Barack Obama has now delivered his nationally televised “closing
argument” summarizing the supposed justifications for electing him to be
the next U.S. President.
Following is a compelling argument against electing him. It is an argument founded on a thorough analysis of Obama’s record vis a vis the
votes he has cast, the positions he has taken, and the promises he has
made during the course of his entire political career—eight years in the
Illinois state senate and four years in the U.S. Senate (of which the
last two years, incidentally, were spent almost entirely on campaigning
for the presidency rather than on attending to any legislative duties—as
evidenced by the very large number of votes for which he was not present during that period).
This document will look also at several of Obama’s alliances that are of great significance, examining the nature of those relationships and
the reasons why they are so important.
Table of Contents:
Obama’s Major Alliances, Affiliations, and Influences
Obama’s Major Alliances, Affiliations, and Influences
William Ayers: “Someone who Lives in my Neighborhood”
( Return to top):
Much has been said about William Ayers during
this presidential campaign. Barack Obama’s detractors point with
derision and concern to the candidate’s past association with Ayers,
while Obama's supporters (and Obama himself) dismiss that association as
having been merely a peripheral and coincidental relationship with a
man whose bad deeds were committed many years ago, when Obama was a
child. Here is what you need to know about William Ayers and his role in
Obama’s life.
Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were high-ranking leaders of the 1960s domestic terrorist groupWeatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction ofStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS),
the most radical student organization of its day. In 1969 Weatherman
went underground to become America’s first terrorist cult.
Characterizing Weatherman as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up
his organization’s ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break
up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your
parents.” The group’s ultimate objective was to ignite a violent race
war, not unlike the professed goal that Charles Manson and his band of
killers pursued in August 1969.
In his 2001 screed, Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts his life as
a Sixties radical, his tenure as a Weatherman lieutenant, and his
terrorist campaign across America. A substantial portion of Ayers’ book
discusses the author’s penchant for building and deploying
explosives. Ayers boasts that he personally “participated in the
bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol
building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.” Of the day he bombed the
Pentagon, Ayers says, “Everything was absolutely ideal.... The sky was
blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get
what was coming to them.”
All told, Ayers and Weatherman were responsible for 30 bombings aimed at
destroying the defense and security infrastructures of the U.S. “I
don’t regret setting bombs,” said Ayers in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Ayers and Dohrn spent most of the 1970s as fugitives running from the
FBI. In 1980 they surrendered, but all charges against them were dropped
due to an “improper surveillance” technicality. They were not, however,
by any means innocent. Ayers described his good fortune this way:
“Guilty as sin, free as a bird, America is a great country.”
Ayers was not an obscure entity. He was a very well-known figure, as was
his wife, who for some time was a member of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted”
list.
Ayers and Dohrn literally declared war on America. In 1974 they co-authored—along with two others—a book titled Prairie Fire, which contained the following statements:
* “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men
... deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle
against U.S. imperialism.”
* “Our intention is to disrupt the [American] empire, to incapacitate
it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its
bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world
struggle, to attack from the inside.”
* “The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.”
* “Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes
mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political
and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in
harmony with the armed struggle.”
* “Without mass struggle there can be no revolution. Without armed struggle there can be no victory.”
* “We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the
struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and
build the new society.”
* “Our job is to tap the discontent seething in many sectors of the
population, to find allies everywhere people are hungry or angry, to
mobilize poor and working people against imperialism.”
* “Socialism is the total opposite of capitalism/imperialism. It is
the rejection of empire and white supremacy. Socialism is the violent
overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on
profit.”
That is whom Bill Ayers was in the 1970s, and it is whom he would remain for the ensuing three decades. In Fugitive Days,
Ayers reflects on whether or not he might seek to use bombs against
the U.S. in the future. “I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the
possibility,” he writes.
It was in the mid-1990s that Ayers and Dohrn, who by then had become
university professors, developed a friendship with fellow Chicagoan
Barack Obama. They hosted meetings at their home to introduce Obama to
their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois state senate in
1996, and they contributed money to his senate campaign.
But Ayers’ relationship with Obama went far beyond politics. In 1995
Ayers—whose stated educational objective was to “teach against
oppression” as embodied in “America’s history of evil and racism,
thereby forcing social transformation”—founded a “school reform
organization” called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). He appointed Obama as the group’s first chairman.
What kind of “educational reform” did the CAC pursue?
“Instead of funding schools directly,” writes reporter Stanley Kurtz,
the CAC “required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners,’ which
actually got the money. Proposals from groups [which] focused on
math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money
through various far-left community organizers, such as ACORN.”
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and
the Political,” Ayers was explicitly clear about his ultimate
educational objectives. He explained that teachers should, first and
foremost, be community organizers dedicated to leading movements of
resistance to American racism and oppression.
“I’m a radical, Leftist, small-c-communist,” Ayers said in an interview at about the same time he was forming CAC.
Can anyone actually believe that Obama, whom Ayers put in charge of
disbursing some $50 million to various educational programs, was unaware
of Ayers’ politics, let alone his storied past as an America-hating
thug? Can anyone actually believe that the programs whose funding Obama personally oversaw through CAC were not dedicated to educating children in the worldviews and agendas of William Ayers?
Consider this tidbit: While Obama chaired the CAC board, he earmarked no less than $600,000 for an Ayers-founded organization run by Michael Klonsky, a leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.
In December 1997 Obama, in a small way, returned the favor when he wrote a blurb praising Ayers’ recently published book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court,
calling it “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system,
and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”
Remember, Obama was promoting the work of a man who, for more than a
quarter-century, had consistently and repeatedly made clear his intense
and undying hatred for America, for capitalism, and for the traditions
of this country; a man who literally had declared war on the United
States.
During Obama's tenure on the board, the Woods Fund also gave $6,000 to
Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, where Barack Obama
was a congregant.
Moreover, in 2002 the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern
University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’
wife and former fellow terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.
Perhaps you’re wondering whether Ayers, in very recent times, may have
moderated his views about either the U.S. or his own revolutionary
goals. The answer is no. In 2001 Ayers wrote that
America “makes me want to puke.” He penned those words during precisely
the period when he and Obama were serving together on the Woods Fund
board.
At a 2007 reunion of former SDS and Weatherman members, Ayers condemned what he called the “rising incipient American form of fascism,” which he said was characterized by:
“empire resurrected and unapologetic, war without end, an undefined
enemy that’s supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized
jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military
expansion, white supremacy changing its form but essentially intact,
attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in
every sphere of our lives … the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a
kind of a scapegoating gesture to keep our minds off of what’s really
happening.”
When questioned about his relationship with Ayers during an April 2008 Democratic primary debate, Obama responded as follows:
“This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who is a professor of
English in Chicago, who I know, and who I have not received some
official endorsement from. He is not somebody who I exchange ideas from
[with] on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow, as a consequence
of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago
when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t
make much sense … [T]his kind of game, in which anybody who I know,
regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, [that] somehow their ideas
could be attributed to me, I think the American people are smarter than
that. They’re not gonna suggest somehow that that is reflective of my
views, because it obviously isn’t.”
The facts are clear. Obama lied about his “relationship” with Ayers. It was not a “relationship,” it was an alliance,
and it was far from “flimsy.” He and Ayers worked together, strategized
together, raised and dispensed tens of millions of dollars together—all
for a host of objectives whose focus was unambiguous: to advance Ayers’
goal of radicalizing large segments of the American people and
fomenting a revolution that would usher in an age of Marxism.
Bernardine Dohrn: Another ex-Terrorist, Marxist Political Ally ( Return to top):
Bernardine Dohrn is currently an Associate Professor of Law
at Northwestern University. Moreover, she sits on important committees
and boards of the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. As noted above, in the 1960s Dohrn was a leader, along with her future husband Bill Ayers, of the terrorist cult Weatherman.
At a 1969 “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most
memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in
what would become known as the Weatherman “fork salute,” she said of the
seven bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family: “Dig it!
First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with
them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
Dohrn’s “War Council” ended with a formal declaration of war against
“AmeriKKKa,” which Dohrn always spelled with three Ks to signify
the United States’ allegedly ineradicable, murderous racism.
As noted above, Dohrn and her husband helped Obama launch his political career in the mid-1990s.
Pro-Soviet Political Ally: Alice Palmer
( Return to top):
A notable attendee at the aforementioned political gatherings which
Ayers and Dohrn hosted on behalf of Obama in the mid-Nineties was
Democrat state senatorAlice J. Palmer(of
Illinois’ 13th District), who quickly developed a friendly relationship
with Obama. Prior to her stint in politics, Palmer had worked for the
Black Press Institute and was editor of the Black Press Review. During the Cold War, she supported the Soviet Union and spoke against the United States. In the 1980s she served as anexecutive board memberof
the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a Communist front
group (and which was an affiliate of the World Peace Council, an
international Soviet front).
In June 1986, the Black Press Institute contributed an article, “An Afro-American Journalist on the USSR,” to the Communist Party USA’s newspaper People’s Daily World.
The article detailed how Alice Palmer had recently attended the 27th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and had been greatly
impressed by the Soviet system. Palmer was quoted making the following
statements:
* “The Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better
education, health and transportation, while we in our country are
hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas. I think that
is a profound contrast.”
* “We Americans can be misled by the major media. We’re being told the
Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living
compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in
meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production.”
* “…the Soviets are carrying out a policy to resolve the inequalities
between nationalities, inequalities that they say were inherited from
capitalist and czarist rule. They have a comprehensive affirmative
action program, which they have stuck to religiously—if I can use that
word—since 1917.”
In 1995, state senator Palmer decided to pursue an opportunity to run
for higher office. As she prepared to leave the state senate, she
hand-picked Barack Obama as the person she most wanted to fill her newly
vacated senate seat. Toward that end, she introduced Obama
to party elders and donors as her preferred successor, and helped him
gather the signatures required for getting his name placed on the
ballot.
Attending theSocialist Scholars Conferences ( Return to top):
In his 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father, Obama reveals
that during his student years at New York’s ColumbiaUniversity he “went
to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs
in Brooklyn.”
As London further observes, “Obama speaks of ‘conferences’ plural, indicating [that] his attendance was not the result of accident or youthful curiosity.”
Saul Alinsky, the Marxist Who Was Obama’s Strongest Enduring Influence ( Return to top):
You may be unfamiliar with the name Saul Alinsky, but in order to
understand the philosophy in which Obama was trained as a young
community organizer—and which continues to guide his politics to this
day—you must know the following information about this exceedingly
influential individual.
Saul Alinsky was a Chicago Marxist who spent his adult life training
activists in the art of agitating for “social change,” with the ultimate
goal of transforming America, piece by piece, into a socialist nation.
Alinsky popularized the concept of the “community organizer,” and he was
instrumental in establishing the aggressive political tactics that
characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent
revolutionary movements in the United States.
Alinsky outlined his tactics and strategies in two books, Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1972).
In the Alinsky model, “community organizing” is a euphemism for
“revolution”—a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the
systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of
the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and
economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent,
moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that
Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted—a revolution whose foot soldiers view
the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus,
the theory goes, the population at large will settle for nothing less
than that status quo’s complete collapse—to be followed by the erection
of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, people will
be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project
an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand
what types of societal “change” is needed.
As Alinsky put it: “A reformation means that the masses of our people
have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values.
They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing
system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won’t act for
change but won’t strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for
revolution.”
But Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic,
sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As political analyst Richard Poe puts it,
“Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to
penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political
parties.” He advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly
gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions,
and to introduce changes from that platform. This was a tactic known as
“infiltration.”
Alinsky’s revolution promised that by changing the structure of
society’s institutions, it would rid America of such vices as
socio-pathology and criminality. Arguing that these vices were caused
not by personal character flaws but rather by external societal
influences, Alinsky’s worldview was thoroughly steeped in the socialist
left’s collectivist, class-based doctrine of economic determinism. “It
is not the people who must be judged but the circumstances that made
them that way,” declared Alinsky. Chief among these circumstances, he
said, was capitalism, or, as he once put it, “the larcenous pressures of
a materialistic society.”
To counter that materialism, Alinsky favored a socialist alternative. To
lead society toward that alternative, Alinsky sought to train an army
of “community organizers,” whom he affectionately called “radicals.”
Finding themselves “adrift in the stormy sea of capitalism,” these
radical community organizers would help society “advance from the jungle
of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human
civilization.” They would, explained Alinsky, “hope for a future where
the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of
just a comparative handful.” In other words, socialism.
Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and
decisions of such “community organizers” and the “People’s
Organizations” they established. The community organizer, he said, “must
first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities
to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and
issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people
are not concerned enough to act.” The organizer’s function, he added,
was “to agitate to the point of conflict” and “to maneuver and bait the
establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous
enemy.’”
Alinsky stressed that community organizers and their followers needed to
take care, when first unveiling their particular crusade for “change,”
not to alienate the middle class with any type of crude language,
defiant demeanor, or menacing appearance that suggested radicalism or a
disrespect for middle class mores and traditions. For this very reason,
he disliked the hippies and counterculture activists of the 1960s. As Richard Poe puts it:
“Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts
in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism,
Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the
system from within.”
While his ultimate goal was nothing less than the “radicalization of the
middle class,” Alinsky stressed the importance of “learning to talk the
language of those with whom one is trying to converse.” “Tactics must
begin with the experience of the middle class,” he said, “accepting
their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity, and conflict. Start them easy,
don’t scare them off.”
