Obama associates with and is allied with and was “mentored” by scum, filth, terrorists, communists, subversives.
What else is there to know?
And this lowlife will likely be elected president in a matter of days.
The Weather Underground and all the other American terrorists and subversives will finally have succeeded.
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FILTH: William Ayers, Bernadine Dhorn, Michelle Obama, Marilyn Katz, Frank Marshall Davis, Alice Palmer, George Soros, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Carl Davidson, Robert Blackwell, Tony Rezko, Dorothy Tillman, Robert Malley, Cornel West, Howard Dean, Donna Brazille, Nancy Pelosi, MoveOn.org, Center for American Progress, Open Society Institute, Arab American Action Network, The Democracy Alliance, The New Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, The Working Families Party, Socialist Scholars Conference, Campaign for America’s Future, The Progressive Caucus, Public Allies, ACORN, Citizens Services, Inc., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ken Rolling, The Woods Fund, The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, The Joyce Foundation, Gamaliel Foundation, Students For A Democratic Society, Barney Frank, Saul Alinsky, Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, Zbigniew Brzenzinski, Penny Pritzker, The Superior Bank, The Broadway Bank, Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Reverend Wright, Rather Pfleuger, Raila Odinga, Rashid Khalidi, Nadhmi Auchi, Fusion Elections, Barack Hussein Obama
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Thomas Sowell: Focusing on Obama’s deeds gets you chided
One of the oldest phenomena of American elections – criticism of one’s opponent – has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as “negative advertising.”
Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal? You might think so, if you were totally ignorant of history, as are so many of the graduates of even our elite universities.
Although Grover Cleveland was elected president twice, he had to overcome a major scandal that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Even giants like Lincoln and Jefferson were called names that neither McCain nor Obama has been called.
Why then is “negative advertising” such a big deal these days? The dirty little secret is this: Liberal candidates have needed to escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals.
In 1988, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts called himself a “technocrat,” a pragmatic solver of problems, despite a classic liberal track record of big spending, big taxes, and policies that were anti-business and pro-criminal.
When the truth about what he actually did as governor was brought out during the presidential election campaign, the media were duly shocked – not by Dukakis’ record, but by the Republicans’ exposing his record.
John Kerry, with a very similar liberal record, topped off by inflammatory and unsubstantiated attacks on American military men in Vietnam, disdained the whole process of labeling as something unworthy. And the mainstream media closed ranks around him as well, deploring those who labeled Kerry a liberal.
Barack Obama is much smoother. Instead of issuing explicit denials, he gives speeches that sound so moderate, so nuanced and so lofty that even some conservative Republicans go for them. How could anyone believe that such a man is the very opposite of what he claims to be – unless they check out the record of what he has actually done?
In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a “community organizer” does, creating a sense of grievance, envy and resentment, in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers’ money or to force banks to lend to people they don’t consider good risks, as did the community organizing group ACORN.
After Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.
Yet those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The mantra is that we should stick to the “real issues.”
What are called “the real issues” are election-year talking points, while the actual track record of the candidates is treated as a distraction – and somehow an unworthy distraction.
Does anyone in real life put more faith in what people say than in what they do? A few gullible people do – and they often get deceived and defrauded big time.
Barack Obama has carried election-year makeovers to a new high, presenting himself a uniter of people, someone reaching across the partisan divide and the racial divide – after decades of promoting polarization in each of his successive roles and each of his choices of political allies.
Yet the media treat exposing a fraudulent election-year image as far worse than letting someone acquire the powers of the highest office in the land through sheer deception.
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Mark Steyn: Obama nears the “now what?” moment
If elected, he’ll likely, as he has done all his life, take the path of least resistance.
Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.
In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.
Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:
“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s–t with bits of broken glass in it?’
“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”
Well, to be honest, I’ve never much cared for chicken.
McCain vs. Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world,” and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCain faute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return.”
It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term,” but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation – the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of that most-recent model: 40 years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.
All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?
In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable.”
More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away this long with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this past half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?
“People of the world,” Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity.
And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one,” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived, and the wall would still be standing. Sen. Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy-listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.
To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex – voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?
The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present,” you can stand down.
Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from “community organizer” to the world’s president-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.
Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the “Now what?” questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and U.N. foreign policy.
Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return,” the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.
If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.
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Larry Elder: The case against Obama
October 18, 2008
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama promises to “cut taxes for 95 percent of American workers.” That’s not possible.
Why? More than 30 percent pay nothing in federal income taxes. Obama comes up with this number by calling tax credits “tax cuts.” One can debate whether these things are good or bad, but they are not tax cuts. McCain offers refundable tax credits for health care, as well as other credits, but he doesn’t insult the intelligence of the American people by calling them “tax cuts.” When Obama’s credits go to people who pay no federal income taxes or who pay less than the value of the credit, they are not “tax cuts.” They are transfers of money from one pocket to another, or redistributions of wealth, but they are not tax cuts.
Republican candidate John McCain should tell people in real, human terms how hiking taxes on the so-called rich affects us all. My friend Nina is a self-employed interior decorator. She just met a prospective married client, whose husband works in the entertainment industry. The client may pull the job because of Obama’s impending tax cuts. Nina makes well under $250,000, lives in an apartment, has no maid, and drives a midsize nonluxury car.
But the couple she hopes to get the job from face a tax rate of 39.5 percent plus increased Social Security taxes, on top of higher taxes for capital gains and dividends.
In promoting his tax cuts, President Kennedy said, “The soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the (tax) rates now.” When Kennedy says it, it’s Camelot. When Reagan says it, it’s trickledown. By the way, Kennedy cut taxes by 22 percent (reducing the top marginal rate from 90 percent to 70 percent), and Reagan by 60 percent (top marginal rate from 70 percent to 28 percent). The “unfair, pro-rich” Bush tax cuts that are set to expire? A reduction in the top marginal rate of approximately 7.5 percent. A recent headline in Agence France-Presse says it all: “Sweden Announces Income Tax Cuts to Boost Jobs.”
On spending, Obama now says – as with taxes – he may defer some of it because of a poor economy. But didn’t he consider the spending “investments” that are “fully paid for”? If they are investments that “don’t cost” anything, why put them off because of a bad economy? If Obama’s been telling the truth, the ideal time to spend and to raise taxes is preciselywhen things are bad, unless they a) are not paid for and b) are not investments that will “jump-start our economy.”
McCain mistakenly put off-limits going after Obama for his 20-year relationship with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. But Obama’s relationship with his “spiritual adviser” serves as a window into Obama’s character. During the primary season, Obama even called this a “legitimate” issue, but insisted he knew nothing about many of Wright’s radical views. Really?
In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama talks of attending the “Audacity of Hope Sermon” (pages 292-293). There is an audio book in Obama’s own voice reading this passage. Obama hears Wright speak of Hiroshima and Sharpeville as examples of acts of injustice. A personal aside: My dad, a former Marine, served as a cook in a segregated unit and was stationed on the island of Guam in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. The invasion never occurred because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which military historians believe saved at least 1 million lives.
What is Sharpeville? In 1960, the South African apartheid government shot down unarmed protestors, killing 69 black men, women and children. Most of the dead were shot in the back, and nearly 200 more were wounded.
Obama felt no sense of outrage to hear Hiroshima and Sharpeville mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, he was so inspired by the sermon that he uses the sermon’s title – “Audacity of Hope” – for his second book, and as the theme of his campaign!
In “Dreams,” Obama tells of how he met Wright. Obama made an appointment at Wright’s church to meet the pastor. Wright was late. While waiting, Obama spoke with Wright’s assistant, a single mom whose husband had just died. She told Obama that she intended to leave Chicago and move to the suburbs to escape the violence. She also wanted her son to attend a better school. Her son, she said, wanted to join a band, and his school didn’t have one. His future school had a band and free uniforms (pages 280-284). “‘He’s always wanted to be in a band,’ she said softly” (page 281). When Obama told Wright of his assistant’s plans, Wright said he tried to talk her out of it. Why? Wright argued that the boy “won’t have a clue about where, or who, he is”?! Obama joined the church.
Next: more about Obama, including Bill Ayers, Iraq, ACORN and the financial crisis.
