Better than 8 in 10 users of Facebook and other social networking sites say they rarely post anything to do with politics, according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
But among those who do, Democrats seem to like doing it more …
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For those of you who couldn’t stomach watching Michelle Obama Tuesday night, you missed quite a performance. She has become a pro at public speaking. She reads the teleprompter as smoothly as her husband, with emotion added in all the right places. It went over just fine in the hall, with Democrats mooning over her with the same creepy rapture we saw in Obama’s mass appearances in 2008. They cried when she called herself Mom-in-Chief. Enough said.
What was most interesting was that her speech had obviously been reworked rapidly in the last week. It was a weird, copycat complement to Republicans. It’s like an unsure competitor looking to see what the champion is doing, and quickly trying to mimic it. “Oh, you talked a lot about the American Dream and that resonated with the public — watch me, I can do it, too.” She even cribbed lines and phrases from the Romneys. The trouble is that the pretend principles did not match who the Obamas actually are. It was the perfect ersatz speech from the wife of our Faker in Chief.
It seemed to me that the Dems have been polling the impact of Dinesh D’Souza’s important film, 2016: Obama’s America and feel they have to counter it. Although all the experts keep telling us we mustn’t say anything negative about Obama because the public won’t believe it and won’t like it, Obama does not share their confidence.
Michelle’s whopper of the night was a direct lie to counter the impact of 2016:
And as I got to know Barack, I realized that even though he’d grown up all the way across the country, he’d been brought up just like me. … But when Barack started telling me about his family – that’s when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine. You see, Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions but who had given us something far more valuable – their unconditional love, their unflinching sacrifice and the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.
Michelle’s Lie One: “even though he’d grown up all the way across the country.”
Barack didn’t grow up all the way across the country. He grew up in Indonesia. One of most the powerful parts of 2016 is the visual impact of seeing what Indonesia looks like, to realize this is the place where Obama spent his most formative childhood years. It is not America.
Michelle’s Half-Lie Two: “he’d been brought up just like me.” The true part of this is that both Obama and Michelle were brought up to despise America. They and their families had the same dream of redistributive “justice” for blacks. Obama’s life passion has been overcoming what he sees as America’s twin problems of racial and economic oppression. His goal, from the days he attended socialist conferences to becoming a community organizer, a state senator, and our president, has remained consistent. He wants to radically transform America from a free-market country based on equal opportunity and individual achievement to a European socialist model plus, with guaranteed income and all the big-government programs that tear down the wealthy and raise up the poor, evening out society in the name of social justice and equality. Journalist Ed Klein, author of The Amateur, Barack Obama in the White House, says Michelle is “even further to the left than her husband.”
The false part of it is that Michelle was brought up in an intact family, in a homogenous community, secure in her self-identity. Her father worked hard, was a ward boss, and was even able to save some money to help her at Princeton.
Obama’s upbringing — brought to the screen with dramatic impact by D’Souza — was not like that of other Americans.
It is true that Obama had a deprived childhood, but not materially. His parents didn’t even date. His mother took him away from Hawaii and from his father a few weeks after he was born. He didn’t meet his father until Obama was ten. It was a flying visit. He didn’t get unconditional love or any kind of love at all from his father.
His mother married an Indonesian, then fought with him when he abandoned political purity for a good job with an American company. Ann Dunham was too interested in being an anthropologist to be a stay-at-home mom in Indonesia. According to the New York Times, Ann Dunham did hire a nanny to care for her young son — the “tranny nanny,” an openly gay man who carried on an affair with a local butcher.
Obama was miserable and lonely in Indonesia, teased for being black and fat.
D’Souza has a voiceover by Obama himself, reading his own memoir, explaining that his mother taught Obama to disrespect the stepfather he lived with as a sell-out and idolize his mythical Marxist anti-colonialist Kenyan father. She sent Obama off to live with his grandparents as a lonely pre-teen, rather than living with her son.
Obama described his feelings this way: “I was to live with strangers.” And: “I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents; I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my troubles out of sight.”
Obama had no one making sure he was safe.
Obama’s grandfather chose a black male father figure for him: Frank Marshall Davis. D’Souza spends some time on this relationship, but not the most distressing parts of it. Obama discusses Frank over a dozen times in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. Davis was a drinking buddy and shared the same politics as Obama’s grandfather. Davis was a member of the Communist Party.
D’Souza leaves out that Marshall wrote a fictionalized memoir boasting of his bisexual and pedophilic exploits. In his memoir, Marshall describes how he and his white wife sexually abuse a 13-year-old girl entrusted to their care.
Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was. She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes….I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual.
This same Frank Marshall Davis, according to Obama’s memoir, counseled Obama not to trust white people.
Michelle’s Lie Three:
[Our two families] didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did … in fact, they admired it. They simply believed in that fundamental American promise that, even if you don’t start out with much, if you work hard and do what you’re supposed to do, then you should be able to build a decent life for yourself and an even better life for your kids and grandkids.
Readers of American Thinker and viewers of 2016 know — though Democrats don’t — that all of Obama’s parental figures were leftists — his grandfather; Frank Marshall Davis, his god-awful Communist father-substitute; his leftie mother and his absent Marxist father. Obama was taught by everyone he loved that American is unjust. He embraced their teaching that the highest calling in the world was to bring down the rich and make them pay, give their money to the poor, and bring America down to size on the world stage.
Michelle’s Lie Four:
We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make … that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters…that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules … and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.
Obama didn’t do hard work. He was a slacker. According to his own memoir, corroborated by interviews with people who knew him and by archives from leftist organizations at the University of Chicago, Obama drifted in a druggie haze through high school and college, a tortured soul who wanted to be an authentic American black and felt he wasn’t due to his white middle-class family. He latched on to revolutionary politics as a way to prove his loyalty to black suffering. He was driven to keep alive his fictive tie to his absent father and his father’s dream of Marxist justice.
After a lackluster performance in prep school, he went to a middling college and continued his druggie ways, hanging out, he says in his memoir, with Marxist professors. He doesn’t believe that anyone earns his achievements: “you didn’t build that” is deep in his psyche. He didn’t even build his own life.
Obama was accepted on the Harvard Law Review after they adopted an affirmative action policy that dropped the grade point requirements for the honor. He didn’t earn that.
He was elected president of the Review. He was wrongly praised as the “first” black student to be president of the Law Review — since the 1920s, which is never mentioned. It was such a big deal that it made national headlines. This one success led to job offers and book offers, and years later it was quoted as one of Obama’s highest achievements and qualifications for the White House. Democrats did not learn, or want to learn, that Obama was also the first Harvard Law Review president to not write a single signed article for the Review. Hard work? Only in manipulating his fellow students to get elected to a post he could not fill.
It was on the basis of being the first black Law Review president that Obama was given a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations. He never delivered. First he changed the book to a memoir, but he was not able to write that, either. No worry. Harvard law graduate Obama had already spent the money, but he begged poverty to be allowed to keep the advance and did. According to Jack Cashill, he got Bill Ayers to write a memoir for him, which he sold to another publisher for $40,000. (He did not pay the first publisher back.)
Obama was given a job as a lecturer at the University of Chicago based on the same slim qualification of being a black law review editor at Harvard. This lecture position was relabeled by himself and the press as being a constitutional law professor, an impressive title he never earned.
Hard work, honesty, integrity, truth — not so much.
Michelle’s Lie Five:
We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean … and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.
Gratitude and humility — just the qualities everyone associates with Obama.
From this Sunday’s New York Times:
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Michelle’s Lie Six:
Barack’s grandmother started out as a secretary at a community bank…and she moved quickly up the ranks … but like so many women, she hit a glass ceiling. And for years, men no more qualified than she was – men she had actually trained – were promoted up the ladder ahead of her, earning more and more money while Barack’s family continued to scrape by. But day after day, she kept on waking up at dawn to catch the bus…arriving at work before anyone else … giving her best without complaint or regret. And she would often tell Barack, “So long as you kids do well, Bar, that’s all that really matters.” Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. … if you work hard and do what you’re supposed to do, then you should be able to build a decent life for yourself and an even better life for your kids and grandkids.
Michelle wants us to imagine Obama’s grandmother as an exploited secretary waiting for the bus, a victim, not “asking for much,” just for a chance to build a better life for her children, but cheated by an unfair system that Obama is trying to correct.
His grandmother was vice president of a bank, the second largest in the state. She came from a middle-class family. She sent him to Hawaii’s most prestigious prep school.
Barack didn’t grow up in a disadvantaged family. His mother was a professional woman with an advanced degree. His stepfather worked for an American oil company in Indonesia.
Michelle did say one true thing about Barack:
So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago.
That is exactly the message of D’Souza’s film, and Stanley Kurtz’s book Radical-in-Chief, and every in-depth and honest analysis of Obama’s life story. He has remained true to himself.
That is the tragedy and the danger to America.
Barack Obama reminds me of the New Coke and the Pepsi Challenge as described in Malcolm Gladwell’s national bestseller Blink (2005).
This story starts in the 1980s, when Pepsi was making serious inroads in the market for cola soft drinks in spite of the fact that Coke had a far greater distribution presence, spent a $100 million more than Pepsi in advertising, and was a true iconic American brand.
Pepsi capitalized on its up-trend by aggressively running TV commercials pitting Coke and Pepsi in a head-to-head taste test in what was then called the Pepsi Challenge. In it, dedicated Coke drinkers were shown taking a couple of sips of two unmarked cola drinks and asked which one they preferred. By a significant majority, they picked Pepsi over Coke.
Coca-Cola’s management couldn’t believe these results, which seemed to confirm the current market trend. And so they privately conducted their own taste tests. To their chagrin, they found that over and over, something like 57% of Coke drinkers did indeed prefer Pepsi.
Panic ensued, which prompted a re-design of Coke into New Coke.
Behind the scenes, Coke was reformulated to be more like Pepsi — that is, sweeter and lighter. As Gladwell writes:
Immediately Coke’s market researchers noticed an improvement. In blind taste tests of some of the earlier prototypes, Coke pulled even with Pepsi They tinkered some more. In September of 1984, they went back out and tested what would end up as the final version of the New Coke. They rounded up not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of consumers all across North America, and in head-to-head blind taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi by 6 to 8 percentage points. Coca-Cola executives were elated. The new drink was given the green light.
Of the New Coke, company CEO Roberto C. Goizueta crowed that the new product was “the surest move the company’s ever made.”
As is now well-known, just like Ford’s Edsel, the meticulously market-designed New Coke flopped in the marketplace, and in short order, the original Coke was back on the shelves, there to stay.
Market research failed in another area, too. Its warning that Pepsi was on the road to capturing leadership from Coke never happened. Today, Coke — the original Coke — is still the number-one soft drink in the world.
This presents a paradox. How can it be explained that in taste tests, people prefer Pepsi over Coke, yet when they make purchases, they buy Coke?
The long and short of it is that in a taste test, the drinkers do not drink the entire can of soda. They take just a sip or two. Gladwell again: “A sip is very different from sitting and drinking a whole beverage on your own. Sometimes a sip tastes good and a whole bottle doesn’t.” A taste test is thus biased towards sweetness — Pepsi. However, when consumers were given a case of both Pepsi and Coke to bring home and report the results a few weeks later, the original Coke won.
