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Now this is what I’ve been trying to say! Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing for the Wall Street Journal writes a fantastic piece. Read on with an open mind.
THE ALIEN IN THE WHITEHOUSE
The distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealed.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president’s earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans’ leader, a man of them, for them, the nation’s voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn’t lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president’s appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America’s attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of “Allahu Akbar!”), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. “People have different reasons” he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn’t want “to say anything negative about any religion.”
And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: “Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear.”
He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan’s pronouncements in that speech: That “violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces.”
Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: “Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square.” Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.
Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal “man-caused disasters” among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama’s moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
That’s my Reetzality for they day! Thanks for the read and thank you Ms. Rabinowitz.
Brett Reetz
Captain Obonga to the Rescue!
I am so relieved. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Captain Obonga. I had no idea that the government, that failed to prevent a terrorist on the watch list whose father reported him as a radical without a passport from getting on a plane headed to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear, no idea whatsoever that that government could fix everything else. The next thing you know they’ll be joking that the government can’t even keep strangers out of White House dinners? But you set me straight Captain Obonga. Thank you.
O.K., on a more serious note (although the first note was serious, I just utilized humor to demonstrate the seriousness, now I’ll get rid of the humor) was that a speech or what? Shoot, here comes the humor again. Captain Obonga is going to do everything. Pheewww! Say good bye to worries my little friends, I mean you American People. You “they” people.
O.K., O.K. O.K., I took a serious pill, so here goes, firm, fair and frank. The State of the Union address was a rambling cacophony of lies, misrepresentations, false promises, insincerity, rewriting of recent history, bragging, blaming, arrogance, ignorance, condescension, and otherwise consistent with a complete ripper of a marijuana fest. Thus, the “Obonga” nick name. We’ll call it a “BS”-afest instead.
Folks, he’s going to raise our taxes either directly or indirectly and has already done so with his deficit spending. Wait, small correction-maybe. He may have only raised our childrens’ taxes. Folks, he’s not going to endorse nuclear energy or off shore drilling. Folks, he has no desire to assist small business. He doesn’t even respect business for what it does. He said that all student loans would be forgiven in twenty years but in ten years if a graduate goes into public service. That’s right, we need more social workers and bureaucrats in our future than business people because social workers and bureaucrats are just so damn critical. See folks, this is another window into Captain Obonga’s soul. He values government more than the private sector. And he doesn’t understand basic values either; like paying off your debt. What in the world would justify a person to stop paying a debt if it’s not paid off? Shoot, that’s that pesky “keep your word” stuff. God that’s irritating. So what’s the big deal? I cut a deal, borrow some money for a four year degree which I actually spend six getting, drag the payments out for twenty years and then tell the lender that Captain Obonga told me I didn’t have to pay anymore after twenty years. Wait, wait, wait. I thought of something. Why don’t I just grab a public sector job in let’s say year nine, work it for a year, stop paying which is absolutely justified since I’ll be doing something so critical to America, actually serving the public for America, like for example, collecting tolls on a turnpike, and then, when I’m free of my promise to re-pay my student loan, I quit my cherished public sector job and go into the private sector and stick the tax payer with the rest of my debt. So many possibilities.
O.K. Folks, now I’m really going to be serious, actually I have been. I was just using humor to exemplify how much of a joke the State of the Union Address was. Our president has never made a bottom line, hangs out with communists and terrorists, loves Government, big government, is a progressive democrat, wants to socialize medicine, (He said he’s not quitting in his pursuit of his anti-American Agenda (He didn’t say “anti-American” but it is)), has no understanding of the economy, nothing is his fault, and after listening to his speech, wants to run everything.
Prior to his address, it was suggested that the Obama Administration was going to do a “re-set” on its agenda due to the rapidly growing trend against them. The pundits got it half right. Obama did do a reset but not on his agenda. He did a reset on the focus button so that the picture we see is different than before, blurred; but the content, the actual content, is exactly the same.
Beware folks, this guy does not like us “they” people. But he’s afraid of us and that’s why he reached out last night and spun the focus button. He changed the focus to hide. What he didn’t change was the content of his ambitions which are very un-American. Only our ability to see it was changed. But folks, you need not worry. I know this guy and his ambitions will come back into focus sooner than you think, definitely by November.
That’s my Reetzality for the day.
Thanks for the read.