In the 1980s Barack Obama wastrainedas a “community organizer” by three mentors who were trained at the Alinsky-founded
Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in the Windy City. Though he never
met Alinsky personally (the latter died in 1972), Obama developed a
reputation as a veritable master of Alinsky’s method. For several years
thereafter, Obama himself taught workshops on that method, most notably with the organization ACORN, to which I will now turn my attention.
ACORN: Socialists and Criminals with Longstanding Ties to Obama
( Return to top):
ACORN’s Roots and Objectives
ACORN is
an acronym for “Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now.” With more than 400,000 dues-paying member families in some 1,200
chapters across the United States, ACORN operates on an annual budget
of approximately $60 million.
Founded in 1970, ACORN grew out of George Wiley’s National Welfare Rights Organization(NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s invaded welfare offices across
the U.S.—often violently—bullying social workers and loudly demanding
every welfare penny to which the law “entitled” them.
By so doing, Wiley and his cohorts were carrying out the so-called “Cloward-Piven strategy”
(named after a pair of Columbia University sociologists), also known as
the strategy of “orchestrated crisis.” This strategy has been
summarized with great skill by Richard Poe. Specifically,
the Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to overload a particular government
bureaucracy with a flood of demands that are impossible to satisfy,
thereby pushing society into crisis and, ultimately, economic collapse.
Wiley attempted, with considerable success, to create such a crisis in
the realm of the welfare system during the late Sixties and early
Seventies. From 1965 to 1974, which was mostly a period of economic
prosperity in the United States, the number of single-parent households
on welfare nationwide soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million.
According to Manhattan
Institute senior fellow Sol Stern, ACORN, from its inception, has
promoted “a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning,
victimology, and government handouts to the poor”—pushing for “ever-more
government control of the economy” and ever-growing levels of economic
“redistributionism.”
ACORN’s “People’s Plafform” candidly says as much: “We are the majority,
forged from all the minorities…. We will continue our fight … until we
have shared the wealth.”
When Rathke and his cohorts founded ACORN, they enlisted civil rights workers and trained them to become “community organizers” in a program patterned after Saul Alinsky’s activist tactics.
ACORN’s Role in the Mortgage Crisis of 2008
For the past three decades, one of ACORN’s chief campaigns has been to
exploit the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, requiring
banks—for purposes of “racial equity”—to make loans to many low-income,
high-risk borrowers.
The CRA was designed to combat “redlining,” a term signifying banks’
purported reluctance to make loans to nonwhites. The “redlining” charge
stemmed from the fact that in the pre-CRA era, nonwhite loan applicants
were being turned down at rates significantly higher than those of their
white counterparts.
A careful look at the facts reveals, however, that those rejection-rate
disparities were not due to discrimination, but rather reflected the
realities of borrowers’ credit-worthiness—as determined by such
objective factors as credit history, debt burden, income, net worth,
age, and education. Nevertheless, the government sought to shrink the
“credit gap” by compelling banks to make loans to borrowers whose
economic profiles were, by traditional standards, inadequate.
This policy was pursued with highly increased aggressiveness by
the Clinton administration in the 1990s. As a September 30, 1999 New York Timesarticle explained:
“Fannie Mae ... has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton
Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income
people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal
growth in profits. In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage
companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to
so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit
ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional
loans, can only get [so-called ‘subprime’] loans from finance companies
that charge much higher interest rates—anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.”
ACORN played a major role in augmenting the Clinton administration’s
push to force banks into making subprime loans. True to its long
tradition of thuggish intimidation tactics, the organization went so far
as to dispatch screaming mobs of protesters to bankers’
private residences in order to intimidate them into lowering their
credit standards.
In so doing, ACORN was dealing from a position of strength. Why? Because the CRA gives “community groups” like ACORN the power to block federal approval of bank mergers and acquisitions if such groups are dissatisfied with a particular bank’s lending practices.
As a result of pressure from ACORN and its ideological allies, the
practice of subprime mortgage lending became ever-more widespread,
culminating ultimately in the recent collapse of America’s two largest
mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
During the years immediately prior to that collapse, ACORN pointed with
pride to its own role in promoting subprime loans. Indeed, after it had
helped defeat a proposal calling for restrictions on the awarding of
such loans, ACORN was quick to take “credit for saving the CRA.”
ACORN’s Massive Voter-Registration Fraud
Also in recent years, and most notably this year, ACORN and its
voter-registration arm, Project Vote, have made headlines by engaging in
a massive and unprecedented campaign of voter-registration fraud. Over
the past three years, ACORN has registered more than 3 million new
voters; at least several hundred thousand of those registrations already
have been determined to be fraudulent—phony names, incorrect or
nonexistent addresses, multiple registrants (some people registering as
many as six dozen times).
Like the NWRO’s aforementioned effort to flood the welfare rolls and
create a cataclysmic economic crisis in the 1960s, ACORN, which grew out
of NWRO, is today seeking to flood the rolls of registered voters—in
hopes of creating a crisis of similar magnitude. There have been reports
of instances where towns actively canvassed by ACORN workers contain
now more registered voters than total residents.
As a result, ACORN is currently under investigation for fraud in 14
states—mostly “swing states” where the electoral races tend to be hotly
contested.
ACORN's voter fraud poses a greater threat to the perceived and actual
legitimacy of America's electoral process than has any other initiative
in the nation's history.
Obama’s Relationship with ACORN
What does all this have to do with Barack Obama? Plenty.
In the 1990s Obama ran ACORN’s Project Vote in Chicago. In those days,
the organization's voter registration effort was not as heavily funded
as it is today, thus the magnitude of its fraud was not as great. But it
employed the same aggressive and unscrupulous tactics to register large
numbers of people who were likely to vote for Democrat candidates.
For several years, Obamawas the attorney for ACORN’s lead election-law cases. In the mid-90s, for instance, he brought a successful suit against
the Illinois state government, demanding the implementation of
the “Motor Voter” law. This law, which called for permitting voters to
register using only a postcard, had been resisted by Republican Governor
Jim Edgars, who feared that it would invite widespread election
fraud. Edgars' fears were well-founded; the law proved to be a breeding
ground for fraud. As such, it effectively complemented the efforts of
ACORN.
Obama also worked as a trainer at ACORN’s annual conferences, where he
taught members of the organization the art of radical “community
organizing”—in the tradition of none other than Saul Alinsky.
Later, when Obama sat on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, he and his fellow board members presided over a number of sizable grants to ACORN.
In 2008 Obama became the first national political candidate ever
to hire ACORN for its get-out-the-vote services. Specifically, Obama’s
campaign paid $830,000 to “Citizens Services Incorporated” (CSI), which
is ACORN by another name—CSI is based at precisely the same New Orleans
address as ACORN’s national headquarters.
Wall Street Journal writer John Fund has revealed that ACORN
actually operates a total of 107 front groups like CSI, and that
whenever there is an ethical problem or a legal violation involving one
of those fronts, the front in question invariably shifts the blame to
another. But in fact, all 107 front groups are ACORN.
The Obama campaign initially failed to properly inform the Federal
Elections Commission (FEC) that it had hired ACORN / CSI to do
voter-registration work. Rather, it reported that it had hired CSI to do
“polling, advance work and staging events.” When confronted with this
“mistake,” the Obama campaign ascribed it simply to a “clerical error.”
In an October 15, 2008 presidential debate, Republican John McCain raised the issue of Obama’s ties to ACORN. Obama replied to McCain as follows:
“The only involvement I’ve had with ACORN was I represented them
alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a
motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs…. ACORN is a
community organization. Apparently what they’ve done is they were paying
people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people
who were out there didn’t really register people, they just filled out a
bunch of names. It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved.”
As is demonstrated by the information above, this was a flat-out lie. To
review: In addition to his motor voter activities, Obama ran ACORN’s
Project Vote in Chicago in the 1990s; he trained ACORN activists in the
Alinsky method during that same period; he presided over the awarding
of large grants to ACORN when he was a board member of the Woods Fund;
and he paid ACORN / CSI no less than $830,000 to register voters on his
behalf in 2008.
It is worth noting that in September 2005 Obama sponsored “Senate Concurrent Resolution 53,”
which expressed “the sense of Congress that any effort to
impose photo identification requirements for voting should be rejected.”
Like the motor voter law, this resolution was a perfect complement to
ACORN’s massive voter-registration fraud; i.e., if voters are not
required to present a photo ID before casting their ballots, it is quite
easy for them to vote multiple times under various phony names if they
wish.
And here’s another tidbit which Obama failed to mention: In 2007 he had told a gathering of ACORN’s members: “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.”
As noted above, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed in 2008 because
of their deep involvement in subprime loans. This collapse, as everyone
now knows, led to the federal government’s $700 billion bailout of the
mortgage giants.
Two of Fannie Mae’s major players had noteworthy ties to Obama. James
Johnson, a longtime aide to former Vice President Walter Mondale, headed
Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998. While
dutifully following the Clinton administration directive mandating that
Fannie Mae make subprime loans to borrowers who were poor credit risks,
and thereby helping to run the mortgage lender into the ground, Johnson
himself earned tens of millions of dollars in his Fannie Mae post,
including $21 million in 1998 alone. In the summer of 2008, Obama tapped
Johnson to chair his vice presidential selection committee. But soon
thereafter, Johnson had to resign in disgrace from
that position when it was revealed that he personally had taken at
least five real estate loans (totaling more than $7 million) at
below-market rates from Countrywide Financial Corporation.
Johnson’s successor as Fannie Mae’s head, Franklin Raines,
had previously served as a budget director to Bill Clinton. During his
years at Fannie’s helm (1999-2005), Raines, while continuing to oversee
the ill-advised policies that ultimately would bankrupt the company,
pocketed nearly $100 million in compensation before leaving under a
cloud of scandal when it was learned that he had manipulated
profit-and-loss reports so as to enable himself and other senior
executives to earn gargantuan bonuses, even as the financial empire he
oversaw was imploding. Notwithstanding Raines’ poor track record,the Obama campaign consulted him in 2008 for his advice on housing matters.
Obama’s Views Regarding Subprime Loans before the 2008 Mortgage Crisis
In 2007, Obama stated that “subprime lending started off as a good idea—helping
Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to.” But when the
crisis arrived in 2008, Obama not only blamed Republicans, but tacitly
blamed the very institution of capitalism—referencing it by the pejorative code name of “trickle-down” economics.
Obama’s Financial Receipts from Fannie/Freddie
During his first three years in the U.S. Senate (2005-2008), Obama received more monetary contributions ($126,349)
from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other legislator in
America except Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, who had been in
Congress continuously for 33 years.
Endorsement by the Democratic Socialists ofAmerica
( Return to top):
Obama’s 1996 state senate campaign secured the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Describing
itself as “the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist
International,” DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United
States. “We are socialists,” reads the DSA boilerplate, “because we
reject an international economic order sustained by private profit,
alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental
destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.”
“To achieve a more just society,” adds DSA, “many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed.... Democracy and socialism go hand in hand.”
DSA seeks to increase its political influence not by establishing its own party, but rather by working closely with the Democratic Party to promote socialist agendas. Says DSA:
“Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights,
religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been
active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to
strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus....
Maybe sometime in the future ... an alternative national party will be
viable. For now, we will continue to support progressives who have a
real chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing
Democrats.”
Alliance with the Marxist “New Party” (Return to top):
Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials—most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.
Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and ACORN.
The party’s Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the
Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.
In 1995 Barack Obama sought the New Party’s endorsement for
his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that
endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers. By 1996, Obama had become a member of the New Party.
Alliance with Carl Davidson, Marxist
( Return to top):
A key supporter of Obama’s 1996 state senate campaign was Carl Davidson, a Marxist who, in the 1960s, had been a national secretary of Students of a Democratic Society. In 1969 Davidson helped launch the
“Venceremos Brigades,” which covertly transported hundreds of young
Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s
communist revolutionary leadership. (The Brigades were organized by Fidel Castro’s
Cuban intelligence agency, which trained “brigadistas” in guerrilla
warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)
Many years later, Davidson would reflect on
his SDS days when he had taken advantage of an opportunity to converse
at length with President Castro. Said Davidson: “He [Castro] is a
remarkable man, with a photographic memory, wide knowledge and keen
insights.... We should all wish Fidel and Cuba well …”
Davidson today is a key member of Progressives for Obama, which was co-founded by Tom Hayden (a Students for a Democratic Society organizer who collaborated with North Vietnamese Communists during the Vietnam War and organized riots at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago); Danny Glover (an actor and leftist ideologue who has ardently supported the regimes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro); Barbara Ehrenreich (Honorary Chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA); and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (a former Maoist and a current DSA leader who co-founded the Black Radical Congress, which has close ties to the Communist Party USA).
In 1988 Davidson founded Networking for Democracy (NFD), a program encouraging high-school
students to engage in “mass action” aimed at “tearing down the old
structures of race and class privilege” in the U.S. “and around the
world.” In 1992 he became a leader of the newly formed Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists,
Trotskyists, and members of the Communist Party USA. In the mid-1990s
Davidson was a major player in the Chicago branch of the aforementioned
Marxist New Party, which Obama eventually joined.
Obama Cites Arafat/PLO Supporter, Rashid Khalidi, As a Voice of Reason
( Return to top):
Rashid Khalidi is a Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. During the Seventies, he taught for a brief time at a university in Beirut, where he often spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). News reports—including a 1982 dispatch from Thomas Friedman of the New York Times—suggest that Khalidi once served as Director of the Palestinian press agency, Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, was reportedly the agency’s main English-language editor from 1976 to 1982. Khalidi so strongly identified with
the aims of the PLO, which was designated as a terrorist group by the
State Department during his affiliation with it in the 1980s, that he
habitually referred to himself as “we” when expounding on the PLO’s
agenda. Khalidi’s 1986 book, Under Siege: P.L.O. Decision-Making During the 1982 War, was dedicated to Yasser Arafat. In the early 1990s Khalidi served on the PLO’s so-called “guidance committee.”