This brings us to politics. In an analogous way, Pepsi is like Obama. In 2008, voters were really only getting a sip of him. Back then, Barack seemed enjoyable, nice, youthful, and even refreshing. And so in that November’s taste test, America voted Obama in as president.
But now, four years hence, the whole can of Obama-cola has been washed down. Many consumers (citizens) are concluding that the initial sipped sweetness is no longer appealing after having drunk the whole can. Obama-cola is coming across as superficial at best and overpowering and sickeningly sweet at worst.
Twenty-twelve is shaping up as a year when reality is beckoning America to return to traditional values including hard work, honesty, self-sufficiency, saving, and yes, even biting the bullet when and where necessary. This is in stark contrast to the sweetness of a childish and nebulous mantra like Hope and Change.
Time will tell soon enough which road America takes.
Trying to figure out Democratic party theology has never been easy. Is it atheism, Islam, New Age globalism, or some weird mishmash of all of the above?
Thankfully, the Democratic National Convention has answered all of our questions. On Wednesday, the All Mighty was inserted back into the party platform to a chorus of loud boos.
So there is a God. And Democrats hate Him.
Delighted to help clear that up.
All the liberal Jews I talk to seem to believe that the age of anti-Semitism is over. That is often true, in countries that have mature, democratic political systems. The United States, which all good liberals learn to sneer at, has the single most mature political system in the world — 230 years of a solid Constitution, which liberals don’t much like.
Most of the world lacks a mature, time-tested and tolerant political system. Even the European Union is governed by an unelected ruling class today.
So the United States is the world home of political tolerance today. No other major country (except maybe Switzerland) has had that kind of stability and tolerance for 230 years. Naturally, the left has decided to import hundreds of thousands of the least tolerant people in the world today, so that today in London there are cases of children being sacrificed in witchcraft ceremonies; and there are cases of home-grown Muslim terrorists bombing civilian targets like the London Underground. Britain has now turned itself into a fearsome Big Brother state, with tens of thousands of CCTV cameras all over the cities. They put video cameras in garbage cans over there.
Jewish liberals are just as ignorant of history and politics as all the other liberals you know.
Vast deserts of political ignorance makes liberalism possible.
Liberal Jews love the tolerance they enjoy in this country, and they often harbor a nasty case of guilt and anger against orthodox Jews, who don’t assimilate the way liberals do.
Liberalism is a species of mental conformity. It makes thinking unnecessary.
Thinking is scary.
All you need to do is believe the 24/7 media, and you feel like a member of the herd. The herd protects. At least, it protects until it turns against you. The biggest fear of herd cattle is that crucial moment when the herd looks for a new scapegoat.
All the socially acceptable race hatred today is on the Left and in the Muslim world. I will repeat that, because it’s the biggest point of denial among liberal Jews and liberal Christians. If you want to hear really dumb criticism of Jews and Israel, go to your nearest liberal Christian, who is really just a secular socialist. Just try it as an experiment.
It’s the very leftists who shout the loudest about love of humanity who also harbor a very nasty case of the hatreds. They hate Christians for not accepting the gay political agenda. They hate Jews who are “neo-conservatives.” They hate “fundamentalists” except if they are Muslims. They hate, hate, hate, because on the left, hating has become good again. It shows how much you really care.
If you doubt that, just watch the Occupy kids and the phony anarchists rioting in black KKK outfits.
Changing the color of your KKK outfit from white to black does not make you a good human being. On the contrary. It’s just the same-old, same-old, another body tent that hides your individual identity and therefore allows you to smash a store window with a big rock. Welcome to the psychology of mob violence. Wearing black all over is just like wearing white all over.
Today, ethnic hatred is encouraged among the “protected victim classes” — there is black anti-Semitism in Jerry Wright and his good bud Louis Farrakhan; there is a huge oil-fueled web campaign of Muslim anti-Semitism, going back to Mohammed’s genocide of the Jewish tribe of the Khureishi when they refused to convert to his new religion; there is a multibillion dollar hate campaign against Israel in countries like Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia; and oddest of all, there are tons of left-wing Jews who really, really hate Israel, like Noam Chomsky.
I’ve talked with liberal Jews who have never heard of all that. They can’t bring themselves to Google Memri.org, which carries daily translations of hate speech straight from the gates of hell. MEMRI (sounds like “Memory”) is for anybody who wants to be informed today, when political hate speech has gone global, right along with Google. MEMRI also covers the heroic moderates of the Muslim world, who are even braver today, because they have to live with Obama’s “Arab Spring.” MEMRI.org tries to cover the good and the bad.
Nazi propaganda is alive and well today, and with mass media on the web, it’s streaming bigger than ever. There are people who fall for it, because even nice people cannot resist the 24/7 tide of canned hatred they hear in countries like Egypt, Saudi, and Iran. They are drowned in hate speech, just like North Korean peasants are as they stoop in the rice paddies.
Jews who forget are out of touch with reality. They are blocking out today’s scary truths. I know some Jews who tell me they never read the news because it’s too upsetting. So they choose a life of ignorance.
What’s even worse, liberal Jews have happily voted for the racial spoils system that now governs America (and Europe), where victim groups get special privileges in jobs, education, and government goodies. Blacks get special privileges, women do, gays do, liberals do especially, and Muslims do, too. The dreaded quota system from Tsarist times is back, and liberal Jews voted for it.
Nobody reminds liberals of the obvious fact that devout Muslims who attend Friday mosque get their week sermons by Wahhabi imams trained by the Saudis to peddle the most radical Muslim line available, on the Sunni side of the street. Many liberals Jews are so ignorant that they even don’t know that old game of ethnic musical chairs: Once you start playing the ethnic Russians against the Poles, the Catholics against the Orthodox, you also start playing the Muslims against the Jews. It’s the same formula for any demagogue. They don’t care who plays the scapegoat. All they care about is having a good one to beat up on. Basic mob politics.
Once you start playing musical chairs with race and ethnicity, somebody is always left standing when the music stops. At some point there aren’t enough chairs left. Gee, I’m sorry about that. I guess you’re the goat today!
Those are the Jews who forget. Like Monica’s Lewinski’s rabbi, who gave the final invocation for the Democrats who booed God and Jerusalem the day before. Because hating religious Christians is okay today. On the left it’s encouraged just like the Dixiecrats used to encourage and justify race hatred against blacks. The color doesn’t matter. It’s the hate industry that does the job.
Liberals want to worship a messianic figure like Obama because like infants they put their trust in Princes. There is a Biblical wisdom literature that anybody can learn from, even atheists, because wisdom is wisdom. “Put not your trust in Princes” is a very wise and practical saying. There are Chinese wisdom sayings and Buddhist ones that are celebrated by liberals, which is fine. It’s just odd that they ignore the vast number Western and Biblical wisdom sayings, because traditional religion is now bad. Except for the “religion of peace” of course.
Liberal Jews have shifted their faith to secular socialism. It’s as simple as that. In that process they’ve lost track of their own wisdom literature, which warns against demagogues like Obama and the rest.
We know that secular socialism can flip on a dime. Socialism turned into National Socialism in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Hitler preferred to recruit Marxists, because he could see they made good Nazis.
After World War II, socialists used to despise divide and conquer by race and ethnic identity. But today we have Third World Socialism (Obama’s kind), which celebrates revenge against imperialistic whites. Now we celebrate diversity — meaning racial, gender, and sexual divide and conquer, and racial revenge is back, just like Hitler used to cook up.
Racial revenge talk is what keeps Jerry Wright and the other Chicago demagogues rolling in the dough. Just listen to their words. It’s not a mystery, except to liberals who tune them out, because Chicago race-baiters have to be Good People. You have to understand their rage.
Liberal belief is a very odd thing.
Conservatives tend to pursue reality wherever it leads, even if it shows some pretty bad things about some people. Conservatives can keep track of the bad guys, even when they change their hats. Liberals can’t figure it out. They are the useful idiots, as Vladimir Lenin said, because they yearn to believe. They are sucker bait. Con artists can spot them at a glance.
Conservatives can tell the difference between Christians who support Israel and who love tolerance, and those who can be seduced by the nasties. Devout Christians have better things to do with their lives than follow some mad totalitarian creed. Traditional religion is in fact a great protection against totalitarian ideologies, which is why Vladimir Putin now makes a big thing out of being photographed kneeling down with the Patriarch of Moscow. The Russian Orthodox survived 70 years of Soviet persecution and they are still a force in that culture. All the traditional religions have survived persecution. They know how.
In Nazi Germany, some of Hitler’s biggest opponents and victims were Catholic priests and Lutheran clerics, as well as Jewish rabbis.
Liberal Jews don’t know that either. They foolishly believe the Nazi swastika was a Christian symbol. It’s an Aryan symbol from India, and it was flipped around by the Nazis to make it their own. The Nazis were not Christians — although there were plenty of professed Christians who joined the Nazis, contrary to their creed. Mussolini did not persecute Jews in the early days, because after all, Jews look just like Italians. Mussolini did not turn against Italian Jews until Hitler actually invaded Italy.
Jewish ignorance about the Nazi period is astonishing. It is only exceeded by contemporary ignorance about the Muslim hate propaganda industry that’s right at your finger tips. (It’s translated free of charge every day by MEMRI.org).
Liberalism is a defense against reality.
That’s why liberals are such useful idiots. Jewish liberals like Noam Chomsky can be intelligent in one part of life and abysmally ignorant in another part. They wear ideological blinders.
Holocaust survivors had one big message for the world:
Never Forget!
Their liberal children have a different slogan:
Always Forget!
It feels much better that way!
Somewhere in the universe the nasties are having a big laugh.
After all, Saul Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer, the personification of evil.
It’s right there in front of our eyes.
Liberals can’t look. It’s their biggest problem.
Republican here, and I love using social media…but not for political posting. In true republican form, I use it for free enterprise…rebuilding this country the way we did it the first time, one business at a time. In a time where unemployment is still soaring, social media affords numerous opportunities for a person to make a full time income working part time from home, self-employed. I have more helpful info about this on my site http://www.fbprofits.youaccomplish.com.
With Obama complaining that Mitt Romney is “new” to foreign policy and that Romney’s positions are “extreme,” mainstream America might need to redefine the word chutzpah. Traditionally defined as stunning audacity, such as murdering one’s parents and then pleading for clemency on the grounds of being an orphan, chutzpah will now have to be defined as spending one’s career on the left-wing fringes of society and then questioning the qualifications of anyone with real-world experience.
In the 2008 campaign, Obama’s closest claim to foreign policy experience was that he had spent part of his childhood in another country. That was tantamount to claiming the right to practice medicine on the grounds that one was treated by a pediatrician in childhood. One suspects that, even now, Romney knows enough not to bow to the heads of foreign states, and that alone validates his foreign policy credentials against those of Obama.
The more stunning charge coming out of the Obama campaign, however, is that the positions of Romney and the Republicans are extremist. This charge comes from the man who openly acknowledges seeking out Marxist professors in college, whose earliest political associates included people like William Ayers, who spent twenty years in a church run by Jeremiah Wright, and who rammed a massive health care takeover down the throats of the American people even though nobody knew what was in the bill.