NOTE: I use the “Captain” title to remind folks of the Titanic, you know that unsinkable ocean liner that sank on its first voyage. Of course, America could never be like the Titanic.
American Tyranny Revealed!
The utter stupidity of those who supported Obama/congressional health care reform which has been tried in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Canada, etc. and every time, always, failed is amazing. It is the classic definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The audacity of the left to put a provision in the Senate bill which will be passed tomorrow that no future congress can repeal what they will pass tomorrow. Imagine if Ronald Regan or George Bush had put a provision in the bills that allowed us more liberty to retain our productivity (tax cuts) that prevented future congresses from repealing the tax cuts? There would have been outrage.
Even if the current bill does what the lefties say it will, they even admit that 25 million Americans (they include illegal aliens as Americans) will not be provided health insurance. This means that they will take over one sixth of the economy with the stated goal of providing everybody health coverage and only succeed at providing health care for less than one half of those who they say don’t have it now. The left says that there are 46 million uninsured folks in the country, (that’s a lie) but for the sake of argument I’ll buy their number to state the obvious, 25 million is more than half of 46 million so they take over one sixth of our (and I mean OUR) economy and only meet half their goal. Why don’t they take over two sixths of our economy and get them all covered? Here’s why, they could give a rodent’s arsh about health care. This is about government control.
Here’s another outrage. Nobody will have read the entire bill with the possible exception of myself, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Imagine the audacity to fundamentally change our ways without even understanding the change that will occur? Without even reading the plan? You don’t have to imagine it, it is happening, right before our eyes.
Here’s another outrage. The unions are exempt from the tax on “cadillac” health care plans. So the very scum that have pushed for “health care reform” are being exempted from paying their share of it. The bill will be passed based upon back room politics, congressional bribes, and an abject ignorance of what we the people want. Tyranny. “Let them eat Cake.”
Here is the biggest outrage. Tyranny has arrived on our shores, in America of all places. I should correct myself, Tyranny has been here for a while, but now it has come out of the closet with a, for lack of a more appropriate term, a “shit eating grin” on its face. Don’t believe me. Watch the news tonight and witness the lefties glee. They know they’re are destroying us. They know that we know they are destroying us. That’s not where the grin comes from. The grin is based upon the fact that they are getting away with it. The grin is based upon the fact that by couching their tyranny under the facade of caring and need, they have conned us into giving up our most fundamental principle, freedom. These tyrants in Washington believe they have won the con game and for now, they have. But here’s some hope. Tyrants never last long. They fall by internal collapse, i.e. the Soviet Union. They fail by revolution, either forcefully or with a political collapse. Our revolution is an example of a tyrant’s forced failure. Poland’s tyrants’ collapse is an example of political collapse. I reviewed my history and cannot find a long lasting tyrant anywhere; thus, there’s hope.
So this Holiday season, sit back and recognize what is being done to us. Recognize that as sad as this moment in history is, that God opens a window when he closes a door. Thank God for your fundamental principles and have faith in them because nobody can take those away from us, nobody. They are God given and not dolled out by a government, anywhere. Yes, they can be and are bridled by government, but when Government goes too far, which ours is doing right now, the principles arise. They are the sleeping dog that should not be kicked. Unfortunately for the tyrants, I have faith that they have indeed kicked the sleeping dog named American Fundamental Principles. And our history tells us, this dog bites.
So now it’s our time to put fear aside and deal with facts. Tyranny is here and it is out in the open. That’s the fact. Fight it without fear my friends and if you don’t, then apologize to your children. Apologize profusely, you owe them at least that.
Who is our President?
OBAMA’S CZARS. THEIR TITLE. THEIR POLITICS.
Richard Holbrooke Afghanistan Czar Ultra liberal anti gun former Gov. of New Mexico. Pro Abortion and legal drug use. Dissolve the 2nd Amendment
Ed Montgomery Auto recovery Czar Black radical anti business activist. Affirmative Action and Job Preference for blacks. Univ of Maryland Business School Dean teaches US business has caused world poverty. ACORN board member. Communist DuBois Club member.
Jeffrey Crowley AIDS Czar Radical Homosexual.. A Gay Rights activist. Believes in Gay Marriage and especially, a Special Status for homosexuals only, including complete free health care for gays.
Alan Bersin Border Czar The former failed superintendent of San Diego. Ultra Liberal friend of Hilary Clinton. Served as Border Czar under Janet Reno – to keep borders open to illegal’s without interference from US
David J. Hayes California Water Czar Sr. Fellow of radical environmentalist group, “Progress Policy”. No training or experience in water management whatsoever.