Characterizing Israel as a “racist” state that is “basically an apartheid system in creation,”
Khalidi claims that the Israeli army is in possession of “awful weapons
of mass destruction (many supplied by the U.S.) that it has used in
cities, villages and refugee camps.”
Khalidi formerly expressed some tepid support for the notion of an
Israeli state alongside a Palestinian one. In more recent years,
however, he has taken to dismissing such a solution as a hopelessly
impractical “utopian vision.” Khalidi has further assailed Israel’s very
legitimacy, proclaiming it to be “a state that exists today at the
expense of the Palestinians,” an existence that “fails to meet the most
important requirement: justice.”
When Barack Obama was a lecturer at the University of Chicago law
school, he became friendly with Khalidi, who was then a professor at the
same university. Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi’s Hyde Park home.
In 1995 Khalidi and his wife had founded the Arab American Action Network (AAAN),
noted for its contention that Arab Americans face widespread
discrimination in the United States, and for its view—a view shared by
Khalidi himself—that Israel’s creation in 1948 was a “catastrophe” for
Arab people.
During the 2000 election cycle, Mr. and Mrs. Khalidi organized a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s unsuccessful congressional bid. In 2001 and again in 2002, the Woods Fund of Chicago, while Mr. Obama served on its board, made grants totaling $75,000 to Khalidi’s AAAN.
In 2003 Obama attended a
farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving
the University of Chicago to embark on his new position at Columbia. At
this event, Obama paid public tribute to Khalidi as someone whose insights had
been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own
biases…. It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to
come, we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not
just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire
world.” Khalidi then returned the favor, telling the largely
pro-Palestinian attendees that Obama deserved their help in winning a
U.S. Senate seat, stating, “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”
In a 2008 interview, Khalidi praised Obama effusively, stating that, if elected President, Obama would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than other politicians.
Obama’s Pro-Arafat Political Advisor (Return to top):
In 2007 Obama appointed Robert Malley, a program director for theInternational Crisis Group (ICG), as a foreign policy advisor to his campaign. Malley’s father,Simon Malley, had been akey figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. Rabidly anti-Israel, Simon Malley was a confidante of the late PLO leaderYasser Arafat; an inveteratecritic of “Western imperialism”; asupporter of
various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly
those associated with the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary ofSoviet funding; and a supporter of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Robert Malley has long allegedthat
Israeli—not Palestinian—inflexibility caused the 2000 Camp David peace
talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fail. He has pennedseveral controversial articles—some of which he co-wrote with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat—blaming Israel andexonerating Arafatfor that failure. One U.S. security official states that Robert Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hezbollah and [has] offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”
In 2008 the Obama campaign severed its tieswith Malley after the latter acknowledged to the Times of London that he—Malley—had been in regular contact withHamas as part of his work for ICG.
Another Obama Associate Who SeesIsrael’s Creation as a “Catastrophe” ( Return to top):
According to journalist John Batchelor,
Abunimah “has remembered Mr. Obama’s speaking in 1999 against ‘Israeli
occupation’ at a charity event for a West Bank refugee camp; and Mr.
Abunimah … has also recalled Mr. and Mrs. Obama at a fundraiser held for
the then-Congressional candidate Obama in 2000 at Rashid and Mona
Khalid’'s home, where Mr. Obama made convincing statements in support of
the Palestinian cause.”
In Abunimah’s calculus,
Palestinian violence and terrorism is caused entirely by Israel’s “land
confiscation,” its “ongoing orgy of violence,” and its “routine
human-rights abuses” that have “made life under a seemingly endless
occupation so intolerable.” In February 2002 he characterized “Israel’s humiliation and virtual imprisonment of Arafat”
(after the Palestinian leader had failed to prevent or discourage a
recent wave of suicide bombings) as confirmation that then-Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon had “never given up the dream of a Greater Israel
stretching from the Mediterrannean to the Jordan River and perhaps
beyond.”
According to Abunimah,
“Zionist leaders, academics, and propagandists are actually
professional, malicious liars as much as they are violent, merciless
murderers.”
In the late 1990s, Abunimah met Barack Obama for
the first time when the latter was a representative in
the Illinois state senate. “He [Obama] impressed me as progressive,
intelligent and charismatic,” says Abunimah. “I distinctly remember thinking, ‘if only a man of this caliber could become president one day.’”
Said Abunimah
in March 2007: “Over the years since I first saw Obama speak, I met him
about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American
community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at
whichEdward Said was
the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for
Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by
a University of Chicago professor [Khalidi].”
“[Obama] came [to that fundraiser] with his wife,” Abunimah recounts.
“That’s where I had a chance to really talk to him. It was an intimate
setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical
of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs.... He was
very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel.”
“On that occasion and others,” Abunimah has written,
“Obama was forthright in his criticism of U.S. policy and his call for
an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
“I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator—when he used to
attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time. I
remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major
community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp
in the occupied West Bank. And that’s just one example of how Barack
Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated
with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.”
In March 2007 Abunimah alleged, with displeasure, that Obama had become more sympathetic to Israel in recent years. Said Abunimah:
“If disappointing, given his historically close relations to
Palestinian-Americans, Obama's about-face is not surprising. He is
merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will
continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power.”
“The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a
gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a
primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United
States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him
trailing. As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up
to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I
haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough
primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.’
He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and U.S. policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”
Obama’s Alliance with Multi-Billionaire George Soros, and Why It Matters so Greatly (Return to top):
In December of 2006, Obama, who by then was contemplating a run for the presidency, met in New York with billionaire financier George Soros, who previously had hosted a fundraiser for Obama during the latter’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
One of the most powerful men on earth, Soros is a hedge fund manager who
has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion. His
management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since
1979, Soros’ foundation network—whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI)—has dispensed more than $5 billion to a multitude of organizations whose objectives can be summarized as follows:
* promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
* promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
* opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
* depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
* promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
* promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
* promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
* defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
* financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
* advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
* opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
* promoting socialized medicine in the United States
* promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
* bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
* promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
Every year, Soros gives tens of millions of dollars to these
organizations, all of which—through publications, press releases,
statements, and activities—directly and indirectly support candidates
who share their agendas. On January 16, 2007, Obama (who had logged a
mere 143 days of experiencein
the U.S. Senate) announced the creation of a presidential exploratory
committee, and within hours Soros made a contribution to his campaign
and announcedthat he would back Obama for the presidency.
In 1995 Obama attended the Washington, DC-based Million Man March which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. “The
real evil in America,” Farrakhan said that day, “is the idea that
undergirds the setup of the Western world, and that idea is called white
supremacy.”
Said Obama in the immediate aftermath of the March:
“What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for
African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm
our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans
have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a
sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white
Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems
African-Americans are facing.”
Louis Farrakhan has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to the “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers” who purportedly decimate America’s black community from coast to coast. He has referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion,” and to Adolf Hitler as “a great man.”
In 1997, the Clarion-Ledger reported Farrakhan’s characterization of “the white man” as the “anti-Christ.” In a 1997 Meet The Press interview,
Farrakhan stated, “It is not accidental that the black male is in the
condition he is in,” and he charged that there was a “conspiracy of our
government against the black male.” In August 1997, the New York Amsterdam Newsquoted
Farrakhan stating, “A decree of death has been passed on America. The
judgment of God has been rendered and she must be destroyed.” “There is
no wicked nation in the past that approaches the evil that is practiced
in America on a daily basis,” said Farrakhan on another occasion. In
March 2000 the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Farrakhan saying, “White people are potential humans
... they haven't evolved yet.” At other times, he has referred to
whites as “vicious beasts” and “the skunks of the planet.” All these
quotes were representative of Farrakhan’s views not only during the time
period in which he held his Million Man March, but of his views to this
day.
On numerous occasions, Farrakhan has made alliances with avowed foreign
enemies of the United States. In January 1996, for instance, he formed a
partnership with Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi,
who pledged $1 billion to help Farrakhan develop a Muslim political
lobby in the U.S. According to Libya’s official news agency Jana,
Qadhafi announced: “We agreed with Louis Farrakhan and his delegation to
mobilize in a legal and legitimate form the oppressed minorities—and at
their forefront the blacks, Arab Muslims and Red Indians—for they play
an important role in American political life and have a weight in U.S.
elections.” The Jana story further stated that Qadhafi and Farrakhan had
pledged to fight Americafrom the “inside.” “Our confrontation
with America,” said Qadhafi, “was [previously] like a fight against a
fortress from outside, and today [with the NOI alliance] we found a
breach to enter into this fortress and confront it.”
This was not Farrakhan’s first friendly encounter with Qadhafi. Eleven
years earlier, the Libyan strongman had granted NOI a $5 million
interest-free loan, in gratitude for which Farrakhan later
visited Libya to personally thank his benefactor. Qadhafi once told a
crowd of NOI followers at a Chicago convention that he sought to sponsor
an armed black revolution in America. On yet another occasion,
Farrakhan and his aides—violating a travel ban imposed on Americans by
President Reagan—flew to Tripoli to meet with Qadhafi, whom Farrakhan
has proudly called “a friend,” “a brother,” and “a fellow struggler in
the cause of liberation for our people.”
In 1996 and again the following year, Farrakhan went on “World
Friendship Tours” to exchange pleasantries with government leaders in
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Sudan—all of which were on the State
Department’s list of nations that supported terrorism. Many times during
these tours, Farrakhan publicly denounced the United States as “the
Great Satan.”
Before Farrakhan left Iran for Syria in 1996, a Tehran newspaper quoted
him saying: “God will destroy America by the hands of the Muslims.… God
will not give Japan or Europe the honor of bringing down the United
States; this is an honor God will bestow upon Muslims.”
Addressing a crowd of some 20,000 people at the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours’ Day celebration in February 2008, Farrakhan said that presidential candidate Barack Obama represented the “hope of the entire world” that the United States might become a better neighbor to other nations. In February 2008 FarrakhancalledObama “a herald of the Messiah.”
From March 1972 until February 2008, Jeremiah Wright—whom Barack
Obama described as his “spiritual advisor,” his “mentor,” and “one of
the greatest preachers in America”—was the pastor of Chicago’s Trinity
United Church of Christ (TUCC), where Obama had attended services since
1988, and where he (Obama) had been a member since 1992. Wright embraces
the tenets of Black Liberation Theology (BLT), which seeks to foment
Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial rather than class
solidarity. BLT is a variation of Liberation Theology,
which teaches that the New Testament gospels can be understood only as
calls for social activism, class struggle, and revolution aimed at
overturning the existing capitalist order and installing, in its stead, a
socialist utopia where today's poor will unseat their “oppressors” and
become liberated from their material (and, consequently, their
spiritual) deprivations.
Wright’s mentor in this discipline is James Cone, author of the landmark text Black Power and Black Theology. Representative of Cone’s worldview are these quotes:
* “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”
* “Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”
* “If God is not for us and against White people, then he is a
murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of Black theology is to
kill Gods who do not belong to the Black community ... Black theology
will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction
of the white enemy.”
The website of Wright’s church identified Cone’s writings as required reading for parishioners who wished to more thoroughly understand the church’s theology and mission.
Jeremiah Wright’s writings, public statements, and sermons—like those of
James Cone—reflect his conviction that America is a nation infested
with racism, prejudice, and injustice. Controversy erupted in early 2008
when news reports surfaced detailing Wright’s incendiary comments.
Among his more noteworthy comments and views were the following:
* “Racism is
how this country was founded and how this country is still run!... We
[Americans] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe
it more than we believe in God.”
* “America is the #1 killer in the world.”
* “We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.”
* Wright laments “the social order under which we [blacks] live, under which we suffer, under which we are killed.”
* Depicting blacks as a politically powerless demographic, Wright
complains that “African Americans don’t run anything in the Capital
except elevators.”
* In Wright’s calculus, white America’s bigotry is to blame not only
for whatever ills continue to plague the black community, but also for
anti-U.S. sentiment abroad. “In the 21st century, says Wright,
“white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the
western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away,
faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West
kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
* Wright characterized the 9/11 attacks as payback for American evil,
calling them a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost.”
* Also regarding 9/11, Wright said: “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it to never come back to you.”
* Wright referred to America as “the U.S. of KKKA”—signifying the country’s ostensibly pervasive, seething, Klan-like racism.
* Wright said that blacks should not say “God bless America,” but rather “God damn America.”
* Wright suggested that America invented the AIDS virus to kill black people.
* Wright detests America’s capitalist economic structure, viewing it
as a breeding ground for all manner of injustice. “Capitalism as made
manifest in the 'New World,’” he says, “depended upon slave labor (by
African slaves), and it is only maintained by keeping the 'Two-Thirds
World' under oppression.”
* Wright’s anti-capitalist perspective is reflected in TUCC’s “10-point vision,” whose ideals include the cultivation of “a congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY” (emphasis in original) and towards a radical restructuring of “America’s economic mal-distribution.”
On its website, Wright’s church describes itself in
distinctly racial terms, as being an “Unashamedly Black” congregation
of “African people” who are “true to our native land, the mother
continent, the cradle of civilization,” and who participate in TUCC’s
“Black worship service and ministries which address the Black
Community.”
TUCC promotes a
“Black Value System” that encourages African Americans to patronize
black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming
“entrapped” by the pursuit of a “black middle-classness” whose ideals
presumably would erode their sense of African identity and render them
“captive” to white culture.