But even Obama’s chutzpah knows no bounds. A major theme of Obama’s campaign has been that our financial crisis is the result of the failure of free enterprise, that we’ve tried the market approach favored by the Republicans and that it has not worked. In reality, it is easy enough to point to failed stimulus packages, cronyism, high unemployment, and alarming debt as real-world evidence that it is Obama’s approach that has failed. But there is also a case to be made that it was the approach favored by Obama that caused the crisis in the first place.
The financial crisis that came to a head in 2008 was triggered largely by the collapse of the mortgage market, and the collapse of the mortgage market was set in motion by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The CRA pressured banks to make mortgage loans based on political criteria rather than economic criteria, and the result of political meddling in these business decisions was an artificial housing bubble that burst in 2008.
And whose view of government gave us the CRA? Enacted under Jimmy Carter, the CRA epitomized the idea of central political control of economic decisions. Liberal politicians like Bill Clinton reaped the benefits of the artificial housing bubble, and banks and shareholders were forced to carry the risks. And when the house of cards collapsed, big government stepped in again to bail out banks that were sinking because of big-government policies. It is these policies that Obama has supported since his days as a community organizer. The reality is that it is Obama’s way that has been tried and has failed.
The problem with Obama’s chutzpah, however, is that it is succeeding politically even as his policies are failing economically. After the Democrats in Charlotte hammered the Republicans for being extremist and uncooperative, the Romney campaign started making bipartisan noises. Over the weekend, Romney talked about the parts of ObamaCare that he likes, such as protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and talked of compromises on taxes.
The conventional thinking is that Romney has to counter the Democrats’ accusation of inflexibility in order to appeal to moderates, but the conventional thinking is dangerously wrong. Damaging leftist policies such as the CRA could not do their damage without Republican concessions. The long-established pattern in American politics is that the left makes a bold policy advance, and the right resists at first. But then the left starts attacking the character of the opposition rather than debating the issue. The left accuses the Republicans of creating gridlock, of not caring about the poor, of denying Grandma her medicine, and then the Republicans compromise. With every compromise, government gains ground, and freedom loses.
If Romney falls into the trap of trying to prove to moderates that he is not who the Democrats say he is, he will let the left avoid responsibility for the ruin they have made of our economy. Republicans have tried for too long to win the political middle by appeasing the left, and it is appeasing the left — not free enterprise — that contributed to the mess we are in.
The way to reach moderates is to educate them. Instead of going on the defensive, Romney should make Obama and the Democrats defend the record that they cannot defend. The real extremists are the people who think they have a right to money that someone else has earned, not the people who think they have a right to keep what they have worked for.
The real extremists are the liberals who pushed the economy off a cliff and now have the chutzpah to insist that they should lead the rescue effort.
Dr. Tim Daughtry is co-author of Waking The Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals At Their Own Game.
“The emperor has no clothes!” That was the cry of a small child in the Hans Christian Andersen tale as the emperor made his way past, entirely unclothed, while no one had the nerve to speak up.
That’s pretty much the situation today. With the recent exception of Maureen Dowd’s scathing critique of Obama’s convention acceptance speech (“My fellow citizens, you were the change…We were the change?”), there hasn’t been much media criticism of the president. Liberal commentators continue to gloss over the mistakes of the most partisan and inept administration in our history.
There is a great deal that is embarrassing about this administration, just as there was about the emperor in Andersen’s tale, even when he had his clothes on. Because he had no real interest in governing — he was all for show — the emperor was easily swayed by charlatans. Because he was arrogant, he refused to accept criticism. And because he was by nature immoderate and extreme, he engaged in foolish and excessive spending. More than anything, he cared about his appearance, and all his efforts went into propping up his approval ratings.
No one around the emperor spoke up, even when he made the most outlandish mistakes. They were all afraid of this haughty ruler, afraid of being charged with disloyalty or of seeming old-fashioned. After all, the emperor’s new clothes were the product of an entirely new technology that no one understood but everyone was supposed to believe in — a bit like solar, wind, and biofuel today. It was not politically correct to suggest that there might actually be nothing there.
Like the emperor of yore, Obama continues to parade around in his magical clothes, isolated from reality by left-wing advisers and shielded from criticism by a weak and acquiescent media. Not many in the Washington press corps are going to point out that, figuratively speaking, the president isn’t wearing any clothes. His promises to create 5 million green energy jobs have come to nothing, as has his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, but who in the national media is pointing that out? Certainly nobody in the mainstream media covering the Democratic Party convention last week in Charlotte.
Even so, everyone in America knows that the last four years have been a bust. Obama’s health care reform bill is wildly unpopular. His attacks on American business are a disgrace. American families are earning $4,000 less than they were four years ago. And Obama, who plays the race card at every turn, is the most racially divisive figure in American politics since George Wallace. So why isn’t anyone pointing it out?
The answer is right there in the Andersen tale. The two swindlers manage to convince the emperor’s court that those who cannot see the invisible cloth they are weaving are either unfit for their office or stupid. Fearing that they actually are unfit or stupid, one adviser after another heaps praise on the swindlers’ workmanship. Fearing that he is unfit or stupid, the emperor also falls for the ruse. No one wants to admit that he is unfit for office and that things are just not working.
No one in the liberal press wants to be the first to speak out, because he will automatically be accused of being unfit and stupid, and disloyal to boot. Everyone recalls the treatment of ABC news anchor Charles Gibson when, in a June 2008 televised debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton, he had the nerve to ask candidate Obama a probing question. His question pointed out that raising capital gains taxes historically results in lower, not higher, revenues for government. So why would Obama want to raise capital gains taxes? Answer: “Well, Charlie, what I said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for the purpose of fairness.”
That lame and illogical answer should have sounded a warning that something was amiss. Right then and there, the media should have pointed out that Obama was so far to the left that he would demand higher taxes on the rich even if doing so imperiled the economy. They should have recognized that Obama’s view of reality had not evolved beyond that of a teenaged radical encountering Karl Marx for the first time. And they, the media, should have had the integrity to point out how truly childish Obama’s travesty of sixties activism actually is. Instead, they closed ranks against Charles Gibson. And Gibson (“Mr. Look Down Your Glasses”) performed the required ablution with his shamefully condescending interview with Sarah Palin.
So as one disaster follows another — the implosion of “green energy jobs,” the Fast and Furious scandal, the “you didn’t build that” speech — it becomes clear that Obama really is just what he seemed: a radical leftist who is incapable of governing because of his unwillingness to compromise. Asked about job-creation in the private sector, the president responds that everything is “just fine.” Well, four years of 8%-plus unemployment is not “just fine.” Not unless you’re living in the same fantasyland as Andersen’s emperor.
Like that foolish monarch with his “new clothes,” Obama continues to parade around like everything is just fine. Gas prices have doubled since Obama took office, but that’s just fine. There is five trillion in new debt, but that’s just fine. ObamaCare has been shoved down the throat of a public that doesn’t want it, but that’s just fine. Don’t you just adore my new clothes?
On the day of the Great Procession, Andersen’s emperor marches through the streets under a royal canopy, haughty and proud of his superior taste in attire, assured that he is fit to continue governing and wearing absolutely nothing. Once again, every observer fears that he may be unfit or stupid, so no one dares to say a word. Not until a small child sees the emperor in the buff and points it out.
“But he has nothing on at all!” cries the child. At first everyone balks, not wanting to admit the evidence of his own senses. “But he has nothing on at all!” cries the child again, unwilling to be silenced. So, finally, everyone looks with his own eyes, and soon everyone realizes that it is true. Despite all his talk of “smart” governance, this arrogant and foolish leader really understood nothing of how to govern. He has spent enormous sums of taxpayer money on an “investment” that came to nothing, and now, quite literally, he has nothing to show for it.
The day of reckoning is approaching when the American people will recognize that Obama, too, has spent lavishly and has nothing to show for it. Perhaps the voice of Maureen Dowd will begin to wake them up. Probably it will require others. But sooner or later, the public will realize that this president’s efforts have come to naught. And after that, the emperor’s reign will come to an ignominious end.
So, let me get this straight:
It is September 11, 2012. An Al Qaeda sponsored mob is marching, running, screaming towards the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Supposedly they are angry about an e-mail cartoon about the Islamic figure, Mohammed. It is known right away that the organizers of the march are the same entity that did the mass murder of Americans on 9.11.01.
The Embassy issues an apology for an American using his free speech rights about a matter of deep concern. They attempt to appease the mob. It doesn’t work. The mobs acts violently and disrespectfully towards the U.S. Embassy. They are al Qaeda. This is what they do.
No comment or almost none from Mr. Obama.
Then an al Qaeda mob attacks the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya, burns it, kills the U.S. Ambassador and three other heroic American diplomats. Again, in a classic al Qaeda move, it is all timed perfectly to infuriate the USA. It isn’t spontaneous. It was 9/11, for Pete’s sake.
No comment from Mr. Obama except terse condolences.
Then along comes Governor Romney, who rightly says, “Hey, why are we appeasing an al Qaeda mob? Why aren’t we calling these guys the vicious killers that they are? Why are we back in this apology to bad guys mode?”
Then, and only then, the Obama White House goes into hyper drive. It turns out that the real problem is not al Qaeda. No, and it’s not Mr. Obama’s appeasement. No, the real threat to America is (wait for it), Mitt Romney. Yes!!! According to White House uber-pal, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Romney is working with the terrorists against the U.S. government by calling for criticism of the al Qaeda!
Yes, Romney is the enemy for pointing out that Mr. Obama is ass kissing the terrorists!
This is terrifying. The media line up to get their marching orders from the Obama Ministry of Truth and suddenly it’s Gospel: the problem is not al Qaeda. It is Romney. With a “more in sorrow than in anger…” look and tone, Mr. Obama pities Romney’s naïveté.
This is disgusting. It is nauseating. This is what happens when you have a one-party media. The lie becomes the truth. George Orwell saw it coming. In 1984, his MiniTrue had up its mission.
Who controls the present, controls the past.
Who controls the past controls the future.
It has happened. The MSM and the White House have outlawed truth. Some of us old ones can remember when it was legal and the media worked to keep it alive. Now, like the firemen in Fahrenheit 451, the MSM press exists to obliterate truth — not to preserve it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Netanyahu begs the U.S. to do something to protect it and the world from the Iranian bomb. Mr. Obama bobs and weaves to avoid contact with reality and responsibility. No one even mentions that if we had allowed Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to build ABM defense, the whole world would be a safer place, and we race towards war or an Islamic control of our expression or both, and the master politician gets ready for his turn on Letterman.
God help us.
President Obama is headed to defeat in November, and it won’t be close. Forget about the polls, and forget about the cadre of delusional Democrats who can’t stop telling us how great and successful the last three and a half years have been. Slick Willy can shill all he likes, but seriously, he’s preaching to the choir, because the only ones believing his shtick are bought and paid for sycophants, crony capitalists, and members of the mainstream media.
Can you think of a single person who didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008 but will vote for him this time around? Yet it is easy to find former minions admitting to the dissolution of their belief in the primacy of the “one.” These people will not vote for him again — and they are legion.