Ron Bloom Car Czar Auto Union worker. Anti business & anti nuclear. Has worked hard to force US auto makers out of business. Sits on the Board of Chrysler which is now Auto Union owned. How did this happen?
Dennis Ross Central Region Czar Believes US policy has caused Mid East wars. Obama apologist to the world. Anti gun and completely pro abortion.
Lynn Rosenthal Domestic Violence Czar Director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Vicious anti male feminist. Supported male castration. Imagine?
Gil Kerlikowske Drug Czar devoted lobbyist for every restrictive gun law proposal, Former Chief of Police in Liberal Seattle. Believes no American should own a firearm. Supports legalization of all drugs
Paul Volcker E conomic Czar Head of Fed Reserve under Jimmy Carter when US economy nearly failed. Obama appointed head of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board which engineered the Obama economic disaster to US economy. Member of anti business “Progressive Policy” organization
Carol Brower Energy and Environment Czar Political Radical Former head of EPA – known for anti-business activism. Strong anti-gun ownership.
Joshua DuBois Faith Based Czar Political Black activist-Degree in Black Nationalism. Anti gun ownership lobbyist.
Cameron Davis Great Lakes Czar Chicago radical anti business environmentalist. Blames George Bush for “Poisoning the water that minorities have to drink.” No experience or training in water management. Former ACORN Board member (what does that tell us?)
Van Jones Green Jobs Czar (since resigned).. Black activist Member of American communist Party and San Francisco Communist Party who said Geo Bush caused the 911 attack and wanted Bush investigated by the World Court for war crimes. Black activist with strong anti-white views.
Daniel Fried Guantanamo Closure Czar Human Rights activist for Foreign Terrorists. Believes America has caused the war on terrorism. Believes terrorists have rights above and beyond Americans.
Nancy-Ann DeParle. Health Czar Former head of Medicare / Medicaid. Strong Health Care Rationing proponent. She is married to a reporter for The New York Times.
Vivek Kundra Information Czar Born in New Delhi, India. Controls all public information, including labels and news releases. Monitors all private Internet emails. (hello?)
Todd Stern International Climate Czar Anti business former White House chief of Staff- Strong supportrer of the Kyoto Accord. Pushing hard for Cap and Trade. Blames US business for Global warming. Anti- US business prosperity.
Dennis Blair Intelligence Czar Ret Navy. Stopped US guided missile program as “provocative”. Chair of ultra liberal “Council on Foreign Relations” which blames American organizations for regional wars.
George Mitchell Mideast Peace Czar Fmr. Sen from Maine Left wing radical. Has said Israel should be split up into “2 or 3 “ smaller more manageable plots”. (God forbid) A true Anti-nuclear anti-gun & pro homosexual “special rights” advocate
Kenneth Feinberg Pay Czar Chief of Staff to TED KENNEDY. Lawyer who got rich off the 911 victims payoffs. (horribly true)
Cass Sunstein Regulatory Czar Liberal activist judge believes free speech needs to be limited for the “common good”. Essentially against 1st amendment. Rules against personal freedoms many times –like private gun ownership and right to free speech.
John Holdren Science Czar Fierce ideological environmentalist, Sierra Club, Anti business activist. Claims US business has caused world poverty. No Science training.
Earl Devaney Stimulus Accountability Czar Spent career trying to take guns away from American citizens. Believes in Open Borders to Mexico . Author of statement blaming US gun stores for drug war in Mexico .
J. Scott Gration Sudan Czar Native of Democratic Republic of Congo. Believes US does little to help Third World countries. Council of foreign relations, asking for higher US taxes to support United Nations
Herb Allison TARP Czar Fannie May CEO responsible for the US recession by using real estate mortgages to back up the US stock market. Caused millions of people to lose their life savings.
John Brennan Terrorism Czar Anti CIA activist. No training in diplomatic or gov. affairs. Believes Open Borders to Mexico and a dialog with terrorists and has suggested Obama disband US military
Aneesh Chopra Technology Czar No Technology training. Worked for the Advisory Board Company, a health care think tank for hospitals. Anti doctor activist. Supports Obama Health care Rationing and salaried doctors working exclusively for the Gov. health care plan.