Wright is a great admirer of Louis Farrakhan, calling him
“one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American
religious experience,” a man whose “integrity and honesty have secured
him a place in history as one of the nation’s most powerful critics,”
and whose “love for Africa and African American people has made him an
unforgettable force.” Wright accompanied Farrakhan on a 1984 trip to meet with Farrakhan’s friend, the Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi.
Farrakhan’s October 16, 1995 Million Man March ranks among the events
about which Rev. Wright has written most extensively and passionately.
When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to
boycott the demonstration because of Farrakhan’s history of hateful
rhetoric, Wright derided those critics as “Negro leaders,” “colored
leaders,” “Oreos,” and “house niggras” who were guilty of “Uncle
Tomism.” “There are a whole boat load of ‘darkies’ who think in white
supremacist terms,” added Wright.
Long before the controversy over Wright erupted, Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the Sojourners evalngelical ministry, told an
interviewer: “If you want to understand where Barack [Obama] gets his
feeling and rhetoric from, just look at Jeremiah Wright.”
During his years as a member of TUCC, Obama gave a great deal of money
to the church. In 2005, for example, he gave $5,000. The following year
he gave $22,500. According to their 2005-2007 tax returns, Obama and his
wife donated a total of $53,770 to
TUCC during the three years following Obama's 2004 election to the U.S.
Senate. Moreover, during Obama's tenure as a board member of the Woods
Fund, he helped steer $6,000 to Trinity.
Obama initially dismissed the audio/video clips of
Wright’s angry rhetoric as mere “snippets,” claiming that the media
were highlighting only Wright’s “most offensive words,” and that his
statements had been taken out of context. In May 2008, Obama finally
made a move to distance himself from Wright and to denounce aspects of
his preachings. As a result of the controversy, Wright in March 2008 stepped down from his position with the Obama campaign’s African American Religious Leadership Committee.
Obama’s claim that for more than twenty years he had been unaware of
Wright’s sentiments about America cannot be believed by any thinking
person. It was a lie. Obama would have been worthier of respect had he
simply told that truth—that he either agreed with Wright’s assessments,
or that he did not object to them strongly enough to cause him to leave
the church. But his feigned unawareness of Wright's perspectives was
indeed worthy of contempt.
Rev. Otis Moss III—whom Obama has extolled as a “wonderful young pastor”—served
as assistant pastor of TUCC from 2006-2008 and then succeeded Jeremiah
Wright as pastor when the latter retired. In one notable sermon, Moss likened the
condition of contemporary black Americans to that of the hapless lepers
referenced in biblical stories. He further implied that whites—who, in
his estimation, continue to segregate blacks both socially and
economically—are the “enemy” of African Americans. “Our society creates thugs,” Moss added. “Children are not born thugs. Thugs are made and not born.”
In one particularly fiery sermon, Moss likened the condition of contemporary black Americans to that of the lepers referenced in biblical stories:
“You see they [blacks] still are lepers. They still have a skin
disease. They had a skin disease. They had a skin disease. Based on
their skin condition, they were considered to be second-class citizens.
They had a skin issue. They had a skin disease. And the lepers lived in a
leper project. The lepers had bad health care. The lepers were
disrespected. They had funny names for lepers. The lepers were
considered inferior. They had an inferior school system. The lepers
lived in a ghetto leper colony. The lepers were segregated from
everybody else.”
Moss further implied that whites—who, in his estimation, continue to
segregate blacks away from them both socially and economically—are the “enemy” of African Americans.
Nicknamed the “hip-hop pastor” by his congregants, Moss has criticized
middle-class America for not accepting the “prophetic brilliance” of
black so-called “thugs.” “There are times,” Moss said in
one sermon, “when our prejudice keeps us from hearing ghetto prophets,
who preach a brand of thug theology which keeps us from hearing the
truth from their lips because of their course language and ragged
subject-verb agreement.”
In the same sermon, Moss cited as a prophetic figure the late Tupac
Shakur—a “gangsta” rap star with a long arrest record for such offenses
as assault and battery, sexual abuse, and weapons violations. In Moss’
view, those who fail to recognize Shakur as a prophet are limited by the
“bourgeois paradigms” that shape their thinking.
“Bourgois paradigms” is the nomenclature of Marxism.
Another notable religious supporter of Barack Obama is Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest who has been the pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago since 1981. A great admirer of Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, Pfleger views America as a nation plagued by “classism and racism,” and he identifies white racism as “the number one sin in this country.”
Pfleger’s views on race were shaped, in large measure, by black radicalism in the 1960s. “I got very educated by the[Black] Panthers—very educated,” Pfleger once toldTrumpet magazine, a publication of Rev. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ.
At the February 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King, Pfleger said that America’s
“greatest addiction is to racism.” In a similar vein, he
suggests that blacks in the United States are in constant danger of
being attacked or exploited by white racists. “African American life in
America is still threatened and still at risk,” he says,
seemingly unaware that 95 percent of black murder victims and 80
percent of all black crime victims are victimized by black, not white,
perpetrators.
In May 2008, Pfleger was a guest preacher at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), In his sermon, Pfleger argued in favor of slavery reparations:
“Honestly now, to address the one who says, ‘Don’t hold me responsible
for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what
your ancestors did ... and unless you are ready to give up the benefits,
throw away your 401 [K] fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away
all the monies you put away into the company you walked into because
your daddy and grand daddy … Unless you are willing to give up the
benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your
generation, because you are the beneficiaries of this insurance policy.”
In the same sermon, Pfleger impugned white Americans for failing
to understand the responsibility they all bore for the historical and
continuing afflictions of the black community. Said Pfleger:
“It’s like saying to a woman who’s been repeatedly raped over, and
over, and over, and over, over, and over [and telling her] ‘you need to
get over it.’ ‘'The HELL I do,’ [she would say]. Get the sucker who’s
been raping me and make him pay.’ Well, America has been raping people
of color, and America has to pay the price. America has to pay the price
for the rape.”
Pfleger has had a longstanding friendly relationship (since the late 1980s) with Obama and has played a significant role as a spiritual advisor for the latter. Between 1995 and 2001, Pfleger contributed a
total of $1,500 to Obama’s various political campaigns—including a $200
donation in April 2001, approximately three months after Obama (who was
then an Illinoisstate senator) had announced that St. Sabina programs
would be receiving $225,000 in state grants. (After Obama’s 2004
election to the U.S. Senate, he would earmark an additional $100,000 in
federal tax money for Pfleger’s work.) Pfleger also has hosted a number
of faith forums for Obama during his political campaigns.
In January 2007 Pfleger said that
Obama, who had recently announced his candidacy for
the U.S. presidency, “is the best thing to come across the political
scene since Bobby Kennedy.” Obama’s campaign would later feature Pfleger’s enthusiastic endorsement on its website.
Cornel West (Marxist) and Obama’sBlack Advisory Council
( Return to top):
West deems the United States a nation rife with bigotry which finds its
expression in an endless flow of affronts and assaults aimed against the
black community. He has branded the U.S. a “racist patriarchal” nation
where “white supremacy” continues to define everyday life. “White
America,” he writes, “has been historically weak-willed in ensuring
racial justice and has continued to resist fully accepting the humanity
of blacks.” This has resulted, he claims, in the creation of many
“degraded and oppressed people [who are] hungry for identity, meaning,
and self-worth.”
West attributes most of the black community’s problems to “existential
angst derive[d] from the lived experience of ontological wounds and
emotional scars inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and images
permeating U.S. society and culture.” He explains that “the accumulated
effect of the black wounds and scars suffered in a white-dominated
society is a deep-seated anger, a boiling sense of rage, and a
passionate pessimism regarding America’s will to justice.” “It goes
without saying,” he adds, “that a profound hatred of African people …
sits at the center of American civilization.”
In West’s view,
the 9/11 attacks gave white Americans a glimpse of what it means to be a
black person in the United States—feeling “unsafe, unprotected, subject
to random violence and hated for who they are.” “Since 9/11,” he said,
“the whole nation has the blues, when before it was just black people.”
Viewing capitalism as the root cause of these alleged American evils,
the Marxist West declares: “Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the
concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts
of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed
elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit—often at the
cost of the common good.”
Al Sharpton is a civil rights activist known for his racially charged,
incendiary rhetoric. Sharpton first entered the national consciousness
in November 1987, when he injected himself into the case of
15-year-old Tawana Brawley, who claimed that she had been abducted,
raped, and smeared with feces by a mysterious gang of six whites that
included some law-enforcement officers in Dutchess County, New
York. Despite a complete absence of any credible evidence, Sharpton made
increasingly wild accusations—all of which were eventually
disproved—against innocent people like then-Duchess County assistant
prosecutor Steve Pagones. Sharpton knew the case was a total fraud from
day 1, but he has never acknowledged or apologized for what he did to
people like Pagones.
In 1991, a 7-year old black child named Gavin Cato was accidentally
killed by an out-of-control car driven by a Hasidic Jew in Crown
Heights, New York. Within three hours, an angry black mob hunted down
and killed an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, in
retribution. Sharpton fanned the flames of racial hatred by publicly
announcing that it was not merely a car accident that had killed Gavin
Cato, but rather “the social accident of apartheid.” He organized angry
demonstrations and challenged local Jews—whom he derisively called
“diamond merchants”—to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my
house” to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the
Jewish driver had run over the Cato child while in a drunken stupor.
Stirred in part by such rhetoric, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took
violently to the streets for three days and nights of rioting. Sharpton
reacted to chaos by stating, “We must not reprimand our children for
outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive
system.”
Also in 1995, Sharpton led his National Action Network in an ugly
boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store
in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners announced
that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no
longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The
street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s
“Buy Black” Committee. Repeatedly referring to the Jewish proprietors of
Freddy’s as “crackers,” Powell and his fellow protesters menacingly
told passersby, “Keep [going] right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the
greedy Jew bastards killing our [black] people. Don’t give the Jew a
dime.” Some picketers openly threatened violence against whites and
Jews—all under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton. The subsequent
picketing became increasingly menacing in its tone until one of the
protesters eventually shot four whites in the store and then set the
building on fire—killing seven employees, most of whom were Hispanics.
Sharpton’s career since then has consisted of an ever-growing list of
reckless charges of racism against police officers, political leaders,
corporate executives, and a host of others.
In March 2008, Sharpton, a strong supporter of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, stated that he was accustomed to speaking with Obama on a regular basis—“two or three times a week.” Sharpton also said that
he had told Obama four months earlier, “I won’t either endorse you or
not endorse you. But I will tell you I can be freer not endorsing you to
help you and everybody else.” According to Sharpton, Obama protested and asked for his public support: “No, no, no. I want you to endorse.”
In April 2007, Obamaaddressed Sharpton's
National Action Network, praising it for its good work. He was back
again in 2008, calling Sharpton “a voice for the voiceless and ...
dispossessed.” “What National Action Network has done is so important to
change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up,” Obama stated.
In 1988 Obama applied for admission toHarvard Law School. At the time, a Muslim attorney and black nationalist namedKhalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansourasked
civil rights activist Percy Sutton to send a letter of recommendation
to his (Sutton’s) friends at Harvard on Obama’s behalf.
Before becoming a Muslim, al-Mansour in the 1960s was named Don Warden.
He was deeply involved in San Francisco Bay Area racial politics as
founder of a group called the African American Association. A close
personal adviser to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, al-Mansour helped the pair establish the Black Panther Party but later broke with them when they entered coalitions with white radical groups.
Al-Mansour is an outspoken hater of the United States, Israel, and white
people generally. In recent years he has accused the U.S. of plotting a
“genocide” designed “to remove 15 million black people, considered
disposable, of no relevance, value or benefit to the American society.”
He has told fellow blacks that
“whatever you do to [white people], they deserve it, God wants you to
do it and that’s when you cut out the nose, cut out the ears, take flesh
out of their body, don’t worry because God wants you to do it.”
Alleging further that Palestinians in Israel “are being brutalized like
savages,” he accuses the Jews of “stealing the land the same way the
Christians stole the land from the Indians in America.”
In March 2005 Obama told the 3-million-member, Web-based, political network MoveOn: “You and millions of others, working through MoveOn, have helped change the way politics works in this country.”
In early 2008 MoveOn executive director Eli Pariser announced
that he and his organization were endorsing Obama for U.S. President.
“We’ve learned that the key to achieving change in Washington without
compromising core values is having a galvanized electorate to back you
up,” said Pariser, “and Barack Obama has our members ‘fired up and ready to go’ on that front.”
“In just a few years, the members of MoveOn have once again
demonstrated that real change comes not from the top-down, but from the
bottom-up. From their principled opposition to the Iraq war—a war I also
opposed from the start—to their strong support for a number of
progressive causes, MoveOn shows what Americans can achieve when we come
together in a grassroots movement for change…. I thank them for their
support and look forward to working with their members in the weeks and
months ahead.”
MoveOn uses its fundraising clout to push the Democratic Party to the
political far left. This game plan was enunciated most clearly in an
email that MoveOn PAC Director Eli Pariser disseminated to the group’s financial supporters on December 9, 2004. Regarding MoveOn’s role in the Democratic Party, Pariser wrote:
“For years, the party has been led by eliteWashington insiders who are
closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base. But
we can’t afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of
professional election losers. In the last year, grass-roots contributors
like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign
and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to
be competitive. Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re
going to take it back.”
Political Alliance with an Advocate of Reparations for Slavery
( Return to top):
In 2004 Obama’s friend and political supporter, the longtime Chicago alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, a passionate admirer of Louis Farrakhan, helped U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama win the voting in Chicago’s predominantly black wards.
