“A man running for the Presidency must talk up, way up
there.”
He also has to tell the truth.
The fact that Illinois Senator Barack Obama doesn’t grasp the
first point, made by John F. Kennedy to his friend Theodore H.
White at the close of White’s classic The Making of the
President 1960, and simply ignores the second, is providing
those of us here in Pennsylvania a startling look at two repeated
behavioral patterns of a man who would be president.
1. A PATTERN OF DELIBERATELY NOT TELLING THE
TRUTH:
As I write, Obama is running ads here in Pennsylvania in which
he says:
“I’m Barack Obama. I don’t take money from oil companies or
Washington lobbyists…”
Uh-huh. Says the Annenberg Political Fact Check:
“Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work
for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses.”
“Two of Obama’s bundlers are top executives at oil companies and
are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000
for the presidential hopeful.”
If you follow the link here to Oil Change International, a site that tracks
contributions from the oil industry to politicians, you can even
discover the Obama contributors by oil company name, title and
precise individual amounts. Hint: do the names Exxon-Mobile, BP and
Hess ring a bell?
Then there’s the business of attacking those big, bad
pharmaceutical companies, from whom Obama doesn’t take money
either:
A quick trip to OpenSecrets.org shows that Obama outstripped all
candidates of both parties in the category of financial
contributions from “Pharmaceuticals and Health Products,” racking
up an impressive $528,765 in contributions.
If that’s not enough, check in with the folks over at Investor’s Business Daily and up pop
these two gems:
“The Washington Times reports that while Sen. Obama has said he
won’t accept money from the Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), he has accepted “tens of
thousands” from partners at Covington & Burling LLP, which was
paid nearly a half-million dollars to lobby for PhRMA last
year.”
And:
“The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that
partners at Covington & Burling have given Obama $25,000 in
contributions and $10,560 since October. Covington & Burling
lawyer Eric Holder, a former top deputy in the Clinton Justice
Department, gave $4,600.”
This is truly an amazing if cynical sight to see. A candidate
for president who is running on a platform of change looks the
camera directly in the eye and brazenly tells a blatant untruth
that he knows is a blatant untruth. Hoping, presumably, that in
this day and age of the Internet there’s such an avalanche of stuff
out there that no one will pay it any attention. Wrong.
Where else has this Obama pattern been seen at work?
Iraq: Obama attacks Senator John McCain for
saying the following at a New Hampshire town hall meeting:
“President Bush has talked about our staying for 50 years, maybe
100. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, in South Korea for 50 years
or so. That would be fine with me as long as Americans are not
being injured or harmed or killed.” In spite of the fact that
McCain’s comments were captured on video and in context from
beginning to end, Obama deliberately misrepresents the statement by
saying this at a town hall meeting of his own here in
Pennsylvania.: “John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps
as long as 100 years.” In other words, tape or no tape, Obama
simply told his audience something that was not true, that
something being that McCain wanted a 100-year war in Iraq.
Campaign Financing: Obama commits to accepting
public campaign financing were he to win the Democratic nomination,
the identical commitment made by Senator McCain on the Republican
side. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly close to victory, Obama
reneges, saying the system is “creaky” and that he may not
participate. Leaving a rarely startled McCain to say in
astonishment: “He committed to it….in direct contradiction to his
rhetoric, he’s now saying well he may not do it.
The UCC and the IRS: Obama accepts an
invitation to appear at the General Synod of his United Church of
Christ denomination saying he will only speak about his “faith
journey.” Instead he campaigns for president from the pulpit, gets
the church socked with an IRS investigation, then says he never
discussed his campaign — in spite of both video and transcripts
that show this not to be true.
With this first pattern of telling repeated falsehoods coming
into view, the obvious question is why? Why does he do this? Or
what makes him do this? Here again are a telltale series of signs
about a second Obama pattern.
2. A FAR-LEFT IDEOLOGY:
With the Almighty secularized out of the way, what is it that
liberalism worships? Power. Raw political power. As much as it can
possibly accumulate. Do they want that power over the rich? Sure.
But as many have come to understand over the years, the left also
wants power over the poor. Over the working class. Over the middle
class. Over everybody — else. Except, of course, their like-minded
souls. And when in the company of like-minded souls, Obama is
apparently unable to see any problems. Which would explain:
* Obama’s lack of alarm at serving on the board of a foundation
with the un-repentant Weatherman William Ayres, who has said “I
don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough.”
