The Friday Letter / Issue #187
Stephen Combs / The Federalist Review
Professional election analysts, radio commentators and self-appointed experts who began handicapping the 2012 election five minutes after the last one often remind us that they are but a small band of political junkies who follow these matters, obsessive-compulsives like the present writer who live this stuff pretty much year-round. Most voters, they say, don’t start paying attention until after Labor Day.
The problem with this statement is that most people don’t pay attention even then, at least not in a serious way. They didn’t in 2008. Look what we have to show for it.
Barack Obama and those who studied him gave us ample warning, and we weren’t paying attention. We were warned that he would:
Nationalize health care.
Punish entrepreneurship and the wealth-builders who create jobs.
Weaken national defense.
Appoint regime loyalists to the federal courts.
Destroy the coal industry.
Increase our dependence on foreign oil.
Implement crushing regulation.
Redistribute wealth and increase the size of America’s dependent class.
Stand down from our national borders.
Abandon Israel.
Some of these promises he made himself; some were warnings from others. Here’s what he told Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber, while campaigning in Ohio in 2008: “When you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”
As Jerome Corsi wrote in in his 2008 bestseller Obama Nation describing another Obama revelation, “We do not have to speculate about this. Obama tells this to us outright; his words are direct, defying us to miss his meaning.”
The fact is that we had plenty of information about Barack Obama in 2008, enough for the “reasonable man” test, which asks, “Would a reasonable person, knowing these facts, elect this man President of the United States?” A reasonable person indeed would not have.
Decades from now, historians will ask how a free people, even without the benefit of Obama’s own words, could place someone in the most powerful position in the world who had never governed or managed, never had to make so much as a minor business decision. All he had to do was vote as a legislator according to his own ideology.
When Obama told entrepreneurs July 13 that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” anyone who has experienced the limitless anxieties that confront the small-business owner only had it confirmed that Obama has no understanding of how commerce works, how jobs are created, where prosperity comes from.
In August we will begin a series on the warning signs that, if heeded, would have kept Obama from the White House. Our purpose is not to dwell on the past. Indeed, these warnings remain relevant – along with new ones we have learned since Obama took office.
For sources we will start with Dr. Corsi’s Obama Nation. We will also look at the writings of the Marxist-communists who radicalized Obama, especially Saul Alinsky, Frank Marshall Davis and Malcolm X. We will use Obama’s voting record as an Illinois and U.S. Senator. And we will use Obama’s own words from the books he wrote about himself and from his campaign speeches.
We know very little about Obama’s academic life – the courses he took or the grades he earned. We do know (as thoroughly annotated in Obama Nation), that he attended both Catholic and Muslim schools and attended services at a mosque in Indonesia, that he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine in high school in Hawaii, and that he involved himself in the presidential campaign of pro-Islamist Raila Odinga in Kenya.
And we know a lot about Barack Obama from his own words.
You will learn about the Life magazine photo – the one he said got him to thinking about his racial identity, the photo that turned out to be nothing more than a figment of his imagination. You will understand Obama’s hatred of Great Britain and why, upon taking office, he returned the bust of Sir Winston Churchill.
And you will learn the chilling truth of how the ghost of Saul Alinsky could make the U.S. a slave state if Obama is re-elected.
In the last few days we have learned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will sign a treaty that could yield domestic U.S. gun control to the United Nations and – assuming the liberal Roberts Court (the Warren Court of our time) upholds the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution as trumping its amendments – lead to cancellation of the Second Amendment.
Just the thought of a second Obama term is chilling enough when one considers that even a single Supreme Court appointment would be tantamount to de facto repeal of our Constitution in its entirely. You laughed at such bluster only a few months ago. You are not laughing now.
The death of journalism
News aggregator Matt Drudge is the first self-styled “citizen journalist” of the Internet Age, so proclaimed when he started his Drudge Report and radio program in the mid-1990s. He made the term popular by filling a vacuum caused by both the decline in the quality of establishment news reporting and its leftward drift since Watergate days. Not much has changed since.
Reporters used to dig into stories like moles after grub worms. They might do that today – depending on the target. While many good ones are still out there plying the trade, too many are there as advocates.
On Wednesday, Michelle Obama made a fundraising trip to Birmingham, where tickets were $200 each or $30,000 for a photo with the First Lady. The Birmingham News was ecstatic, assigning three reporters and a photographer – no doubt graduates of one of our fine schools of advocacy journalism – and playing the story on A1.
The story ran 29 paragraphs on two pages with two color photos.
Mrs. Obama made the nominal visit to some ostensibly non-political event to qualify the trip as non-political. “The children squealed and gave Obama a standing ovation when she entered the gym,” the News gushed. As for the campaign speech, two adoring admirers “discussed the speech as they walked away,” the News story explained in breathless delight. “Harrington praised the first lady’s ‘passion and compassion.’ Both praised her focus on the positive.”
Gosh, and you wonder why the Birmingham News will cut publication to three days a week this fall? Call me if you don’t get this.
And how much did we learn from this story about the cost to taxpayers of Mrs. Obama’s mission – Secret Service, advance men, airplanes, hairdressers, ladies-in-waiting, local police, propaganda flaks, armored cars – and the inconvenience to commuters trying to crawl through Birmingham’s celebrated Malfunction Junction?
Call me if you don’t know the answer to that one.
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