The Obama Vessel I am tired and I can‟t wait for this election to be over. Shocking words from a political junky, I know. I am pretty sure most of you feel the same way. We have all been inundated with so much information about the upcoming presidential election that it makes you want to scream “ENOUGH!” Before you tune out and let fate take its course, I hope you will devote time to reading this comprehensive biographical sketch of Barack Obama. He may be the next President of the United States, and during very challenging times. So, we should all have our eyes wide open when we pull the lever on November 4th. Many in the electorate have been confused by so many conflicting reports in the media about Obama and his background. The airwaves are filled with dire predictions about Obama‟s true character and convictions, many of them based on speculation and innuendo. This piece will attempt to bring Obama into focus by examining what he has in fact done and said, as well as the major influences in his life. I have obviously exercised editorial discretion as to what portions of Obama‟s life to write about in this piece. However, I can assure you that all of the information presented here has been thoroughly researched and corroborated. Moreover, I have attempted to use original source materials wherever possible and limit other sources of information to the mainstream media and liberal or non-partisan publications in an effort to bolster the credibility of the piece. I urge you to verify any information if you have any question about its veracity. Vessel of Hope Barack Obama is a good man, a smart man, a family man, an articulate man, a persuasive man, an empathic man, and a thoughtful man. His demeanor is soothing, cheerful, charismatic, and unflappable. Yet, he is also extremely opaque. For most of his career, Obama has resisted taking resolute positions, making it difficult to know where he stands on big public policy issues. His presidential campaign rhetoric has relied on slogans (“change we can believe in”; “change we need”; “hope”) and has avoided discussions of the type of change Obama intends to bring. Obama has asked the electorate to view his campaign as a social movement in which, in his own words, he is “an imperfect vessel of your hopes and dreams.” Desperate for a savior to assuage our economic and existential fears, angry with the Bush administration for its bumbling inadequacy, and lulled to sleep by Obama‟s reassuring demeanor, the American public seems all too willing to trust Obama‟s vague promises of change without an examination of the imperfections of the Obama vessel. We need to be certain that the vessel is sturdy if we are going to trust it to navigate the ominous waters of a financial crisis, radical Islam, a nuclear Iran and Korea, a ballooning national debt, and the impending insolvency of our Medicare and Social Security systems. The mainstream media has failed to provide the public with a comprehensive profile of Barack Obama. This piece attempts to fill that hole. The Early Years In his first memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age 18 was an African-American poet that Obama refers to merely as “Frank.” According to
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Professor Gerald Horne, “Frank was a predominant influence in helping the young Obama to find his identity as an African-American.” However, Obama didn‟t want to disclose Frank‟s last name. With good reason. The murky “Frank” was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis. Davis‟ membership in the American Community Party is well-documented by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas and an expert on the life and writings of Frank Davis. The connection between Frank Marshal Davis and the young Obama is definitively confirmed by Professor Gerald Horne, an editor of the Communist Party USA's theoretical journal Political Affairs: [I]n Hawaii was an African-American poet and journalist by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, who was certainly in the orbit of the CP [Communist Party]– if not a member – and who was born in Kansas and spent a good deal of his adult life in Chicago, before decamping to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson. Eventually, he befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago. Horne also notes that, “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack‟s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis‟ equally affecting memoir, “Living the Blues”… Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college. During that meeting, Davis referred to college as an “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama that “they'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.” Perhaps influenced by Davis‟ admonitions about being subsumed into the power structure, Obama reports that in college, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” Community Organizing In 1985, as a bright-eyed, twenty-four year old Columbia University graduate, Obama went to Chicago for the purpose of “organizing black folks for change,” recounted Obama in Dreams from My Father. Obama launched a career as a community organizer with the Developing Communities Project (DCP) in a black community on the South side of Chicago. Community organizing was popularized by Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), acknowledges David Moberg of the far-left magazine The Nation (as well as many other commentators). Alinsky wrote the Rules for Radicals and agitated for social revolution in America. According to the Alinsky model, community organizers identify aggrieved populations, identify the source of pain in their lives, and encourage those communities to take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky explains why effective community organization requires subtly working within the existing power structures:
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There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default. Alinsky also wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” By all accounts, Obama was extremely good at community organizing. Mike Kruglik, who worked with Obama as a community organizer and tutored Obama in the Alinsky method, described Obama‟s skills in this way: He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better. Despite his obvious skill, Obama has acknowledged that his community organizing efforts didn‟t transform his adopted community: I can't say we didn't make mistakes, that I knew what I was doing…Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up. Sometimes preachers said, “Why should I listen to you?” Sometimes we tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn't show up. I couldn't tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood. According to David Moberg of the ultra-liberal magazine The Nation, Obama‟s interest in community organizing certainly “provides clues to his worldview.” Reverend Wright Obama was not a churchgoer early in his community organizing career. However, when Obama was seeking ways to connect with the entire community, Reverend Alvin Love of Lilydale First Baptist Church urged him to join a church to bolster his credentials among the pastors in the area. Obama chose Reverend Jeremiah Wright‟s Trinity United Church of Christ and remained a member there for 20 years until the recent political pressure forced him to resign. Obama acknowledges that he found religion and Jesus Christ through Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright became Obama‟s spiritual mentor. The pastor married Barack and Michelle Obama, baptized their children, prayed regularly with Obama, and inspired the title of the
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Senator‟s book The Audacity of Hope. According to the liberal publication The New Republic, Obama was drawn to Reverend Wright‟s message: Obama was taken with Wright's worldview, perhaps best encapsulated by a Trinity brochure proclaiming that, “while it is permissible to chase “middleincomeness” with all our might,” ambitious African Americans must beware the “psychological entrapment of black “middleclassness” that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest of US.” Here is a smattering of some of Reverend Wright‟s other worldviews: The government gives them [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a threestrike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No! No! No! God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people…God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. We [the U.S.] bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye…We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. 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. Capitalism as made manifest in the “New World”…depended upon slave labor, and it is only maintained by keeping the Two-Thirds of the world under oppression. The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now…Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism. Trinity United Church of Christ is an unorthodox place for a U.S. presidential candidate to find God. The church‟s “Statement of Faith” on the “About Us” page of its website declares: We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.….We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community. The church‟s website also used to include the following statement (before it was taken down in response to the recent Reverend Wright controversy): “Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System….We believe in the following twelve precepts and covenantal statements.” Those precepts included “Commitment to the Black Community,” “Disavowal of
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the Pursuit of “Middleclassness,” “Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System” and “Personal Commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.” And the church‟s “10 Point Vision” proclaims that it is a “congregation with a non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA.” Obama‟s response: “I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial” and “he [Wright] was never my, quote-unquote, „spiritual advisor.‟” Legal Career Growing restless with the slow pace of change on Chicago‟s south side, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School. Obama notes “I had things to learn…, things that would help me bring about real change.” According to Michael Evans, also a DCP community organizer, “[Obama] said you can only go so far in organizing. You help people get some solutions, but it's never as big as wiping away problems… It wasn't end-all. He wanted to be part of the end-all, to get things done.” After graduating from Harvard Law School with honors in 1991, Obama returned to Chicago to join a small civil rights law firm headed by Judson Miner, also a community activist of sorts. Bill Ayers Enter Bill Ayers. Ayers is the unrepentant former leader of the leftist, anti-Vietnam war, terrorist organization Weather Underground who has boasted about carrying out an attack on the Pentagon. When a 1980 criminal case against Ayers for his past activities was dismissed because the government had used an illegal wiretap, Ayers gloated that he was “guilty as hell and free as a bird.” Although Obama‟s relationship with Ayers is still shrouded in a great deal of mystery, Obama seems to have developed some sort of involvement with the man while practicing law in Chicago. In 1994, Ayers had obtained a $50 million grant from philanthropist Walter Annenberg for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAA), whose mission was to reform public schools. While Ayers ran the operational aspects of CAA, he apparently chose Barack Obama to be the Chairman of the Board. Ayers and Obama worked together for the next several years raising matching funds and disbursing grants to local organizations. While not entirely corroborated, it seems inconceivable that the two did not develop a fairly intimate relationship during that time. Bill Ayers has refused to give any interviews relating to his relationship with Barack Obama. Illinois State Senator In 1996, Obama spotted an opportunity to run for Illinois state senate when Alice Palmer, Obama‟s “friend and early mentor” (according to Michele Norris of NPR) announced that she would vacate her senate seat in order to run for U.S. Congress. Palmer was also a radical leftist. She had been a member of the executive board of the U.S. Peace Council, which had been labeled as a communist front group by the FBI. When Palmer returned from the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, she gushed in the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, about the “Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education” and she spoke of “the „efficiency of the Soviets‟ most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to „central planning‟.”
