Obama's High Horse and Fuzzy History

Old Gadfly:  Since the Orlando shooting incident, do we now see Obama using a bully pulpit or simply riding a high horse?  He accuses Trump of violating American values by wanting to ban Muslim immigration to America and that using the term, “radical Islam,” serves no purpose.  Obama seems to have created a meme that Trump is anti-Muslim and anti-immigration by extension—you know, one of those leftist labels called xenophobia.  With a complicit media, he expects others will imitate the meme. 

IM:  My understanding is that Trump is against illegal immigration (he’s married to a legal immigrant after all) and especially concerned about not being able to vet a swarm of Muslim refugees into America from an Islamic region that is far from peaceful.  This is a completely different mental frame than “anti-Muslim.”  I would say that Trump strikes me as an individual who believes that a just society is based on a system of laws and that America welcomes immigrants of all backgrounds through a legal process.

AM:  Obama’s message is crystal clear.  He believes his angry oration via a bully pulpit, where he, the self-righteous preacher with good public approval ratings (thanks to a horrific media slant and spineless Republicans who seem to have lost a grip on reality), rebukes the presumptive Republican presidential candidate for sinfully warning the public that there was a radical Islamist connection to the shooting.  Obama counts on an incredibly naïve public to swallow what he says on face value.  As we discussed in the last conversation, he has a colluding and fully complicit media to amplify the message.  Just this morning, I marveled at how George Stephanopoulos, on ABC Good Morning America, facilitated clips of Obama, Clinton, and Trump, shaping the message in favor of Obama and Clinton.  This is the same man who served as a senior advisor in the Clinton Administration, and then later donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  I’ll say more about connections later.

IM:  Sadly, at last year’s national prayer breakfast he sat on a high horse while accusing others of sitting on a high horse because an increasing number of Americans (and Europeans) are concerned about the increasing death toll stemming from radical Islam.  He lectured us about Christian violence in the name of Christ but refused to suggest there might be violence in the name of Muhammad.

Old Gadfly:  I remember he mentioned the Crusades.

IM:  He counts on fuzzy history.  Our progressive public education has done a great job in creating a mental frame that blames Christians for the Crusades.  A deeper look shows that the Crusades spawned in defense of Muslim aggression.  And when he sanctimoniously mentioned Jim Crow laws, he failed to mention that these were Democrat policies that are similar to much of the progressive inspired regulatory regime and rulings that pick winners and losers as we speak.

AM:  In the current Foreign Policy Magazine, Moscow-born Julia Ioffee wrote an article with this title:  “If Islam Is a Religion of Violence, So Is Christianity.”  Leftists are already pushing similar themes (see Dr. Paul Kengor’s excellent analysis here).  Let’s just stick to the current issue and I’ll ask, during high horse Obama’s reign, how many Christian-associated casualties have we recorded?  Aside from the thousands of casualties, to include many on American soil, and the millions of refugees stemming from radical-Islam, politically correct imitators like Ioffee want us to play make believe; just as George Lakoff advises all progressives, “if the facts don’t fit the frame, then they are irrelevant” (Read Lakoff’s Thinking Points, a Handbook for Progressives, here).  I think Mitt Romney may have received the Lakoff training based on his “trickle down racism” assertion the other day.  And, I’m sure Barry Goldwater would assure Trump to stay the course despite Mitt’s father, George Romney, going to great lengths to undermine Goldwater after his nomination by suggesting he was unfit to be president (jumping on the bandwagon of leftist efforts along these lines).  The major issue here was that Goldwater believed the issue of civil rights exceeded federal authority and belonged within the realm of the states.  George Romney, showing progressive colors, wanted the federal government to take on extraconstitutional authority. 

IM:  Back to Ioffee, politically correct imitators like Ioffee, who also wrote the GQ hit piece on Melania Trump, do not like their frame being challenged.

Old Gadfly:  Obama seems angry that the presumptive Republican nominee is personally challenging him on this topic.

IM:  God forbid anyone should challenge Obama because any such sacrilegious act would clearly be racist.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I remember a Democrat presidential nominee saying very derogatory things about his predecessor.  In fact, I recall that he did this to rally his political base, to get them angry and hungry for his special antidote of “hope and change.”

Old Gadfly:  So, what do you think he had in mind for change?

AM:  You mean more specifically than his vision to “fundamentally change America” ?  Wayne Allyn Root, a Columbia University classmate of Obama’s told us what the change was in 2010.  Here is an excerpt from an article he penned:

Rahm Emanuel cynically said, "You never want a crisis to go to waste." It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Barack Obama's presidency.

Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

Old Gadfly:  I remember reading about this strategy in the 60s, going into Johnson’s Great Society agenda.  Later in graduate school, I read Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s book, Regulating the Poor:  The Functions of Public Welfare.  Notice the action described:  regulating; not elevating or empowering, or some other uplifting strategy.  The authors described the importance of “stabilizing” the masses as a function of the welfare state.  This is very consistent with the growing administrative state that we now have, where a powerful central government continues to expand a regulatory regime that is becoming more and more coercive, controlling the centers of wealth production and significantly chipping away at individual liberty.

AM:  Which brings us to motivations for “hope and change” and the connections I mentioned earlier.  First, let’s start with Obama’s connections:  besides his mentoring by communist Frank Marshall, Obama’s key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod have their own direct connections with communist mentors.  See, for example, the evidence provided by Dr. Paul Kengor.  In his recent book, Takedown:  From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, Kengor explains (with powerful evidence) how important it was to destroy the traditional institutions of family and marriage to allow communism to flourish.  This is the fundamental change Obama had in store for America.

IM:  Just like V. I. Lenin, Obama knew that he needed to grow a Bolshevik-style grassroots to imitate his “vision” for a transformed America.  To achieve this, he instituted an initiative called “Organizing for America.”  Here is the video he released on January 15, 2009 announcing this grassroots initiative.  Today, his organizing machine is now named BarackObama.com.  At this renamed site, Obama imitators/followers can watch over 30,000 videos.

Old Gadfly:  In terms of “connections,” are there any concerns about Hillary Clinton?

AM:  Aside from the apparent corruption associated with the sleazy pay-to-play connections at the Clinton Foundation, a more sinister set of connections--especially in light of what happened in Orlando--begins with Huma Abedin, Hillary’s former aide at the State Department with access to Top Secret information and now vice-chair for her presidential campaign.  A recent expose’ by Roger Stone is very troubling!  According to Stone, Huma Abedin, a Muslim (ironically married to former, penis-texting Jewish Congressman Anthony Weiner), was the assistant editor for 12 years of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic journal published by the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a family business founded in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the patronage of Abdullah Omar Naseef of the Muslim World League.  Naseef’s connections go beyond this.  Naseef was involved in creating Rabita Trust in 1988.  Here is an important excerpt from Stone’s article:

Just a month after the 9/11 jihadist attack left thousands dead and brought down the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush’s Executive Order designated the Rabita Trust as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity and the Treasury Department froze its assets on October 12, 2001.

Naseef founded the Rabita Trust and remains involved with it to this day.  A Treasury Department press release issued when Rabita Trust’s assets were frozen indicated that Rabita Trust is headed by Wa’el Hamza Jalaidan, one of the founders of al-Qaida with bin Laden.  He was the logistics chief of bin Laden’s organization and fought on bin Laden’s side in Afghanistan.  Jalaidan himself was branded a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity by the United States Treasury Department, and his assets have been frozen, as well.

But the connections between Abedin’s Saudi benefactor, the Muslim World League, and al-Qaeda don’t end there.   (To read more, see here).

IM:  The Washington Post assigned 20 journalists to scrutinize Trump.  When do you think they might consider doing the same for Hillary Clinton?

Old Gadfly:  Not likely.  Fuzzy history is an asset for the left.  I realized this last year when a USAF Academy cadet admitted to me that he had no idea what communism is.  We need a modern Max Eastman to refresh people of real history. 

Eastman was a socialist activist in his early years and a close associate of John Reed, a fellow intellectual, Greenwich Village Bohemian who tried to bring socialism to America in the early 1900s.  You may have watched Warren Beatty’s movie, Reds.  Beatty wrote the screenplay and played the role of Reed in the movie.  I saw it when it was first released in the 80s and mostly treated it as fiction.  Then I watched it again last month.  After serving over 34 years defending America against the threat of communism, I truly understood the message of this biographical and historical movie this time.  In his book, The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek relied heavily upon Max Eastman observations.  Here is Hayek’s opening paragraph in Chapter 11, “The End of Truth”:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.  To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends.  It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.  Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.  If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.

AM:  Obama, the planner, must be pleased because even Republicans are acting “spontaneously in the way the planner wants.”

Old Gadfly:  Yes.  About 35 years after Hayek’s warning, in the 1983 edition of George Orwell’s 1984, the venerable Walter Cronkite provided the Preface.  Here is an excerpt:

If not prophecy, what was 1984?  It was, as many have noticed, a warning:  a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.

Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984.  But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing.  It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.

IM:  Pretty powerful observation from a respected journalist.

Old Gadfly:   Are there any living American journalists worthy of the title?  They seem to have lost their sense of duty and their soul.  And they have good company with imitating Democrats and spineless Republicans who lack the courage to support Trump, who clearly understand what Hayek and Cronkite warned us about.  Trump has a realistic understanding of history and is not on a high horse—he’s out front leading Americans who refuse to relinquish their God-given liberty.