* Obama attends the UCC Trinity Church in Chicago and says for
20 years he never knew pastor Jeremiah Wright was preaching the
kind of sermons now so vividly documented on the DVD’s supplied by
the church itself, sermons widely described as racist.
* Obama praises abortion by saying that having a baby is
“punishment.”
* Michelle Obama’s statement that this is the first time in her
adult life she’s had anything to be proud of as an American.
Thoughts that he should not serve on a board with Ayres or that
he should use his power as a Trinity UCC member to get his pastor
dismissed — a power the UCC gives its members — apparently never
occurred to Obama. It is reasonable to ask why. The answer, based
not only on Obama’s lack of reaction in these two cases but, with
the other recent incidents declaiming against babies as
“punishment” and his wife’s inability to see any reason up until
the Obama campaign to be proud of America are what Wall Street
types might call “leading indicators.” Surefire signs that this is
a man with a reflexively far-left wing ideology, so reflexive that
Obama himself doesn’t even recognize the signals he or his wife or
his minister or Ayres send by their own statements and actions —
or lack thereof.
Which would also explain his latest dustup causing a stir here
in Pennsylvania. Read again the remark that Obama has already tried
to apologize for, something he has said “everybody knows is
true.”
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot
of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25
years and nothing’s replaced them….And they fell through the
Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each
successive administration has said that somehow these communities
are gonna regenerate and they have not,” he said.
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to
explain their frustrations,” he also said.
The thinking here is clear. Crystal clear. Obama has clarified
that his views are an “underlying truth.” They are also stunningly
condescending, something JFK warned against. Particularly are they
so towards blue collar and small town Pennsylvanians.
IN THE OBAMA WORLD (and note he said this in San Francisco, not in
Altoona), the thought honestly just doesn’t occur that someone in
Pennsylvania towns like Juniata or Chambersburg or Bedford or
Forest City or Warren could own a gun for the sheer joy of hunting
on a crisp late fall day in the woods of Pennsylvania. Or even
because one believes passionately in a Second Amendment right to do
so. Or, gasp, because in the pursuit of happiness one just loves to
shoot a gun! No, all those hunters you see in the huge swaths of
Penn’s woods are tramping around in their fashionable camouflage
and bright orange come deer season because, in Obama’s leftist
world, they must have some sort of “frustration” that can only be
soothed by clinging to guns. In heaven, the sound is heard of
Charlton Heston laughing.
Having already displayed a mind-boggling elitist view of
Pennsylvania gun owners, Obama wanders on to reveal an elitist’s
thoughts on our religion. He quite seriously believes
Pennsylvanians “cling” to religion out of the same kind of
bitterness that has them clutching guns in their warm, very much
alive hands. One wonders whether the Senator has ever bothered to
ponder that those of us who attend churches in small Pennsylvania
towns do so not because of the Marxian inanity that religion is the
opiate of the masses but because we are the lineal descendants of
William Penn and his Quakers. Penn’s followers came to Pennsylvania
intent on the words of English Quaker George Fox: “My
friends…going over to plant, and make outward plantations in
America, keep your own plantations in your hearts, with the spirit
and power of God, that your own vines and lilies be not hurt.” As
historian Daniel Boorstin noted in The Americans: The Colonial
Experience, the very insistence “on a belief in equality” that
was instilled by the first Pennsylvanians came out of — and is
maintained today — precisely because so many Pennsylvanians of all
faiths saw their churches as a place to nourish and care for the
“inward plantation” that is a human soul believing both in an
Almighty God and the liberty of all men and women.
These views are alien doctrine to Obama and his wife Michelle,
both well-educated and well-paid liberal elitists, for a reason
that has been abundantly clear to Americans since about 1968. The
moral core of modern liberalism has been hollowed out, the heart
once vibrantly represented by FDR and JFK replaced by a bleak and
soulless view of the world that not only gives a pass to the racism
of a Jeremiah Wright or the bomb setting of a William Ayres it
never blinks at the telling of falsehoods designed to gain the
heights of power. Political power is the only god left for
liberalism to worship. It may be sought with bombs by Ayers, racism
by Wright or by Obama’s simply never blinking as he tells an
increasingly longer list of outright falsehoods.
But in the end, the question that keeps coming back into view is
always the same. Every time an Obama commercial sails on to a
Pennsylvania television screen, that question — and the patterns
that raise it — becomes more insistent. It is a question of
character.
Based on what we are seeing here in Pennsylvania, all by itself
that one question should disturb.
A lot.
