Barack Obama: President of ... What?

The biggest problem with President Obama is that he so often seems not to have a grasp on just exactly what it is that he is president of.  There appears to be no recognition in this White House that, once the election campaign is over, the winner becomes the president of all 50 United States, along with every person who resides within them.

We have never had a president who so openly demonizes huge swaths of American society on such a regular basis as we have seen this President repeatedly do with Tea Partiers (even resorting to the obscene "tea bagger" reference), opponents of socialized healthcare, anyone making more than $100,000 per year, and the entire state of Arizona, to name just a few of his chosen rhetorical targets.  Then there are those segments of our society to whom this President and his gang of Chicago thugs offer nothing more than benign neglect:  The people of Nashville, who just weeks ago suffered through flooding comparable to what Katrina did to New Orleans with barely a mention from this President, millions of Americans living along the border with Mexico who suffer with the drug trafficking and violence that are a facet of daily life in the region while this Administration steadfastly refuses to do anything about enforcing the laws on the federal books, and the people of the Gulf Coast, who had to wait 37 days before this President summoned the interest to deign to hold a press conference about the ongoing tragedy of the BP oil spill.

To that growing daily list, we can add the families of America's fallen veterans, insulted on Monday by this President's choice to vacation in Chicago rather than take part in the traditional Memorial Day presidential ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.  The breaking of this tradition is just the latest in a long line of insults to the military offered by Mr. Obama and his Administration over the last year and a half.

Given these and many more divisive acts taken by this President, it is increasingly obvious that Mr. Obama considers himself the "president" only of those who voted for him and support his radical leftist political agenda.  Can there be any real question, for instance, that had it been a very blue-state Boston that suffered through massive spring flooding rather than deep-in-the-heart-of-a-red-state Nashville, this Administration would have staged a massive federal response to the disaster?

If the BP oil spill threatened the coastlines of blue-state California, Oregon and Washington rather than red-state Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, does anyone really believe that this President and his minions would have sat benignly by for a full month doing little other than deflecting blame before finally and begrudgingly beginning the process of treating the event as a disaster of national proportions?  If you do believe that, well, you'd be much better off reading Alice in Wonderland than this column.

Whatever else one thinks about George W. Bush, as President – and as Texas Governor before that – he was studiously careful not to use derogatory rhetoric about any segment of our society.  Where Obama derides Tea Party activists at seemingly every given opportunity, Bush never lowered himself or the office he occupied to criticize those who participated in the thousands of obscene and often violent anti-war protests that became a staple of American life after the invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton was also very careful to avoid the use of divisive rhetoric against any segment of the American public, and clearly understood the necessity of any president staying above the fray.  In reality, until the elevation of Mr. Obama to the office, one would be at great pains to find an example of any sitting president since Woodrow Wilson who openly and frequently demonized large segments of the U.S. population for political gain.

Clearly, President Obama feels no similar need for restraint, and in fact obviously believes that dividing the nation is in his own self-interest.  As long as that political calculation holds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can anticipate two and a half more years of a nation becoming increasingly and more bitterly divided.

And there is no reason to believe the political calculation will change.  This strategy is in keeping with the Obama Administration's adherence to the demonize-and-conquer strategies taught by late Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, whose teachings have guided this President throughout his adult lifetime.  This is who Mr. Obama is, and who he will remain.

This reality will bring joy to the hate-filled cretins who inhabit leftwing websites, but it won't do much for the rest of a population yearning for a President who actually gives a damn when a tragedy such as the BP oil spill devastates an entire region of the country, regardless of how that region voted in the 2008 presidential election.  For that, they will have to wait until January 20, 2013.

The Mindless and Disgraceful Alinsky Democrats

One of the most amusing pass times I've engaged in recently has been to observe as the Democrat Party and its press agents in the old, tired, dying, Dinosaur national news media demonize those who participate in the loosely-organized Tea Parties around the country.  The Democrats are in fact so frightened by the Tea Partiers that they have resorted the tactics preached by their apparent guiding philosopher, the late radical Saul Alinsky, attempting to brand all Tea Party participants as racist rednecks.

In the runup to their vote on the healthcare nationalization atrocity a few weeks back, several African American Democrats leveled accusations that some of the participants in the Tea Party rally that took place on the day of the vote had shouted racial epithets at them as they filed into the Capitol building.  Barney Frank, the gay pathological liar from Massachusetts, similarly alleged that at least one of the tens of thousands of Tea Partiers there that day hurled a gay slur at him. 

The leftist news media, as always utterly incurious about why these specific members of congress would choose to enter the capitol building at ground level, rather than use the tunnels they use about 99% of the time, breathlessly reported the accusations from these members of congress as fact (after all, they're all liberals, they wouldn't lie, would they?), and have spent the last three weeks tarring and feathering everyone who has ever participated in a Tea Party rally.

On the day of the vote, I told some friends that I suspected these accusations were fake, and after a few days of the demonization of the Tea Partiers, others began to wonder the same thing.  After all, dozens of members of the media recorded every step those members of congress took that day, and yet none of them managed to catch audio or video of a single racist or homophobic remark coming from the crowd.  Yet no one in the dinosaur media found this to be curious.

Andrew Breitbart, a journalist who runs the very successful website, Breitbart.com, realizing that there had to be hundreds of individuals in the area using either video cameras or cell phone capable of recording audio, decided to offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who could produce any evidence at all that any racist or homophobic remarks had come from the crowd.  After a week of getting no response, he upped the reward to $100,000.  To this day, there has been no response.

Why?  Because the accusations were clearly fake, staged by these Alinsky Democrats as a means of marginalizing a movement they perceive as a threat to their political future.  These fake accusations are based on these rules from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

So, the Tea Party participants now become demonized as a bunch of lower-class, uneducated, racist rednecks.  Nevermind recent polling data that show a) more than 40% of Tea Partiers are political independents or Democrats, b) the average education level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large, and c) the average income level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large.  In the Alinsky Democrat view, Tea Partiers cannot be perceived to be a cross-section of the population at large because that lends them legitimacy in the eyes of others.

I think this Alinsky Democrat tactic will fail – and already has failed, in fact – with everyone who is not already a hopelessly smug, leftist ideologue.  Because most Americans are going to understand that an attack on the Tea Partiers is really an attack on middle America, that vast swath of the country that lies outside of the leftist media centers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  The Alinsky Democrats used the same tactics against Sarah Palin, and were largely successful in marginalizing her.  But Sarah Palin is one person – the Tea Partiers are millions of ordinary Americans, whose views are supported by millions more.

The Tea Party movement is the single most important political development of the last 20 years, and the Alinsky Democrats know it.  When 48% of those surveyed in a recent poll say their political views are closer to the Tea Partiers than to the President's, the Alinsky Democrats know they have a very real problem.

Lashing out and demonizing millions of registered voters, at a time when your party is already lagging behind in the polls, does not appear to be a recipe for success, regardless of what Saul Alinsky taught.

Tuesday Morning Roundup

Interesting stuff out there this morning, especially if you want more insight into the President's thought process regarding his policy priorities.  I've told you for a year now that this guy is a true believer radical leftist, and unlike Bill Clinton, getting re-elected is not his first priority.

If you need confirmation of that from the horse's mouth check out this video.  "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president."  To a Saul Alinsky (the real spiritual head of today's Democrat Party, pictured at left) disciple, that  means he'd rather keep trying to institutionalize as much neo-fascist policy as he possibly can over the next three years, whether via legislation or regulation (like the EPA's move to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act), than worry about moderating himself in order to improve his public standing and increase his chances for re-election.

This is a very, very dangerous man.