by I have argued before that Barack Obama is as close to being a rogue president as can be imagined. There is something troublingly undocumented about him, a cloud of ambiguity hovering over his selective reticence. No one can doubt that his actual résumé, compared to that of any of his predecessors, is strangely bare, like a kind of Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. (Obama’s first memoir in particular, Dreams from My Father, as Jerome Corsi shows in The Obama Nation, is a distinctly unreliable source. Corsi has been viciously attacked as a liar and a “discredited, fringe bigot,” but his defense of his allegations is point-device.)
Some facts are known—where Obama studied, where he taught, his activities as a “community organizer,” his various associates, his attendance at Trinity United Church, his law firm employment, his voting record in the Senate, and now the White House visitors list to which, as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer reveal in The Post-American Presidency, access had been blocked until a legal suit forced him to release it. The problem is that much of genuine importance remains an ongoing mystery.For example, his college and university transcripts, including his academic papers and financial statements, his senate files and schedules, his professional client lists and other documentation remain sequestered under seal, a fact which should properly distress even his most ardent supporters. There is also the enigma of his faith, for although Obama professes to be a Christian, “we don’t know,” writes Bosch Fawstin, “when he renounced Islam, if he ever truly did.” (Political scientist John Drew who knew Obama at Occidental College is confident that “his basic mental architecture has more links to Islam than Christianity.”) Obama’s informational footprint, unlike his carbon footprint, is scarcely discernible. What does the president have to hide? There should be no reason for such coyness—if that is what it is—any more than, for example, there could be a legitimate reason for the Los Angeles Times to suppress video footage of Obama’s words and actions at former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi’s Chicago farewell party. Something is clearly not kosher here.
It is time, once again, to look at a few hard facts about the president’s policies, traits and activities well into the first half of his administration, of which I will bullet only some of the most conspicuous:
- his uncontrolled spending leading to the tripling of the deficit he claims to have inherited;
- his puerile blaming of the previous administration for his own inadequacies;
- his evident playing of the “race card,” giving the lie to his supposed “post racial” presidency (e.g., the Gates episode; the New Black Panther voting scandal, his administration’s reaction to the popular Tea Party movement);
- his forcing massive, unread bills through Congress against the wishes of the majority of the American people;
- his manifold broken promises (e.g., closing Guantánamo, reducing unemployment to 8%, banning lobbyists, and innumerable others);
- his egregious mishandling of the Gulf oil spill;
- his egregious mishandling of the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio;
- his egregious mishandling of the Afghanistan war;
- his betrayal of close allies (e.g., Honduras, Israel, Poland);
- his misguided and failed “outreach” to the Islamic world and especially to the Iranian mullocracy, as well as his shameful indifference to the Iranian protestors crushed by the regime;
- his obsequious kowtowing to despots (e.g., King Abdullah, Hugo Chavez);
- his constant apologizing to all and sundry for America’s geopolitical behavior and his downplaying of American exceptionalism;
- his abysmal ignorance (e.g., the Cairo speech with its hundreds-year howler, the 57 states, the Austrian language, even the minor yet embarrassing reference to a “corpsman” as a “corpseman,” an epiphany in itself);
- his putative intention to grant amnesty to twelve to fifteen million Mexican illegals;
- his frequent parties, outings, vacations (six in one year), fun and games, and Air Force One junkets at a time when the United States is about to enter a double-dip recession, betokening not a serious and concerned leader but a cabriolet sensibility exploiting the perks of office;
- his apparent tendency to subordinate American law to transnational law, thus exposing the nation to a form of stealth warfare known as lawfare, as evidenced by his promotion of transnational enthusiast Harold Koh to a top post in the State Department;
- his aligning national policies with various United Nations treaties and resolutions, thus solidifying relations with the most corrupt organization on the international stage under the rubric of a “new era of engagement”;
- his endorsement of the increasingly discredited Global Warming (or Climate Change) theory to enable the passage of counter-economic bills such as Cap-and-Trade;
- his refusal to police the Arizona south which is under veritable attack by thousands of illegal aliens streaming in from Mexico, and further, his initiating a lawsuit against the state for actually complying with American law;
- and most recently, his support for the Cordoba mosque/Park51 project near Ground Zero at a White House iftar meal and then, predictably, his PR backstroke when he found himself in hot water—though without an explicit disavowal.
Admittedly, very few presidents keep all their promises or are even expected to, and very few would qualify as moral and intellectual paragons. But the lengthening rap sheet of Obama’s character defects, equivocations, dissemblings, bad judgments and actions harmful to the integrity of the nation may well be unprecedented in POTUS annals. The warning signs are everywhere and critical pushback has become necessary. Barack Obama is patently a high maintenance president that America cannot afford, whether fiscally or politically. “A great part of America now understands,” writes Israpundit editor Dorothy Rabinowitz, “that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class.”