Pols like Bill Clinton say what they have to say, and election polls are often designed to say what the designers want them to say. But Americans, ever the social creatures they are, remembering the hopes and dreams they had for a better world in 2008 — and the hopes and dreams they have today for a better tomorrow — are reluctant to tell someone taking a poll that they don’t like Barack Obama. It doesn’t matter how well a case can be made against the man’s disastrous and disgraceful leadership; guilt can often preclude telling a stranger they plan to vote against the black guy — especially today, when all opposition to the president is framed as racist.
Yet, at some point, that curtain closes in the voting booth, and a decision has to be made as to which candidate is better for voters, their children, and the future of America.
When watching the news or any of the president’s campaign speeches, it is easy to get the message that Barack Obama is way ahead and can’t lose. His successes are portrayed as many and significant, although he needs another term because much still needs to be done. After all, the Republicans have stymied his every selfless effort these last three and a half years, and “we can’t go back.”
He did his best, and there was nothing more he could have done to improve what was an unprecedented (everything with Barack is unprecedented) decline in economic activity. Didn’t Obama call the downturn the “great recession?” The misery the nation feels now is an illusion — or else, they tell us, it is simply the “new normal.”
But usually in mainstream media world, all is well — and Americans should pay no attention to the price of gasoline, or the unavailability of financing for mortgages or business investment, or the price of groceries and the dearth of jobs. Who needs a job when they have Barack Obama?
The media, Obama, and his adulators have become the “check is in the mail” bloc. Things are better; we just haven’t noticed.
Yet there are no real accomplishments, which would be bad enough if it stopped there, but in actuality, everything is much worse since many trusted the “one” in 2008 to solve all the ills of the nation and humanity. All he has done during his tenure is torture the economy into submission with poor decisions, bad legislation, overregulation, and threats of onerous taxation.
It’s been said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Americans, but it is also true that no one ever got rich continually assuming that Americans were idiots. You see, just when a demigod like Barack is convinced he has demagogued his way into the hearts and minds of the electorate, the nation wakes up, and a deafening “thud” can be heard as he falls back down to earth.
Seniors see the true danger to Medicare comes from ObamaCare, a legislative nightmare. Obamacare strips $716 billion from Medicare, and as a result, seniors in states like Florida will make their voices heard this Election Day.
Workers and commuters see the price of gasoline as a function of Barack’s desire to be the one who breaks America’s dependency on fossil fuels. Yet like everything Obama does, he seeks to do it backwards. Because he can’t make alternative energy cheap enough to overwhelm fossil fuels as the main source of energy in America, he chooses to make fossil fuels so expensive that his green energy dreams seem cheap by comparison. Gasoline at $4 a gallon and necessarily skyrocketing electric bills are the “new normal.” Didn’t you know?
If people’s lives have to be destroyed to usher in this new era, then, so be it. They should be grateful that the destruction of their hopes and dreams is in service of the greater Barack Obama good. History books will not remember the individual whose life was ruined today, but they will certainly remember Obama as the man who saved humanity from what might have happened in a hundred years. And isn’t that what’s important?
Small business understands that Obama built this. They understand this so well that there are trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines awaiting his departure next January. They may have supported him in 2008, but does anyone think business owners, long demonized by Barack and minions, are going to vote for Mr. Obama again? No, they will run kicking and screaming to the polls to vote for anyone but the man who has destroyed their incomes and futures, and those of their children.
States with a culture of coal mining are also running away from Barack. After all, miners have families, and killing King Coal has not only hurt the interests of America and Americans, but slain the future of an industry long important to the nation’s prosperity. Who needs cheap energy anyway?
The United Coal Miners Union sat out the Democrat National Convention. Although they didn’t jump ship, they weren’t about to support the moron killing coal jobs while making electricity more expensive and ceding energy independence in the process. I suspect that Obama will get few miner votes this election.
I believe that the administration’s war on coal and the slow realization that the EPA’s future plan for war on fracking have already won Ohio and Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney, despite what the polls say. A union member working in the fossil fuel industry is never going to admit to supporting a Republican, yet he still wants to feed his family and send his kids to college…and maybe someday even retire. Four more years of Barack, and he won’t even have a job.
At the Democrat National Convention, John Kerry said Americans should “ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off now than he was four years ago.”
The answer would be “no,” just as it is for most Americans, because Obama is killing us. Bin Laden at least has the luxury of being dead; the job is finished.
For us, Obama needs another 4 years.
On November 6, 2012, Americans will flock to the polls to ensure that Barack Obama does not get another term to finish the job he started, and the empty chair will lose in a landslide.
Obama Is a Spokesmodel for Tyranny
By Stella Paul
Barack Obama is not a real president, though he does play one on TV. So what is he? It’s my contention that the bizarre creature currently residing in the White House is an attractive spokesmodel for our destruction, sponsored by America’s mortal foes.
The time for politely mincing words is over. After the Democrats booed God and Jerusalem at their national convention; after Obama refused to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel faces nuclear destruction; after Obama enthroned the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East and then apologized for America when our embassies were fatally attacked there on 9/11 — well, really, what’s the point of making nice?
Forget calling Obama “incompetent.” This tiresome meme presupposes that Obama wants to do what’s right for America but doesn’t know how. Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?
Yes, he’s incompetent, in that he’s a fairly unimpressive bloke with no skills, imagination, or ability to learn, who couldn’t run a third-rate laundromat.
But so what? His sponsors didn’t install him for his competence. They installed him so that he could strut on the runways of the world, showing off his fashionable skin color and perfectly creased pants, while babbling whatever useful venom they put on his teleprompter.
As the body of America’s Libyan ambassador was dragged through the streets and three other American embassy workers lay dead, we learned that Obama attended only 38% of his intelligence briefings in 2012. In fact, he didn’t attend a single intelligence briefing in the week preceding 9/11. So ask yourself: would the outcome be any different if he had?
Of course not. Does L’Oréal spokesmodel Beyoncé attend board meetings in which the location of new factories or other nitty-gritty corporate business is decided? Why should she? Her job is to go out there and look good and sell the brand.
And thus our Spokesmodel-in-Chief, who found no opening in his schedule to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, somehow made the time to appear on the 9/11 radio show of “The Pimp with a Limp,” fly to Las Vegas, and clown around with David Letterman. Next up is a fundraiser at the 40/40 Club in Manhattan with fellow spokesmodel Beyoncé, and a whirlwind of similar brand-promoting frippery, as the world burns.
If you haven’t figured out the nature of the brand that Obama is promoting, the Democrats helpfully informed us in their opening convention video: “Thegovernment is the only thing we all belong to.” We all belong to the government, and the government is Obama — so we all belong to Obama, that exciting celebrity with the big smile who loves to give us free stuff. And now that we’ve been docilely collectivized, our celebrity friend, “President Obama,” can deliver us into submission at the hands of those who despise us.
And thus, “President Obama” will have “more flexibility” to surrender to the Russians, whose warships he displayed at his convention, after his election. And when rabid Islamists storm American embassies, and sodomize and murder an American ambassador, the reaction of “President Obama’s” White House is to abjectly apologize to the protestors for America’s right to free speech. Meanwhile, “President Obama” weakens and undermines America’s military, leaving us ever more vulnerable in an increasingly chaotic world.
Who is this “President Obama” who puts such an appealing face on our destruction? Just a few weeks before the election, we still don’t really know. Two gripping documentaries, 2016 and Dreams From My Real Father, portray different aspects of his background, exposing the America-hating fervor of his various mentors.
A blockbuster hit, 2016 examines the anti-colonial politics of his purported father, the Harvard-educated Kenyan governmental economist, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. With its glossy production values brought to you by Schindler’s List producer Gerald Molen, 2016 takes us on a fast-paced tour of Obama Sr.’s worldview, in which villainous America and the West must be humbled for deliberately ravaging the third world. Along the way, we meet freedom-hating influences on “President Obama,” including terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, leading Israel-basher Professor Edward Said, and card-carrying Communist agitator Frank Marshall Davis.
It’s Frank Marshall Davis who takes center stage in Joel Gilbert’s fascinating documentary, Dreams From My Real Father. Gilbert contends that Davis was Obama’s biological father and deploys some compelling physical and circumstantial evidence to make his point. Even Obama’s pre-presidential nose job can’t mask the physical resemblance of the two men, and Frank Marshall Davis’s side job as a pornographer allowed him access to Obama’s teen mother, as Gilbert’s photo cache dismayingly proves.
But whoever spawned “President Obama,” the end result is the empty, angry Spokesmodel-in-Chief, whose sponsors now hold our fate in their hands. While Obama preens and prances around the country, the real workers continue their destruction of our national security and economy, strangling us with a $16-trillion debt and another threatened downgrade. The Spokesmodel saw no need to attend any job council meetings as 23 million Americans suffered without work; those jobs could be destroyed without any personal input from him.
Now the Spokesmodel’s contract is up for renewal, and like all successful celebrities, he’s demanding we pay a higher price for his services. If he wins, many Americans may be forced to pay the ultimate price.
Note: I am Cynical Susan’s smarter, wiser, older, Republican cousin…at family gatherings we make her eat at the children’s table-it’s a win-win that way. The adults can have adult conversations, and CS spews libral garbage to the youngest members of our family.
Rick, why is Mother Courant giving Obama and Holder a get out of jail free card on this matter?
After government-trafficked guns were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010, higher-ups all the way to the White House started scrambling to cover their tracks.
The gun-walking program known as Operation Fast and Furious came to a head two years later on June 20, 2012, when the House voted to hold the United States attorney general in contempt for lying to Congress.
The same day of the House vote, the president himself publicly stepped into the fray. Obama invoked executive privilege in order to prevent long-awaited subpoenaed documents from seeing the light of day. Not surprisingly, the state-run media downplayed Obama’s official entrance into the Fast and Furious scandal.
Now, after a 17-month-long investigation, the inspector general for the DOJ is releasing his findings. And another hearing has been scheduled for September 20 (the third time it has been rescheduled), with the IG appearing before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee.
Fox News has already obtained certain sections of IG Michael Horowitz’s report. If this partial information is any indication of the rest of the report, it doesn’t look like the investigation will be a shining example of transparency.
The IG’s conclusion: Fast and Furious began in Phoenix, with most of the blame going to three ATF managers: Phoenix Agent in Charge Bill Newell, Supervisor Dave Voth, and Case Agent Hope MacAllister. Attorneys for all three vehemently defended their clients.
Debra Roth, an attorney for MacAllister, wrote to Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the report “fails to account for the abdication of oversight, guidance and responsibility by ATF headquarters and Main Department of Justice regarding the implementation of what is in essence a strategy to combat an international criminal enterprise.
It looks like Horowitz plans to scapegoat ATF underlings who followed orders from higher-ups at the DOJ. What about DOJ U.S. Attorney in Arizona Dennis Burke, who talked openly about “the river of iron flowing from Phoenix to Mexico”?
The report also cites “a failure in leadership and a lack of accountability and oversight up and down the chain of command.” Translation: nothing to see here — just some negligent ATF agents and their supervisors looking the other way.
