Roman Around

In speaking of President Obama and his ongoing bid to transform the nation he says he loves (because, naturally, if one loves his country, the customary instinct is to want to transform it), I admit to some perplexity when conservative friends make curious comments like, “I can’t believe what Obama is doing to my country,” or pose questions like “Can you believe what this President is doing to America now?”

Some I’ve spoken with shake their heads not at the President’s liberalism, but at how far left his worldview actually is.

“I knew he was a liberal, but not like this.”

While exasperation and resentment understandably exist among limited-government, Constitution-loving, free-market types (like myself) – as well as some head scratching Democrats who are now looking at each other with puzzled expressions, asking themselves, “Is this what we asked for?” – the Obama Transformation Plan is not at all unbelievable.

Throughout the eon-long presidential campaign season, the writing on the wall was unmistakenly bold and legible. His resume, associations, public comments and policy positions prior to becoming a candidate for the presidency revealed a man with leftism in his blood and Marxist sympathies. Once Obama officially threw his hat into the presidential ring - and details of his leftist past were brought to light by industrious alternative news sources - the mainstream news outlets routinely brushed aside much of the concern coming from conservatives about Obama’s hard left leanings, dismissing them as fear-mongering and shameless demagoguery.

That’s not to say these stories did not make the news.

They certainly did.

The alphabet channels, for example, did explore Obama’s associations with people like the racist Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the reprehensible Bill Ayers; but ultimately, their desire to be a part of history and jump on the Bam-a-licious bandwagon trumped any real interest in getting at the heart of these stories or Obama’s radical leftism. Obama’s “past” was deemed largely irrelevant to the task of saving America from George W. Bush.

The media were so enamoured with him – so consumed with everything Obama - it didn’t seem to matter that only days before the election, some of the biggest names in America media admittedly still had no idea who Barack Obama was.

Take this famous exchange between PBS’s Charlie Rose and former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw:

ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know. 

But how on earth can that be true? Especially for professionals like Rose and Brokaw?

In the real world, the man who admitted to choosing his friends carefully while in college – namely, “the more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists” – couldn’t exactly be confused for a political centrist. The man who, while in New York, would visit the East Village for “the socialist conferences (he) sometimes attended at Cooper Union” could never be mistaken for a middle-of-the-road independent.

His support of late-term abortion was perfectly clear. His desire to see the American health care system transformed into a single-payer model was unquestionable. His belief that wealth should be distributed was incontrovertible. His two-decade long membership in a church led by a man who promulgated racism and hatred of America was indisputable. His affiliation with terrorists like Bill Ayers was undeniable. His adherence to the teachings of hyper-radical Saul Alinsky was unmistakable.

Yes, Virginia, these are among the tell-tale signs of leftism.

This once again brings me to ask my conservative friends … What exactly is there to be surprised about? What exactly is “unbelievable” about the Obama vision for America?

In October of last year, at the great American Thinker website, Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote:

Obama was raised on the mother’s milk of socialism. Both his parents were fellow travelers, who met at the height of the Cold War in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. Obama’s grandfather was a close friend of Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, sending young Barry (as he was then known) to him for mentoring, despite (or in ignorance of ) Davis being a pedophile. From the time he returned from 4 years in Indonesia and rejoined his grandparents in Hawaii at the age of 10, he was taken often to be with Frank Marshall Davis.

In Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, there is a strange revelation, perhaps intended as a signal of Davis’ stamp on Obama’s socialist creds. Obama makes this odd observation:

“The visits to his (Davis’) house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn’t fully understand.”

Dedicating the young Obama to the elder socialist mentor for the collective cause, perhaps? One hopes there were conditions protecting the ten year old from worse than indoctrination, in this “transaction.”

Obama did everything Alinsky prescribed. He went to Chicago, home of Alinsky and the place where Davis had worked for the communist revolution. Obama trained at the Industrial Areas Foundation, an Alinsky training institute. He organized in Chicago and did voter registration and training for ACORN. He went to law school. He built political alliances. He kept a tight lock on his records and his past.

You may recall that the official blogger for the Obama Campaign was a man by the name of Sam Graham-Felsen. He was a writer for the leftist magazine The Nation before he joined the Big Bam ranks.

As reported in April, 2008 at World Net Daily:

In 2003, Graham-Felsen participated in a labor march in France that Associated Press reported ended in violent riots – a characterization he disputed in The Nation. His coverage of the 2003 French protests against a new employment law again appeared in 2006 in Socialist Viewpoint, a journal that proudly proclaims its Marxist point of view:

The Socialist Workers Organization was formed to advance the revolutionary Marxist political program in the United States. Our members are long time active participants in the socialist and labor movements. We agree with Karl Marx that society is divided into social classes whose interests are irreconcilable. …

Socialism, the ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the working class, and the removal of profit from the system of production, is the aim of Socialist Viewpoint, which reflects the political views of the Socialist Workers Organization. Socialism is the prerequisite for the next stage in human development that will end class oppression and exploitation for all time.

The President’s catapulting deficit totals; his attempt at destroying private sector health care delivery; his unabashed declarations that the “rich” should have to pay more taxes to help those who are not (which they already do in gross disproportion); his transparent contempt for the free market system; none of this should be surprising to anyone.

In a 2006 opinion piece, Benjamin Shapiro writes:

Obama cites as his economic guru Warren Buffett and quotes him as stating, “[Billionaires] have this idea that it’s ‘their money’ and they deserve to keep every penny of it. What they don’t factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the way we do.”

This is Marxist trash.

“Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power,” Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto.”

Viewing private property as social property is a mandate to tyranny. Yet that’s precisely how Obama views private property: “I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring every American child has a chance for that same success.”

Let us also not forget that Barack Obama was named the most liberal Senator on Capitol Hill prior to becoming the Democratic nominee for President .

Quoting Barack Obama himself:

-What I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

-This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably

-We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

-I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

-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 ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as people try 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, 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.

That pretty much sums it up.

I’m not sure what else anyone could have been expected from electing someone with such a pedigree.

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