The GSA, the President, and the Bimps: Making Disrespectability Respectable

The General Services Administration website http://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/21354  tells us that:

GSA oversees the business of the U.S. federal government. GSA’s acquisition solutions supplies federal purchasers with cost-effective high-quality products and services from commercial vendors. GSA provides workplaces for federal employees, and oversees the preservation of historic federal properties. Its policies covering travel, property and management practices promote efficient government operations… GSA leverages the buying power of the federal government to secure, in the most cost-effective, transparent, and sustainable manner possible, the goods, services, and real property that the civilian federal government needs to operate.

In essence, the GSA is the nuts and bolts agency literally ensuring that the United States government can work; it, in a sense, is the most federal of the federal agencies.   The GSA administrator is chosen by and reports to the president.  One would expect, therefore, that the GSA chief is philosophically in tune with Barack Obama and attempts to promote policies and practices to please the boss. 

Martha N. Johnson, GSA administrator until her resignation on April 2, 2012 in the wake of the Department’s  abuse scandal, was especially indebted to Obama; he had made her a co-leader of his GSA transition team in 2008 and in 2010 he fought to have her confirmed to the GSA leadership position when Congress balked.  To quote the President, “Nobody can tell me that there's anything particularly wrong with her. They're blocking her because of some unrelated matter. Don't hold this — this woman hostage.”

One would expect that Ms. Johnson’s gratitude might have been such that she fully and enthusiastically fashioned a GSA “corporate culture” complimentary to Barack Obama.  The staff had to know that she admired him and his style.

In any case, news footage of the GSA scandal had Barack Hussein Obama written all over it—the offenders evidenced the same swaggering bimp theatrics that we observed from President-endorsed rap stars such as Cee Lo Green and  Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., both of whom freely and publically broadcast  degrading words such as “nigga,” “fuck,” and other in-the-hood profane expletives and both have performed at the White House..  

The news film showed GSA employees dancing and gesturing in a manner consistent with the bimpest of the bimp rappers.  Workers danced to and fro, pumping their arms and splaying their fingers.   The “performers” wore their caps askew.  They waved money in the air and pointed to their “bling.”   In one skit, an especially “cocky” guy pranced between two approaching policemen, gesticulating and shouldering them aside, as one might see on an MTV rap video.  Of the persons pictured, about 80 percent were white.

All this proves what I have said a thousand times:  You don’t have to be black to be a bimp: arrogance, vulgarity, egotism, and narcissism cross all racial and ethnic boundaries.

Barack Obama contributed to the GSA scandal unwittingly, merely by being the dark-triad personality that he is.  He and his supporters created a culture that elevated bimp antics and self-indulgent disrespect to a governmentally acceptable level.   When bimps and rappers behaved in asocial, anti-American, outrageous manner, Obama had remained mostly silent, the only exception being times when he believed that the crude behavior was widely publicized and would have cost him politically. 

In short, Barack Hussein Obama has fostered an us-versus-them Whitehouse mentality, implying that traditional “white” Leave It to Beaver morality needs to be replaced by 21^st Century rapping bimp with-it-ness.     

The GSA folks, then,  acted out their renditions of bimp behavior—distorted views of what is black cool—consistent with what they had seen their swaggering first black (really biracial) president repeatedly endorsed, directly or implicitly.   As shown in the news footage, the General Services gang was ecstatically living it up— smug and tickled with delight.  They perhaps felt that they had reached a point of 21^st Century social sophistication such that one day, with a little luck, they, too, could make it to the Oval Office as their mentor has.