Media are thrilled that Obama is an action president. But his first hundred days that ended yesterday produced trillions in debt, throttled free markets, severely weakened individual liberties and failed to improve the economic climate.
They have reported that he: introduced a $787 billion stimulus package destined to cost $3.27 trillion (but the media didn’t point out he allowed it to be fashioned by Nancy Pelosi and hence was full of pork)…named Tim Geithner as treasury secretary who was behind on his taxes (but didn’t report on Geithner’s failure to add details to a bank bailout nor that the bailout hasn’t worked thus far)…thrust the federal government into running large segments of the domestic auto industry…propelled the government into becoming Citigroup’s largest shareholder and suggested it will do the same thing with other major banks…ordered treasury to extend federal regulation to all trading in financial derivates…announced he will create a regulator to monitor the largest financial institutions with the authority to take over major nonblank financial firms such as insurance firms and hedge funds…encouraged his Department of Homeland Security to release a report titled “Right-Wing Extremism: Current Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” citing returned veterans as grist for reactionary “radicalism” which it described as “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”
Ordered the EPA to regulate all carbon emissions…appointed Catholic pro-abort Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services (who was forced to withdraw for tax delinquency) and finally got one confirmed, Kansas Catholic pro-abort governor Kathleen Gilligan Sebelius, daughter of pro-abort Catholic governor of Ohio John Gilligan (the only father-daughter governors in U.S. history). Her confirmation was held up in the Senate after it was revealed that she misstated how much money she received from late-term abortionist George Tiller and had vetoed an important anti-late term abortion bill, leading Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann to ask her not to receive Holy Communion any longer…extended taxpayer-financed health insurance to all children in families with incomes up to three times the federal poverty level—crowding out private insurance and creating a vast federal government health insurance industry.
Pledged to remove all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010…ended the F-22 program that threatens to give us a deteriorated and hollow force that may not be able to win future wars…taped a video message to Iran that discussed the possibility of direct negotiations…banned interrogation techniques he has considered “torture” such as water-boarding…relaxed rules so Cuban Americans can visit relatives on the island and send them money…ordered Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorists to be closed by January, 2010…sought credit for the rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips in the hostile pirate kidnapping off Somalia which was accomplished when Navy Seal sharpshooters killed three of his terrorist captors…
Announced Bush tax cuts will end in 2011 for individuals earning more than $200,000, unprecedented by economic standards, which means tax hikes announced during a recession…eliminated the voucher program in the D. C. public schools costing only $14 million a year which allows 1,700 poor children to escape the worst public schools in the nation, as a sop of the powerful teachers’ unions…signed an order approving federally funded research on embryonic stem cells…proposed an ambitious tripartite social democratic agenda: nationalized health care to cost $1 trillion and (which media have not reported) a $1.1 billion set-aside in the stimulus package for “comparative effectiveness research,” double-talk for a health care rationing blueprint covering everything from MRIs to intensive care much as is kidney and heart transplants based on survivability criteria which means queuing……outlined federalized education from kindergarten through college paid for by a cap and trade carbon tax which will raise electric bills and further deteriorate the nation’s manufacturing capacity…
Neglected to provide entitlement reform for Social Security and Medicare. ..lifted a Bush rule that blocked federal money from going to international “family planning” clinics…ordered the EPA to rule that greenhouse gases threaten public health by increasing global warming and asked Congress to set limits on emissions.
The Hip President.
Important actions but not all that startling, given what we have come to expect from him during the 2008 campaign. All this dolled up with p. r. glitz for the young current and future voters are the stylistic flourishes he has made to show youth and hip-ness including...bringing his Blackberry into the Oval Office to remain in touch with the 21st century…dressing in black, sitting courtside at a Chicago Bulls-Washington, D. C. Wizards game, sipping a glass of beer and high-fiving a trash-talking fan…demonstrating panache to be either white or black or both with a personally gregarious style that is elusive and hard to define…skipping work occasionally mid-day to go to the basketball court, expertly dribbling, swerving, faking and dodging Arne Duncan, his education secretary who himself was a Harvard hoops star…unveiling his March Madness basketball predictions to the media in the Oval Office…and talking wonk language on health care one minute and the next greeting pop artists Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, Will.i.am (yes that name is spelled right: it’s not a typo), Sheryl Crow and Sweet Honey in the Rock, ultra-cool a capella singers with underground vibe.
Next to him, all politicians look square. Even John Kennedy notwithstanding who was tight with celebrities stars but they were establishment movie stars…Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin… not hip. Next to Obama, Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show looked like a chubby Ozark bubba: uncool.
Okay, now we’re getting warmer…but even these are still not the most significant changes in the first hundred days. What were they? Give up?
