comedy) designed to obscure meaning, rather than to reveal it, in common with most of the Nuspeak variants.

 

‘I hear what you say’ – I disagree with you entirely.

 

‘A very bold suggestion’.  You are barking.

 

‘Very interesting’. Totally stupid.

 

‘Safe pair of hands’. Does nothing therefore does no harm.

 

There is journalese, words that are quite at odds with their true meanings. Murray is a ‘sporting hero’. No he’s not. He’s a grumpy tennis player earning loadsamoney. A hero is someone who shows exceptional courage in hazardous circumstances. ‘Facing financial Armageddon’ the DT tells us today.  ‘Armageddon’   is the final battle between good and evil. So who will be the contestants? He really means another nice mess they’ve got us into.

 

And the pages are scattered with ’syndrome’ and ‘traumatic’, but never in their real meaning. You might be ‘traumatised’ by serving in Afghanistan, but not by a theatre performance.

 

The world of politics? Don’t get me started!

 

Time was when plain speaking was the hallmark of a good politician – ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. One of my favourites is from Ernest Bevin. When someone commented that Herbert Morrison, whom he hated, was ‘his own worst enemy’, Ernie replied ‘Not while I alive he ain’t !’

 

Now politicians use the words of the huckster, the sharp-elbowed estate agent. ‘Messages’ must be ’promoted’; ‘selling a positive image’; the slogans of the marketing man.

 

They change or obscure the meaning of words. ‘Developing country’ means one that is getting poorer and the people are eating field-mice. Everything is a ‘priority’, a contradiction. ‘The Third Way’ doesn’t mean anything at all.

 

They always have a ‘passion’ for their policies. No, they don’t. They only have a passion for their expenses and horizontal jogging. They don’t have policies; they have slogans. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’; a meaningless soundbite. ‘I’m a reglar kinda guy’, but morally constipated, your Reverence.

 

And we have a multitude of ‘wars’ and ‘Tsars’. ‘War on crime’. ‘War on drugs’. These lead to ’crackdowns’. Have they ever won any of these wars? And capital letters instead of words; IED – a bomb; WMD – a fictional weapon owned by someone we don’t like.

 

About 30 years ago, my local Council decided that we were no longer ‘ratepayers’; we were ‘customers’, as if we had the choice of taking our custom elsewhere if not satisfied with the bin collection. The NHS started calling patients ‘clients’, as if the GP was the equivalent of you solicitor, charging by the millisecond. That didn’t last long.

 

We now live in a world of euphemism.

 

A letter to William Hague.........

Dear William,

 

Pardon the familiarity, but I feel that I have known you since your sensational maiden speech to the Tory Party Conference as a smirking 16 year-old.

 

Might I offer some advice about your foreign policy.

 

I think you should have one.

 

We might begin with a few of Gladstone’s precepts.

 

It is not our business to tell other countries how they should be governed. In particular, trying to impose ‘democracy’ on people who don’t understand it, are incapable of making it work, and don’t want it, is folly. It will inevitably end in tears, as we have seen in Iraq. ‘For forms of government let fools contest…..’

 

‘We have no permanent friends; only permanent interests’. In particular, we should stop harping on about the ‘special relationship’ with the US. It does not mean that we follow America like a trusting puppy dog to wherever the master fancies taking us. By all means invoke it when it suits British interests; otherwise forget about it.

 

No foreign entanglements. The role of our armed forces is the defence of the realm. We have no business chasing fuzzy-wuzzies around the deserts and mountains of far-away countries of which we know little.

 

Stopping foreign government from slaughtering their own people may seem very virtuous, but the Western conscience seems a tad selective. You may want to put an end to it in Syria, but how is this different from Ruanda, where you watched genocide unfold before your eyes and did nothing? Or the gassing of the Kurds by Saddam. Or the 400,000 deaths in Darfur. Or 5 million in the Congo. Or Pol Pot’s extermination of a whole class?

 

Every time the prospect of foreign intervention arises, ask yourself just one question. What vital British interests are at risk?