Adolfo Carrion Jr.. Urban Affairs Czar Puerto Rican born Anti American activist and leftist group member in Latin America . Millionaire “slum lord” of the Bronx , NY. Owns many lavish homes and condos which he got from “sweetheart” deals with labor unions. Wants higher taxes on middle class to pay for minority housing and health care
Ashton Carter Weapons Czar Leftist. Wants all private weapons in US destroyed. Supports UN ban on firearms ownership in America .. No Other “policy”
Gary Samore WMD Policy Czar Former US Communist. Wants US to destroy all WMD unilaterally as a show of good faith. Has no other “policy”.
Well folks, there they are. Quite amazing. For those of you who think I’m over-reacting, what if I came over to your house with a crew like this? You’d be worried, extremely worried, and rightfully so; just as we should be. So here’s the obvious question. How can our President be a true American who supports the fundamentals of our nation while surrounding himself with such nefarious characters? Here’s the answer. He can’t be a true American. It defies logic and reasoning and most of all, common sense, to assert that a guy who surrounds himself with such folks can be a true American.
And that’s my Reetzality for the Day.
Believe in my lies.
1. I’ll have no lobbyists in my administration. He does. 2. I’ll read every bill, line by line, before I sign it. He didn’t read the stimulus bill. 3. I will have no earmarks. there were over eight thousand earmarks on the stimulus bill. 4. I’ll be out of Irac in sixty days. Nope. 5. I’ll close Guantanamo. Nope. (but a good nope) 6. My administration will be transparent. It’s not. 7. I’ll put an end to red-state-blue-state politics. The nation has never been more polarized. Actually it was once, in 1861. I think Lincoln was president) 8. Cap and Trade will not impose a cost on families. Obama covered up an internal report that said it would do just that. 9. My focus will be on Afghanistan. It’s not, it’s on Letterman. 10. I won’t raise taxes on anybody earning less than $250,000.00. Not true if he gets his way on cap and trade and health care. 11. Health care won’t cover illegal aliens. (It did until Wilson called him a liar. He went on to say we should make illegals legal and kill the issue. 12. I’m for a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. He betrayed our allies and reversed course. 13. Obama-care won’t include a tax. It does. 14. I didn’t even know ACORN was getting that much federal funding. Either he’s a liar or ignorant, pick. 15. If we pass the stimulus bill, unemployment will not go above 8%. It has. 16. I have no intention of running General Motors. He is. 17. (a new one) Health care won’t fund abortion. Not true in the newest tax, I mean health care bill.
So the guys a liar and a blatant one. Not to worry, his charm will sugar coat the immorality of his dishonesty. But will it? Are you, the liberals, so pathetic, so disrespectful of yourself, that you allow somebody to lie to you?
Apparently so. But here’s the big lie. “I’m going to change the way Washington works.” He campaigned on this issue. CHANGE was his mantra, his theme. But what do you know, he didn’t change anything except this: He has injected steroids into everything that’s bad about Washington. Lobbyist are running rampant in his administration. Transparency is aggressively thwarted. Corruption and special interests are in full force. Spending is out of control. Bi-partisanship is dead.
So liberals, when do you get mad that your guy lied to you about his fundamentals? I can actually sympathize with some of his words. No lobbyists, good. Transparency, good. No new taxes, good. But he isn’t doing any of these things, he’s doing the opposite, bad bad bad president. Liar.
My point is this liberals; have some self respect and for God’s sake (literal), don’t tolerate his lies. I’ll forgive you for making a mistake. I won’t forgive you for not standing up for yourselves, for allowing yourself to be lied to, and mostly for your insistent feigned ignorance of what this guy is about. I know and like a bunch of you liberals, but again, have some self respect so I can like you more.
That’s my Reetzality for the Day.
Washintgon's Tyranny
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history… the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
Here’s some quotes from Sal’s book:
“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.” p.10
“The end is what you want, the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work. … The real arena is corrupt and bloody.” p.24
“The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means….” p.29
“The tenth rule… is you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments…. It involves sifting the multiple factors which combine in creating the circumstances at any given time… Who, and how many will support the action?… If weapons are needed, then are appropriate d weapons available? Availability of means determines whether you will be underground or above ground; whether you will move quickly or slowly…” p.36
“The first step in community organization is community disorganization. The disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. Present arrangements must be disorganized if they are to be displace by new patterns…. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.” p.116
“An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent… He must create a mechanism that can drain off the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. Out of this mechanism, a new community organization arises….
