Personal Aside: One Man’s Catechism on Obama. NBC 5’s Decision to Blot Out the March on Washington a Near-Fascistic Usurpation of the News.

As we approach the 250th day Barack Obama has been in the presidency, how do we summarize? The best way I can do it is via a catechism of questions and answers.

Is Obama (a) a weak president who just can’t get his program through and who is putty in the hands of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel? Or (b) a strong president who will stop at nothing to achieve his left-wing ends?

Decidedly (b). Although as a pretty good amateur basketball player, he has learned to feint right and dash left to the basket. Long before he met Axelrod and Emanuel, Obama…a creature of the Third World whether born there or not (and the verdict is not yet in on that front) was decidedly a leftist. His danger to this country is this: With 43 previous presidents we’ve had some very good ones, some mediocre ones and some knaves and fools…but all of them have been patriots, the definition of which is “one who loves and zealously supports his own country.” My view, as one who was the first to interview him after he was elected state senator, is that he is not a patriot.

Why not?

Obama has always maintained…and is the first president who has said bluntly…that America is not exceptional. Tied to love of country is the Christian ethic that love of country closely follows love of God. Part of the Christian obligation is to see that one’s country does not fail in its duty to make witness to holiness and charity. But also, Obama has stated publicly that America is no longer a Christian country. Thus whether he gets his program passed or not, he is definitely an historic breakthrough among the presidents and the country is in danger from his leadership whether he is effective as a president or not. But even were he to be successful in his presidency and radically change its traditions as he wishes, it would not be the worst thing that could happen.

What would that be?

If some deranged person decides to bring harm to him or his allies out of hate and the crazed belief that his presidency should be interfered with by violent means. Christ’s law, as we are taught, is far more stringent than Moses’ in this regard. The Mosaic code forbade murder; Christ’s law does even more. Christ stressed that interior feelings of hatred can be murderous and thus convey mortal guilt. The proper role of one who opposes Obama is to strive to clarify the record and to use every legitimate means to bring home to the country the dangers of adopting his program. It requires moral and ethical tightrope walking to be sure…but that is our obligation.

What in your estimation has happened to the Obama administration politically?

It has suffered the most rapid decline in approval for any administration since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon (and the Ford pardon was in my estimation a good thing but a step for which Ford paid the highest price by losing the next election). Obama came in as a virtual Messiah. He relied on Emanuel and Axelrod not for inspiration but to devise the mechanics of implementing his program—and that’s where he failed greatly. At the urging of Emanuel who is a former congressman, he handed over the crafting of his stimulus package to Nancy Pelosi who turned it into a $787 billion Christmas tree of special goodies with little relevance to solving unemployment. At the urging of Axelrod he piled far too many liberal ideas on his plate—universal health care, cap and trade, education with a larded helping of federal spending from k-1 to college.

But didn’t Franklin Roosevelt do the same thing to fight the Depression when he first got in?

No. FDR came into office in 1933 with a single goal for the immediate time—to fight unemployment. He created a good many federal make-work projects which didn’t solve it including the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps: 1933-42) that gave military-style employment to 3 million young men… but gave the impression jobs were forthcoming. He didn’t take the next step—to drastically change the system, Social Security—until 1935…two years after his inauguration. He was lucky that in the early days of his administration many of his radical plans were blocked by the then-conservative U. S. Supreme Court. Roosevelt did not undertake to “pack the Supreme Court” until 1937. But from the earliest days of his administration, Obama loaded his plate and allowed the lefties of the Congress like Ms. Pelosi far too much leeway. That’s the difference. Also…take it from one who was on hand during Roosevelt’s days…FDR’s style was far different from Obama’s.

Style? What do you mean?

FDR’s style was Judeo-Christian (whether you give him credit for deep religious belief or not) and consonant with its religious tradition which conveyed confidence since it dealt with God. He was a patrician, a high church Episcopalian vestryman. When he met with Winston Churchill at sea on the HMS Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941, he later reported on a national radio broadcast to the nation that he and Churchill attended Anglican services on deck, sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” together and heard a lesson from the Book of Joshua.

Again, it is immaterial as to whether you like FDR or not: the point here is that Roosevelt’s style was in the Judeo-Christian framework. Obama’s is decidedly not. He has severed himself from any Christian tradition—unless you believe that his ex-pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ is in the Christian tradition, who heaped lavish praise on Nation of Islam head Minister Louis Farrakhan and who has blamed whites for the sufferings the black community faces.

What will happen to Obama’s health care bill?

Don’t think he will get nothing —but it’ll be a weak substitute for what he wants. Democrats have to pass a bill and make it sound like a huge reform, heaping praise on Obama and hoping the public will accept it as a victory and go to the 2010 polls happy. What he’s likely to get is this: no public option; no end-of-life counseling; the bill pronouncing that health care is a universal “civil right,” with tough regulations on the insurance industry that bans it from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, forbidding the dropping of coverage if a person gets sick and which caps insurance reimbursement. The “mainstream” media will toot it as a great accomplishment.

…to his energy bill?.

Because it smacks of higher taxes, it will be a dead letter item.

…to his education program?

Ditto.

Well, that pretty well certifies he’s a failure as a president, doesn’t it?

Sure. But don’t forget the mainstream media have a major stake in seeing he’s viewed as a success—because they invested so much of their prestige in him.

