Post-American Presidency (7 page)

Sharia is a complex and comprehensive unity that traditional Muslims believe to be the unalterable law of Allah. To open the door to one aspect of it is only to open the door to the rest—which inevitably will result in the institutionalized subjugation of women and non-Muslims, and the extinguishing of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. Consequently, all free people may have hoped that Koh would reconsider his earlier naïve approval of the coming of Sharia to the Land of the Free.

But given Barack Obama’s warm praise for all things Islamic and thoroughgoing commitment to internationalism, nothing seemed less likely.

GIVING UP SOVEREIGNTY FOR GUN CONTROL

Obama was also actively engaged in efforts to extend the authority of United Nations gun control initiatives to the United States, using them to limit the freedoms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

“In most cases,” according to the National Rifle Association, “agendas for the elimination of private ownership of firearms are disguised as calls for international arms control to stem the flow of illicit military weapons. These instruments are generally promoted by a small group of nations and a large number of Non-Governmental Organizations
(NGOs) working in conjunction with departmental bureaucracies in multi-national institutions such as the UN and European Union.”

While the Bush administration had opposed such initiatives, Obama reversed course, actively cooperating with the UN and the EU on the development of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which would severely restrict Second Amendment rights within the United States.
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Would the Second Amendment stop the importation of weapons restrictions laws into the United States? The question was the same as for the First Amendment and free speech: all Obama needed to circumvent the Constitutional protections was a pliant Supreme Court, aided and abetted by an ideologically driven media. He had the media, and with a few retirements would have the Supreme Court as well.

John Bolton observed that Obama might use “norming” to impose gun control laws on America. “I think it would work this way: They know, for example, that legislation restricting gun rights—infringing on the Second Amendment—would be very unpopular and very hard to get through Congress. They may want to do it to repay certain of their constituencies, but they know there would be a fight. If it comes in through the back door, where they can say, ‘Well, look, this is an international agreement,’ then it’s a lot easier to say we’re simply going along with something else that may have other benefits for the U.S.”

Bolton said that UN internationalists were just waiting for Bush to leave in order to try to force the United States to accept international protocols. “People in the U.N. system, the Non-Governmental Organizations, basically concluded they weren’t going to get anything through while Bush was president. So they’ve been waiting, they’ve been holding back, and it’s precisely what they’ve been waiting for—the right guy to get in the White House. I think they believe they have found him. And that’s why I think groups that care about Second Amendment rights—groups like the NRA and all of its members—really have to pay very close attention to what’s going on in the State
Department and New York for the next four years. In a diplomatic world, a lot takes place below the radar screen. You don’t see it until it’s essentially a done deal, when it’s much harder to oppose.”

Groups lobbying at the UN for international arms control legislation restricting weapons distribution in combat zones have a “hidden agenda,” said Bolton. “In fact it’s not so hidden to many of these groups,” and it “is not weapons flowing to conflict zones. It’s imposing their domestic agenda, particularly on the United States, to get gun laws enacted here in ways they couldn’t possibly be successful in doing in Congress. They’d much rather lobby the U.N. than our own Congress.”
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Apparently, so would Barack Obama.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH INTERNATIONALISM?

As Barack Obama made significant moves during his first year in office to subject the United States to the authority of the UN and the OIC, Americans remained largely indifferent. Of course, the mainstream media did not report on these initiatives. But informed citizens knew what was at stake.

Decades before the post-American president took office, Ayn Rand saw the UN for what it was, and what every free person should have known it was—and it has only gotten worse since then: “Psychologically, the U.N. has contributed a great deal to the gray swamp of demoralization—of cynicism, bitterness, hopelessness, fear and nameless guilt—which is swallowing the Western world.”
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That, of course, was just the kind of guilt Obama and his cronies were playing upon. This guilt and demoralization was largely due to Communism in those days; now the “gray swamp” is still there, but it stems from Islam.

The similarities between Communism and Islam are many. French
sociologist Jules Monnerot, in his 1949
Sociologie du communisme
, which was published in English as
Sociology and Psychology of Communism
, concluded that “Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam.”
⁴⁹
And today Islam is enjoying the same success in intimidating the West and keeping it off balance that Communism once did—and in the same way, with willing help from subjugated Westerners. “The communist world,” Rand continued, in words that apply equally to the Islamic world today, “has gained a moral sanction, a stamp of civilized respectability from the Western world—it has gained the status and prestige of an equal partner, thus establishing the notion that the difference between human rights and mass slaughter is merely a difference of political opinion.”

Whether Obama thought that making such concessions to thugs would pacify them, or whether he actively favored their cause, or both, was unclear. In any case, he seemed determined to feed the beast, to the detriment of those he had sworn to protect.

And to the detriment of the free and sovereign nation he was supposed to be leading.

So the question comes to mind yet again: Who is this guy?

HOW DID BARACK OBAMA BECOME THE
LEADER OF A NATION WHOSE POWER HE SEEMED
DETERMINED TO DIMINISH?

