The American Spectator

Special Report

Freedom and the View From Obamaland

By Jeffrey Lord on 7.1.08 @ 12:08AM

Pull back for a moment from the day-to-day and see the pattern.

Talk radio. Oil. Guns. Global warming. Smoking.

On the surface this is a seemingly unconnected laundry list of issues, their connection one to another tangential at best. Or is it?

In the increasingly disturbing view we are all getting of the messianic world that is Obamaland, these subjects in fact have a chilling commonality.

* Talk Radio: Think back for a moment to that threatening letter sent earlier this year to Rush Limbaugh's business partners at Clear Channel Communications by Senator Harry Reid, the Democrats' Senate leader. It was signed by all Senate Democrats, prominently including Barack Obama. While Limbaugh famously turned the attempt to intimidate him into a hilarious charity bidding war that raised four million dollars for the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, make no mistake. The idea behind the letter was an attempt by government officials to intimidate a private citizen into silence. To shut down Limbaugh's freedom to run his radio show the way he sees fit. Silencing freedom is also the point with the push by Obama supporters to revive the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a move that would effectively shut down the free-market world of talk radio as Americans by the millions have so enthusiastically come to know it.

* SUVs: Remember this gem a while back from Barack Obama?

"We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world's energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we'll be fine. Don't worry about us. That's not leadership."

The point is not subtle. Obama is laying the ground work here for the potential banning of SUVs as well as pushing regulations that will tell all of us at exactly what temperatures we must heat or cool our homes. Over at the website BanSUVs.com, an outpost of the type of thinking that prevails in Obamaland, the goal, as the name of their site proclaims is just that: banning SUVs because they are "endangering peoples lives" and are "high polluting." The Obama point that we should no longer enjoy the freedom to "keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra" has already emerged as a proposal in California. In this Obamaland vision the state would mandate that every heating and cooling system in a private dwelling include a "non-removable" FM receiver that would allow the government to decide the temperature inside your home.

* Global Warming: The answer in Obamaland is simple. Not only should there be no further debate ("Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers..." wrote Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman a while back), the demand is on for a Nuremberg-style trial for oil executives. Applauding the sentiments of climate "scientist" James Hansen, who suggested as much in a recent appearance before Congress, one enthusiastic denizen in the Daily Kos precincts of Obamaland put things more succinctly: "Put the bastards on trial on national television."

Are you seeing the thread here?

If not, there's more of this kind of thing. Also on Obama's list of things he either wants to ban or has considered banning are ammunition magazines, semi-automatic weapons, smoking (to be resolved with a federal ban on smoking in public places) and -- at one now infamous campaign rally -- Muslim women wearing the hijab. The Obama campaign apologized for the latter incident, but the apology only underscores the point. While his staffers may be sensitive to the image of Muslims in the Obama campaign, they either know or intuit that the idea of restricting the freedom of others is, as a rule, perfectly acceptable in Obamaland.

FOLLOW ALONG NOW to a just-released Obama commercial featuring Obama himself. Doubtless un-intentionally it speaks exactly to what lies at the heart of the philosophical heart of Obamaland. Praising himself for spurning a post-Harvard Law School opportunity to work on Wall Street in the heart of free-market capitalism, the candidate boasts of his decision instead to "go to Chicago...helping neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed." Helping them? Did he go out and raise capital to start a new business that would bring jobs to the neighborhood? Well, no. Job creation through the free market system was not at all what Obama had in mind. What did he have in mind as to how one creates jobs? As Obama himself expressed it in a 1995 interview with the Chicago Reader, Obama wondered if he could "figure out ways to use the political process to create jobs for our communities?"

In other words, when faced with a disagreeable problem (in this case the lack of jobs) the answer for Obama always seems to get back to the manipulation of the political process to achieve the desired result.

Are Obamalanders uncomfortable with the free-market driven success of talk radio? Then they will "figure out ways to use the political process" to shut it down. In the case of talk radio, how else to explain the threatening Reid-Obama letter to Rush Limbaugh's business partner? How else does one explain the attempt to retrieve the "Fairness Doctrine" from the dustbin of history? These are nothing more or less than the "use of the political process" to subvert someone else's freedom. Period.

Are Obamaland followers hostile to oil? Do they hate SUVs? Do they think you have no right to heat or cool your own home beyond what they consider politically correct? Do they think you should pay $5 -- or $6 or $7 or $8 or more -- for gas at the pump to ensure you conform to the Obamaland world-view? Yes, they do think all of this and their Obamaland answer is inevitable. They will "use the political process" to stop drilling off shore in its tracks. So too with stopping the use of oil shale or ANWR or anything else that even hints at allowing average Americans their basic freedom to drive whatever vehicle wherever they damn well please whenever they damn well please. In Obamaland it is not only perfectly acceptable, it is gospel from the secular bible that they must use the political process to stop refineries from being built, to keep nuclear power plants from being built, to keep coal from being burned. Use the political process to forcibly mandate the temperature inside every single American home. As a matter of fact, why not just go all the way and nationalize the oil companies -- this actually being suggested by Obamaland's New York Congressman Maurice Hinchey.

Tired of debating global warming? Use the political process to set up show-trials for oil company executives. Who will be around to object if you have successfully used the process to silence the world of talk radio?

As we learned in one of his last debates with Mrs. Clinton, presented with the economic fact-of-life that cutting the capital gains tax resulted in increased revenue for the government, not, as he was portraying it, a loss, the ringmaster of Obamaland simply shrugged, saying he would raise it anyway because to do anything else was "unfair." The idea of your having the freedom to do with your money as you please -- even when doing so increases the revenues for Washington politicians to spend -- was simply irrelevant to Obama. No, your freedom must pass his "fairness test" -- and if it doesn't, well, too bad. Your income is going to suffer right along with your freedom to listen to talk radio, drive an SUV, debate global warming, eat what you please, heat your house the way you please or -- the latest Supreme Court decision notwithstanding -- own a gun if you please.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Trade, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Television, Business, Global Warming, Constitution, Law, Supreme Court, NATO, Fascism, Energy, Oil