How can they do that, exactly?

In two ways. The first way is to stifle major gaffes of the Obama administration as per the issue with Van Jones and the second is to put a pretty picture out on Obama and his deeds. Regarding Van Jones: If you don’t know who he is, you were not reading the right news nor tuned to the right TV and radio outlets. Here’s a guy who was entrusted with federal power as the White House’s Green Jobs czar. His appointment was praised by Valerie Jarrett of the Chicago crowd, who ranks with Emanuel and Axelrod as senior assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs.

He is a 9/11 “truther,” having signed a statement attesting that George W. Bush caused the attacks on September 11, 2001, is a self-admitted Communist who after 9/11 stood in the streets with the Maoist organization he founded, “Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement” (STORM) that denounced the U. S. for bringing the terrorist attacks on itself, who wrote last January that “white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don’t have a racial justice flame.” Despite these things, he was largely excused from the “vetting process” in the White House.

Can you imagine the media storm that would have ensued had George W. Bush hired a pro-Nazi skinhead to do these things? The major news outlets never mentioned Jones’ name during the several weeks following revelation of his background? Yet the story never was raised on NBC-TV, CBS-TV or ABC-TV or in The New York Times or Washington Post until the storm passed and Jones “resigned” under pressure. Nor in either The Chicago Tribune or The Chicago Sun-Times. The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet, its Washington bureau chief, is very close to all the Obama-ites. Not a peep out of her either. This is not happenstance but a very concerted effort to block the news for Obama’s benefit—tantamount to journalistic malpractice.

Now the Obama administration says Van Jones was a minor player in the White House at the Council for Environmental Quality. True?

Not true. He had great influence and major support from the topmost leaders of the administration. And, as one who knew Obama and his clique from Chicago, I can tell you that Van Jones and Obama share the same Marxist ideology and background, with Obama being far more clever.

But you’re talking about the national media, not the local, right?

Decidedly not. Last night you didn’t get a glimmer of the Tea Party march on Washington from NBC 5 Chicago. A firm decision that a march of many thousands was made in its Chicago studios. It smacks of Pravda and mind-control fascism. Generally, “mainstream media” are a strong force but not impregnable. In the old days, before the Internet, cable news and talk radio, old-fashioned major media were impregnable: not now. Take a look at how the Van Jones story got out without major media’s cooperation—indeed over their objection.

The Van Jones story was uncovered by a single blogger, Trevor Loudon of New Zealand (by the way). He heard about the Van Jones appointment and started investigating. He says “I began to investigate after seeing several separate pieces of information. I first came across the name in the mid-1990s in a New Zealand socialist publication which had a small clip about Van Jones, a Yale-educated lawyer involved in STORM. The name stuck.” While researching the far-left Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in 2008, before Obama was elected, which Loudon discovered was the Obama campaign’s “think bank,” he found a piece from a staffer extolling Van Jones for a future top government job.

Then he probed again and found that Jones was a Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a George Soros-funded entity. A few days after Obama’s election he found a statement from former Weather Underground terrorist leader Mark Rudd (a friend of Chicagoan Billy Ayres, an Obama neighbor and supporter) that Jones was high on a list drawn up by John Podesta, the last chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton, a leftist ex-Chicagoan Catholic pro-abort (a Jefferson Park native) who heads the CAP and was co-head of the Obama transition team (and is a teaching Fellow at Georgetown law school, incidentally). Rudd extolled: “Look to the second level appointments. There’s a whole government in waiting that [John] has…They’re mostly progressives [sic] except in military and foreign policy [italics mine].”

Loudon stayed on the story like a bulldog. He tracked Jones’ appointment as “Green Jobs Czar” in March, 2009. His first article on his blog about Jones’ Communist connections appeared April 6. Alerted by the blog article, the organization Accuracy in Media headed by Cliff Kincaid filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests. The Obama administration tried to stonewall-- which Kincaid reported on his own blog on August 25. Kincaid and Loudon pressed on. They reported that STORM was influential in the San Francisco Bay area, had ties to the Cuban and South African Communist parties, that Jones had ties to two former Weather Underground supporters, that Jones was the keynote speaker at the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Further that he served on the board of Movement for a Democratic Society along with Weather underground leaders the aforementioned Rudd and Bernardine Dohrn, wife of Bill Ayres. Further that Ayres was heavily involved along with Angela Davis (remember her?). The story was passed to Glenn Beck of Fox and to Rush Limbaugh who gave it national attention and did further work on it themselves. They found that in 1999 Obama was called to New York to set up a far-left think tank called “Demos.” He served for a time on the “Demos” board. “Demos” is a partner organization to the Institute for Policy Studies and works closely with ACORN and Project Vote (remember them?). Finally that Jarrett of Chicago, known as “Obama’s brain,” was intimately familiar with Jones and his radical ties. Her words are preserved on tape saying that “they” (meaning the good guys) were watching Jones for years but the Obama people were happy to recruit him.

Says Loudon who first turned up the story: “The spotlight must go on Jarrett but eventually it must come back to the president himself.”

That’s how the story got out and how Jones was forced to resign…while major media not only slept but was tightly curled up in bed with the Obama administration.



What other scary things are you going to tell me about the Obama administration?

Stay tuned. We haven’t touched foreign policy yet.