 

That should just about do it.

 

O:clutching at straws..

 

So, we have a new deal in the making.

 

It looked very much to me as if O were grabbing at another straw when he pounced on the prospect of Russia tucking away Syria's gas bombs. Now that the details of what such a slight of hand entails, everyone is less enthusiastic and optimistic about the proposition.

 

The French added to the details by insisting the perpetrators of the gas attacks be not only identified but delivered to the International Court of Justice as well. That will not happen as long as Assad is alive.

 

As statesmen continue to examine the prospect of Assad neutralizing his weapons in some way or another, more and more nasty details arise. We all know where the devil is now.

 

O must have rewritten his much anticipated speech for tonight several times already. Every day a new angle comes up that is deal breaking or in some other way overwhelming.

 

I plan to listen to what he has to say as I suspect he may indulge in some fantasy and a few rewrites of history.

My last night of 'The Last Night'.......

What a travesty!

 

The ‘Last Night of the Proms’ is an English (not British) tribal rite. As such, it must follow the rituals established by years of tradition.

 

It all happens in the second half with patriotic music, such as ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Sea Songs, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’; silly hats, poppers, squeakers and motor horns. The conductor makes a speech poking gentle fun at the promenaders. The bust of the founder of the Proms, Sir Henry Wood, is solemnly adorned with a laurel wreath. A daft, jolly and sentimental time is had by all.

 

Or at least that’s the way it was. Not anymore.

 

The ‘Last Night’ has not been the same since the incomparable Andrew Davies deserted us for Chicago. From memory he was the last English conductor for this most English of occasions. Since then, there has been a rag-bag of foreigners with scant appreciation of the spirit or significance of the performance, including the hapless and hopeless American, Leonard Slapkin. It is said that he dropped ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as being ‘too nationalistic’. Where did he think he was?

 

And so to last night’s ‘Last Night’.

 

Another foreign conductor, an American woman.

 

We had the diamond geezer Nigel Kennedy dressed in a scruffy-looking sweat shirt looking as though he had just come out of the pub. His grotty, greasy hair-do and  3-day stubble make me want to scratch.

 

Then we had an American soprano, previously unbeknownst, to give a vapid rendering of ‘Rule Britannia’. Shades of Bryn Terfel, dressed in Welsh rugby strip, kicking a ball into the audience and then belting out the song as if he really meant it. Or the majestic Anne Evans dressed as Britannia and towering over the company like an old-style Headmistress.

 

Last night ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ might have been sung but I don’t recall it. There was no wreath ceremony for Sir Henry Wood, just a quick shot of him already garlanded.

 

To add insult to injury, ‘Sea Songs’,  Sir Henry’s own composition was once more left out.

 

The conductor’s speech, from what  little I remember of something so instantly forgettable, was some feminist drivel about ‘Why has it taken so many years to have a woman conductor?’ Because there’s not too many top women conductors about , ducky!

 

And who is responsible for this pieced of PC vandalism.

 

Surprise, surprise. The BBC!

 

Unpopular Obama......

Obama's popularity in the USA is low and sinking.

 

Initially, a majority of Americans including a near majority of whites felt that O was the perfect candidate. His racial origins gave Americans their first opportunity to demonstrate that skin color was a at best a secondary consideration for a successful election.

 

He was bright, youthful, articulate, and palatable to all blacks, most Hispanics and the rest of us to some large degree. His speeches were riveting and nobody seemed to mind his being slightly left of center.

 

Soon, things began to fall apart.

 

To a large extent, this deterioration was precipitated by a handful of outspoken conservative detractors who enjoyed large radio and TV audiences. Their message was that O was bound to fail because of his socialist thinking and lack of experience.

 

Over time, the list of perceived faults grew longer; smug, indecisive, anti-British, pro-Muslim, unreliable, power hungry, and neither willing nor able to keep his often naive campaign promises. Many of his black American critics felt he was not black enough as he never really experienced growing up black in the continental USA.