“We found no evidence in Operation Fast and Furious that the ATF or the (U.S. attorney’s office) attempted at any point during the investigation to balance the risks to the public safety against the long-term benefits of identifying trafficking networks and participants,” the draft report says.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives (BAFTE) receives its orders from the DOJ. And since the president made the decision to cover for his AG, Americans can safely assume he and Holder are up to their eyeballs in Fast and Furious.
Did Horowitz find a smoking gun leading directly to the White House? Did Obama know about Fast and Furious back in 2009? What about Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
Maybe the IG will be able to explain Holder’s and Obama’s “under the radar role” in a plot that killed two federal agents and scores of Mexican citizens. Perhaps one of the representatives will ask Horowitz the exact location of White House National Security staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Is he still in Iraq hiding out?
Can the IG tell us when weapons possibly linked to Fast and Furious will finally stop showing up in Mexico? Recently, a cache of firearms was found there when school authorities discovered a nine-year-old boy with a fully loaded semi-automatic gun stashed in his bookbag. A police SWAT team raided the boy’s home, where they located powerful weapons — some brand-new. The packaging suggested that they came from the United States, according to David Codrea at the Examiner. Sources will neither confirm nor deny whether the guns are tied to Fast and Furious.
Will Issa then ask Horowitz why he felt it necessary to run the report by White House lawyers before making it public? Why not just let the DOJ attorneys go over it? According to Issa, because of DOJ “pushback,” Horowitz delayed the hearing a week in an effort to delete sensitive information and to allow any agencies named in his final report to refute his findings.
Congressman Issa told Greta Van Susteren he is “trying to be cautiously optimistic” and taht he hopes the report and hearing get to the bottom of who really authorized the gun-walking program.
After the last four years of this administration’s “transparency,” odds are Issa and the rest of us are going to be severely disappointed.
The reason the Fast and Furious scandal never gets off the merry-go-round is because the Obama administration is rife with corruption. Agencies like the DOJ that police an independent IG’s reports through demands to review it before the final release to the public can mean only one thing: there’s nowhere to turn for real justice.
Many in the World Trade Center chose to jump to their deaths, but Christopher Stevens chose to remain inside and die rather than face the tender mercies of his attackers. Stevens had spent enough time in Libya to have seen what the jihadist fighters did to their captives and must have known what horrors he could expect at their hands. The photos that have been released, along with claims by Libyan jihadists that they sexually assaulted his corpse, suggest that he made the right choice. And perhaps in those final moments, facing that terrible choice, Christopher Stevens finally understood the true horror of the Muslim world that he had fallen in love with as a Peace Corps volunteer.
“He was an avid student of Islam and the Middle East, and consistently strove to build the proverbial bridge between our two cultures in the face of sometimes overwhelming antagonism and bitter misunderstanding,” a friend from the diplomatic service tells us. But though Christopher Stevens may have studied Islam, he had learned very little about it, and so his final lesson was the bloody one that Westerners who never really learn what Islam is about end up receiving.
“The world needs more Chris Stevenses,” Hillary Clinton said, but does it really? Does it need more tall dead blond Americans lying bloodied in the gutters of Muslim cities? Does it need men who give up the hopes and dreams of their country to take on the dreams of their enemies without ever realizing where the fatal road of those dreams leads?
None of this seems to be making any impact on the White House operations. Obama neglected to attend the intelligence briefing before the attacks and didn’t participate in the briefing afterward, choosing instead to fly off to Las Vegas for yet another fundraiser. Maybe Leon Panetta should try to find a way to combine the briefings with the fundraisers.
We know how Barack Obama feels about Mitt Romney. He holds him in contempt — and, speaking through his proxies, has all but called him a felon, tax cheat, and murderer.
Who cares? Trash talk is Obama’s political lingua franca. He relishes delivering these insults face-to-face while shielded by the respect his victims have for the office of the presidency — a reverence he does not share.
What should be important is how he feels about us: the American people. And how should this impact the so-called likeability gap between him and Romney as election day approaches?
In 2008, Americans questioned Barack Obama’s feelings towards Americans. His famous gaffe was the tipoff:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them[.]
So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Yawn — everyone knows about that broad-based insult. And everyone certainly knew that Obama’s “moral compass,” Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., had scathing views of America and toward Americans. One was explained away as a “gaffe” and the other explained away by claims that Obama was never in the pews when a stream of anti-America invective poured forth from Wright — an excuse belied by Obama’s own words in a newspaper interview and by keen investigative work by Stanley Kurtz in his book Radical-in-Chief (pages 320-3).
But Obama’s condescension towards broad swaths of Americans was presaged years before, and it has deepened and widened over the years. In 1990, he said that “suburbs bore me.” By implication, suburbanites bore him but do have their uses — donations and votes, for example.
But Barack Obama has never been able to keep his feelings towards Americans hidden for long. Americans don’t see the contempt too often, though, because Obama’s speechwriters are more circumspect than he is on the stump.
The truth comes out Washington-style: as “gaffes.”
There is a stream of insults that has flown forth over the past few years — and have been all but smothered by the media. That is an anomaly, of course — because if there has ever been a “man bites dog” story that should compel media coverage, it would be a politician — let alone a president — who, instead of delivering paeans to the people, rebukes them repeatedly.
What have these insults been? What do they reveal? And, more importantly, why should we vote for a man who holds such a low opinion of Americans? And why do Americans like a man who clearly does not like many of us?
The Dirty Laundry List
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Obama must have realized how this might be interpreted, so he added some nice-sounding verbiage, but the deed was done. Bill Clinton had proclaimed in his second inaugural address that “America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation” (italics mine). Barack Obama does not agree — and moreover, he says we are not a model for the world and in fact have reasons to atone to it. And Obama has assumed for us the role of atoner in chief.
Very early in his presidency (in 2009), Obama did apologize at least five times, and perhaps as many as ten times, within the first six months of his presidency. We are not worthy of respect.
Furthermore, Americans don’t think clearly. When the red tide of the 2010 midterms became visible, Obama refused to accept responsibility that Democratic policy was at fault. On the contrary, the people were.
President Barack Obama said Americans’ “fear and frustration” is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country’s scared.”
This was echoed recently by Michelle Obama, who depicted undecided voters as “confused” and “knuckleheads.”
People who watch Fox News (the most widely watched cable news outlet — and one Obama has appeared on, opposite Bill O’Reilly, over the years) are a “little stubborn” and don’t understand Obama’s policies. For good measure, he told Republicans in 2009 (pre-Sandra Fluke) that you “just can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done” — as if Republicans just are mindless robots marching to Limbaugh’s tune.
Why should that matter, since Americans are poor listeners anyway?
President Obama recently said that the biggest mistake of his first term was not being a good enough story-teller, explaining that he needs to be better communicate to the American people as to why his policies mattered. (His verbal tic “let me be clear” when he prefaces a point reflects the view that Americans need to pay better attention.) Paul Ryan had some fun with this criticism during the Republican National Convention.
Was the animated version of Obama’s story about his agenda “The Life of Julia” dumbed down enough for hapless Americans? The Julia fiasco was mocked not just for its approach (the moral of the story is that all one has to look forward to is a life of dependency), but also for apparently leaving some important facts on the cutting room floor, resulting in a collection of “bogus” assumptions. Is this the type of story we are told to absorb?
Many of the stories that Obama does tell us, from his own life story (filled with fabrications) to the auto bailout “success” fairy tale to the broken promises regarding ObamaCare and the incessant peddling of tall tales known as Mediscare, lean a bit more toward fiction than fact. Should we trust a man who shamelessly abuses the facts of his own mother’s death for political purposes? As Victor Davis Hanson writes, “[i]f a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain healthcare, then he will fudge on almost anything.”
How true.
Policeman “acted stupidly” when they did their duty and investigated whether a friend of Barack Obama’s (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) was committing a crime. Since Gates is black, Obama commented that there is a “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” So policeman not only act stupidly, but also are motivated by racism.
Barack Obama see a more pervasive sense of racism stalking the land than was evident when he gave his famous 2004 “There is no white America, no black America” speech at the Democratic National Convention. He commented recently that elections are tight when you have a name like “Barack Obama.” This is not the first time he has cast aspersions on Americans. Back in 2008, he said Americans might be reluctant to vote for him because, referring to himself, “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” His grandmother was fearful of black youths because she was a “typical white person,” and he quoted approvingly in his book The Audacity of Hope that “white men’s greed runs a world in need.”
Republicans are “bomb-throwers” and “hostage takers” who sip Slurpees while driving the economy into a ditch. If they want to help, though, they have to sit in the back of the bus. From there, at least they won’t be able to excavate moats and fill them with alligators to kill Hispanics slipping across the border from Mexico. Republicans are members of the Flat Earth Society, though, so how worthwhile would their input be anyway? Might as well stick with the Slurpees — if Mayor Bloomberg permits.
Guess that whole “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America” thing was “just words” back in 2004.
Why has the economy been so weak — fueled only by endless printing of money by the Federal Reserve? Obama says it is not his fault because he believes that “all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones.” The fault lies elsewhere. Someone else is always at fault, but this time, Obama’s scapegoats expanded beyond the Arab Spring, Republicans, Congress, ATMs, tsunamis, and George Bush to include all of us.
Americans have gotten “a little soft, and we didn’t have the same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.” A few weeks later, Obama riffed off the theme when he said, “[W]e’ve been a little bit lazy.” Well, that is partly true: Obama has admitted in a rare moment of candor to being a bit lazy himself. Others might agree with him about his own laxity.
Americans are not just lazy, but also gluttons. In 2008, Obama told Americans that “we can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times…and then just expect that other countries are going to say ‘OK.’” Then he won the election, moved into the White House, and promptly moved the thermostat up to “greenhouse levels” because he doesn’t like wearing suits and has nostalgia for his days in Hawaii. Hypocrisy is endemic to Washington.
We have “lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do things that built the Golden Gate Bridge.” Tellingly, when people aspire to do great things, they use the metaphor of a moon shot. Obama did not — perhaps because he eviscerated our space program, which was symbolic of our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do great things.
Nor have African-Americans been spared the condescension. Obama resented calls that he work harder for them, so he told them to stop complaining and “take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’.”
We are an ungrateful people. When the Tea Party emerged to oppose the fiscal hole his profligacy was digging America into, Obama noted that he had cut taxes (a deal reached with Congress) and ridiculed their concerns: “You would think they’d be saying thank you.” Perhaps protesters had realized that the impact of relatively small tax cuts were being dwarfed by the debt accumulated under Obama’s reign. New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor writes in her book, The Obamas, that there is a palpable sense of grievance on the part of the Obamas; the small group of people they rely upon reinforce the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.” We are not worthy.
Even liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has criticized the condescension that radiates from the president.
And yet the condescension streams forth.
Jews should “search their souls” over Israel’s seriousness to make peace — or at least that’s what President Obama seemed to be saying when he pompously hectored a group of Jewish leaders. The man who claimed to know more about Judaism (and many other topics besides — see “Competitor in Chief,” regarding his zeal to declare his superiority) should know better. Jews , if anything, have been introspecting for thousands of years. Hence the large number who become psychiatrists, philosophers, psychologists, and the like. Sometimes they introspect to a fault and become Woody Allen.