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Initially, Palmer supported Obama as her replacement and introduced him within Democrat party circles. However, when Palmer lost the U.S. congressional race, she then decided that she wanted to hold onto her state senate seat after all. Well, even as a political neophyte, Obama was apparently not above hard-nosed politics, even if it meant ending the career of one of his mentors. Obama sent his minions to the courthouse to examine the signatures Palmer had used to get back on the state senate ballot. Those efforts panned out nicely for Obama. His aides were able to uncover enough falsified signatures to knock Palmer off the ballot. In fact, the tactic worked so well that Obama employed it against his other opponents in the race and successfully disqualified them as well. So, Obama waltzed into the Illinois state senate without having to campaign or defeat a political opponent. Even though Obama ran unopposed in his 1996 campaign for Illinois senate, for some reason Obama still felt compelled to seek the endorsement of the New Party, a political party that was established by the Democratic Socialists of America to support socialist and other far-left candidates. The New Party required candidates who received its endorsement to sign a pledge of support for the party. The New Party endorsed Obama, so we can only assume that Obama signed The New Party pledge. Although Obama has denied that he was a member of the New Party, a 1996 New Party campaign publication indicates otherwise (See http://web.archive.org/web/20010306031216/www.newparty.org/up9610.html). Moreover, after being elected, Obama apparently spoke at a New Party meeting to express his gratitude for their support. It is not clear why Obama would affiliate with a socialist organization like the New Party, particularly when he did not require their support to be elected. Obama served in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. While most of his state senate colleagues remember Obama as a hard-working, genial fellow who could inspire people, his legislative accomplishments were minor and few. He sponsored a meager number of bills that were actually passed. He didn‟t carry the torch or offer any bold solutions on any major issues of the day. He avoided taking principled stands on a multitude of hot button bills by voting “present” 130 times during his tenure, including 36 times when Obama was either the only senator or part of a group of fewer than seven senators to vote “present.” According to University of Illinois political studies professor Kent Redfield, “if you are worried about your next election, the present vote gives you political cover.” Obama‟s signature achievements in the Illinois Senate were an ethics reform bill that passed unanimously and a bill that required police confessions to be taped. However, despite only three years as a state senator under his belt, Obama continued to eye greater political power. In 2000, he challenged incumbent U.S. Representative Bobby Rush in the Democrat primary and lost badly. U.S. Senator Undaunted by his loss to Bobby Rush, in 2003, Obama decided to take a monumental step forward in his political career, launching his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. When Obama‟s Republican opponent dropped out of the race only four months before the election because of scandal, the Illinois Republican Party convinced Alan Keyes to run against Obama. Obama won handily against the underfunded, impromptu opponent and was sworn into office in early 2005. Obama‟s record as a U.S. Senator has been even more paltry than his record as an Illinois state senator. Again, Obama has sponsored few, if any, major pieces of legislation and has not lead the
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fight on any paramount issues. Of course, it would be difficult for Obama to have generated much of a record in the Senate, given that he launched his presidential campaign only two years after arriving there. According to the Washington Post, Barack Obama has missed 303 votes (46.3%) during the current Congress (which coincides with his campaign for the presidency). The National Journal (a nonpartisan political publication) rated Obama as the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2007 based on his voting record. Obama was more liberal than 95.5% of his senate colleagues on key votes during the 2007 legislative session, voting the liberal position on 65 of the 66 key votes. In the same year, the average senator voted with his party 84% of the time, while Obama voted with his party 96% of the time. In 2005 and 2006, Obama voted with the Democrats 95% of the time. According to the Americans for Democratic Action, a leading liberal advocacy group, Obama has voted “right” 98% of the time. It seems that, while Obama has been campaigning for President as a bipartisan agent of change, he has been legislating in the Senate as an ideological partisan for trademarked liberal causes. ACORN Obama also has significant and longstanding ties to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Sol Stern of the City Journal has described ACORN as the “largest radical group in the country”and noted that, “It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor.” Stern‟s comprehensive opus on ACORN can be found at http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=1040. According to Stern, ACORN was initially formed to “build a broad constituency of low-income and working class people to agitate for social change.” Seems harmless enough, unless you are particularly attuned to the buzzwords used by the far left. The group‟s platform, The People’s Platform (http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=2706), reveals its truly radical, anti-capitalist, redistributionist agenda in prose that is reminiscent of Marxist revolutionary tracts. The Preamble to The People’s Platform enumerates the group‟s guiding animus and makes you wonder whether a 1917-style worker‟s revolution may be right around the corner: We [the dispossessed people] have waited and watched. We have hoped and helped. We have sweated and suffered. We have often believed. We have frequently followed. But we have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor. Our patience has been abused; our experience misused. Our silence has been seen as support. Our struggle has been ignored. Enough is enough. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America's door. We will not be meek, but mighty. We will not starve on past promises, but feast on future dreams. We are an uncommon people. We are the majority, forged from all minorities. We are the masses of many, not the forces of few. We will continue our fight until the American way is just one way, until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom...We demand our birthright: the chance to be rich, the right to be free. ACORN‟s platform on workers‟ rights are sure to send a chill down the spine of any red-blooded American (http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=2739&L=0%2Findex.php%3Fid%3D4201): Every person who wants to work has a right to a job - a job which pays a living wage and offers opportunities for advancement.” ACORN would “[r]equire companies which reap a large profit to hire and train the unemployed.” Government should “[g]uarantee a minimum annual family income at a figure equivalent to the most recent Bureau of Labor
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Statistics „medium living standard,‟ adjusted for inflation,” not to mention guarantee “[t]he right to a job which is accessible from home…The right to a job which does not require overtime work as a condition of employment...The right to company or government financed child care for the worker's children. You get the picture. Obama first made contact with ACORN while he was working as a community organizer to rid a low-income housing project of asbestos. According to a Los Angeles Times report, Madeleine Talbot, one of the leaders in Chicago ACORN at the time, was so impressed with Obama that she invited him to help train her staff. Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN‟s National Association Board, has described the evolution of Obama‟s relationship with ACORN on the website Social Policy: When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois' refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter…Obama took the case…and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them). Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. Writing before the general election in 2004, Foulkes also detailed ACORN‟s mammoth voter turnout efforts on behalf of Obama during his primary campaign for U.S. Senate in 2004. Obama has also sat on the board of directors of the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation, both of whom have funneled grant money to Chicago ACORN. If Obama‟s connections to a radical, left-wing group aren‟t bad enough, ACORN has been implicated in several voter fraud schemes in the past few years and is currently being investigated by the FBI in at least twelve states for voter registration fraud in connection with the current presidential election. Islam There is ample evidence that Obama was raised as a Muslim during a portion of his childhood. (See http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5544.) That fact alone is not an indictment of Obama in any way, but his denials about his affiliations with Islam do arouse concerns about Obama‟s willingness to tell the truth. Obama was born to a Muslim father who gave Obama a Muslim middle name (Hussein). In Islam, a child‟s religion is passed down through the father. Obama‟s stepfather and his stepfather‟s family were devout Muslims. When Obama‟s stepfather moved Obama to Indonesia, Obama first enrolled in a Catholic school. However, his parents listed him as a Muslim on the registration form for the school. Three years later, Obama‟s parents again registered Obama as a Muslim at the public school in Jakarta. In Dreams of My Father, Obama also acknowledges
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having attended Koranic studies classes as a child in Indonesia. His Indonesian friends and family recall that Obama attended mosque at least occasionally. Despite this history, Obama has categorically denied ever having been a Muslim: “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 [Kenya]. But I‟ve never practiced Islam.” Obama does not appear to be telling the truth. Financing from Muslim Extremists There are serious questions about whether nefarious people may have helped Obama get into and pay for his Harvard Law School education. Former African-American Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, who speaks glowingly about Obama, told a New York cable channel in March that a man named Khalid Al-Mansour was raising money for Obama‟s education in 1988 and approached Sutton to help Obama get into Harvard Law School. (See http://www.newsmax.com/timmerman/obama_harvard_/2008/09/23/133199.html). Khalid Al-Mansour is a black nationalist, an orthodox Muslim, a former mentor to the founders of the Black Panthers, and an advisor to Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Al-Mansour has written several books that are filled with anti-American rhetoric, including charges that the United States has plotted genocide against African-Americans. Al-Mansour is also virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. One of his booklets is entitled “Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against S. Arabia.” He has denied any Jewish biblical tie to the land of Israel, and he has repeatedly accused Israel of various forms of barbarism. For example, he told a South African audience that, “Today, the Palestinians are being brutalized like savages…If you protest, you will go to jail, and you may be killed. And they say they are the only democratic country in the Middle East. ... They are lying on God.” He has also accused the Jews of “stealing the land the same way the Christians stole the land from the Indians in America.” While Obama flatly denies Percy Sutton‟s charge that Al-Mansour helped raise money for his law school education, Al-Mansour has refused to either confirm or deny the report. Moreover, the Obama campaign‟s categorical statement that “Al Mansour doesn‟t know Obama” doesn‟t ring true, given that Al Mansour has provided accounts of his discussions with Obama to Newsmax and other media outlets. If Obama accepted financing from a character like Al-Mansour, which seems probable from the evidence, the Obama campaign is clearly not telling the truth and Obama‟s independence and judgment should be in question. Campaign Staff Connections to Islamists Obama‟s first Muslim outreach coordinator for his presidential campaign has ties to nefarious Islamist organizations. Mazen Asbahi was forced to resign from the campaign after it was reported that he had served on the board of a subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). NAIT was named as a participant in a criminal conspiracy to support Hamas and, according to prosecutors in the case, is or was a member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood (a radical Islamist organization). Asbahi is also affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America, both of which were also named as co-conspirators in the Hamas funding trial and have been accused of aiding other Islamist causes. You can read about other ties between Obama and various other Islamists and the Nation of Islam here: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5983.
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Empathy for the Palestinian Cause Many Palestinian Americans are convinced that Obama will be much more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than any other American politician in recent history. They base that conclusion on Obama‟s various friendships and associations inside the Palestinian American community and Obama‟s attendance at various Palestinian events where Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy were harshly criticized. (See http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-naobamamideast10apr10,0,1780231,full.story). For example, Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow for the American Task Force on Palestine, gave Obama an approving nod when he said during the presidential primaries that “I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates,” referring to the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist in Chicago who also helps run Electronic Intifada, has testified to meeting Obama a half-dozen times at various Palestinian and Arab American events in Chicago. Abunimah claims that, at each of those events, Obama “was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” (See http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6619.shtml). Abunimah has also reported that, when he saw Obama during the primaries of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama told Abunimah “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.” Abunimah also writes that Obama “referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, [and told Abunimah] „Keep up the good work!‟” Obama‟s campaign manager has denied that Obama made any of these statements to Abunimah and has maintained that Obama‟s relationships with Palestinian Americans merely reflect his ability to listen to a wide array of people and viewpoints. Abunimah now believes that Obama has morphed into a supporter of Israel and implies that Obama has been bought off by AIPAC, the pro-Israel Jewish lobby. Either way, Obama‟s position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems quite malleable. Obama also has a friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a scholar, a critic of Israel, and an advocate for Palestinian rights, from the days when Khalidi taught at the University of Chicago. Khalidi told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that “he strongly disagrees with Obama's current views on Israel, and often disagreed with him during their talks over the years. But he added that Obama, because of his unusual background, with family ties to Kenya and Indonesia, would be more understanding of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians.” Translation: Obama, who has been exposed to Islam since childhood, may not be as pro-Israel as he is pretending to be. The Change We Need? Despite Obama‟s long line of questionable alliances and his far-left political inclinations, many people voting for Obama have become convinced by the force of Obama‟s charm and seemingly eminent reasonableness that Obama will nonetheless govern from the center of the political spectrum. These people are engaging in a healthy dose of denial.