Back to Reetzality. This guy, Sal Alinski is a mentor of our president? What have we brought upon ourselves? I’ll tell you what. A liar, I’m up to seventeen blatant lies so far, lies relating to fundamental issues. But what is more disturbing is President Obama’s statement that he is for fundamental change. Remember, “fundamental” is defined as the origin of existence. This might not be so worrisome if it weren’t for the folks, including Sal Alinski, who our president has surrounded himself with. But we tell ourselves, don’t worry, he’s not a communism even if he does associate and praise communists. He’s not a radical even though he considers Sal Alinski, a self-admitted radical. And in the end, he’s not employing any radical strategies, nor does he have a goal for a socialized United States. Don’t think so? Here’s what Politico reported today:
Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report today:
President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.
With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News. Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.
We are in no way the first to point this out, but this Obama administration strategy is taken directly from the pages of Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It identifies thirteen rules for progressive activists including, “The thirteenth rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Explaining just how far progressives must be willing to go to marginalize their “enemies” Alinsky explains a few pages later:
Many liberals during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 percent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard but then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as, “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.
And then in his final chapter, Alinsky reveals what progressives really think of the average American: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right.”
Contempt for average Americans, and the desire to marginalize their common sense questions is both at the core of the Progessive vision for governance and completely antithetical to the values of our Founding Fathers. Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, explains:
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.
This is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of health care “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like, “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies use more expensive alternative energy sources?”, and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage?” can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced. That’s what the White House campaign the Politico identifies today is all about.
Uh Oh, this Obama guy is actually following Sal Alinski’s Rules for Radicals. And don’t kid yourself by thinking he’s not running for the same end zone Sal Alinski was running to, he is. Communism. (As long as he, Obama, is king)
Be scared, be mad, act. Your country and children depend upon it. Fundamental liberty depends on it.
He did it again. He lavished us with his idealistic rhetoric that he loves and adores so much. But mostly, what he did again, was leave out the details of how he was going to obtain his dream. He still appears to have not read a single health care bill. If I’m wrong, and he has read the pending bills, then he’s lying.
Here are some examples of what he said and what HR 3200 says. I won’t list them all; this would be a novel rather than a blog if I did so.
1. (1) GRACE PERIOD- (A) IN GENERAL- The Commissioner shall establish a grace period whereby, for plan years beginning after the end of the 5-year period beginning with Y1, an employment-based health plan in operation as of the day before the first day of Y1 must meet the same requirements as apply to a qualified health benefits plan under section 101, including the essential benefit package requirement under section 121.
O.K. This means that private insurance or private employer insurance, five years after passage of the law, must comply with the “qualified health benefits.” So after five years, all private insurance must be like public insurance. Choice? Apparently you get to choose the name of your insurer but not the type of insurer. Don’t believe me in my interpretation? Let’s go to the bill. Here’s what it says:
IN GENERAL- Individual health insurance coverage that is not grandfathered health insurance coverage under subsection (a) may only be offered on or after the first day of Y1 as an Exchange-participating health benefits plan.
He said that he didn’t hate insurance companies. Really? Here’s what the bill says about how health insurance companies can vary rates:
In General- The premium rate charged for an insured qualified health benefits plan may not vary except as follows: (1) LIMITED AGE VARIATION PERMITTED- By age (within such age categories as the Commissioner shall specify) so long as the ratio of the highest such premium to the lowest such premium does not exceed the ratio of 2 to 1. (2) BY AREA- By premium rating area (as permitted by State insurance regulators or, in the case of Exchange-participating health benefits plans, as specified by the Commissioner in consultation with such regulators). (3) BY FAMILY ENROLLMENT- By family enrollment (such as variations within categories and compositions of families) so long as the ratio of the premium for family enrollment (or enrollments) to the premium for individual enrollment is uniform, as specified under State law and consistent with rules of the Commissioner.
So, according to HR3200, insurance rates can only vary based on the age of the insured, the geographic area, and by the number of family members on a family plan. Great, start smoking, keep drinking, hell, and gain five hundred pounds. Under Obama’s plan, insurance companies can’t charge you more for these activities. They, sorry Pres, won’t be able to compete. Why? Because their revenue source is voluntary. Government revenue is not-it’s called taxation. They will go out of business. Who wouldn’t if they couldn’t control price and had to compete against a government program with no cost restraints and more specifically, no need to make a bottom line?