Meanwhile, for Muslims, we have a speech to the Islamic world filled with praise, encomiums, and a great deal of mythmaking, and then there was the deep bow to the Saudi king.
Obama has made derogatory comments regarding vast swaths of America: greedy doctors who are coming after your tonsils and amputating limbs so they can become wealthier, “fat cat” bankers, workers in the oil and gas industry, corporate jet owners, Supreme Court justices, insurance companies, veterans riven by flashbacks and wracked by depression… even the Democratic base gets mocked for its lethargy and inability to buck up. And of course, last but not least, there are all those “who did build that.”
America is a target-rich environment for our insulter-in-chief: few Americans are spared derogatory remarks and characterizations from the man they elected president. (For even more examples see here, here, and here.)
Barack Obama can dish it out, but he can’t take it. He is notoriously thin-skinned and prickly when it comes to criticism of his own actions. His Velcro-attached friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett, serves to shield him from meeting with anyone who may damage his ego. The spin regarding his bravery in choosing the second coming of the Lincolnesque “Team of Rivals” as Cabinet members has faded along with Obama posters; even New York Times liberal columnist Roger Cohen thinks that these people were chosen for their craven willingness to be “Obama’s Team of Idolizers.”
When criticized, he complained that “they talk about me like a dog.” This whining from the president of the United States. Ronald Reagan faced far worse criticism, name-calling, and insults, yet cheerfully brushed it all off, since he had larger concerns than his own ego.
Why does Obama look down on so many Americans?
Dinesh D’Souza has speculated that an ideological inheritance from his biological father led him to being anti-American; Paul Kengor cites an early mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who may have led him down the path of anti-Americanism. His childhood in Indonesia and his own mother’s influences may have given him an anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic bent — he sometimes does seem to view Americans as his mother, an anthropologist, might have, as Spengler has noted. He admits to having sought out anti-American radicals in his college years; the elitism and sense of entitlement that are part of the academic atmosphere that he breathed in for years may have played a role (after all, anyone who name-drops Reinhold Niebuhr as his favorite theologian and leaks to the New York Times that he reads Thomas Aquinas while ordering drone strikes might have a hard time respecting the average American. Perhaps the sense of superiority is just a reflection of his narcissism writ large — the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor wrote recently about Obama’s overwhelming need to show and tell how much more talented he is compared to those around him (see also my earlier column, “President Put-Down”). Regardless, it’s clear that Barack Obama has a pejorative view of Americans.
The Yes We Can 2008 campaign slogan must have referred only to our ability to be swayed to vote for Obama, since he seems to think we lack the ambition and imagination to do much more. Isn’t that the Story of Julia? We are soft and lazy and easily confused, and fearful and bitter, and we fear foreigners and grasp only for God and guns. We are fit only to be subject to Obama’s derogation.
Why does this view of Americans matter? A country is only as good as its people. If Obama has so little faith in our potential, if he is so certain that America is on the decline (recall in 2008 that he was seen reading The Post-American World, written by his friend Fareed Zakaria), he will adopt policies to “manage” (and some would say accelerate) this decline. He is what might be called a “declinist.”
Given his desire to “spread the wealth” and not create the wealth, Obama’s goal of redistribution is made clearer. Even more government control is coming. We can expect — as Obama has all but declared — a second term that will make the overreach and intrusiveness of the first term seem benign in comparison. After all, declared the Democrats recently, we all belong to the government, to be ruled from on high.
Mitt Romney, however, has a problem. There is a “likeability gap” between him and Obama. Why people find Barack Obama likeable — even likeable enough — is a mystery. Have Americans not heard the serial insults leveled at them over the years? Are they taken in by the smiles and beer-drinking by Barack Obama that seem to happen only when a camera is nearby and as election day approaches? Do we swoon over the staged spectacle of the Kiss-Cam moment at a basketball game a few months ago? Is that how America votes?
Have the ever-unreliable media just smothered all these dismissive and derogatory comments, sending them to the cutting room floor to join the stammering and the multiple mistakes (Austrian is the language of Austria, Hawaii is in Asia, West Virginia is near Arkansas) of the president that occur regularly when he is unplugged from the teleprompter (see Bret Stephens, “Is Obama Smart: A case study in stupid is as stupid does” and “Obama Is Not That Bright” by Jack Kelly)?
Aren’t journalists supposed to inform us? Don’t people bemoan the scarcity of informed voters?
So here is an idea that may be akin to a Hail Mary pass for the Romney campaign — and in particular for super-PACs.
Most of Barack Obama’s insults toward Americans are on video. The media’s obsession with Barack Obama and his own desire to be filmed for posterity have created a vast amount of raw material that can be used to compile commercials that reveal how little respect Barack Obama has for Americans. The compilation would make Jimmy Carter seem Reaganesque.
And it would prompt Americans to ask a question before they cast their votes: do we really want to give our vote and show our faith in a man who has so little faith in us or our future?
Or do we want to support Mitt Romney, a man who instead does “Believe in America”?
Karl Rove — are you there?
Well, well, well. So the mighty Rahmbo has met his match in the sweet-talking president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis. All that bravado, the stabbing of knives, the mailing of dead fishes, none of that seems to scare the union teachers, who decided to stay on strike Sunday.
There is something more important than saving public education for “the children.” It is Barack Obama’s reelection. So even as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel threatens court action to send the teachers back to work, the chances are he will do whatever it takes to get the issue out of the way for his former boss.
But I am not discouraged. The teachers’ unions, and government employee unions in general, are our friends. They will do what conservatives cannot do “on our own.” They will demolish big government as we know it. Why? Because the union teachers hate their jobs.
Liberals are running around these days extolling the wonder years of the 1950s. They remember when the workers had good union jobs at good wages. But Michael Barone recently poured cold water on their nostalgia.
As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
That set me to thinking. Now I know why the private-sector unions did such a good job of destroying the good jobs at good wages in the unionized steel industry and have half way destroyed the jobs in the unionized auto industry. Once you have started what our lefty friends call a “movement of resistance” against some evil oppressor the movement will not rest until it has destroyed the target of its rage. Once you set up a union and teach the rank and file to hate the bosses, then you have created a monster that will not stop until it has won final victory or final defeat — just ask Joe Soptic.
The factory workers had a perfectly good reason to be angry. The factory system turned them into mechanical robots. They hated that and so they formed labor unions to fight the system that had humiliated them. They fought and they fought, eventually inventing the weekend and the good jobs at good wages of which we have all heard tell. They even got the politicians to lend a hand by writing pro-union labor laws that tied the bosses up in red tape. But they ended up destroying those good jobs and those good wages. Because they hated those jobs and everything associated with them: the bosses, the assembly line, the foremen, Frederick Taylor, and the infernal speed-up.
The union workers ended up like the woman scorned. Nothing would satisfy them but to destroy the people that had humiliated them, even if they destroyed themselves in the process.
But, as the Frankfurt School lefties pointed out, the problem is not just the mechanical factory system, the bosses, and the unjust domination of the workers. Every system of “instrumental reason” is a system of domination, a means to dominate nature and other men. That goes for bureaucratic government just as much as the evil robber barons of the factory system. The system dominates government workers just as much as factory workers.
You and I may sit in front of our computers wondering why the Chicago teachers and the Wisconsin state workers, the California local government workers and the rest of the 20 million government workers just don’t get it. Are they dumb or something? Don’t they understand that there is No. More. Money?
It doesn’t matter. They hate their jobs. They will keep marching and demonstrating and bullying politicians, and they will keep electing leaders like Karen Lewis, and they will keep winning themselves ridiculous pensions, and they will keep wrecking the school system, and the health care system, and the child-welfare system, until the whole thing collapses.
But what about the “little people?” What about the children in those lousy Chicago schools? What about the children neglected by the failing child welfare system? What about the ruin we call Medicaid?
Politicians like Rahm Emanuel don’t care about the little people. They just care about getting elected. They don’t care about debt or default the economy or the security of US embassies. They just care about the next election.
But it really doesn’t matter. Let the politicians win their elections, and let the union leaders win fabulous benefits for their members right up until the moment that the government goes belly up and the voters realize that they have been had.
The problem is what comes after that. Will the man on the white horse turn the economy around and restore prosperity like Ronald Reagan, or will he ruin the country like the Kirchners ruined Argentina?
He threw down the race card, saying Republicans want him to wash their cars.
CNSNews.com reports that Obama said,
“While speaking in Cincinnati on Monday [September 17], Obama said, “The only thing they [Republicans] can do is keep trying to bluff their way through until November, and hope that you won’t call them on it. But understand Cincinnati, look, I want to work with them to reduce the deficit. I’ve said if the Republicans need more love, if they want me to walk the dog or wash their car, I’m happy to do it.”
This language is reminiscent of a reported conversation between Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy back before the 2008 election as recalled in the September 10, 2012 edition of The New Yorker magazine.
“Bill Clinton’s attacks hurt Hillary as much as they did Obama. The [New York] Times denounced Clinton’s fairy-tale comment as a “bizarre and rambling attack” and as exemplifying a campaign that was “perilously close to injecting racial tension” into the conversation. At a press conference in South Carolina the morning after Obama won the state, Bill Clinton seemed to dismiss the victory as a fluke of local demography. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Clinton’s role in the campaign rattled Obama. He told ABC News in an interview that Clinton “has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.”
In a January 10, 2010 article in NewYorkDailyNews.com, staff writer Helen Kennedy wrote,
Bill Clinton helped sink his wife’s chances for an endorsement from Ted Kennedy by belittling Barack Obama as nothing but a race-based candidate.
“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” the former president told the liberal lion from Massachusetts, according to the gossipy new campaign book, “Game Change.”
The book says Kennedy was deeply offended and recounted the conversation to friends with fury.
After Kennedy sided with Obama, Clinton reportedly griped, “the only reason you are endorsing him is because he’s black. Let’s just be clear.”
Now we have Obama saying that the (racist) Republicans would have him walk dogs and wash their cars in order for him to show them some respect.
This is what candidate desperation looks like.
It won’t be the last time he uses the Race Card.
The old media is dialing-up its defense of a failed Presidency. It will cost them.
As the Obama Doctrine, that ill-defined foreign policy born during the conflagration that brought an end to the dictator Gaddafi not unlike that recently delivered upon U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, dissolves in failure, media shills for the regime focus their criticism on Mitt Romney.
It won’t hurt him. But it will hurt them, because Americans are watching.
While this media misdirection doesn’t surprise us, what is noteworthy is the strident tone of anti-Romney desperation bleeding through outlets and pundits like the website POLITICO.com, and TIME magazine’s columnist Joe Klein.
It’s serves little purpose, though, to harp on the bias among the old media illuminati. Those who discern its existence need no persuasion. Those who do not are generally not subject to being persuaded, anyway.
So, perhaps we might try to understand, in an historical context, the phenomenon that is today’s sycophantic, Obama-adoring, liberal “professional” journalists — for our own edification.
First, they promote a species of propaganda not new to the planet. One place to probe their past is in two propaganda campaigns in Germany. First, National Socialism ruled Germany, and most of Europe. Then, Marxist-Leninist ideology filled the political vacuum in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the fall of the Nazis.
