Post-American Presidency (36 page)

Cowards. Have they studied Islam? Jihad?

Here is something they don’t know: Sohaib Sultan, who helped get the Darwish lecture canceled, wrote the book
The Koran for Dummies
. In that book he says that the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir is the “most referred to” authority on Islam “in the Muslim world today.” Sultan says that Ibn Kathir offers “an excellent collection of historical analysis on the Koran and his mastery of Islamic law makes his insights especially interesting.” Yet Ibn Kathir taught that Muslims should wage jihad war against Jews and Christians and impose laws upon them that would make them “disgraced, humiliated and belittled.”

Ibn Kathir said that “Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah [Jews and Christians] or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.”

So who really resembles the KKK or neo-Nazis? A courageous woman standing up for human rights for Muslim women and ex-Muslims, or a Muslim imam who holds up as an authority someone who says that non-Muslims should be “disgraced, humiliated and belittled”?
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Darwish told me that she was shocked that just weeks after an Islamic attack on Fort Hood, the largest such attack in U.S. history, activists who speak the truth about Islam are being shut down and marginalized.

In another assault on free speech that same month, they were throwing pies at a Robert Spencer event at New York University. What’s next? Grenades? And in the summer of 2009 the American Library Association canceled an appearance by Robert Spencer at
their national convention in Chicago when they succumbed to pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an unindicted coconspirator in a Hamas jihad terror funding case. CAIR falsely accused Spencer of bigotry, and instead of allowing him a fair hearing and opportunity for rebuttal, the ALA simply canceled his appearance.
⁶⁶

The war against free speech is being waged internationally as well—and here again, if Obama were acting as the leader of the Free World, he could put a stop to this. Instead, he abets it. At the beginning of 2010 the Dutch politician Geert Wilders faced prosecution in the Netherlands for “hate speech” for his elegant and brilliant film exposing the Qur’anic imperative to violence and supremacism,
Fitna
. He was also being sued by a number of European countries, and was barred from entering Britain (although that ban was later overturned) and the Czech Republic.
⁶⁷
When Dutch authorities disallowed fifteen of the eighteen witnesses Wilders had requested for his defense, Wilders called the court on its obvious intention to railroad him: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”
⁶⁸

It is America that has always stood solid and true. America has stood on the wall protecting these our basic freedoms—freedoms that have been the lifeblood of the greatest constitutional republic ever to have existed.

Until the post-American president took office.

Freedom of speech defines a free people. In the war of ideas, free speech is the foremost defense of a free people against tyranny.

You won’t like what comes post-America.

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA HID THE FACT
THAT HE WAS A HARD-LINE, DOCTRINAIRE
SOCIALIST AND STATIST, WHO BELIEVED IN CENTRAL
planning and government control of the economy as fervently as Stalin or Mao or Kim Jong Il ever did.

As president in the history of the United States, Barack Obama has been extraordinarily secretive. Among the many records he has sealed and never allowed to see the light of day are the infamous long form of his Hawaii birth certificate; the Indonesian passport he had as a dual citizen of that country and the United States; the marriage licenses of his parents and his mother and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro; the papers pertaining to his adoption by Lolo Soetoro; his application to the Fransiskus Assisi School in Indonesia; his academic records at Occidental College, Columbia, and Harvard; his medical records; his law-practice
client list; and the scholarly articles he produced at the University of Chicago.

Among the many records that never saw the light of day during his campaign or the first months of his presidency was his Columbia thesis—which became the focus of a minor media pseudo-controversy about Obama’s socialist leanings late in October 2009. At that time a bit of satire circulated around the Internet, featuring a fake thesis from Columbia University in which Obama criticized the Constitution. Rush Limbaugh, as well as Denis Keohane at
American Thinker
and Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media, picked it up, only to be pilloried by the Left when it proved to be a hoax.

The fake thesis featured Obama criticizing the Constitution, saying that “the so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”
¹

While it would have been inconceivable that any president of the United States before Barack Hussein Obama would ever have spoken that way, it wasn’t at all out of character for the post-American president. It sounded to many like something Obama would have said. As Michael Ledeen said, “it worked because it’s plausible.”
²
Was it really unbelievable that a protégé of Frank Marshall Davis, the ideological kin of Alice Palmer, a longtime associate of Bill Ayers, would turn out to be a socialist? It would have been more surprising if he hadn’t.

Obama had in fact said things very similar to the ones he was made to say in the satire of his thesis. He said them in a radio interview dating from 2001. The fake thesis just echoed things Obama has already said. In the interview, Obama discusses the best way to bring about a
redistribution of wealth. He speaks of the “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.”
³

Yes, “redistributive change.” He said that it was a tragedy that the Constitution wasn’t radically reinterpreted to force redistribution of the wealth: “I am not optimistic,” he said, “about bringing about redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.” He praised the civil-rights movement and its “litigation strategy in the court” for succeeding in vesting “formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples.”