 

A nasty campaign was mounted early in his presidency claiming that he was not American born and therefore not eligible for the office of POTUS. 

 

The idea caught fire among people subject to conspiracy theories and soon a small number of 'birthers' were spreading the word that he was not only born in Kenya, but was also a Muslim. The above mentioned radio and TV conservatives began  emphasizing his middle name; Barack HUSSEIN Obama. These people were just stirring the merde as they knew full well he was born in the USA of an American mother and Kenyan father. His reluctance to make public a copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate added fuel to the fire.

 

The issue of citizenship is now dead and the birthers have dwindled to a whisper.

 

Seeing as how Muslims are not baptized or otherwise ordained into their confession, and because Muslims believe everyone is born into the Islamic faith,  it is difficult to say whether Obama is a Muslim or not. The vast majority of Americans are content to view him as a Christian, but of undetermined denomination and not terribly religious. He himself claims to be a Christian. The issue is dead.

 

One might declare Obama to be tolerant to Muslims or even giving them more slack and attention than certainly other Presidents did. He may have been favorably influenced toward Muslims by his father and by his childhood years in Indonesia. In both cases, he learned from religious Muslims who were not culturally Arabs.

 

Such experience could easily give one a softer impression of Islam than if one had lived in a strictly Arab household. Indonesians are known for their acceptance of others and gracious cultural attitudes. Viewing Islam from an Indonesian perspective, therefore, give a much softer impression than viewing it from the perspective of a desert Arab.

 

Just now, it is not popular in the USA to speak kindly of Muslims. As a religious group, they are generally not tolerated. Most Americans do not distinguish between culturally different adherents to Islam. Instead, they bunch Muslims into a single group. Thus, being anti-Muslim is tantamount to being against everyone, Arab, Asian, African, Caucasian, who embrace the religion.

 

It follows that anyone showing sympathy to Muslims is going against a contemporary bias. Thus, Obama's earlier efforts to seek a dialogue with the Middle Eastern world was viewed with suspicions of being pro-Muslim. That aspect of his early  foreign policy failed miserably and it mattered not whether he pursued it out of respect for Islam or out of a desire to make new friends for America.

 

It would be an exaggeration to say the Obama is universally disliked in the USA.

 

He still commands the loyalty of a vast majority of blacks and a solid majority of Hispanics. He is also respected by a minority of whites, mainly liberals and leftists. He maintains good relations with the American version of Champaign Socialists, i.e. wealthy individuals dedicated to a liberal political philosophy and the democratic party.

 

Given today's demography, the preceding groups voting as a block would almost guarantee election. He is decidedly out of favor with the mainstream white population. His popularity rating has plummeted to somewhere in the 30th percentile, but this is a highly mercurial rating that cannot be trusted over any measurable length of time.

 

Aspects of Obama's loss of followers have more to do with his personality than his politics, race or religion. He comes across as bourgeois and noveau riche.  His intemperance over wining and dining, and partying, and sports, and holidays add up, in the minds of the American public, as excessive. It is as if he is eating out of the public trough as long as the food is free.

 

Many feel he is living the good life at taxpayers expense.

 

In another vein, he seems to have lost his magic. His speeches are less riveting. His ability to persuade political allies and enemies alike has waned. He holds no apparent sway in the Senate or the House. Nor does he appear to have the ear of the democratic Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. He is known to be out of sorts with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

 

It looks as if Obama is in over his head, has lost the stomach for politics and for being POTUS and is just along for the ride. His recent fiasco about drawing red lines and allowing Congress to decide whether or not to sanction the Assad regime in Syria have acted to largely hand over hard-won presidential powers to his political opponents.

 

The only way that history would treat the Obama presidency kindly would be if he were commissioned to write it. His public image is all most Americans have to go by. That persona is not doing well at the moment and the tend is downward.

 

This does not imply that he is a bad person or a poor husband or father. He has become of victim of his own success. He is likely cocooned in a bevy of trusted advisors who feed him on campaign-type propaganda to the extent they now all believe it.