This disclaimer comes up-front: There is no suggestion made below that Democrats are Nazis. For that matter, neither are Tea Party supporters — despite what Nancy Pelosi says. References to the role of propaganda in Nazi Germany below are made solely for comparative and illustrative purposes.
Randall L. Bytwerk, Professor of Communication at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, compares propaganda during those two totalitarian regimes in Germany in his book Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democrat Republic (Michigan State University Press, 2004).
Bytwerk defines a totalitarian state as being…
“…dedicated to an ideal vision of history and sees its mission as getting the world there. It has a party willing to do everything necessary to reach its goals, a leader chosen either by Providence or the laws of history, a worldview that lays claim to all aspects of life, a confident reliance on mass propaganda, and central control of at least most institutions. This definition does not require that a totalitarian state succeed in being completely totalitarian or that totalitarian states be equally reprehensible.” (p. 12)
America is not a totalitarian state, but more than a few Americans believe the nation has taken significant steps, during the Obama Presidency, in a totalitarian direction, and we are alarmed.
Today, America’s liberal media displays behavior typical of how news and political commentary outlets function in totalitarian states. Bytwerk writes,
“The masses’ limited capacity makes repetition critical. Even the most gifted propagandist faces great challenges in securing the attention, much less the belief, of the masses. Since the masses are of limited intelligence and great forgetfulness, ‘all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan’.” (p. 45, the quote is from Adolf Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf”)
The Obama regime’s slogans and memes, propagated by the legacy media today, include, but are not limited to, the Republican’s “War on Women,” “fair-share,” “Forward,” and the general characterization of “rich” Republicans as uncaring about the poor, minorities, LGBT persons, and so on.
The legacy media parrots these memes and repeats the Obama Re-Election Campaign’s talking-points — daily.
“The media in totalitarian societies have catechetical functions. Their goal is to present people with convincing accounts of what they cannot know firsthand – the reality beyond their everyday lives. That which is presented must agree with the reigning worldview. If Jews are bad, news of Jews anywhere in the world must be bad news. If capitalism is in its dying days, it will not do to present its successes. And if the news is to serve as an organ of the truth, those who determine what is news must be those who supposedly know that truth themselves.” (p. 89)
The old media’s catechetical-like repetition of Democrat talking points was exposed in 2010 during the “Journolist Scandal”. Before the scandal was, conveniently, forgotten by the people who caused it, USA Today’s Patrick Maines wrote an article entitled “Journolist scandal eclipses the real problem: News bias”.
“The “Journolist” kerfuffle — surely you’ve heard of it by now — says more about the state of media criticism than it does about the state of journalism. Worse, it provokes a microscopic narrative about the thoughts and motives of opinion writers that only diverts attention from the macroscopic subject — the public’s perception of bias among mainstream news reporters.
In the event that you’ve been vacationing abroad, or have better things to do than monitor pundits’ opinions of themselves, Journolist is a now-defunct listserv once made up of some 400 liberal commentators, activists, academics and “think tank” ideologues. It was assembled (and then disassembled) by The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.”
The “listserv” may now be officially defunct, but the catechetical function of the legacy media lives on, unabated. It is as much a “perception of bias” as seeing the sunrise is a merely a perception of reality. The catechetical sameness of the storylines used by the old liberal media to attack Romney, Ryan, and Republicans in general, is too broadly identical to be coincidental.
There’s nothing new here; we’ve seen “journolists” before.
On March 33, 1933, newly-minted Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels addressed German journalists.
“You should obviously get your information here, but you should also get your instructions. You should know not only what is happening but also what the Government is thinking and how you can most usefully explain this to the people. We want to have a press that works with the Government, just as the Government wants to work with the press.” (Bytwerk, p. 91)
By 1943, Goebbels’ attitude toward the press had shifted.
“Any decent journalist with any feeling of honor in his bones simply cannot stand for the way he is handled by the press department of the Reich government. Journalists are sat on as through there were still in grade school. Naturally this will have very serious consequences for the future of journalism. Any man who still has a residue of honor will be very careful not to become a journalist.” (p. 104)
In the Marxist-Leninist regime of the GDR, a journalist described the status of his profession in 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell.
“We had no status either with the population or in the party apparatus…. We were seen by the entire party apparatus as ink lackeys, as people to whom one gave orders. We were not taken seriously. People said we were the court fools of the nation” (Bytwerk, p. 105)
The characterizations of the East German media as “ink lackeys” and “court fools” do not significantly differ from how many Americans view the legacy media today.
Frequently, those posting comments on American Thinker wonder if the nation has reached the tipping point where a majority of voters lack critical thinking skills, and are, therefore, poised to re-elect Obama.
Lest we assume that only the less-educated are susceptible to propaganda, Bytwerk offers this warning:
“The mass of such material [modern propaganda] is so great that even those who claim to be critical readers have little option but to accept most of what they read. They may be suspicious, but it is difficult to confirm their suspicions. Few are able to doubt everything. Citizens of both systems [National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism] faced a comprehensive media system that was difficult to disagree with. There was either no competing information in the case of National Socialist Germany or limited information in the case of the GDR.” (p. 107)
In the quote above we find a redemptive difference between state-sanctioned propaganda in the two political systems examined in Bytwerk’s book, and the media landscape in America today.
We have a flourishing, expanding, new media that lives and thrives on the internet. And it’s still in its infancy.
While that new media covers the spectrum of ideological opinions, as it should, within that spectrum are America’s most independent, conservative news and commentary outlets.
Supporting those outlets is a legion of unpaid citizen-journalists and modestly-paid semi-professionals. They join with full-time staff writers for pre-existing conservative magazines that now post on the web. The combined effort offers alternative viewpoints to those of the old liberal media.
To conclude:
Historically, the corruption of the professional media in totalitarian societies has been omnipresent.
America’s old liberal media has, likewise, been thoroughly corrupted, and its integrity irreparably damaged.
Because Americans are not uniformly stupid, many know that.
Consequently, the November election will, also, be a referendum on the liberal media.
History does not bid well for their long-term success.
“Totalitarian propaganda fails for inherent reasons that over the long term (which may take generations) make it unable to achieve the goals its makers set. It fails because it is untruthful, because it encourages hypocrisy, and because it is in the biblical sense idolatrous, placing a human absolute in place of a divine absolute. The last is the worse. With the conviction that the Fuhrer or the party is infallible, the way to evil is open.” (p. 161, Bytwerk)
You will not see the legacy media on the ballot in November. But it will, most assuredly, be there.
And so will we.
Barack Hussein Obama has always run his political campaigns to exploit racial, economic, religious, and political divisions. After nearly four years of Obama, the nation is furiously divided, and the political scene is positively treacherous. Everyone expects this campaign to be the ugliest and dirtiest in our nation’s history. It is certainly shaping up that way.
The most poisonous aspect of this race is the Democratic Party political tactic of racial slander. The Democrats can’t campaign on Obama’s stellar accomplishments as president, and they can’t attack Romney’s qualifications. Most Americans agree with Romney’s policies. So the progressives are playing the race card.
To the Democrats and the mainstream media, this is war. They now have the political power to advance their leftist ideology and they will stop at nothing to keep it. The progressives aren’t merely playing the race card. They are deploying the entire deck in a scorched-earth policy. If you oppose the Democrats, then you are a racist.
Republicans and conservatives are now regularly smeared as racists. Their history of being the party and ideology that freed the slaves, overturned the Jim Crow laws, and fought for racial equality is being deliberately distorted. The progressive left is waging their race hate campaign against the American people as a whole — not just against the Republicans. The Democratic Party/mainstream media narrative is that virtually all Americans are racist, except for the enlightened ones who make their home in the Democratic Party.
America’s Race Card Media
The mainstream news media are reveling in their role as race hounds for the Democratic Party. Chris Matthews of NBC leads the pack of race howlers. In a recent Morning Joe show, Matthews viciously attacked Reince Preibus and accused candidate Romney of playing the race card. Matthews reviled the Republican for using the term “work requirements” when discussing welfare reform. That’s racist, you know. On his Hardball show on MSNBC, Matthews regularly accuses Romney of leading a racist campaign. He hears Republicans “dog-whistling” racial code words all the time — in practically every speech or announcement. He recently set up Cynthia Tucker, an über-liberal Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist, to declare of the Romney campaign that “[t]his is the Southern Strategy writ large. This is all about appealing to racially resentful whites.”
I’ve got news for Matthews and Tucker. There aren’t enough “racially resentful whites” to matter. They represent the tiniest fraction of the American population. Then why are the Democrats and their media stooges woofing so loudly on these racialist hate themes? They continue to play on rapidly disappearing “white guilt” over slavery, which ended a century and a half ago, and racism, which will never end, according to liberals.
The critical voting demographic for Obama is the white male professional. They are the target. How many of these people will flee to the embrace of the Democrats for fear of being labeled as racist, and to secure the badge of racial enlightenment? Enough to matter, perhaps. That’s what the Democrats are counting on. Their underlying strategy is to neutralize this demographic since they can’t possibly win it.
The Racial Stink Brush
Americans as a people are fairly free from racial prejudice. This is certainly true when Americans are compared to people living in the rest of the world. But you would never know that, and certainly wouldn’t believe it, if all your information came from American television.
There are few real racists in our country, relatively speaking. They are considered wackos, out of mainstream thought and belief. We Americans believe that all men are created equal. We Christians are commanded to love one another as brothers. The only way we can reunite this nation is through brotherly love.
And that is exactly why the Democrats are raising the specter of racism in this political race. The only way they can gain political power is through exploiting social division. Right now the Democrats and the mainstream media are vigorously conducting a broad-spectrum campaign of racial division across America.
The current mainstream media propaganda sound bite lineup is as follows:
•Voter ID and poll-watching equal suppression of minority votes. Shades of Jim Crow.
•Racist code words uttered by Republicans will be regularly discovered and interpreted by the media.
•Racist remarks and actions by Democrats do not exist. And those that do will be ignored.
•Attacking President Obama is racist by definition.
•Supporting or voting for Romney is racist by definition.
This list will grow as we approach November 6. The mainstream media will repeat these racist political attack themes over and over again. Repeat the lie often enough, and people will believe it.
The media is also carefully parsing every word of every statement made by Republicans. The mainstream media are desperately searching for racial slips, inferences, and “code words” they can amplify and wield. Just ask George Allen how this works. Allen lost the 2000 Virginia Senate race to Democrat political newcomer Jim Webb by only 10,000 votes — after an intense media campaign brushing him with racist stink paint. The racist slander worked, and the media won the race for the Democrats.
The mainstream media will discover racist intent even if they have to fabricate it, as NBC did when it edited the George Zimmerman 911 recording in order to make him appear to be the racist killer of an innocent black boy. Think about that. NBC was willing to misrepresent the facts to make the Hispanic man (initially represented as white) appear racially motivated to kill a black man. No innocence until proven guilty. NBC convicted Zimmerman in the digital courtroom in which it is judge, jury, and executioner. Why did NBC violate Zimmerman in this way? To stir up racial division to enhance the leftist political paradigm.