Tillman was one of America’s leading and most vocal proponents of
reparations for slavery. In 2001, for instance, she hosted the first
ever “National Reparations Convention for African-American Descendants
of African Slaves” in Chicago. Under Tillman’s direction, the convention
drafted a “national plan” that would have compelled the federal
government and American corporations to provide reparations to blacks
nationwide.
Slavery, Tillman insisted, had “put the freed slaves and their
descendants at a disadvantage that will never be overcome without
reparations.” Claiming that America remains “one of the cruelest nations
in the world when it comes to black folks,” Tillman declares that
the U.S. “owes blacks a debt.”
In 2006 Obama endorsed Tillman in the Third Ward race for the Chicago City Council.
Obama’s Lies about His Muslim Upbringing as a Child (Return to top):
In December 2007 Obama said,
“I’ve always been a Christian. The only connection I’ve had to Islam is
that my grandfather on my father’s side came from that country [Kenya].
(Actually, both his natural father and his stepfather were practicing
Muslims.) But I’ve never practiced Islam.”
In February 2008 Obama elaborated,
“I have never been a Muslim.… [O]ther than my name and the fact that I
lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child
[Indonesia, 1967-71], I have very little connection to the Islamic
religion.”
Certainly there is no reason to believe that Obama is a Muslim today.
Even if he were, that should not disqualify him or anyone else from
being able to run for President, so long as the candidate has no desire
to replace the U.S. legal system and the Constitution with Sharia law.
What is troubling, however, is that Obama flat-out lied when he said
that he had never been a Muslim at any time in his life. We now know that
as a child in Indonesia, Obama spent two years in a Muslim school, then
two more in a Catholic school. School records show that even when Obama
attended the Catholic school, he nonetheless was enrolled as a Muslim.
Journalist Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times—hardly a mouthpiece of the Republican Party—learned from Obama’s childhood friends that “Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque.”
Similarly, Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune—another publication which has endorsed Obama and whose politics are quite definitively on the left—found that Obama, as a youngster, had commonly accompanied “his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.”
An Indonesian friend of Obama, Zulfin Adi, states definitively: “[Obama] was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong [a garment associated with Muslims].”
Rony Amir, an Indonesian who remembers the young Obama, describes Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.”
Again, what is of concern is not that Obama was a Muslim during his childhood, but that he has chosen to lie about it.
Issues and Perspectives Redistribution of Wealth
( Return to top):
During a call-in program on Chicago’s WBEZ public radio in 2001, state senator Barack Obama said the following (click here for audio):
“You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the
civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think
where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed
peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be
able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for
it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of
redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and
economic justice in this society.
“And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to
characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break
free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding
Fathers in the Constitution—at least as it’s been interpreted, and the
Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the
Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the
states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to
you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state
government must do on your behalf.
“And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the
civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so
court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of
the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that
are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which
you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer
from that.”
A caller then asked: “The gentleman [Obama] made the point that the
Warren Court wasn’t terribly radical. My question is … is it too late
for that kind of reparative work, economically, and is that the
appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place?”
Obama replied:
“You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive
change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that
way.... You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues,
you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process
that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know,
the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very
hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.
“So I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for
it, legally, you know, I think any three of us sitting here could come
up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the
courts.”
In summation, Obama views the redistribution of wealth as the very
embodiment of “political and economic justice.” His assertion that this
redistribution “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time”
implies that he sees it as a task which can be done more efficiently by
the President. The very purpose of the Constitution was tolimitgovernment,
but Obama sees this as a negative, as an impediment to “redistributive
change.” And he believes that there is in fact “a rationale for bringing
about economic change through the courts.” That is, he favors activist
judges who create, rather than interpret, law. He has acknowledged that those are precisely the types of Justices he would appoint to the Supreme Court.
People of good will and good hearts can disagree on whether abortion is
morally acceptable or not. But voters should know that Obama, throughout
his political career, has consistently and invariably voted in favor of
expanding not only abortion rights, but also the funding of abortion
services with taxpayer dollars. His voting record does not contain a single instance of ever having voted for any regulation or restriction on any abortion-related procedure whatsoever, nor for any restriction on government funding for such procedures. None. Consequently, he has received perfect 100 percent ratings from
NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, the later of which
ranks as world’s largest abortion mill—taking in hundreds of millions of
taxpayer dollars each year to fund the abortions it performs. By
contrast, the National Right to Life Committee gives Obama a zero rating
year after year.
Abortion for Minors
As a state senator, Obama voted “No” on a bill prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to gain access to abortion services.
He also voted “No” to requiring physicians to notify the parents of minors who get out-of-state abortions.
Legally Requiring Doctors to Perform Abortions Even if They Object
On July 17, 2007, Obama declared, “The first thing I’d do as President
is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” This bill would effectively
terminate all state restrictions on government funding for abortions. It
would also invalidate state laws that currently protect medical
personnel from losing their jobs if they refuse, for personal reasons,
to participate in abortion procedures. In other words, doctors would be
compelled either to participate in a procedure they find morally
repugnant, or to find another line of work. Period.
Partial-Birth Abortion
When Obama was an Illinois state senator, two separate partial-birth
abortion bans came up for vote in 1997. On both occasions Obama voted
“Present,” the functional equivalent of a vote against the ban. In
the Illinois state senate, a “Present” vote is tallied as a “No.” Under
such a system, when a politician wishes to defeat a particular piece of
legislation but does not want to go on record as having voted against
it—for fear of possibly alienating certain classes of potential future
donors or voters—he sometimes will vote “Present.” Obama actually did
precisely that on 130 separate occasions as a state senator—a number far
higher than average among state senators. It is not at all illogical to
reason that such votes (i.e., “Present”) result from an admixture of
political calculation and personal gutlessness.
For readers who may be unfamiliar with the specifics of the term in
question, “partial-birth abortion” is a procedure whose technical name
is “intact dilation and extraction.” It is used only in the late stages
of pregnancy. Here’s how it works: Over a two-to-three-day period, the
mother’s cervix is gradually dilated with laminaria tents, which are
essentially sticks of seaweed that absorb fluid and consequently swell,
very gradually, in size. Once the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the
doctor performing the abortion uses forceps to grasp the baby’s legs and
pull them out of the birth canal, hence the term “partial birth.” The
doctor then extracts the rest of the baby’s body with the exception of
the head, which is left inside the birth canal so as to prevent the baby
from being fully “born.” At that point, the doctor makes an incision at
the base of the baby’s skull, inserts a scissors-like instrument into
the incision and opens them to widen the hole, and then vacuums the
brain out with a suction catheter, causing the skull to collapse and
allowing the dead baby to pass through the end of the birth canal with
relative ease. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, in the year 2000 this procedure was performed approximately 2,200 times in the United States.
Obama has explained that his opposition to the ban on partial-birth
abortion was rooted in the fact that the bill contained no exception for
cases where a mother’s “health” might require the procedure. But as
anyone who is familiar with this issue understands, the “health of the
mother” exception includes not only the mother’s physical or medical
condition, but also her mental health, which she may claim would be
compromised if she did not undergo an abortion. In other words, the
“health of the mother” exception is a canard that effectively serves as a
continued endorsement of abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy.
On the very germane topic of whether partial-birth abortion might ever
actually be necessary to protect the physical well-being of the mother,
former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop says the
following: “Partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to
protect a mother’s health or her future fertility. On the contrary, this
procedure can pose a significant threat to both.” In making this
assertion, Koop has plenty of company among medical professionals.
Similarly, the Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth declares:
“The most serious … distortion is the claim … that a partial-birth
abortion can be medically necessary to protect the health of a woman
carrying a child diagnosed with severe congenital or genetic
disabilities ... There is no medical basis for such an assertion…. There
is only one reason to ever consider the partial-birth abortion
procedure ‘necessary’ —to ensure the delivery of a dead child rather
than a living one.”
Taxpayer Funding for Partial-Birth Abortion
As a state senator, Obama voted against legislation that would have
ended state funding of partial-birth abortions. In other words, he
deemed it appropriate for Illinois taxpayers to foot the bill for this
procedure.
Allowing the Death of Babies Who Survived Botched Abortions
As a state senator in 2001, Obama voted against
a piece of legislation known as the Induced Infant Liability Act, which
was intended to protect babies that survived late-term abortions from
being permitted to die of intentional neglect, in essence to fulfill the
mother’s wish to end the life of the baby which she had been carrying.
Obama explained his vote as follows:
“[W]henever we define a pre-viable fetus as a person that is protected
by the equal protection clause or other elements in the Constitution,
what we’re really saying is, in fact, that they are persons that are
entitled to the kinds of protections that would be provided to a—a
child, a nine-month-old—child that was delivered to term. That
determination, then, essentially, if it was accepted by a court, would
forbid abortions to take place.... For that reason, I think it would
probably be found unconstitutional.”
As author David Freddoso observes in his 2008 book The Case Against Barack Obama,
Obama’s argument “implies that babies born prematurely without
abortions might not be ‘persons.’ They might have to be ‘nine months
old’ before they count.... [O]ne might even conclude from [his words]
that he actually does think they are persons. But, he argues, we cannot
legally recognize them as ‘persons.’ Because if we do, then somewhere
down the road it might threaten someone’s right to an abortion....”
In an August 17, 2008 interview with
Pastor Rick Warren, Rev. Warren asked Obama directly: “Now, let’s deal
with abortion ... [A]t what point does a baby get human rights, in your
view?” To that question, Obama replied:
“Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a
theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that
question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.”
It is stunning, and morally repugnant, that someone who has never once voted against placing any restrictions whatsoever on any abortion procedure at any time,
could have uttered a response so intellectually shallow, vapid, and
incoherent—on a subject that is literally a matter of life and death for
some 1.2 million pregnant women, plus another 1.2 million unborn
babies, each year.
Obama’s Support forPlanned Parenthood
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is the largest
abortion provider in the United States, with some 850 clinics across the
country. PPFA purports to offer “a wide range of medical and counseling
services and health care education,” but its primary business is
providing abortion services. In 2004 Planned Parenthood completed 138
abortions for every adoption referral it made to an outside agency.
During the 2004-2005 fiscal year, the ratio was 180 to 1. In 2005-2006,
PPFA performed 264,943 abortions; garnered $345.1 million in clinic
income; took in $212.2 million in donations; and received record
taxpayer funding of $305.3 million. PPFA opposes any limitations on
access to abortion; it opposes a ban on partial-birth abortions; and it
opposes the requiring of parental notification for minors wishing to
undergo the procedure.
“Thanks to all of you at Planned Parenthood for all the work that you
are doing for women all across the country and for families all across
the country—and for men, who have enough sense to realize you are
helping them, all across the country…. We know that a woman’s right to
make a decision about how many children she wants to have and
when—without government interference—is one of the most fundamental
freedoms we have in this country…. Now the good news is that there has
been a decline in the teen birth rate, in part due to the outstanding
work of Planned Parenthood….”
Obama opposes immigration raids designed to identify illegal aliens in workplaces or housing units.
He says the U.S. should
“allow undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine,
learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to
become citizens.”
He is in favor of permitting illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.
He voted in favor of
allowing former illegal aliens who had previously worked at jobs under
phony or stolen Social Security numbers, to someday reap the benefits of
whatever Social Security contributions they may have made while they
were so employed.
He voted in favor of
an amendment placing an expiration date on a point-based immigration
system (i.e., a system that seeks to ensure that people with skills that
society needs are given preference for entry into the United States).
Obama instead advocates a system focusing on the reunification of family
members, even if that means permitting the relatives of illegal aliens
to join the latter in America.
He is a supporter of the DREAM Act, intended to allow illegal aliens to
attend college at the reduced tuition rates normally reserved for
in-state legal residents. He helped to pass a state version of such a
law in Illinois during his years as a state senator.
According to Dick Morris, the political strategist who formerly advised
President Bill Clinton, Obama’s plan for universal health care would
include coverage for illegal immigrants.
In March 2008, Obama voted to table a Senate amendment calling for the withdrawal of federal assistance “to sanctuary cities that ignore the immigration laws of the United States and create safe havens for illegal aliens and potential terrorists.”
Obama Visits La Raza
In July 2007 Obama was a featured speaker at the annual convention of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR),
an organization that lobbies for racial preferences, open borders, mass
immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Among his remarks were the following:
“I will never walk away from the 12 million undocumented immigrants who
live, work, and contribute to our country every single day…. [W]e are a
nation of immigrants—a nation that has always been willing to
give weary travelers from around the world the chance to come here and
reach for the dream that so many of us have reached for. … That’s
the America we believe in. But that’s the America that the President and
too many Republicans walked away from when the politics got tough....
[W]e saw parts of the immigration debate took a turn that was both ugly
and racist in a way we haven’t seen since the struggle for civil
rights.”
Indeed, Obama used the term “racist” to describe anyone’s opposition to
illegal immigration and the many costs it imposes—both in terms of money
and violent crime.
In July 2008, Obama again spoke to NCLR. Among his remarks were the following:
“It’s been the work of this organization for four decades—lifting
up families and transforming communities across America. And for that, I
honor you, I congratulate you, I thank you, and I wish you another
forty years as extraordinary as your last….
“The system isn’t working when 12 million people live in hiding, and
hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when
companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to
avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are
terrorized by ICE immigration raids—when nursing mothers are torn
from their babies, when children come home from school to find their
parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal
counsel….