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The outlines of Obama‟s plan for America are replete with big government prescriptions, economic redistributionism, foreign policy naïveté, and pandering to liberal special interest groups. Here are a few examples: Increasing taxes. Obama often repeats the disingenuous claim that he is going to reduce taxes on 95% of Americans. What Obama refers to as tax cuts, however, are actually refundable tax credits that would be payable to American workers each tax year whether or not they pay taxes. So, the 40% of working Americans who do not currently pay any income taxes will be receiving checks from the government under Obama‟s plan. Obama‟s calls this a tax cut. Commonsensical observers call it a welfare spending program. In reality, Obama‟s tax plan would increase real taxes significantly, albeit mostly on highincome earning, job-creating, productive Americans. Obama proposes to increase taxes on the top income tax bracket by 13%, from 35% to 39.6%, and on the second-highest income tax bracket by 9%, from 33% to 36%. For all families and small businesses making over $250,000 per year, the Social Security payroll tax would be raised between 16% and 32% and capital gains and dividend tax rates would increase by 33% from 15% to 20%. All of these tax increases operate as disincentives on individuals and businesses to work and invest. Despite the recent financial crisis and economic downturn, Obama has refused to change his mind about raising taxes. Everyone but Obama seems to understand that raising taxes during a recession will only exacerbate the problem. Increasing spending (by a lot). According to the thorough research of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, a non-partisan research and education arm of the National Taxpayers Union, Obama‟s plan would increase federal spending by a net of $292 billion per year, after accounting for all spending increases and spending cuts proposed by Obama. (See http://www.ntu.org/main/press_printable.php?PressID=1061&org_name=NTUF). Obama has yet to explain how spending increases will lead to a balanced budget. Redistributing the wealth. Obama is a modern day Robin Hood. He revealed as much on a 2001 radio interview: One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil-rights movement was, because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think 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. [Emphasis added] Obama also let his redistributionist philosophy out of the bag in response to a question from Joe the Plumber. When Joe Wurzelbacher asked Obama on the campaign trail whether Obama‟s tax plan was going to tax him more, Obama said the following: It's not that I want to punish your success. I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success, too. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody. [Emphasis added] Obama sounds like a European socialist, not an American capitalist. Does taking from the rich and giving to the poor sound like a recipe for unity and harmony among the citizens of America?
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Opposing drilling and nuclear power. Until recently, Obama expressed opposition to offshore and onshore drilling and nuclear power as methods to reduce the country‟s dependence on foreign oil. When oil prices rose and public opinion swung in favor of drilling and increasing other sources of energy, Obama half-heartedly acknowledged that we will probably have to permit offshore drilling and invest more in nuclear power. Still, the country should not hold it‟s breath for the possibility that an Obama administration will risk offending environmental interest groups in the name of drilling and nuclear power. Taking steps towards government-run health care. Obama‟s health care plan is a huge incremental step towards government-run health care. First, Obama would require every U.S. business to either provide health insurance coverage and finance a portion of the premium for their workers or pay a 7% payroll tax to the federal government to offset the costs of enrolling workers in government-organized health insurance. Second, Obama would have the federal government establish and operate a new national “insurance exchange” for people who don‟t get coverage through a job. Third, as an additional option in the insurance exchange, Obama would launch a new publicly run insurance plan, modeled on Medicare, in which the federal government would act as the insurer, collecting premiums from enrollees to cover the costs of their healthcare claims. Heck, the federal government has done such a nice job with Social Security and Medicare. Why have them run a program to guarantee health insurance coverage for all Americans too!? It probably won‟t cost anything either. Choosing judges based on their empathy. In July 2007, Obama said “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 criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges.” What happened to choosing judges based on their judicial temperament, intellectual vigor, and ability to interpret the law without favoritism for any particular litigants? Campaigning in Ohio in March 2008, Obama cited Earl Warren as a model for the kind of justice he would pick for the Supreme Court. Earl Warren is considered one of the most liberal Supreme Court justices in U.S. history. Calling for troop withdrawal from Iraq before allowing the surge to work. When Obama launched his campaign in early 2007, he called for all of the troops in Iraq to be withdrawn within 16 months, despite the intense sectarian violence that was then rocking Iraq. Obama opposed the surge that was championed by President Bush and John McCain, declaring in January 2007 that “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.” Well, Obama was wrong. The surge worked, which has now paved the way for the implementation of Obama‟s policy of removing the troops. If American had removed the troops when Obama began calling for their withdrawal, Iraq would likely be fighting a civil war right now. Certainly better to leave with a victory. Negotiating with sworn enemies without preconditions. Obama has touted discussions with some of the world‟s most tyrannical leaders as a centerpiece of his new foreign policy. For example, Obama would cede the presidential stage to Iran‟s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the holocaust and has referred to Israel as a “stinking corpse” that “must be wiped out from the map of the world.” Abolishing secret ballot voting when workers vote on whether to unionize. Without secret ballots, unions will be able to intimidate workers, mafia style.