Some assumed that he must not have known what he was doing, but was carried along by inexperience and naïveté into embracing policies that were disastrous for the nation and the world. But this view was at odds with the assessment of his political rivals and colleagues, who during the rough and tumble of the 2008 presidential campaign increasingly regarded him—according to a July 2008
New Yorker
profile—as a “pure political animal”: after Obama outfoxed John McCain on the issue of campaign finance reform, “commentators abruptly stopped using the words ‘callow’ and ‘naïve.’”
¹

The key to Barack Obama’s policies and activities as president lies in beliefs and assumptions that he began to absorb in his earliest upbringing—often in associations and events that he has done his best to obscure. But they must be explored. Before understanding why Obama does what he does, it’s important to review his schooling, his parents’ social mores, their political beliefs, his gurus, his mentors, his friends, and his associations. Essentially, these things are what made Obama what he is.

The unique and singular beauty of America is that we are not a single race, creed, or color. Ours is a shared value system. Rugged individualism, property rights, intellectual property rights, freedom of speech and religion and the right to assemble—we are wet-nursed on such basic unalienable human freedoms. We assume these freedoms, like we assume the very air we breathe. No other country can say such a thing. This is what makes America exceptional, an historic anomaly, blessed and gifted. This is how America is built.

But Barack Obama was not built this way. He did not grow up this way. Since America is not an ethnicity, but a value system, in order to
be
American, in order to “get” America, one has to have grown up in America, and to have soaked in the idea of living free—growing up under the righteous glow of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is neither tribal nor collective. It is singular and individual—America is the place where one man is not at the mercy of mob rule or minority plotting.

But Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t always Barack Hussein Obama. From 1967 to 1971, he was Barry Soetoro, an elementary school student in Jakarta, Indonesia. Barack Hussein Obama spent four of his crucial formative years, from the ages of six to ten, outside the United States, in the largest Muslim country in the world. His father was a Muslim from Kenya; his stepfather a Muslim from Indonesia. Even when he moved to the United States, he came to a place that was far
from the American heartland both geographically and culturally. “Hawaii,” according to the
Chicago Tribune
, “had become a state only two years before Obama’s birth, and there were plenty of native Hawaiians still deeply unhappy about it.… The arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.”
²

While in Indonesia also, Obama’s family lived “as Indonesians lived.” Much later, he recalled that the family lived what in America would have been considered a life of poverty: “We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my stepfather rode a motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service every morning to the US embassy, where she worked as an English teacher. Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks.”

The future president recalled a decidedly Indonesian childhood, saying he spent his days “chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo.”
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He recounted much later: “When I think of (Bali) and all of Indonesia, I am haunted by memories—the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields; the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire.”
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Occasionally his mother would take him to the American Club, “where I could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola to my heart’s content.” Obama said in his second autobiography,
The Audacity of Hope
, that he knew that he and his mother were “citizens of the United States, beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.”
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Yet his mother appeared dedicated to undermining that power and stripping American citizens of that safety and security. For Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was a communist. She moved in communist circles and had communist friends. Her parents put her in a high school run by a self-proclaimed communist who had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. A high school friend described her as a “fellow traveler,” and in both high school and college she moved in the most radical circles in her area.
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Stanley Ann Dunham met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., in 1960, at the height of the Cold War, in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii.
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It was, no doubt, a meeting of the minds: Obama, Sr., according to journalist Andrew Walden, “left behind a published record of an embrace of communist policies.”
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And why was Obama’s mother taking Russian-language classes in 1960—the height of communist antagonism toward the West? Stanley Ann Dunham had no interest in becoming a diplomat.

Obama recalled that when Lolo Soetoro got a job with an American oil company in Indonesia, the family’s standard of living improved considerably. They moved to a better house and bought a car, a television, and a record player. But instead of being pleased, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro’s Marxist consciousness was offended. “Looking back,” Obama writes in his first autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
, “I’m not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them.” As if there was something normal, right, and logical about his mother’s reaction.

Apparently no one had clued Lolo in on white guilt, middle-class guilt, and the agony of a socialist consciousness that has been raised. Obama recalled later that his mother argued with Lolo Soetoro over her refusal to go to dinner parties at the oil company. Obama describes
these as dinner parties from hell, choked with crude, boorish Ugly Americans: “American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help.” Lolo asked Stanley Ann to consider “how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people.”

In response, Obama remembered, “my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. They are
not
my people.”
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Yet that was far from the picture Obama painted of her as he ran for president. “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists,” said Obama during the campaign, “was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew.… She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals.”
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He said nothing about her radical leftism and Marxism.

Yet this was the milieu in which young Barack Obama grew up. This was the early air he breathed, the early intellectual food he feasted upon. He has called his mother “the dominant figure in my formative years.… The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.”
¹¹
Certainly he has maintained and strengthened associations that his mother made in those years: Morgan Reynolds, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former chief economist for the Department of Labor, reports that “Peter Geithner oversaw the ‘microfinance’ programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother.”
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