“[W]e’ll make the system work again for everyone. By living up to the
ideals that this organization has always embodied the ideals reflected
in your name, ‘Raza,’ the people. [Actually, a literal translation is
“the race.”] … And together, we won’t just win an election; we will
transform this nation.”
U.S.Border Control Gives Obama a Low Rating
The U.S. Border Control (USBC), a nonprofit citizen’s lobby
dedicated to ending illegal immigration and securingAmerica’s borders,
reports that Obama’s immigration-related votes are consistent with
USBC’s values only 8 percent of the time. By USBC’s definition, Obama’s stance on immigration qualifies him as an “open borders” advocate.
Obama voted against permitting
exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). For his entire political career, he has opposed
such drilling. Says Obama:
“It is hard to overstate the degree to which our addiction to oil
undermines our future…. A large portion of the $800 million we spend on
foreign oil every day goes to some of the world's most volatile regimes.
And there are the environmental consequences. Just about every
scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real. We
cannot drill our way out of the problem. Instead of subsidizing the oil
industry, we should end every single tax break the industry currently
receives and demand that 1 percent of the revenues from oil companies
with over $1 billion in quarterly profits go toward financing
alternative energy research and infrastructure.”
At a July 30, 2008 campaign stop in Missouri, Obama said:
“There are things that you can do individually ... to save energy;
making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could
save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off [from]
drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting
regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.”
Obama is a staunch supporter of federal ethanol subsidies; in 2006 he
himself inserted an ethanol subsidy into proposed tax legislation.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, he characterized “alternative fuels like E85, a fuel formulated with 85 percent ethanol” as “the future of the auto industry.”
But by 2008 ethanol had proven to be an unmitigated disaster. It was
contributing to record-high food prices not only in the U.S. but in many
other nations; in some parts of the developing world, full-blown food
riots erupted. Author David Freddoso explains what he calls “the
physics of ethanol” as follows:
“To produce five gallons of ethanol from corn, one must spend the
energy equivalent of roughly four gallons of ethanol for farming,
shipping, and processing. (In other words, ethanol has a 25 percent net
energy yield.) ... America’s entire 6.5 billion gallon ethanol
production created the net energy equivalent of 2.2 days’ worth of
American gasoline consumption. In exchange for that miniscule output,
federal and state governments provide between $6.3 billion and $8.7
billion in annual direct and indirect subsidies.... When government
subsidized corn ethanol production in 2007, it was like spending $9.00
to create a gallon of gasoline, and doing it 853 million times.”
In January 2008 Obama said the following about the future of the coal industry, which currently accounts for half of all the electricity
produced in America: “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant,
they can, It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they will be
charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.” Added Obama:
“When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, you know, under my
plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily
skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or
bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know,
natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the
industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That
will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”
Throughout his entire legislative career, Obama has consistently
supported increases in the tax rates paid by Americans, and has
consistently opposed tax reductions. In 2001 he said, “I consider the
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to be both fiscally irresponsible and
morally troubling.” He has candidly stated that he plans to let those
tax cuts expire if he is elected President.
During a June 28, 2007 primary debate at Howard University, Obama was
asked, “Do you agree that the rich aren't paying their fair share of
taxes?” He replied:
“There’s no doubt that the tax system has been skewed. And the Bush tax cuts—people
didn’t need them, and they weren’t even asking for them, and that’s why
they need to be less, so that we can pay for universal health care and
other initiatives.”
Obama’s view is founded on the premise that higher taxes will raise more
government revenue to pay for those programs. This is the view of
someone so wedded to the dogma of high taxes, that he is seemingly
ignorant of the fact that, over the course of recent American history,
there have been at least three instances of major reductions in tax
rates which, because they stimulated economic activity, led to increases
in government revenues. Those were the tax cuts of JFK, Ronald Reagan,
and George W. Bush.
In 1999 Obama voted “No” on a bill to create an income tax credit for the families of all full-time K-12 pupils.
In 2003 he voted “Yes” on a bill to retain the Illinois Estate Tax. He
also supported raising taxes on insurance premiums and levying a new tax
on businesses.
Inhis keynote address at a 2006 “Building a Covenant for a New
America” conference, he urged Americans of all faiths to convene on
Capitol Hill and give it an “injection of morality” by opposing a repeal
of the estate tax.
In an April 2008 Democratic primary debate, Obama was asked, by
journalist Charlie Gibson, a question about his proposal to nearly
double the capital gains tax (from 15 percent to 28 percent). Said Gibson:
“… In each instance when the rate dropped [in the 1990s], revenues from
the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s,
when the [capital gains] tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues
went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100
million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”
Obama replied that
he wished to raise the tax “for purposes of fairness.” “We saw an
article today,” he explained, “which showed that the top 50 hedge fund
managers made $29 billion last year…. [T]hose who are able to work the
stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower
tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.”
In a September 2008 Fox News Channel television interview, Obama, who has never once opposeda
tax hike or supported a tax decrease, reiterated a pledge he had been
making to cut taxes for 95 percent of "middle class" Americans, while
raising taxes on those who earn more than $250,000. Political
commentator Bill O’Reilly objected, “That’s class warfare. You’re taking
the wealthy in America, the big earners … you’re taking money away from
them and you’re giving it to people who don’t. That’s called income
redistribution. It’s a socialist tenet. Come on, you know that.”
Obama replied, “Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax…. If I
am sitting pretty and you’ve got a waitress who is making minimum wage
plus tips, and I can afford it and she can’t, what’s the big deal for me
to say, I’m going to pay a little bit more? That is neighborliness.”
In October 2008, CNS News provided the following analysis of the Obama tax plan:
“The heart of Obama’s tax cut proposal is in his use of refundable tax
credits, which the [nonpartisan Tax Policy] Center describes as ‘credits
available to eligible households even if they have no income tax
liability’—in short, refunds available even to those who don’t
pay taxes. These refunds are claimed on tax returns and are paid to all
taxpayers who qualify for them, regardless of whether they owe taxes or
not. These refunds have the ability of reducing a taxpayer’s liability
below zero, meaning they can get a refund without actually paying taxes.
“In real numbers, 60.7 million people who have no tax burden at all
will receive refunds from Obama, while only 33.8 million people, who pay
approximately 40 percent of income taxes, will get any kind of
refund. Twenty percent of taxpayers, who pay 87.5 percent of total
income taxes, will actually see after-tax income decline under Obama by
nearly two percent, according to the Center.”
It is a misnomer to say that 60.7 million non-taxpayers will receive tax
“refunds.” They will actually be receiving what amounts to welfare
payments. In other words, the size of the welfare state will grow
substantially.
Several organizations committed to fighting for low taxes—the
National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Small Business
& Entrepreneurship Council, the National Federation of Independent
Business, and the Business-Industry Political Action Committee—have consistently given Obama the lowest possible ratings.
Meeting Adversarial World Leaders “Without Preconditions”
During a July 2007 Democrat primary debate, Obama was asked: “[W]ould
you be willing to meet separately, without preconditions, during the
first year of your administration, with the leaders of Iran, Syria,
Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides
our countries?”
He replied: “I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous.”
Notwithstanding subsequent criticisms from Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and numerous other Democrats as well as political commentators—all of whom contended that some preconditions were essential—Obama initially did not change his position.
Since that time, however, Obama and his campaign staffers have sought to
quietly, incrementally reframe the candidate’s position. For instance,
his senior policy advisor Susan Rice in early 2008 said Obama would
“meet with the appropriate ... leaders” of such countries, specifying
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In May 2008, Obama further parsed
the words he had spoken ten months earlier: “What I said was I would
meet with our adversaries including Iran, includingVenezuela,
including Cuba, including North Korea, without preconditions but that
does not mean without preparation.”
Rarely has a weaker, more pathetic spin been proffered by any political candidate.
“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these countries are tiny compared to
theSoviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us…. Iran may spend
one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried
to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports
terrorism across the regions and militias in Iraq. It
threatens Israel’s existence. It denies the holocaust….”
Obama voted “No” on a bill to remove the need for a FISA [Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant before the government may proceed
with wiretapping in terrorism-related investigations of suspects in
other countries. “Warrantless surveillance of American citizens, in
defiance of FISA, is unlawful and unconstitutional,” says Obama.
But contrary to Obama’s assertion, in 2002 the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, citing a precedent from 22 years earlier, ruled that
“the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless
searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.... We take for
granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that
is so, FISA could not encroach on the president’s constitutional power.”
Americans should refuse to support a presidential candidate who would be
more inclined to fabricate some supposedly inalienable “rights” for
potential terrorists, than to do everything in his power to protect the
United States from future acts of terrorism.
Should Terror Suspects be Tried by Military Commissions (or Civilian Courts)?
(Return to top):
In Obama’s view, “the creation of military tribunals”—where military
officers serve as the judges and jurors—to try terror suspects captured
in the War on Terror was, from its inception, “a bad idea.” Obama feels
that such tribunals trample on the civil rights and liberties of
defendants who, he contends, should be entitled to all the rights and
protections afforded by the American criminal court system—where the
standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably
stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals.
Military tribunals are designed to adjudicate the cases of so-called
“lawful combatants”—as distinguished from “unlawful combatants”—who are
captured in battle. The former are entitled to prisoner-of-war status
and its accompanying Geneva Convention protections; the latter are
entitled to none of that. Article IV of the Geneva Convention defines
lawful combatants as those whose military organization meets four very specific criteria:
“(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his
subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign [a uniform or
emblem] recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly;
[and] (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the
laws and customs of war.”
Al Qaeda, for one, fails even to come close to satisfying these conditions.
But Obama opposes making any distinction between lawful and unlawful
combatants, and has called for the repeal of any separate standards
regulating the treatment of each.
Over Obama’s objection, Congress in November 2006 passed a Military Commissions Act formally authorizing the adjudication of war-related crimes and terrorism cases in military courts.
The issue of whether it is appropriate to try a suspected terrorist in a
military court depends upon how one answers a single overriding
question: Is terrorism a matter of war, or is it a legal issue where
redress should be pursued via the criminal-justice system—like robbery,
vandalism, or murder?
Obama has made his position crystal clear.
Habeas Corpus for Detained Terror Suspects?
( Return to top):
Obama has voted in favor of preserving habeas corpus for the foreign detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Habeas corpus is
the notion that the government may not detain a prisoner without filing
specific charges that can expeditiously be brought before a court.
U.S. officials consider the Guantanamo prisoners—captured mostly on the
battlefields of the Middle East—to be of the highest value for
intelligence purposes, or to constitute, in their own persons, a
significant threat to theUnited States.
Says Obama:
“Why don’t we close Guantanamo and restore the right of habeas corpus,
because that’s how we lead, not with the might of our military, but the
power of our ideals and the power of our values. It’s time to show the
world we’re not a country that ships prisoners in the dead of night to
be tortured in far off countries.”
As political analyst Dick Morris has explained,
Obama’s prescription for dealing with terrorism is: “to go back to the
era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the
successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade
Center in 1993.” Adds Morris:
“[T]hat prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to
avert 9/11 than any other single factor. Because we treated the 1993
WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and
constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the
terrorists. As a result, we didn’t know that Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda were responsible for the attack until 1997—too late for us to grab
Osama when Sudan offered to send him to us in 1996.”
Military/Missile Defense/Weapons Systems ( Return to top):
Obama has consistently opposed America’s development of a missile defense system. In a February 2008 campaign ad, he stated:
“I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will
cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not
weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.”
This objective dovetails perfectly with Congressman Barney Frank’s
recent assertion that the U.S. military budget should be slashed by 25
percent.
It also dovetails perfectly with very real, clearly enunciated threats
from increasingly belligerent nations such as Iran, Venezuela,
Syria, North Korea, and Russia.
Speaking in August 2007 about America’s post-9/11 military initiative in Afghanistan, Obama suggested that
as a result of President Bush’s poor military leadership, U.S. troops
in Afghanistan had done a disservice to their mission by “just air
raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous
problems there.”
It is obscene that an aspiring president could utter, for political
expediency, such an abominable lie about his own country’s military.
Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, though when the
Senate voted in October 2002 on whether to authorize the use of force to
remove Saddam Hussein from power, Obama was still in the Illinois state
senate and thus was not in a position to vote against such
authorization. His position, however, was a reasonable one, for which a
good case could be made.
By contrast, his subsequent characterization of George W. Bush as a President who had led America in a “rush to war” was entirely unreasonable. In fact, it was a demonstrably vicious lie.
By making his “rush to war” claim, Obama exhibits either a willful
denial of the timeline of events leading up to the war, or a complete
ignorance vis a vis that timeline:
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush declared that Saddam Hussein was in
defiance of the arms control and inspection agreements he had signed as a
condition of the truce that had brought the 1991 Gulf War to a close.
On January 20, 2002, Bush issued an ultimatum demanding that Saddam comply, for the first time in more than ten years, with the disarmament and transparency terms of the truce he had signed in 1991.
In September 2002, nine months after issuing the aforementioned
ultimatum, Bush went to the United Nations to make a case for the notion
that if Saddam were not forced to honor the resolutions he had been
flouting for more than a decade, the UN would fall into utter
irrelevance.
In October 2002, Bush went to Congress and got (by a vote of 77 to 23)
the Senate authorization he needed to use force against Iraq if Saddam
were to not comply with the UN resolutions.
Notwithstanding Democrats’ subsequent claims of having been “tricked”
and “deceived”—by a supposedly warmongering Commander in Chief—into
voting for the authorization of military force, every single senator who
cast his or her vote had full access to the very same intelligence
(regarding Iraq’s WMD programs) that was in President Bush’s possession.