But it goes deeper than that. He is a president who seems hell bent on plunging the nation into ruin. The damage he has inflicted upon his country, in both his domestic and foreign policies, is on the cusp of becoming irreversible. This presidential silverback has got to be stopped in the larger interests of the tribe. Nobama is the watchword. How to do this in indeed the question. A Republican majority in Congress and/or Senate would go some way to resolving the problem that Obama epitomizes, and represents a midterm election opportunity that must not be lost. Thomas Sowell is insistent on this point: “If Obama doesn’t get stopped in 2010, I don’t know how he will ever be stopped.” Sowell believes that America is careening toward “the point of no return” and that November 2 is a watershed moment in the fate of the nation. He stresses the overwhelming importance of an anti-Democratic Party vote, even though this would not strip the president of executive privilege and the veto power.
Some would go even further. Former Colorado representative Tom Tancredo has cited the president’s refusal to enforce immigration law as an impeachable offense, and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, in a recent interview, has strongly—“absolutely” is the word he used—concurred. “Five to ten thousand folks come across that border daily,” he declares, “and what’s coming across—20 percent have criminal convictions—are gang members, drug smugglers, human smugglers, child molesters, rapists. It’s an invasion. It’s in violation of the Constitution. Yes, it’s impeachable. He [Obama] not only neglects to do it, now he’s refusing to do it. It’s impeachable.” (The recent passing of legislation by Congress to toughen border security is plainly an attempt to restore its sagging credibility after the fact and only partially addresses the issue.)
In any event, there should be little doubt by this time that Barack Obama is a grave security threat to the United States. He is, as Sowell argues, a president the country may not survive. And still many of us are disinclined to grasp how truly dangerous this man is, for he is not just another Democrat seeking the privilege of power but a crypto-Marxist who hauled his buckets from the wells of the left (e.g., Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which, as James Lewis points out, he “taught his ACORN followers in all his Community Agitator classes in Chicago”), a clear Islamo-sympathizer and a man who gives every indication of intensely disliking the country he was elected to serve. He is not simply naïve, misdirected, frivolous, unprepared for office, partisan and ignorant—he may be all these things—but, to quote Pajamas Media CEO Roger Simon, he may also suffer from “a serious personality disorder.”
Solving the Obama Problem
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It is time, once again, to look at a few hard facts about the president’s policies, traits and activities well into the first half of his administration, of which I will bullet only some of the most conspicuous:
- his uncontrolled spending leading to the tripling of the deficit he claims to have inherited;
- his puerile blaming of the previous administration for his own inadequacies;
- his evident playing of the “race card,” giving the lie to his supposed “post racial” presidency (e.g., the Gates episode; the New Black Panther voting scandal, his administration’s reaction to the popular Tea Party movement);
- his forcing massive, unread bills through Congress against the wishes of the majority of the American people;
- his manifold broken promises (e.g., closing Guantánamo, reducing unemployment to 8%, banning lobbyists, and innumerable others);
- his egregious mishandling of the Gulf oil spill;
- his egregious mishandling of the Israeli/Palestinian imbroglio;
- his egregious mishandling of the Afghanistan war;
- his betrayal of close allies (e.g., Honduras, Israel, Poland);
- his misguided and failed “outreach” to the Islamic world and especially to the Iranian mullocracy, as well as his shameful indifference to the Iranian protestors crushed by the regime;
- his obsequious kowtowing to despots (e.g., King Abdullah, Hugo Chavez);
- his constant apologizing to all and sundry for America’s geopolitical behavior and his downplaying of American exceptionalism;
- his abysmal ignorance (e.g., the Cairo speech with its hundreds-year howler, the 57 states, the Austrian language, even the minor yet embarrassing reference to a “corpsman” as a “corpseman,” an epiphany in itself);
- his putative intention to grant amnesty to twelve to fifteen million Mexican illegals;
- his frequent parties, outings, vacations (six in one year), fun and games, and Air Force One junkets at a time when the United States is about to enter a double-dip recession, betokening not a serious and concerned leader but a cabriolet sensibility exploiting the perks of office;
- his apparent tendency to subordinate American law to transnational law, thus exposing the nation to a form of stealth warfare known as lawfare, as evidenced by his promotion of transnational enthusiast Harold Koh to a top post in the State Department;
- his aligning national policies with various United Nations treaties and resolutions, thus solidifying relations with the most corrupt organization on the international stage under the rubric of a “new era of engagement”;
- his endorsement of the increasingly discredited Global Warming (or Climate Change) theory to enable the passage of counter-economic bills such as Cap-and-Trade;
- his refusal to police the Arizona south which is under veritable attack by thousands of illegal aliens streaming in from Mexico, and further, his initiating a lawsuit against the state for actually complying with American law;
- and most recently, his support for the Cordoba mosque/Park51 project near Ground Zero at a White House iftar meal and then, predictably, his PR backstroke when he found himself in hot water—though without an explicit disavowal.
