Post-American Presidency (32 page)

When he was concerned about the alleged injustices at Gitmo, it was obvious that Obama wanted very much to take the American eye off his failed policies. He wanted Americans to ignore his foreign-policy realignment with despots and mullahs. He wanted to distract us from his abandonment of our allies and his promotion of jihad. Obama turned a blind eye in the summer of 2009 to the worst and most brutal crackdown imaginable in Iran, but was shocked and dismayed that we may have been too tough on the jihadis who planned to overthrow and defeat America.

Obama dropped the plan for a New York trial of the 9/11 plotters after a sustained public outcry, but he still continued with plans to try these terrorists in civilian courts.
¹⁹
He even said in February 2010 that the trial could still ultimately be held in New York City: “I have not ruled it out.”
²⁰

It was yet another appalling chapter in the Obama presidency.

BLAMING AMERICA FOR 9/11

None of this came as any surprise to those who had been following Barack Hussein Obama’s career. For as long ago as September 2001, in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in U.S.
history, Barack Obama set a pattern he would repeat again and again: he blamed America, and prescribed as a solution to the problem the transfer of wealth from Americans to Third Worlders. Speaking just eight days after the 9/11 jihad terror attacks, when America’s righteous indignation and will to fight were at their peak, Obama termed the attacks a “tragedy”—as he would many years later as president, when another Islamic jihadist murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in Texas.

“The essence of this tragedy,” Obama said, “it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

So in other words, poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and despair had caused 9/11, and it was up to those deep-pocketed Americans to be empathetic enough to transfer their wealth to these poor, ignorant, despairing people to make sure that such an attack would not happen again. In the socialist Obama’s eyes, 9/11 was another occasion for the poor of the world to soak the rich.

Obama also included a warning to Americans: “We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just
in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.”
²¹

“Embittered children.”

In the cynical and depraved bloodlust of the 9/11 jihadists, Obama saw the cry of lost children. And eight years later, as president of the United States, he demonstrated again and again his solicitude for these brutal and hateful “children.”

SOON AFTER HE BECAME PRESIDENT
,
BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WENT TO WAR. BUT
NOT AGAINST THE GLOBAL JIHAD, OR THE ROGUE STATE
of North Korea, or any other enemy of the nation he had sworn to protect.

Instead, Barack Obama went to war against the freedom of speech, the most basic, fundamental, unalienable right of every individual who lives and breathes the air of America’s exceptionalism and rule of law.

America is the most magnificent experiment in human history. A novel, moral form of governance that stands on the rights of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to dissent.
There was not before, and not since, a country built so completely upon capitalism, the most benevolent human system in the world, in which the individual was protected by rule of law against both mob rule (majority rule) and minority plotting (special interests). The United States of America boasted the first government founded on the rights of the smallest minority in the world, the individual.

The Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”

It is our foremost safeguard against tyranny. The most basic tenet of our great and noble nation is freedom of speech. It is the cement that holds together the bricks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is no possibility of a constitutional republic without freedom of speech. If one group is allowed to suppress the speech of another, the suppressing group has achieved total hegemony: and more to the point, in the words of Ayn Rand, the principle of free speech is “not concerned with the
content
of a man’s speech and does not protect only the expression of
good
ideas, but of
all
ideas. If it were otherwise, who would determine which ideas are good and which to be forbidden? The government?”
¹

Yes, the government. In August 2009, just as the national debate over health care was ramping up, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said this in a
USA Today
op-ed about those who were protesting against the plan: “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.”
²

But who was really trying to drown out the opposition?

Three days before Pelosi and Hoyer branded opponents of Obama’s health-care plan as “un-American,” Obama spoke at a campaign rally for Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Creigh Deeds. Speaking also of the opponents of his health-care plan, Obama declared: “I don’t want the
folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking. Am I wrong, Virginia?”
³

Yes, Virginia, Barack Obama was wrong. Talking—dissent, debate, and loyal political opposition—is the very heart, the lifeblood, of the American Republic. Freedom of speech not only protects popular ideas, it protects all ideas. If Pelosi, Hoyer, and Obama succeeded in silencing dissent to the Democrats’ health-care proposals, the life of that republic would be effectively over.

THE HATRED OF THE GOOD FOR BEING THE GOOD

But surely they did not intend to demonize and silence dissent, did they?

Yes, they did.

It started even before Barack Obama became president. Columnist Michael Barone noticed it in October 2008. After recounting how Obama told a Nevada crowd to “talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” and to “argue with them and get in their face,” Barone noted that “actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.”