Moreover, all 435 members of the House of Representatives were given access to the intelligence as well.
On November 9, 2002, the UN Security Council voted unanimously, 15 to 0,
to pass Resolution 1441, which told Saddam—who already had defied or
ignored 16 previous UN resolutions—that he would be given one last
opportunity to comply with his disarmament and transparency obligations
within the next 30 days.
He failed to do so.
Two-and-a-half months later—on January 28, 2003—President Bush said the following:
“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since
when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely
putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to
fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all
recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint
of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.”
No logical case can be made for characterizing President Bush’s words
and actions as those of someone who, as Barack Obama has depicted him,
recklessly “rushed” to war. Fully 18 months elapsed from Bush’s
initial post-9/11 assertion that Iraq was in violation of its
agreements, to the start of the war in March 2003.
Reasonable people can say, of course, that President Bush was wrong to
invade Iraq. But those same reasonable people ought not to forget that
the intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel,
and even France all agreed that
Saddam posed a grave and gathering threat to other nations. Nor should
reasonable critics of the decision to go to war forget that every major
Democrat figure in America agreed, at the time, that Saddam represented
a menace specifically to America. Consider, for instance, the
following quotes, which are representative of many more exactly like them:
* “It would be naive to the point of great danger not to believe that,
left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will misjudge, provoke and
stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized
world. He has as much as promised it.”— John Kerry, October 9, 2002
* “If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international
community’s already existing order, then he will have invited
enforcement, even if the enforcement is mostly at the hands of the
United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to
act.” — John Kerry, September 6, 2002
* “Saddam Hussein could not be left to his own devices based on
everything we learned about him for seven and a half years while we were
inspecting in Iraq. People have forgotten that for seven and a half
years, we found weapons of mass destruction. We were destroying weapons
of mass destruction. We were, the United States of America, together
with … the United Nations.” — John Kerry, September 14, 2003
* “[I]f in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a
grave threat to the well-being of our nation or the entire world and it
cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we
believe is right and wise.” — John Kerry, November 9, 1997
* “Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic
missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them.
Not once, but repeatedly.… The international community had little doubt
then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again….
Second, if Saddam can crippled the weapons inspection system and get
away with it, he would conclude that the international community—led by
the United States—has simply lost its will. He will surmise that he has
free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction, and someday—make no
mistake—he will use it again as he has in the past…. And mark my words,
he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he
will use them.” — Bill Clinton, December 1998
* “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock,
his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also
given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda
members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein
will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical
warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.” — Hillary
Clinton, October 10, 2002
* “We know that he [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological
and chemical weapons throughout his country….Iraq's search for weapons
of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume
that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. — Al Gore,
Sept. 23, 2002
* “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and
developing weapons of mass destruction…. He must be disarmed.” — Ted
Kennedy, September 27, 2002
* “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of
mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region
and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” — Nancy
Pelosi, December 16, 1998
* “Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and
our allies … We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has
already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is
trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to
build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to
achieving that goal.” — John Edwards, October 10, 2002
* “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working
aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear
weapons within the next five years has made in development of weapons of
mass destruction.... Saddam’s existing biological and chemical weapons
capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now … we must authorize
the President to take the necessary steps to deal with that
threat.” — Jay Rockefeller, October 10, 2002
* “He [Saddam] is producing WMDs and he is qualitatively and
quantitatively different from other dictators.” — Madeline Albright,
February 18, 1998
Barack Obama disagreed with all these people, and with the intelligence
agencies of the aforementioned nations. On October 2, 2002, the very day
the Senate resolved to authorize the use of force against Iraq, Obama
delivered a speech in
Chicago condemning the possibility that the Bush administration would
launch a “dumb” and “rash” war which would be a “cynical attempt by …
arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own
ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives
lost and in hardships borne.” He further derided “the attempt by
political hacks like [Republican strategist] Karl Rove to distract us
from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the
median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock
market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great
Depression.” “I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct
threat to the United States, or to his neighbors,” said Obama, “… and
that in concert with the international community he can be contained
until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin
of history.”
Based upon the foregoing statements, some have concluded that Obama was
wise and prescient in counseling against war. But in reality, Obama’s
position on the war was not at all consistent. Indeed it changed
repeatedly with the crisscrossing of political winds. During a November
11, 2007 appearance on Meet The Press, Obama was confronted about that reality by newsman Tim Russert:
“In July of ’04 [you said]: ‘I’m not privy to Senate intelligence
reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,’ in terms of how you
would have voted on the war [in 2002].
“And then this: ‘There’s not much of a difference between my position
on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.’ That was July of ’04.
“And this: ‘I think’ there’s ‘some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war.’
“It doesn’t seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that
you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may
have voted for it.”
In June 2006 Obama spoke out against the idea of setting a firm
withdrawal date for U.S. troops in Iraq. Immediately after the midterm
election five months later, however, he declared that it was vital “to
change our policy” and to bring home all the troops promptly. In January
2007 Obama proposed legislation calling for a complete troop withdrawal
within 14 months. He also said that the U.S. presence in Iraq was
“illegal.”
President Bush announced in January 2007 that he would send a “surge” of
some 21,500 additional troops to Iraq in an effort to quell the
insurgency there. In response, Obama said:
“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to
solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the
reverse.” Throughout 2007, Obama continued to argue that the surge was
ill-advised.
In 2008 Obama’s campaign website declared that if he were elected, he
“would immediately begin to pull out troops engaged in combat operations
at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the
end of [2009].”
Obama later backed away from his position that a firm withdrawal
timetable was necessary, but he refused to acknowledge that he had
changed his mind, or that his earlier policy may have been misguided.
Notwithstanding his generally consistent calls for swift U.S. troop
withdrawal, Obama, in a July 2008 discussion with Iraqi leaders
in Baghdad, privately tried to persuade the
latter to delay an agreement on a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal until
after the November elections. According to Iraqi Foreign Minister
Hoshyar Zebari:
“He [Obama] asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until
after the U.S. elections and the formation of a new administration
in Washington…. However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security
agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than
keeping the matter open.”
The political implications of delaying the troop withdrawal were clear:
If Obama were to win the election and subsequently set the withdrawal in
motion, he could claim credit for what President Bush allegedly had
been unable or unwilling to do.
Also in July 2008, by which time the surge had proven to be extremely effective in reducing the violence in Iraq, Obama continued to say that the correct course of action would have been “withdrawal”—in other words, surrender.
Obama adamantly opposes the concept of vouchers which would give
low-income parents the ability to cover the cost of sending their
children to the private schools of their choice, rather than being
forced to send those youngsters to the abysmal, failing schools
of America’s inner cities. Obama’s opposition to vouchers, which a vast
majority of low-income minority parents favor, is easy to explain: He
and the Democratic Party receive enormous sums of money from the
nation’s largest labor union, the National Education Association (NEA),
which, of course, stridently condemns vouchers because they would
siphon away a portion of the taxpayer money that currently supports the
public education system.
Obama is quite eloquent in speaking the language of the NEA. For every
education-related problem, he recommends precisely the same remedy—an
added infusion of taxpayer money. Throughout his 2008 presidential
campaign, for instance, he has repeatedly stressed the importance of
increasing government expenditures on public schooling.
“We’re going to put more money into education than we have,” he says.
“We have to invest in human capital.” Obama’s education plan calls for
“investing” $10 billion annually in a comprehensive “Zero to Five” plan
that “will provide critical supports to young children and their
parents.” He calls for more money to “create or expand high-quality
early care and education programs for pregnant women and children from
birth to age five”; to “quadruple the number of eligible children for
Early Head Start”; to “ensure [that] all children have access to
pre-school”; to “provide affordable and high-quality child care that
will … ease the burden on working families”; to allow “more money” to be
funneled “into after-school programs”; and to fund “home visiting
programs [by health-care personnel] to all low-income, first-time
mothers.”
As for the low graduation rates of nonwhite minorities, Obama’s proposed solution is
as predictable as the morning sunrise: “… I’m going to put billions of
dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our
African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are
getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers,
their colors, their letters.”
From listening to Obama, one would think that the U.S. currently devotes
only meager resources to its public education system. But that is not
at all the case. In the 2006-07 academic year, the United States spent
$553 billion on public elementary and secondary education—an average of
$9,266 per pupil. No other country on earth comes even close to earmarking such
a large percentage of its overall public spending for education. Even
so, the achievement-test scores of American public school students rank
well below those of students in most other industrialized countries around the world.
Why, then, does Obama speak as if throwing additional piles of money at the problem of student under-achievement, will solve it?
Busing and Race-Conscious Admissions Policies
( Return to top):
Obama opposed the Supreme Court’s 2007 split decision that
invalidated programs in Seattle and Louisville (Kentucky) which sought
to maintain “diversity” in local schools by factoring race into
decisions about which students could be admitted to any particular
school, or which students could be allowed to transfer from one school
to another. Under these programs, parents were not free to send their
children to the schools of their choice. Instead they were obliged to
abide by the quotas preordained by bureaucrats who had never met any of
the children whose educational lives they sought to micromanage. Both
the Seattle and Louisville programs were representative of similar plans
in hundreds of other school districts nationwide.
In Obama’s opinion,
the Court’s “wrong-headed” ruling was “but the latest in a string of
decisions by this conservative bloc of Justices that turn back the clock
on decades of advancement and progress in the struggle for equality.”
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954
overturned the notion that it was permissible to use race as the basis
for denying students the right to attend the schools they preferred.
Like the 1964 Civil Rights Act that would become law ten years later, Brown was intended to remove barriers to integration by outlawing de juresegregation, but it issued no mandate for measures (like busing or racial quotas) to forcibly integrate America’s schools or workplaces. Obama, however, wants to change all that.
Viewing racial mixing as an educational objective compelling enough to
warrant the use of quotas and busing for its attainment, Obama has stated that
“a racially diverse learning environment has a profoundly positive
educational impact on all students,” and thus he remains “devoted to
working toward this goal.”
Hoover Institution fellow and Stanford University sociologist Thomas
Sowell, who has studied this matter in great depth, has exposed Obama’s
assertion about “diversity” as yet another hollow, however politically
expedient, bromide. Sowell explains that
the “‘compelling’ benefits of ‘diversity’ are “as invisible as the
proverbial emperor’s new clothes”; that “[n]ot only is there no hard
evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in school
produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number
of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or
exceed the national average”; that for more than a century, “[s]ome
black students—in fact, whole schools of them—have performed
dramatically better than other black students and exceeded the norms in
white schools”; that black students who have been bussed into white
schools have seen no discernible rise in their standardized test
scores—“not even after decades of bussing”; and that “[n]ot only is
there no hard evidence” for the dogma “that there needs to be a
‘critical mass’ of black students in a given school or college in order
for them to perform up to standard,” but that “such hard evidence as
there is points in the opposite direction. Bright black kids have
benefited from being in classes with other bright kids, regardless of
the other kids’ color.”
Obama favors racial preferences for minorities in university
admissions, public employment, and state contracting. “I still believe
in affirmative action as a means of overcoming both historic and
potentially current discrimination,” says Obama.
In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope,
Obama expresses his belief that the U.S. Constitution is a “living
document” (subject to reinterpretation and change), and he states that,
as President, he would not appoint a strict constructionist Justice (one
who seeks to apply the text of the Constitution as it is written and
without further inference) to the Supreme Court. “The Constitution,”
Obama says, “… is not a static but rather a living document and must be
read in the context of an ever-changing world.”
Obama objected when President Bush in 2005 nominated John Roberts to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Obama stated that
“the critical ingredient” was neither what the law nor the Constitution
says, but rather “what is in the judge’s heart.” “[W]hen I examined
Judge Roberts’ record and history of public service, it is my personal
estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on
behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” Obama said in
a floor speech on September 22, 2005. “… [H]e seemed to have
consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to
eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political
process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of concerns that
it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a
woman rather than a man.”
Is it not remarkable that these words on behalf of “the weak” were
spoken by the same legislator who had never once voted to place a single
restriction on such practices as partial birth abortion, or on the
practice of permitting babies who had survived botched abortions to die
of intentional neglect?
Obama was also “deeply troubled” by “the philosophy, ideology and
record” of yet another Bush nominee to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito.
Obama said in
a floor speech on January 26, 2006: “[W]hen you look at his record,
when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I found that in
almost every case he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful
against the powerless.”
Columnist Terrence Jeffrey observes:
“In contrast to his soaring campaign rhetoric about
bringing America together, Obama’s Senate speeches against Roberts and
Alito revealed a polarizing vision of America. Minorities, women,
employees and criminal defendants were among the weak; majorities, men,
employers and prosecutors were among the strong.”
In April 2007, newsman Wolf Blitzer asked Obama, “Are there ... Justices
right now upon whom you would model [appointments to the Supreme
Court]?” Obama replied, “Well, you know, I think actually Justice
[Stephen] Breyer, Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg are very sensible
judges. I think that Justice [David] Souter ... is a sensible judge.”
In an August 2008 symposium, Obama was asked which, if any, of the
current Supreme Court Justices he would not have nominated if he had
been President at the time. He replied that
he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas, because “I don’t think
that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that
elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his
interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.”
On another occasion, Obama criticized Justice Antonin Scalia for
believing “that the original understanding [of the Constitution] must be
followed, and that if we strictly obey this rule, then Democracy is
respected.... [I]t is unrealistic to believe that a judge, two hundred
years later, can somehow discren the original intent of the Founders or
ratifiers.”
Explaining the criteria by which he would appoint judges to the federal bench, Obama declared:
"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what
it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's
like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old--and
that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges."
