By John Perazzo
November 3, 2008
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.
William Ayers: “Someone who Lives in my Neighborhood”
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 group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students 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.
Did the Ayers-Obama alliance end with CAC? Not by a long shot. There is strong evidence suggesting that Ayers contributed heavily, if not entirely, to the writing of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
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.
From 1999 to 2002, Obama and Ayers again worked together, this time as board members of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which gives money to a wide array of far-left organizations such as the Midwest Academy, the Tides Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, the Arab American Action Network, and ACORN.
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
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
A notable attendee at the aforementioned political gatherings which Ayers and Dohrn hosted on behalf of Obama in the mid-Nineties was Democrat state senator Alice 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 an executive board member of 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 the Socialist Scholars Conferences
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.”
He was referring to the Socialist Scholars Conferences sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States. According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.
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
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 was trained as 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
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 Times article 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, Obama was 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.”
Fannie Mae and Obama
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 a 1995 case known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow attorneys charged that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants and won the case. Obama’s position was that the bank should increase the number of loans it made to undercapitalized borrowers—precisely the practice that would lead to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
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 of America
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”
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
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
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
In 2007 Obama appointed Robert Malley, a program director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), as a foreign policy advisor to his campaign. Malley’s father, Simon Malley, had been a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. Rabidly anti-Israel, Simon Malley was a confidante of the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly those associated with the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a supporter of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Robert Malley has long alleged that Israeli—not Palestinian—inflexibility caused the 2000 Camp David peace talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fail. He has penned several controversial articles—some of which he co-wrote with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat—blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for 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 ties with Malley after the latter acknowledged to the Times of London that he—Malley—had been in regular contact with Hamas as part of his work for ICG.
Another Obama Associate Who Sees Israel’s Creation as a “Catastrophe”
Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian American who serves as a board member for Rashid Khalidi’s Arab American Action Network. Abunimah also a co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, which, like Khalidi, refers to Israel’s 1948 creation as “The Catastrophe.”
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.”
In January 2008, Abunimah told interviewer Amy Goodman:
“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.”
Abunimah added:
“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
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 experience in the U.S. Senate) announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros made a contribution to his campaign and announced that he would back Obama for the presidency.
Louis Farrakhan
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 Farrakhan called Obama “a herald of the Messiah.”
Rev. Jeremiah Wright
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
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.
Rev. Michael Pfleger
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 told Trumpet 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’s Black Advisory Council
For his 2008 presidential run, Obama formed a Black Advisory Council whose members included, most notably, the Marxist professor from Princeton, Cornel West—a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a great admirer of Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, and an ardent advocate of the livid Black Liberation Theology of James Cone.
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.”
Rev. Al Sharpton
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, Obama addressed 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.
Khalid al-Mansour
In 1988 Obama applied for admission to Harvard Law School. At the time, a Muslim attorney and black nationalist named Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour asked 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.”
Political Alliance with MoveOn.org
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.”
Said Obama in response:
“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
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
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.
Redistribution of Wealth
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 to limit government, 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.
Abortion
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….”
Though the Induced Infant Liability Act did not in any way conflict with, or compromise, Roe v. Wade, Obama again voted against this very same legislation in 2003, and as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee, he blocked yet another attempt to bring the bill to the floor of the Illinois Senate.
“At What Point Does a Baby Get Human Rights?”
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 for Planned 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.
On July 17, 2007, Barack Obama spoke before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. His comments included the following:
“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….”
Immigration
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.
Energy Policy
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.”
Taxes
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.
In his 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 opposed a 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.
Foreign Policy
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.
Is Iran a Threat, or Not?
During a May 18, 2008 campaign event, Obama said:
“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.”
Two days later, he told another audience:
“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….”
This is sheer incoherence.
Homeland Security / War on Terror
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)?
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?
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
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.
The War in Afghanistan
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.
The Iraq War
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.
Education
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
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 jure segregation, 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.”
Affirmative Action
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.
Constitution / Supreme Court
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.
Environment
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 scientists across 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.
Same-Sex Marriage
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
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.
Welfare Reform
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.”
Earmarks
“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.
Criminal Justice
Obama’s Claims of Racism in the Justice System
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.
Gender Discrimination
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.
Foreign Aid
Obama supports an initiative known as the Global Poverty Act (GPA), which, if signed into law, would compel the 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,” Obama says. “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 report by Accuracy in Media editor 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 the United 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
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
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.”
Conclusion
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?