The media has been doing this for a long time. Remember the Tawana Brawley rape that never happened — the one that launched Al Shapton’s political career? How about the Duke lacrosse rape that also never happened? False accusations of rape against nine white men and a charge of murder against a Hispanic man. What the media are doing now is not merely a “tragic rush to accuse.” It is a deliberate political strategy. Think what the mainstream media are willing to do for Obama.
The Ethics and Morality of Race Slander
The political racial attacks are being coordinated between the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee Chair and Florida congresswoman, accused the Republicans on television of wanting to “literally [sic] drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally and very transparently block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”
This is pure political deception. It is an outright lie. Wasserman Schultz neglected to mention that it was the Democratic Party that wrote and enforced the Jim Crow laws in the first place. It must have slipped her memory that it was the Republican Party that did away with those and other laws that discriminated against black people.
At a recent campaign rally in Danville, VA, Vice President Joe Biden said, with a newfound Southern twang, that if Republicans won the election, “they gawn’ to put y’all back in chains.” The vice president of the United States was telling black people that if the Republicans win the election, slavery will return. What a scurrilous remark. How low can you get?
According to the Daily Caller, Matthew “Mudcat” Arnold, national campaign manager for the liberal super-PAC CREDO, told supporters in Aurora, CO that calling Republicans racist was a more effective tactic than criticizing their policies.
Americans will pay the price for the racial hatred being incited by the Democrats and their media shills. The price will be steep and paid in blood. In playing the race card, the Democrats show that they have no moral scruples whatsoever. To the progressive, the end always justifies the means. It is a dishonor and a sin to bear false witness against your neighbor. But this is the political party that booed God out of the DNC party platform three times before the chair ignored the majority and allowed the Almighty to return. And this was done cynically to avert political fallout and a possible loss of votes in November. Even God is a political calculation for Democrats.
There are no moral or ethical constraints on the Democrats or their progressive ilk in the media. Race-baiting is a strategy they believe will work for them. We can expect a hellish campaign in the run up to November 6. If you plan to vote for Romney, be prepared. The Democrats will call you a racist. And they won’t think twice about doing it.
Will Ordinary Dems Ever Say ‘Enough’?
By Karin McQuillan
I have a lot of liberal friends. I know they disagree with Republican principles and proposals — profoundly disagree. That’s fine. They are decent, big-hearted, smart people. They love our country. I’m proud to have them as friends. There are many problems that face our nation that should not be partisan.
So when will they say “Enough” to President Obama?
Will I ever hear them say things like what’s below? For example:
I want honest talk when our embassies are overrun and our ambassador and others murdered — not nonsense that it had “nothing to do with the United States,” 9/11, the killing of bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda. I don’t want to hear about how “it is in response not to U.S. policy, not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video — a film.” Do not tell me that it was a spontaneous riot caused by an obscure YouTube posting from last June. Please. We are really not that stupid.
I don’t want one more lecture on Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance. Your job is to protect our country from the jihadis, not interfaith outreach.
Why is our national security being limited to drone strikes? What about the need for intelligence? If we still had a functioning intelligence capability, wouldn’t we have known about the planning of the attacks in Cairo and Libya?
I want free speech — it is not okay that a man who posts something obnoxious on YouTube was carted off by federal agents in the middle of the night.
I don’t want my president to meet with Letterman and Beyoncé and refuse to meet with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. It is a dereliction of your responsibilities. It is unbefitting and disrespectful to the office of president. Israel is facing the looming threat of a nuclear Holocaust from Iran. What on Earth are you doing choosing Letterman over your job as president?
I don’t want my president to hold a fundraiser in Las Vegas instead of staying in Washington when there are anti-American riots in 21 Muslim countries across the globe.
I don’t want my president to tell me that the Muslim Brotherhood are moderates, when their motto is “Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
I don’t want my president to not protect our embassies on 9/11.
I don’t want a president who fought against sanctions on Iran in Congress, then gutted them with hundreds of exemptions, including oil for China, and claims that that’s all he has to do to deal with the threat of a nuclear Iran.
I want a president to attend his national security meetings each day in person so he can ask questions and discuss options, instead of half the time skipping the meeting and reading a brief summary.
Will my Democrat friends ever hold Obama accountable on the economy? Republicans were revolted by Bush’s overspending, and they created the Tea Party to insist on fiscal responsibility. Where are the rebels in the Democrat party? Will they ever say any of what follows?
I want a president who works with his own party and submits a budget to Congress, as required by law.
I want the president to take the debt seriously.
I want to hear how you’re going to save Medicaid and Social Security from going bankrupt. People rely on those programs. We can’t afford for them to fail while you are milking them for votes.
Don’t lie to me that “taxing the rich” is going to pay for your yearly trillion-dollar overruns.
Stop printing money to finance our crushing debt burden. You are jacking up oil prices and the price of everything that is transported. You are killing the middle class every time they fill up their cars or buy groceries. You have doubled the price of gas. Enough. Stop spending money we don’t have.
Twenty-three million Americans don’t have work. Fewer people are working now than when you took office. The recession and banking crisis ended in 2009. Mr. President, what policies did you put into place to stimulate the private sector, and where are the results? Any new ideas other than attacking the rich?
My friends are silent, which leaves me with nothing but questions. Where is their sense of holding Obama responsible — for anything? Where is there sense of what is creepy behavior by a president? Obama has time for The Pimp with a Limp, but not for national security briefings? Where is their sense of our constitutional rights and protections? A citizen is carted off by federal agents for posting something on YouTube, and they are silent? Why aren’t they crying like Clint Eastwood when 23 million fellow Americans are out of work? How can they want four more years of the same?
This is not what they voted for. They voted for something much better. Is there any broken promise, any failure, any lie, any flouting the law, any dereliction of duty, any divisive political tactic that would make them say “Enough”?
The media is on its knees. It’s the customary position of worship, and worship they do — Barack Obama — their chosen “one.”
He is the man they told us would halt the rise of the oceans and heal the planet, the man who had game like Lebron, knew more than his advisers, was more brilliant than all brilliance, the smartest man to ever be president, the winner of a Nobel Prize and 2 Grammy awards, who was like Lincoln, then FDR, then JFK, then Reagan, the man who would make America loved and respected the world over, the man who would balance the budget and usher in a new era of racial tolerance — no white America or black America, one America — the man who would get us out of our cars and break our dependency on foreign oil, who would change the economy into a green energy powerhouse, the man who would solve all the ills of all the world, the man who would change everything. He was new, he was different. He was better than the common man; he was more than us; he was like a god.
Three and a half years later, the only thing Barack Obama has improved is his golf game. For the media, when their messiah is 0 for a zillion, what can they do? It’s too late to quit. They are all in. They have to double down.
Mitt Romney makes a comment about how 47% of Americans are “dependent” on government handouts, and the media is outraged that he would tell the truth.
The rest of America is outraged that the figure is 47%.
This is why Americans cannot believe the media message that the president is winning. The press has to pretend, and they will, right up until November 6, when he will lose in a landslide.
Strip away the Obama myth, and what are you left with? You are left with a man who is nothing more than an illusion. There never was and never will be a Barack Obama, because he is not real.
The man reading from the teleprompter is nothing more than the sum total of the audacious hopes and dreams of delusional progressives — touted endlessly by a submissive press.
He is Mike Tyson, just before Buster Douglas knocked him face-forward to the canvas, where he floundered, spitting out his mouthpiece — powerless, a victim of his own hubris.
Before that, he was invincible; no one would ever beat him; no one could ever beat him; he was the best ever, and the best that would ever be.
Well…sprawled out on the canvas, he wasn’t so tough anymore. And he never redeemed himself from that first loss. He became a mere mortal. While undefeated, he was larger than life, a god — when he became man, he seemed so small.
He burst on the scene as a 5′ 7″ animal who took apart every opponent. The more fights he won, the bigger he was — 5′ 8″, then 5’10″. By the time he lost to Douglas, they told us he was 6′ tall.
You see, that’s the problem with the media; they are supposed to be observers, impartial. But as observers and not participants — they don’t “do” — it is easy for them to become captive of those who do “do.” Impartiality fades, soon becoming something they fake and no longer a job requirement.
Just as Mike Tyson grew in stature with every win, so did Barack Obama with every speech. At least with Tyson, when he was shown to be less than what he actually was, the press turned.
With Barack Obama, who has not done a single thing correctly since winning the election, no failure is acknowledged. In fact, every blatant failure is held up to a non-attentive America as resounding success.
Just look at recent events. The Libyans warned American officials. Yet the Obama administration did not assign any Marines to protect our ambassador and the three members of his staff also killed in Benghazi. No…their security was provided by Libyan locals, untrained and certainly unmotivated.
When it hit the fan, they fled, either because they were in collusion with the attackers, or they were terrified.
There is no finer fighting man on this earth than an American soldier. Twenty Marines — each and every one a volunteer — would have been more than a match for a thousand Libyans. And if by chance, they were not, they would have given their lives protecting the ambassador.
In any case, we will never know because they weren’t there, apparently because Barack Obama didn’t want to insult the Libyans with an American presence.
Imagine: an American president thinking the presence of Americans is insulting.
This should be a huge story — and would be with any other president. Yet the narrative pushed by the media was that Mitt Romney’s denunciation of the Cairo Embassy’s statement of apology, issued just before the attack in Egypt, showed him to be unfit to lead. It wasn’t about the assassination of an American ambassador at our consulate in Benghazi, the first since 1979.
Four Americans lost their lives in coordinated attacks, on the anniversary of radical Islam’s greatest triumph, one of them an American ambassador, who reportedly was sodomized by his attackers before being killed.
…And this unlucky quartet was left virtually unprotected, in a war zone, by this administration.
…And it took Obama most of a day to renounce the apology.
…And after denouncing the video and the violence, he immediately jumped on his plane to Vegas to raise campaign cash (too bad what goes to Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas).
…And since then, despite attacks on our embassies all over the world, spokesmen for the administration want us to believe that it’s not about a failure in policy — or that they don’t like us — no one could dislike Obama, after all. It is about a low-rent YouTube video made months ago that few people ’til recently had even seen.
…And the administration asks Google, owner of YouTube, to take down the video and has the maker of the video brought in for “questioning.” First Amendment…what First Amendment? We don’t need no stinking First Amendment rights in Barack Obama’s America.
Yet…the story is about Mitt — the audacity of these dopes.
You see they are desperate. The reality of Barack Obama has brought them to their knees. If he loses in November, the mainstream media will be shown for what they are — shills for what they wanted and pretended to be true, and not tellers of truth.
What is left for them when there is no more Barack?
Will anyone take seriously the relentless attacks on President Romney they will be sure to prosecute? No one but the most committed progressive will ever believe a word they say again, especially after they not only gave Barack Obama a free ride for all of his years in office, but unconvincingly attempted to redefine his every failure as success.
There was a time when the mainstream media dictated the conversation while hiding behind the veneer of impartiality, and Americans deferred to their wisdom. And despite having always been partial, at least in the past they made some pretense of neutrality.
A defeat for Barack is a defeat for them. No longer will they be the exalted press — the arbiter of truth and justice. After the debacle that is Barack Obama, they will be seen for what they are: publicity agents for progressivism.