Yet, for Obama, the civil-rights movement didn’t go far enough. “One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused… in some ways we still suffer from that.”
⁴

This was the fault of the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical.”
⁵

And that was because of the constraints of the Constitution: “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, it 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.”
⁶

So he doesn’t think redistribution of wealth can be accomplished
through the courts, but he thinks it can be done legislatively. That is why a liberal supermajority in Congress was crucial to Obama’s strategy.

Notice that Obama was not discussing whether redistribution of the wealth is right or wrong—this was a conversation about how to achieve that goal. And this was back in 2001.

Obama has been on record favoring the redistribution of wealth for years. The media just never bothered to notice.

THE NEW PARTY AND THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA

When Barack Obama first ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1996,
The Progressive Populist
newspaper noted blandly: “New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate seat from Chicago.”
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According to journalist Stanley Kurtz, “the New Party’s agenda was radically redistributionist. More important, the New Party’s specific strategy for achieving its economic goals precisely paralleled Obama’s now infamous 2001 radio remarks on ‘major redistributive change.’”
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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed Obama for that State Senate seat. Obama didn’t shy away from this association; on the contrary, he cultivated it. In February 1996, State Senate candidate Obama participated in a panel discussion at the University of Chicago, sponsored by the University’s DSA Youth Section, the Chicago chapter of the DSA, and the University Democrats. The panel topic was “Economic Insecurity.” The DSA newsletter
New Ground
reported that Obama said that “a true welfare system would provide for medical care, child care and job training.” It noted: “While Barack Obama did not use this term, it sounded very much like the ‘social wage’
approach used by many social democratic labor parties. By ‘workforce preparation strategy’, Barack Obama simply meant a coordinated, purposeful program of job training instead of the ad hoc, fragmented approach used by the State of Illinois today.”

In other words, Barack Obama was singing the praises of a centrally planned economy. Obama believed that the state should control the means of production and redistribute the wealth of its citizens. In line with this,
New Ground
reported that Obama also said that “the state government can also play a role in redistribution, the allocation of wages and jobs.… The government can use as tools labor law reform, public works and contracts.”
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In March 1998, State Senator Obama spoke at a memorial service for Saul Mendelson, who—again according to
New Ground
—“joined the Socialist movement at the age of 18” and was a lifelong agitator for socialist causes.
¹⁰

NATIONALIZING THE AUTO INDUSTRY

The economic crisis that attended Obama’s accession to the presidency enabled him to move swiftly to nationalize large segments of American industry—particularly the flagging auto industry. And once that was done, he wanted more. “Given the Obama administration’s rapid takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler,” remarked the director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, John Berlau, in June 2009, “it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to conservatives that, in the name of ‘financial reform,’ President Obama is arguing that government should get vast new powers to seize private firms.”
¹¹

Obama almost immediately announced ambitious new plans for the new government-subsidized auto industry. Pundit Charles Krauthammer explained in May 2009: “Well, with an essentially nationalized
auto industry, the president has decreed that by 2016 autos will have exactly on average 39 mpg and trucks 30. Well, if you do the math, it is a seven-year plan. Stalin restricted himself to five-year plans.”
¹²

There was bite to Krauthammer’s quip. Economist John Lott put it succinctly: “Government ownership implies much less efficiency. It implies political decisions in running the company.”
¹³

It was the problem with the socialist economy in a nutshell—and soon it would become the problem of the United States health-care system.

SOCIALIST HEALTH CARE

Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.

—attributed to Lenin

Despite overwhelming and unprecedented opposition to nationalized health care, Democrats in the House of Representatives passed the administration’s health-care resolution. Then the Senate quickly voted to consider the bill, which was tantamount to approving it.

And yet few Americans really wanted nationalized health care at all. Again and again America had spoken on this, yet the autocrats in Washington steadfastly ignored the will of the American people. A League of Women Voters/Zogby poll released in November 2009 found that Americans of all ages opposed Obama’s health-care proposals. Even those who were assumed to be most solidly in the Obama camp, voters under age thirty, opposed the plan by a 65–25 percent margin in a sampling taken in Arkansas, North Dakota, and Maine. Pollster John Zogby commented: “These results among 18- to 29-year-olds are striking. It puts in jeopardy the whole theory of the new
Democratic majority, because young people are essential to that base.” Nationally, support for the plan had fallen to 38 percent by November 2009.
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But Obama and the Democrats appeared intent on steamrolling over “we, the people.” One indication of that was that the administration passed over workable solutions to the health-care mess in favor of their hypertrophied and unreadable plan. Dr. C. L. Gray, president of the watchdog group Physicians for Reform, a coalition of working physicians, patients, and business leaders, proposed a simple, commonsense alternative to the elephantine health-care bills that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid seemed intent to force upon Americans. “Mr. President,” Gray wrote, “if you believe so strongly in the principles of choice and competition, introduce them.
Let individuals and businesses purchase insurance across state lines.
With one, simple, twenty-five-page bill—no pork, no slight-of-hand [
sic
], written with clarity the average American can understand—we can have choice and competition without adding a dime to the federal deficit or asking for a penny of new taxes.”