Monthly Archives: February 2011

Michael Savage: Time for Barack Obama to go

Issue #114

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

One of the saddest things a man can do, Emerson wrote in his essay “Self-Reliance,” is stifle his own thoughts of genius only to later hear them explained by others, rejecting “without notice his thought, because it is his.” We should, he said, “abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility,” because “else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”¹            Your humble correspondent was reminded of Emerson’s wisdom last night while hearing the radio commentator Michael Savage say it is time for Barack Obama to be removed from office.
            I have been thinking this for months, but what can only be described as a act of timidity prevented its airing. Who wants to be called a crackpot?
            Mr. Savage, whose real name is Michael Alan Weiner, has a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from UC-Berkeley. Often called a crackpot himself, he is yet the real thing, the author of 18 books on nutrition and politics, his two most recent (The Enemy Within and Trickle-Up Poverty) huge bestsellers.
            Mr. Savage noted that Mr. Obama is acting like a dictator with his latest pronouncement, that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and therefore will not be defended by his Justice Department. As I had to explain to my mostly unread college students today, the President of the United States does not have the authority to declare the constitutionality of any law. That is the purview of the courts.
            Obama is likely the first U.S. President to attempt to usurp the court’s authority in this way. This is more than another act of self-aggrandizement of which Mr. Obama is famous. This is more than narcissism spun out of control. This act of supreme arrogance is the behavior of one who would fancy himself a ruler, not an elected President.
            The President of the United States has the responsibility to defend all duly-enacted federal laws. He does not have the authority to pick and choose only those that support his political aspirations. If he doesn’t like the law, he can lobby the Congress to change it. But because he has set himself above the law – remember Nixon? – he is derelict in his duty. This is not an impeachable offense. It doesn’t matter. It is time for him to go.
            It is not hyperbole to say that we may not survive as a free nation if Obama is allowed to complete his term. If we lose our sovereignty, so will every other free nation. The situation is very, very dangerous and must be confronted without delay.
            More than two years into Mr. Obama’s term, we still know little about him – what he did at Columbia, what he studied, how he was introduced to Marxism, even where he was born. We do know that he was enculturated in Indonesia and we understand something about his hatred of Great Britain.² And we know that for 20 years he attended a church that preached black liberation theology and racial bigotry. None of this matters right now. The urgency of the situation outweighs these questions.
      We do know this about Barack Obama:

• He stands in contempt of court for ignoring a federal court order to permit oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
• He stands in contempt of court for ignoring a federal court order, and its de facto injunction, declaring the entire government health care takeover law to be unconstitutional.
• He has jeopardized national security by making unilateral weapons concessions to Russia and revealing British military secrets.
• Because he does not understand a fundamental cultural fact about the very people who raised him – Muslims – he has engineered a loss of respect for American power and prestige by continually bowing to mullahs and dictators and apologizing for American greatness.
• In a military movement that only Jimmy Carter could admire, he has endangered the lives of American citizens by failing to protect and effect their safe removal from Libya.
• He refuses to accept the outcome of the last election and continues to push ahead for more punishing regulation of private commerce, for more redistribution of wealth created by honest producers, and for more ruinous spending that is creating what his own Secretary of State has said is a threat to our national security.
• He allowed our Navy to “arrest” 15 pirates on the high seas who should have been summarily executed. Now they will be entitled to ACLU lawyers and endless defense expenses paid by American taxpayers. We can only hope that Mr. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, decides to take the case.
• And he refuses to protect our southern border while obstructing the efforts of Arizona and others who are willing to do so.  

We cannot afford any more of this, and we need to acknowledge the fact, openly. Let them call us racists. Let them call us right-wing haters. Let them call us Nazis. I just do not care anymore.
            Mr. Vice President, please convene a delegation of your most trusted allies in your party. Lead them to the Oval Office, and tell the President it is time for him to go, for the sake of the nation. Urge him to resign. We may not share your political philosophy or favor your election to a full term, but we know you are a decent person who loves your country. We will stand behind you and give you the respect a President should deserve.

NOTES
            1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals. New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1968.
            2. Corsi, Jerome R. The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

A refreshing sound: President Chris Christie

Issue #113

Stephen Combs in Orlando, Florida

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is quick to remind those who mention him as a 2012 Presidential contender that he has governed for only a year and doesn’t have the experience to become President. That’s nice, but let’s consider that the current President had no management experience of any kind before his election – not as a mayor, not as a governor, not as the proprietor of a hot dog stand in front of the Home Depot. He had been a part-time United States Senator for a third of a term with a dismal participation record but had never worked in a meaningful government position – not as a state attorney general or U.S. attorney, not in any capacity in the U.S. State Department, not even as a municipal bureaucrat deciding who gets to have a building permit. Today we are paying a tremendous and punishing price for electing someone so ill-prepared, so ill-suited for the job.
            And the worst part is that in more than two years in office Barack Obama has learned little from the experience. He has not grown into the job as have some of those who had the Presidency thrust upon them without warning: Theodore Roosevelt, Truman, Ford. Despite his words, he clings to his ideology, without which his life would have no purpose.
            Gov. Christie says he is not prepared for the Presidency. Compared to whom? As U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey he took on political corruption and compiled an astonishing record of 130-0. In little more than 13 months as governor he has waged a valiant effort to save the state from fiscal ruin, standing up to government and teacher unions, and even legislators in his own party over reckless spending. He also exposed a real stink in the Passaic Valley Sewer Authority, sacking its commissioners and firing 85 employees over nepotism and corruption. Can you imagine Obama doing anything like that?
            “Here’s the truth that nobody’s talking about,” he said Wednesday in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “You’re going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security. Ho-ho! I just said it, and I’m still standing here. I did not vaporize.” 

If we are to prevail, we must get behind those who are willing to speak the truth without regard to the political consequences. The ossified leaders of the House and Senate don’t seem to get this, but we will predict that those who ignore the political consequences are the ones for whom  Americans most hunger, the ones who could be propelled to greatness as soon as 20 months from now.
            The timid, the tepid, the tired, the tread-lightlies. Those who are more interested in protecting their social status on the Washington party circuit than in making unpopular choices for saving the country are relics that – one may hope – the emerging generation will view with disdain if not disgust.  

→ See more of Gov. Christie’s remarks at In Their Own Words

Black (Leftist) history month

Our college library has a display of books by and about black Americans in commemoration of Black History Month. In addition to the predictable subjects of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Medgar Evers and Frederick Douglas, there is a book of Barack Obama posters like the life-size ones we saw during the campaign promising hope and change, apparently produced by a communist revolutionary front group; a book for school children on how to idolize the President and some other fawning publications that hold Mr. Obama up as a god-like figure.
            You may not believe this, but we looked high and low but couldn’t find anything on opportunity and self-reliance; nothing by Jesse Lee Peterson or Alan Keyes; nothing about teenage entrepreneurial wonder Farrah Gray; nothing by the great black economists Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams; nothing by Ward Connerly; nothing about Janice Rogers Brown or Herman Cain; nothing by Larry Elder; nothing by Alveda King or Shelby Steele or Armstrong Williams; no biographies of Clarence Thomas or Condoleeza Rice. Here in Florida, not even anything about our new lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll. (We are sure this has nothing to do with the fact that she is a Republican.)
            Just so that you will feel better about this, we are certain that this was just an oversight.