As Edward Whelan commented in The Weekly Standard: "So much for the judicial virtue of dispassion. So much for a craft of judging that is distinct from politics."
It is quite likely that the next President will appoint two or three
Supreme Court Justices during his administration. Those Justices will
have a profound influence on American law for at least a full
generation, and probably much longer than that. Obama has been clear. He
strongly prefers activist Justices who will legislate from the bench,
and whose political ideals are congruent to those of the American Civil
Liberties Union. He adamantly opposes the appointment of strict
constructionists.
This is a profoundly important consideration for voters.
Obama’s position on the issue of global warming is unambiguous. Says the Obama campaign:
“Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human
activities. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled
in the last 30 years. Glaciers are melting faster; the polar ice caps
are shrinking; trees are blooming earlier; oceans are becoming more
acidic, threatening marine life; people are dying in heat waves; species
are migrating, and eventually many will become extinct. Scientists
predict that absent major emission reductions, climate change will
worsen famine and drought in some of the poorest places in the world and
wreak havoc across the globe. In the U.S., sea-level rise threatens to
cause massive economic and ecological damage to our populated coastal
areas.”
This view is founded on the premise that the matter of global warming
has been settled intellectually and scientifically; that its causes and
implications are agreed upon by all knowledgeable people.
Yet Obama offers no acknowledgment of the fact that earlier this year, it was announced that more than 31,000 scientistsacross the U.S.—including some 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, earth science, and environment—had
signed a petition rejecting the assumption that the human production of
greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate. Said the petition:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence
that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse
gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic
heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.
Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in
atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
According to Fred Singer,
an atmospheric physicist and Professor Emeritus of environmental
science at the University of Virginia, global warming is caused not by
human activity but by the sun. “The evidence we have shows an extremely
strong correlation with solar activity. The [Earth’s] temperature
follows the solar activity and the correlation is very strong.”
Notwithstanding such weighty voices as these (and many others)
contradicting Obama’s assertions about global warming, he fully
intends to enact far-reaching legislation premised entirely on the
dogmatic contention that “global warming” is caused by human activity.
In the wake of a May 2008 California Supreme Court decision
legalizing same-sex marriage in that state (similar to a 2003 decision
by the high court of Massachusetts), Obama issued a call to “fully repeal”
the Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by President Clinton in
1996), a move that would have the effect of legalizing same-sex
marriages nationwide. The Defense of Marriage Act currently allows
states to decide for themselves whether or not to recognize same-sex
marriages that are contracted in other states.
Notably, no Congress or state legislature has ever voted to
define homosexual unions as marriages, though they have consistently
supported the notion that such unions deserve full legal recognition in
terms of civil rights and liberties.
Racial Gerrymandering of Voting Districts
( Return to top):
In 1993 Barack Obama took a job as a litigator of voting rights and
employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland,
P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner), where he remains a Counsel today.
In 1994 Obama worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that challenged the racial makeup of Chicago’s voting districts. The Obama team sought to raise the
number of black super-majority districts from 19 to 24. According to
the judge in the case, Richard Posner, Obama and his fellow litigators
held that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a
white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and
it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent
black is not a black ward—is indeed a white ward, even though only 42
percent of its population is white.”
In short, the goal was to create voting districts whose populations
consisted of enough blacks to guarantee the election of black officials.
In 1997 Obama opposed an Illinois welfare reform bill, proposed by
Republican senator Dave Syverson, which sought to move as many people as
possible off the state welfare rolls and into paying jobs. He tried to
weaken the legislation by calling for exceptions not only to the
requirement that welfare recipients make an effort to find employment,
but also to the bill’s proposed five-year limit on benefits.
Two months after Syverson’s bill was first proposed and was clearly
going to pass by a wide margin in the state senate, Obama added his own
name to it. The legislation ultimately would slash welfare rolls by some
80 percent. As David Freddoso points out, “It was a bill that the
Senate had to pass in order to conform to the federal welfare-reform
laws. It passed with only one senator voting against it.”
“Earmarking” refers to the commonplace congressional practice of
directing federal tax dollars to local projects which are often
frivolous and are of extremely limited utility. In fiscal year 2008,
Obama was the sole Senate sponsor of 29 separate earmarks whose
aggregate sum was $10.7 million.
Earmarks are often informal quid pro quo arrangements, where
recipients show gratitude by giving money to the political official who
steered the earmarks their way. For example, after Obama inserted
earmarks into a 2008 defense appropriations bill, the recipients sent
$16,000 in contributions to Obama’s presidential campaign.
Sometimes the quid pro quo works in the other direction, where the senator earmarks money for recipients after they
have taken action that is in some way beneficial to the senator. For
example, in 2007 Obama earmarked $1 million for the University of
Chicago Medical Center, where his wife, who served as vice president of
the Center, had received a $200,000 pay raise immediately after
Obama took office as senator in early 2005. In other words, Obama
steered $800,000 of taxpayer money to his wife’s employer and another
$200,000 to his wife’s (and his own) personal fortune.
Obama promises that as President, he will work to eliminate racial
disparities in criminal sentencing. “The criminal justice system is not
color blind,” he says.
“It does not work for all people equally, and that is why it's critical
to have a president who sends a signal that we are going to have a
system of justice that is not just us, but is everybody.” According to
Obama:
“[W]e know that in our criminal justice system, African-Americans and
whites, for the same crime … are arrested at very different rates, are
convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences.
That is something that we have to talk about. But that’s a substantive
issue and it has to do with how … we pursue racial justice. If I am
president, I will have a civil rights division that is working with
local law enforcement so that they are enforcing laws fairly and
justly.”
But Obama’s reference to a discriminatory justice system is a striking
example of how “conventional wisdom” and political demagoguery can be
utterly without basis in fact. As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather
MacDonald points out,
a massive review of the criminal-justice literature reveals that racial
disparities in rates of arrest, conviction, or sentencing are due to
entirely to differences in rates of offending and to the seriousness of
those offenses, not to racism. In fact, one landmarkJustice Department
study of felony cases from America’s 75 largest urban areas found that
blacks actually were less likely to be prosecuted after committing a
felony than whites were, and that blacks were less likely to be found
guilty at trial. The literature is replete with facts like this.
Obama contends that the harsher penalties for crimes involving crack
cocaine as opposed to powder-based cocaine—the former disproportionately
involve black offenders, whereas the latter involve mostly white
offenders—are racist and, as such, should be completely eliminated.
But in fact, the Congressional Record shows that the currently strict, federal anti-crack legislation dates back to 1986, when the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—deeply
concerned about the degree to which crack was decimating the black
community—strongly supported the legislation and actually pressed for
even harsher penalties. Indeed, a few years earlier CBC members had
pushed President Reagan to create the Office of National Drug Control
Policy to tackle the crack epidemic head-on.
While Obama may claim to be a “healer” and a “uniter,” no healing or
uniting can stem from a premise that is, by its very nature, a divisive
lie.
Voting Against Penalizing Gang Membership
During his years as a legislator, Obama voted against a proposal to
criminalize contact with gang members for any convicts who were free on
probation or bail. Moreover, in 2001 he opposed,
for reasons of racial equity, making gang activity a consideration in
determining who may be eligible for capital punishment. “There’s a
strong overlap between gang affiliation and young men of color,” said
Obama. “… I think it’s problematic for them [nonwhites] to be singled
out as more likely to receive the death penalty for carrying out certain
acts than are others who do the same thing.”
An Obama presidency would make the issue of race a major focus in all areas, including criminal justice.
Opposition to Longer Prison Terms for Sex Offenders
In 1999 Obama was the only Illinois state senator to oppose a bill
prohibiting early prison release for offenders convicted of sex crimes.
The Obama campaign asserts that gender-based “discrimination on the
job” is a big problem in America. “For every $1.00 earned by a man, the
average woman receives only 77 cents,” says the campaign website. “A
recent study estimates it will take another 47 years for women to close
the wage gap with men.” To rectify this, Obama “believes the government
needs to take steps to better enforce the Equal Pay Act, fight job
discrimination, and improve child care options and family medical leave
to give women equal footing in the workplace.”
This yet another example of Obama exploiting a fraudulent, nonexistent
“problem” in order to imbue a particular demographic—in this case, the
very large demographic of women—with a sense of victimization and
grievance. You see, Obama’s claim that women are underpaid (in
comparison to men) by American employers is entirely untrue. The
longtime employment lawyer William Farrell, who served as a board member
of the National Organization for Women from 1970 to 1973, addresses this issue in painstaking detail in his 2005 book Why Men Earn More.
First of all, Farrell explains, the gender “pay gap”—in terms of the
median earnings of men and women overall—is actually 20 cents per
dollar, not 23 cents as Obama has stated. And that “gap” has absolutely nothing to
do with gender discrimination. It is due entirely to the fact that
women as a group tend, to a much greater degree than men, to make
employment choices that involve certain tradeoffs; i.e., choices that
may suppress their incomes but, by the same token, afford them some
tangible lifestyle advantages that they value highly.
Specifically, Farrell explains, women tend to pursue careers in fields
which are non-technical and which do not involve the hard (as opposed to
the social) sciences; fields that do not require a large amount of
continuing education in order to keep pace with new developments or
innovations; fields that offer a high level of physical safety; fields
where the work is performed indoors as opposed to outdoors (where bad
weather can make working conditions poor); fields that offer a pleasant
and socially dynamic working environment; fields typified by lower
levels of emotional strife; fields that offer desirable shifts or
flexible working hours; fields or jobs that require fewer working hours
per week or fewer working days per year; and fields where employees can
mentally “check out” at the end of the day without needing to “take
their jobs home with them.”
Moreover, Farrell notes, women as a group tend to be less inclined to
commute long distances, to travel extensively for work-related duties,
or to relocate geographically in order to take a job. In addition, they
tend to have fewer years of uninterrupted experience in their current
jobs, and they are far more likely to leave the work force for extended
periods in order to attend to family-related matters such as raising
children.
When all of the above variables are factored into the equation, the gender pay gap disappears entirely.
When men and women work at jobs where their titles, their
responsibilities, and their experience are equivalent, they are paid exactly the same.
The concept of “equal pay for equal work” is a good one, well worth
defending. What is not good is a politician who, like Obama, is willing
to lie to women in order to make them believe that they are being
victimized by an enduring injustice that can only be eradicated by
someone who, like Obama, actually “understands” and “cares about” it.
That is called class warfare and victimology, and it is beneath
contempt.
Obama supports an initiative known as the Global Poverty Act (GPA), which, if signed into law,would compelthe
U.S. to develop “and implement” a policy to “cut extreme global poverty
in half by 2015 through aid, trade, debt relief,” and other means. Says Obama:
“With billions of people living on just dollars a day around the world,
global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges and tragedies the
international community faces,” Obamasays.
“It must be a priority of American foreign policy to commit to
eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter,
and clean drinking water. As we strive to rebuildAmerica’s standing in
the world, this important bill will demonstrate our promise and
commitment to those in the developing world…. Our commitment to the
global economy must extend beyond trade agreements that are more about
increasing profits than about helping workers and small farmers
everywhere.”
According to a reportbyAccuracy in Mediaeditor Cliff Kincaid, the adoption of the GPA could “result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States”and would make levels“of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of theUnited Nations.”
Kincaid states that the legislation would earmark some 0.7 percent of
the U.S. gross national product to foreign aid, which over a 13-year
period would amount to roughly$845 billion“over and above what the U.S. already spends.”
Foreign Contributions to Obama’s Presidential Campaign
(Return to top):
Foreign contributions to an American presidential campaign are illegal. In October 2008, Frank Gaffney reported the following in The Washington Times:
“A Federal Election Commission (FEC) employee has reportedly been
warning for months about evidence that the Obama campaign has received
as much as $200 million, almost half of his total donations, in amounts
less than $200. That is below the threshold for donor information
[which] Mr. Obama has chose[n] to report to the FEC—unlike the [Hillary]
Clinton and McCain campaigns, which have reported all donor
information. Of the $200 million, between $30 million and $100 million
are from the Mideast, Africa and other places Islamists are active. It
is unclear whether—as seems likely—these funds come not only from
Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood types, and jihadists of other stripes, but from non-U.S. citizens. Such contributions would be not only worrying but illegal.”
Along the same lines, in August 2008 Pamela Geller wrote, in the American Thinker,
that among the myriad foreign donations Obama had received was a
$33,000 contribution from some “Palestinian” brothers based in the
Hamas-controlled Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, brothers who had proudly
declared their “love” for Obama. The Obama campaign later claimed that
it had returned the brothers’ money, but the donors in question said
they had never received such a return. Moreover, Geller catalogued
several dozen of the foreign cities and nations from which illegal
contributions to the Obama campaign were confirmed to have
originated. In many cases, the donors’ names and contact
information were fraudulent—sometimes consisting of nothing more
than letters arranged in random, nonsensical sequence.
All this is strikingly reminiscent of ACORN’s fraudulent voter registrations.
Obama Likens Aspects of America to Nazi Germany ( Return to top):
In a January 18, 2001 radio interview, Obama said:
“There’s a lot of change going on outside of the Court that judges have
to essentially take judicial notice of. I mean you’ve got World War II,
you’ve got the doctrines of Nazism that we are fighting against, that
start looking uncomfortably similar to what's going on back here at
home.”
Contrary to what many observers have said, Barack Obama is by no means
“an unknown quantity.” His words, his actions, his voting record, and
his alliances have been very clear for many years. We know exactly who
Barack Obama is. The only question is, do we have the courage and the
intellectual honesty to acknowledge what we see?