He also said that it wasn’t a government takeover of 1/6th of the economy. Really? Here’s what’s in HR3200:
Such report shall include any recommendations the Commissioner deems appropriate to ensure that the law does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure or create adverse selection in the risk pools of large group insurers and self-insured employers.
Wait, the commissioner gives recommendations the commissioner deems appropriate to ensure the law does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure? Good job Mr. President. That’s sure smacks of government control. I mean come on; you’ve got a commissioner fighting against incentives for private citizens to take care of themselves.
There are others and tons of them. He said that the plan won’t increase the federal deficit? The CBO says it will. He says that everyone has to participate. There’s no way to reconcile this without increase taxes which would break his promise not to increase taxes on anybody making over $250,000.00 per year. He says savings will pay for most of it. Really, if there is so much waste in the system, for example and we’ll use his example, Medicare; why not cut it now? The waste, according to our President, is just sitting there waiting to be culled. He said businesses will be required to pay. More tax increases and another lie unless you’re naïve enough to believe that every business makes more than $250,000.00 per year. He said the mis-information has clouded the issues. What mis-information: Death panels. Call them what you want, but there will be rationing, and that will cause some folks to go without treatment. He said as much in his town hall meeting at the White House. He told one participant that her grandmother should take a pain pill rather than get more comprehensive treatment. He said it won’t cover illegal aliens. It doesn’t say that anywhere in HR3200. Are we going to tell illegals that they can’t get coverage? Maybe they’re not covered under the bill, but they will still get health care, and therefore they will cost the system. No federal funds to fund abortions? Doesn’t say that in the bill. And then he went on to state that federal conscience laws will remain which doesn’t mean that it won’t fund abortions, it means that it won’t force a doctor to perform an abortion if he or she doesn’t want to. Wow, the freedom to not perform an abortion. He said it won’t impact those with private insurance. Read the bill Mr. President. Either you are woefully uninformed or are a blatant liar. Your pick Mr. President.
Here are some of the other things he said: He called Medicaid and Medicare a sacred trust. Really? Last time I reviewed these government monoliths, these sacred trusts were bankrupt and made Bernie Madoff look amateurish in his ponzi scheme. He said it will reduce everybody’s costs. Evidently, Albert Einstein’s theory of conservation of matter was flawed according to our President. Let me get this straight; We are going to get more health care for more people and it will cost less? We are actually going to create more with fewer resources? Impressive Mr. President. He’s going to tax insurance companies. Does he really think that they won’t pass the cost on to the consumer? Sure they will. A new tax, an old lie.
In the end, what our President missed was Americans’ real problem with his proposal; the fear of government based on hard facts of continual inefficiencies, corruption, mismanagement, cancerous growth, and ultimately intrusion upon our liberties. He also missed this. The real problem is not health care, it is government. Government needs to be regulated, made more efficient, changed, and shrunk. Period. Do that and we will return to prosperity and we will be able to afford better health care for those on the lower tiers. Do it your way Mr. President and everybody will be equal, equally subject to more inefficiency, reduced health care quality, and reduced freedom. But based on your friends, isn’t that what you want Mr. President.
And why were you silent about including yourself and congress in your grand plan. Why? Here’s why: It’s not good enough for you, that’s why. But for the folks that pay for your excesses, it’s just fine I guess?
Obama, the Mortal
By Charles Krauthammer Friday, September 4, 2009
What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?
The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?
But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama’s behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can’t get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.
Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob — misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest — from drug companies to auto unions to doctors — in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.
“Get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the “mess” from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.
Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president — trust. You can’t say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits — and not inspire incredulity and mistrust. When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.
After a disastrous summer — mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing — Obama is in trouble.
Let’s be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He’s not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred — irreversibly — is this: He’s become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He’s regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform — and his own standing — with yet another prime-time speech.
But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises — mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama’s supreme self-regard may never adapt.
“Under my plan, if you like the health plan you’ve got, you can keep it!” Chairman Obama endlessly preaches this mantra over and over and over again. He’s misleading you, big time. I reviewed the draft of the Discussion Draft of the House Bill and found this language under LIMITATION ON INDIVIDUAL HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE. -(1) IN GENERAL. “Individual insurance coverage shall not qualify as acceptable coverage under this division for purposes of section 59B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 unless the coverage is GRANDFATHERED health insurance coverage or is coverage offered as an Exchange-participating health benefits plan.” Read the rest of this entry »