Lack of Concern for National Security.
Answer: The most significant changes involve insouciant carelessness about national security including: releasing secret CIA documents on torture that betray techniques on information-gathering to our enemies…leaving the door open for Justice to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who approved enhanced interrogation stratagems following 9/11: no concern about endangering America…dropping the words “war on terror” in favor of “overseas contingency operations” and “man-made disasters.”
Then there’s the obvious narcissism, elevation of self far above country. Imagine any other president sitting through 55 minutes of an excoriating verbal assault on America as a land of fascism, delivered by Nicaragua’s Daniel C. Ortega who assailed John Kennedy’s actions against Cuba during the Missile Crisis. What was Obama’s response: “I’m grateful President Ortega didn’t blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.” See what I mean? See the narcissism? His country is attacked and Obama shrugs it off as incidental to him since when the Cold War raged he was an infant. Meaning: shove off, JFK, Harry Truman. Those days of testing mean nothing to me. To our enemies this means: Hate the U. S if you prefer, but love me!
Hugo Chavez the arch-critic of the U.S. presents Obama with a book outlining his paranoid view of the United States and the president receives it warmly with a handshake, saying “thanks, amigo!” In Europe, Obama is asked if he believes, as other presidents have, in U. S. “exceptionalism.”
Exceptionalism is the idea that America is an unique laboratory of personal and economic freedom which unleashed unrivaled gains in technological and social advances. But this former non-tenured part-time instructor from the University of Chicago law school, says he is not an advocate of American exceptionalism but blands the concept to say just as some Americans feel their country is exceptional, so the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism and the Italians in Italian exceptionalism: thus every nation is exceptional. In other words, he doesn’t believe in American uniqueness.
Then there’s his release of CIA interrogation memos, pleasing to the left, which throws open the door to years of lawsuits and investigations that demoralize those who seek to protect this country by forcing them to fight an immoral jihad by Marquis of Queensbury rules—despite the fact that Dennis Blair, Obama’s own director of national intelligence acknowledges that the harsh interrogation methods did, in fact, “produce high value information” and “a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”
All the while he apologizes to the French—the French!—for America having been too arrogant ignoring the fact that there are 9,800 graves of American soldiers in Normandy alone and 70,000 American bodies in 489 cemeteries all over France, men who helped liberate France in two world wars.
Also his insouciance, seeming lack of patriotism…a cavalier, lighthearted unconcern when his country is under attack…and the strange case of his wanting to prosecute Bush officials for prosecuting the war on terrorism and to change the nature of interrogations of terrorists who wanted us to die as 3,000 did on 9/11, who would have prevented even fake tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11? The reason the protective media have steadfastly resisted from bringing up an essential question. What is it? It’ll be found later on in this piece. But media stealth cooperation with liberal presidencies earlier produced disastrous results for our country.
Media Protection of Presidents.
Media collaboration with presidents to keep voters in the dark has a long tradition here. Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland and Warren Harding were had life-threatening illnesses the media knew about but didn’t report. And then there was the scandal of Franklin Roosevelt’s poor health, kept from the people for at least a decade.
Franklin Roosevelt was all but a dead man when he ran for his fourth term in 1944 and the media, excepting a few outlets which were called reactionary and ultra-partisan, did not mention it…thus the great majority of the people either didn’t believe it or discarded the health issue as partisan. His top aide Harry Hopkins catalogued them after FDR’s death.
In 1938 at the age of 56 while visiting his son at the Mayo Clinic, records there show the president suffered a the first in a series of relatively minor strokes, slight fainting, unilateral blurring of vision, a temporary one-sided numbness caused by temporary insufficiently of blood supply to the cerebral area, based on an arteriosclerosis occlusion of a vessel feeding the brain. The White House in league with most of the media kept these things private.
At the Teheran conference in 1943, his doctor, Admiral Ross McIntyre reported the president suddenly fainted, “his complexion turned green” and he was hurriedly wheeled away for a complete rest. McIntyre’s diagnosis: another light stroke.
In 1944, age 62, a already a paralytic victim, survivor of several minor strokes, a two-pack a day cigarette smoker, seeking an unprecedented fourth term, and against his family’s wishes, he determined to show himself to as large a group of voters as possible. In a chilling October 21 rainstorm with the temperature at 40 degrees, he rode in a top-down green presidential Packard convertible, discarding his Navy cape and waving to crowds while bareheaded, through the four largest boroughs in New York city--Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan in a pouring cold drizzle lasted four hours. American media cheered that “the Champ” was fit and ready for another four years. Not that some of the public hadn’t sensed the truth. I remember as a boy my father and his friends commenting about how bad Roosevelt looked in the photos. But holding that opinion was strictly politically incorrect at the time.