Barone recalled that when Obama opponent Stanley Kurtz, a writer for the conservative
National Review
who had been exploring ties between Obama and sixties terrorist William Ayers, appeared on radio host Milt Rosenberg’s show in Chicago, “Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.”
⁴

That same month, the governor of Missouri, Matt Blunt, issued a statement on the Obama campaign’s “abusive use of Missouri law enforcement.”
Blunt charged that three Missouri state officials, St. Louis county circuit attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis city circuit attorney Jennifer Joyce, and Jefferson County sheriff Glenn Boyer, along with the leader of Obama’s campaign in Missouri, Sen. Claire McCaskill, had “attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.” They had announced the formation of “Truth Squads” in Missouri that would track down people who stated publicly what they considered to be falsehoods about Obama, and would initiate proceedings against them for slander or libel. In this, said Blunt, they were “abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.”

Such behavior, said Blunt, was “scandalous beyond words.” Obama and his supporters, he said, were trying to “frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.”

“Barack Obama,” he declared, “needs to grow up.”
⁵

But when Barack Obama became president, he was empowered. The Obama administration embarked upon a campaign of demonizing dissenters, eagerly abetted by his corrupt, morally bankrupt, activist propaganda arm, the mainstream media. These were primarily Obama’s willing serfs and useful idiots. Secondarily, they hoped for a government bailout for their failing publications as their circulation and readership were falling precipitously. They were quickly being relegated to the trash bin. But Obama was doing his best to keep them alive. Clearly, his Marxist views would lead him to take the media under his wing and shape it according to his own opinion and discourse. It is no wonder that he was so anxious to meet and hug
Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chávez. Chávez took over all the media in Venezuela. No worries that way.

The New York Times
’s opinion makers began not long after Barack Obama took office to warn its dwindling readership about the evils of those who opposed the new president. Within one eight-day span in June 2009, Bob Herbert warned about “right-wing hate-mongers” and “gun crazies”; Frank Rich sounded the alarm about “far-right rage”; Paul Krugman claimed that “right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment”; and Tobin Harshaw also muttered about the “rise of right-wing extremism.”
⁶

But above all, there was the race card. The demonization of Obama’s opponents was illustrated vividly in the summer of 2009, when there appeared in Los Angeles the now-notorious “socialism” poster of Barack Obama made up as The Joker. But although this poster depicted Obama, not his opponents, it was they who ended up being demonized, not the president. Predictably, opponents of the president’s policies were branded as “racists.” Steven Mikulan said in the
LA Weekly
that the poster “has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger’s Joker’s) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word ‘Socialism’ appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose.”
⁷
And
Bedlam Magazine
charged: “The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quality to it.”
⁸

How disingenuous this was. For years, those of us who chronicled the relentless Bush bashing of the Left documented innumerable instances at rallies, on Internet posts, and in articles, in which Bush was vilified and smeared in the most lurid terms—far worse than the Obama Joker poster. This abuse was never even noted, much less covered
by the media. Yet the depth and breath of the invective against Bush was stunning. It is also ironic that
Vanity Fair
published an iconic cartoon of President Bush in white face, as The Joker. In the case of Bush, it was all in good fun, all just for laughs. But it was dead serious when Obama was depicted that way.

This favorite tactic of the Left began in the opening months of the Obama administration to verge on self-parody. Any criticism of Obama, no matter what it was or how legitimate it may have been, was labeled racism. Tea party? Racism! Opposition to socialism? Racism! Opposition to nationalized health care? Racism! Opposition to cap and tax? Racism! Opposition to the ethnic cleansing of Jewish people in Israel? Racism!

Nobel Prize–winning
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman epitomized this absurdity in an August 2009 column when he linked health-care protesters to those who questioned Obama’s American citizenship, as well, of course, to racism. “The driving force behind the town hall mobs,” Krugman claimed, “is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship.” The Obama propagandists deliberately coined the pejorative tag of “birther” to sound similar to “truther.” This, of course, was a terrible smear. Truthers are conspiracy theorists who actually believe that Bush and members of his administration were the real perpetrators of the September 11 Islamic attacks on America. The birthers, on the other hand, simply wanted Obama to release his long-form birth certificate.

“Senator Dick Durbin has suggested,” Krugman continued, “that the birthers and the healthcare protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.” It is, he said, “a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard
Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.” Krugman thought we were beyond all that as a nation: “Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the ‘angry white voter’ era in America.” But alas, “the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.”
⁹

And they’re all racists.

Times
columnist Maureen Dowd made the same charge after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shouted “You lie!” at Obama during the president’s September 9, 2009, speech defending his plan to nationalize health care. Dowd made Wilson’s objection to Obamacare sound like something only Bull Connor would love: “Surrounded by middle-aged white guys—a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club—Joe Wilson yelled ‘You lie!’ at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”