Admittedly, very few presidents keep all their promises or are even expected to, and very few would qualify as moral and intellectual paragons. But the lengthening rap sheet of Obama’s character defects, equivocations, dissemblings, bad judgments and actions harmful to the integrity of the nation may well be unprecedented in POTUS annals. The warning signs are everywhere and critical pushback has become necessary. Barack Obama is patently a high maintenance president that America cannot afford, whether fiscally or politically. “A great part of America now understands,” writes Israpundit editor Dorothy Rabinowitz, “that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class.”
But it goes deeper than that. He is a president who seems hell bent on plunging the nation into ruin. The damage he has inflicted upon his country, in both his domestic and foreign policies, is on the cusp of becoming irreversible. This presidential silverback has got to be stopped in the larger interests of the tribe. Nobama is the watchword. How to do this in indeed the question. A Republican majority in Congress and/or Senate would go some way to resolving the problem that Obama epitomizes, and represents a midterm election opportunity that must not be lost. Thomas Sowell is insistent on this point: “If Obama doesn’t get stopped in 2010, I don’t know how he will ever be stopped.” Sowell believes that America is careening toward “the point of no return” and that November 2 is a watershed moment in the fate of the nation. He stresses the overwhelming importance of an anti-Democratic Party vote, even though this would not strip the president of executive privilege and the veto power.
Some would go even further. Former Colorado representative Tom Tancredo has cited the president’s refusal to enforce immigration law as an impeachable offense, and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, in a recent interview, has strongly—“absolutely” is the word he used—concurred. “Five to ten thousand folks come across that border daily,” he declares, “and what’s coming across—20 percent have criminal convictions—are gang members, drug smugglers, human smugglers, child molesters, rapists. It’s an invasion. It’s in violation of the Constitution. Yes, it’s impeachable. He [Obama] not only neglects to do it, now he’s refusing to do it. It’s impeachable.” (The recent passing of legislation by Congress to toughen border security is plainly an attempt to restore its sagging credibility after the fact and only partially addresses the issue.)
In any event, there should be little doubt by this time that Barack Obama is a grave security threat to the United States. He is, as Sowell argues, a president the country may not survive. And still many of us are disinclined to grasp how truly dangerous this man is, for he is not just another Democrat seeking the privilege of power but a crypto-Marxist who hauled his buckets from the wells of the left (e.g., Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which, as James Lewis points out, he “taught his ACORN followers in all his Community Agitator classes in Chicago”), a clear Islamo-sympathizer and a man who gives every indication of intensely disliking the country he was elected to serve. He is not simply naïve, misdirected, frivolous, unprepared for office, partisan and ignorant—he may be all these things—but, to quote Pajamas Media CEO Roger Simon, he may also suffer from “a serious personality disorder.”ccording to a report in The European Union Times, French president Nicolas Sarkozy is on the same page, having described Obama as “a dangerous aliéné” (French for “lunatic”); elsewhere, he slams Obama’s Iran policy as “utterly immature.” Similarly, Obama’s jettisoning America’s nuclear ambiguity and committing under certain circumstances not to use nuclear weapons to respond to biological or chemical devastations, which leaves the country shorn of its deterrent threat and vulnerable to proxy attacks, is another symptom, not merely of political narcosis, but of overt psychological imbalance—unless, of course, as a trained and committed Marxist with Islamic sympathies, he has deliberately set out to sabotage American strength and longevity. Take your pick.
America’s allies, from Taiwan to Ukraine to Israel and the United Arab Emirates are feeling profoundly at risk as a result of Obama’s fecklessness or intentions. Indeed, Obama has effectively abdicated America’s role as the guarantor of the free world. But it is America itself that is in direst jeopardy from the operations of a president who governs at a great distance from the people. It is as if a majority of electors and salon intellectuals hurtled down the rabbit hole and found themselves in a sinister wonderland whose gaudy illusions they foolishly took for reality. Many have been chastened and are now scrambling to climb back out.
November would be a good place to start.