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To make matters worse, Obama‟s leftism will be enabled by a Democrat Congress that has seen its plans for America foiled by a Republican president for the past two years and views a real opportunity with Obama as president to make a quantum leap to the left. If Obama becomes president, he will be flanked by a House of Representatives and Senate controlled by partisan Democrats and piloted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Democrats may even preside over a Senate with a filibuster-proof majority of 60 Democrats. With total dominance of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Democrats will have free reign over public policy. Sensing a presidential victory, the Democrats in Congress have already signaled that they will be moving full speed ahead on their left-wing policy priorities. Here are just a few examples: Barney Frank (D-Mass) recently told the editorial board of his local paper The StandardTimes that he wanted to reduce military spending by 25%. While we are still locked in an existential battle with Islamists?! President Clinton also cut defense spending and, in the process, weakened our intelligence community, all in the name of a supposed peace dividend after winning the Cold War. That brought us 9/11. This time we are still at war, but that isn‟t stopping Barney Frank from flexing his political muscle in support of an instinctive liberal policy position on defense spending. John Kerry is hoping for a 2009 New Deal. According to the Boston Herald, Kerry said recently that “the nation‟s battered economy needs an old-fashioned „Rooseveltian lift‟ of regulatory reforms and government spending on the infrastructure, clean energy and other sectors.” Kerry continued, “I am for a stimulus package. I am not for a stimulus package that just sends out checks.” Kerry apparently believes that “the nation needs to spend more in areas that will both help the economy in the short run and long run - such as on roads and bridges, clean energy initiatives and life sciences.” It‟s the old Keynesian canard that the government can spend us out of recession. What happened to the tax cuts promised by Obama? Or the notion that private enterprise generates growth? Incidentally, Kerry has been rumored for the Secretary of State job in an Obama administration. Nancy Pelosi and her cohorts in the Senate are talking about reinstituting the so-called Fairness Doctrine, an old policy that would force media outlets to present controversial issues of public importance in a “balanced” manner. Balance would of course be in the eye of the beholder (probably the courts). This is nothing more than a ploy to kill conservative talk radio, which is a lot of things, but not balanced. House Democrats are considering a plan to eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to 401(k) and IRA plans. (See http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6122417). Instead, the government would create a “guaranteed retirement account” (GRA) for each worker. Workers would be required to contribute 5% of their earnings to the GRA and would obtain a $600 federal tax credit for such contributions. The Social Security Administration would handle the management of the account (because they have done such a nice job with Social Security returns) and would guarantee an after-inflation return of a measly 3%. So Democrats want the public to swallow a plan that mandates savings and provides a low return on investment. Sound good? I didn‟t think so. Conclusion Barack Obama is not a bad man, and his intentions for this country seem pure enough. However, his background and associations lead one to conclude that he is not the appropriate vessel for our
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hopes and dreams. Given what we have been able to discern about the man, it seems unfathomable that Barack Obama would govern as anything other than the leftist that he is and always has been. To believe otherwise, would be to employ a blind faith in the vessel. A far-left ship will merely move us to the left. It will not help us reach our destination. Some liberal partisans will dismiss the above profile out of hand as salacious fear-mongering. Others will claim that certain individual aspects of this piece have been taken out of context, could be interpreted in other ways, or are not 100% accurate. Or that there are aspects of Obama‟s life story have been omitted from the synopsis. There is no doubt that I have a bias, but I can also assure you that I have dutifully researched and corroborated every statement made in this piece. If even half of the claims are true, conscientious voters should be concerned, at the very least. You know the old adage that, where there‟s smoke, there‟s fire. Well, there‟s a whole lotta smoke here. If you still don‟t see any smoke, please ask yourself why are actual communists like Frank Chapman brimming with glee about an Obama presidency? In a letter to the Communist Party USA newspaper People‟s Weekly World shortly after Obama won the Iowa primary, Chapman crowed: Obama‟s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary “mole,” not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through. The American public has allowed the force of Obama‟s intellect and personality to overshadow his biography and far-left political predilections. If you want change (and who doesn‟t), Obama will lead you to the promised land. But, he‟s not going to be specific about what kind of change he‟s going to bring; he‟s going to let you decide what kind of change you think he wants to bring. That way, everybody‟s a winner. At least until he gets elected. Then we can expect the same old big-government prescriptions that have repeatedly failed us in the past, and possibly worse. Is this the first coming of Barack Obama as his supporters want us to believe or the second coming of Jimmy Carter as his detractors fear? My guess is the latter, although I really hope that I am wrong. I‟d rather be wrong. But I don‟t have much hope for that, given the record. Please just think long and hard before making your decision on Tuesday. The country is depending on it. Are you willing to take the Obama plunge?
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