On that trip, his car pulled into municipal garages after each borough and his aides peeled off his soggy overcoat and suit, giving him dry ones. After the tour, he rested at a privately rented apartment, had three stiff bourbons, a hot bath and a nap before hobbling on his braces, assisted by aides who held him up by gripping him under his arms (again violating his doctor’s orders) addressing a major crowd at Ebbets field.
He was suffering from illnesses the White House media knew in general but not in a specific way and which the public had no inkling of—cardiological problems including occasional angina attacks, high blood pressure, anemia, occasional insufficient blood supply to the brain which caused forgetfulness and a condition his physicians called secondary metabolic encephalopathy which led to a slack-jawed, gape-mouthed condition caught on some photographs, he convincing voters he was hale and hearty with his bronze face which had been sprayed to a golden tan by a Hollywood makeup artist.
Five months later, on April 12, 1945, he was dead at 63 of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Only then did the media investigate his prior bouts of serious ill health. After Roosevelt’s death, Hopkins wrote to Britain’s Lord Edward Halifax that at Yalta, Roosevelt didn’t follow more than half of what was said there. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran (Dr. Charles Wilson) who was at Yalta said Roosevelt had “all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries at an advanced stage.” Walter Trohan, Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune has said in his unpublished oral history at the Truman library that there was a conspiracy between the Washington press corps and FDR’s staff (and while Trohan himself reported on Roosevelt’s failing health, his reports were dismissed as products of a vengeful, mean-spirited, ultra-conservative, hate-filled anti-FDR Tribune) and ignored.
But media cooperate with president on other things than health.
The Strange Case of Obama’s Birth.
By now it is recognized only dimly by a few Americans that there has never been submitted by Team Obama definitive proof that Obama was born in this country, a prime requisite for the presidency under the Article II of the Constitution. Instead, questions about his birthplace are dismissed as racism by the White House and its bull-dog defenders, the liberal elite media which discount all genealogical questions as from paranoid Obama haters. Not so about Republicans, however. In 1968 there were serious questions raised by the media about George Romney who was born to American parents in Mexico. And early in 2008 the fact that John McCain was born to American parents in the Canal Zone. Questions like these were viewed as okay: not so any about Obama.
The official Obama campaign biography is all the media have and it says he was born at the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961 What we do know is that no one …no member of the media…has ever seen his original birth certificate. Last fall Team Obama posted what they said was a certification by Hawaii that an original birth certificate exists in a vault but the location of the vault or place of birth is not listed.
Obama’s late paternal grandmother and several of his half-brothers have said he was born in Kenya and that his mother, 18 at the time, visited Kenya in 1961 in the late stages of pregnancy, was not allowed by the airline to fly back to Hawaii and gave birth to the baby in Kenya. A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent (Barack Obama, Sr. was a citizen of Kenya) acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) of U.S. immigration law provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period at the child’s birth. For birth between 1952 and 1986 a period of 10 years (five after the age of 14) is required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child. Because his mother was not 19 years old, she wouldn’t have satisfied the requirement if rthe birth took place in Kenya—and Obama wouldn’t have been born a U.S. citizen.
Disclosures from Obama’s campaign fund last week showed that more than $1 million was paid out to a legal team to keep the original certificate from coming to light. Obama’s people could easily settle it by releasing his original birth certificate; instead they released a short-form birth certificate which can easily be manufactured by anyone downloading a blank template. Why, then, doesn’t his legal team end the controversy by releasing the original?
Be that as it may, we know he has been floating all his life in a disparate non-family structure involving scores of nondescript half-brothers, half-sisters and step-siblings in flotsam-jetsam fashion with supposed grant aunts and half brothers living in African shacks turning up all the time.
Lack of connection with this country may be one reason why he displays no visible patriotism for a country he may not feel a part of. To those who complain that this question of his birthplace is unfair, I say: end the controversy, then, by producing the original certificate. Instead they spend a million to prevent its disclosure.
One thing is sure: he is a Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine sophisticate, smooth enough to win voters but with loyalty to very little other than the shifting kaleidoscope of his own political self-interest. And in this country today where political correctness reigns , don’t count on the truth coming out from either the media or professional historians until long after he leaves the presidency.
Until then, we’re stuck with a presidential mystery man, unfeeling about many things including the well-being of babies born live from botched abortions. He decided coldly, by his action as Illinois state senate Judiciary chairman that they would be denied nutrition, medical care and comfort to assuage the pain and be allowed to die untended by any medical care.
As Churchill once said of the USSR: Obama is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Please give a source for Obama's "late paternal grandmother."
ReplyDelete