Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack
Obama
By David Limbaugh
(Regnery, 503 Pages, $29.95)
Here’s attorney David Limbaugh’s opening salvo, fired in the
first sentence of this strongly written and thoroughly researched
bill of particulars: “This book is about a young presidency— young,
but already the most destructive in American history.”
“Since his first day in office,” Obama has worked to
“‘transform’ the country into a land consistent with his socialist,
secular, multicultural vision.” He views America, writes Limbaugh,
as a country that has failed “sufficiently to atone for its racial
sins,” subscribes to “an antiquated and discriminatory system of
values,” has an economic system “that fosters an ‘inequitable’
distribution of wealth,” consumes “a disproportionate share of the
world’s resources,” and exercises its power in the world
“imperialistically.”
In pursuit of his vision for a transformed country, Limbaugh
charges, Obama is wreaking havoc with “America’s culture, its
Constitution, and in every sector of the American economy (save the
public sector)”; and while “holding himself out as a post-partisan,
post-racial president, he has exacerbated racial tensions, inflamed
partisan divisiveness, engaged in acrimonious class warfare, and
demonized anyone to the political right of the late Ted
Kennedy.”
Limbaugh proceeds to lay out the particulars of his indictment,
attacking with strength and a gusto lacking in much current
conservative writing, documenting Obama’s offenses against the law,
including his administration’s concept of race-based justice, as
witness “his stunning protection of the New Black Panther Party”;
his attempts “to redistribute wealth among Americans in ways he
believes are fair”; pushing through “socialized medicine against
the will of the people”; and attempting a “redistribution of
America’s resources to other nations to further settle what he
perceives as our injustices toward the world.”
Moreover, Limbaugh writes, Obama “has apologized for and
condemned America at almost every turn,” and “his worldview leads
him to scorn American exceptionalism and American sovereignty in
favor of a globalist approach.” This worldview was reflected in
Obama’s “international apology tour,” which took him to London,
where he declared, “I would like to think that with my election and
the early decisions that we’ve made, that you’re starting to see
some restoration of America’s standing in the world.”
He told the French that America failed “to appreciate Europe’s
leading role in the world,” and that we’d been “arrogant,”
“dismissive,” and “derisive” (music, no doubt, to French ears). He
apologized to Latin America for our failure to pursue “sustained
engagement with our neighbors” (which his administration shows no
sign of doing), and repeated in Trinidad that we’d been
“disengaged” and “dictatorial.”
In May of this year, writes Limbaugh, the administration
actually apologized for Arizona’s immigration law to the Communist
Chinese, of all people. And in a Rose Garden press conference with
Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon, he stood by without comment as
Calderon, in a breach of common courtesy and diplomatic good
manners, attacked Arizona for passing that law.
And in his ill-advised speech in Cairo, says Limbaugh, Obama
gave legitimacy to Muslim grievances, inflated the number of
Muslims in America, exaggerated Muslim contributions to American
and world history, and implied that the war in Iraq was the result
of unjustified American aggression. Limbaugh quotes international
studies professor Fouad Ajami, who put it this way: “No one told
Mr. Obama that [in] the Islamic world, where American power is
engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay
a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one’s own tribe in the midst,
and in the lands, of others.”
Obama’s odd concern for Muslim sensibilities can take bizarre
turns, as when he directed the administrator of NASA to refocus the
space agency’s mission. As the administrator, quoted by Limbaugh,
told the Arabic TV network al Jazeera, “Perhaps foremost, [Obama]
wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage
much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good
about their historic contribution to science…and math and
engineering.”
“Making Muslims feel good,” Limbaugh comments, “—a very strange
charge for the head of America’s space agency.” (Although, if you
consider where flying carpets originated, it might make some
space-age sense.)
In contrast to this concern for the feelings of Muslims, his
dealings with the Israelis are much less delicate. Obama’s
unprecedented public attempts to force the Israeli government to
bend to his will prompted this response from former New York City
mayor Ed Koch: “I weep as I witness outrageous attacks on
Israel….I weep today because my president, Barack Obama, in a few
weeks has changed the relationship between the U.S. and Israel from
that of closest of allies to one in which there is an absence of
trust on both sides.”
Limbaugh puts it this way: “The Obama administration’s
heavy-handed treatment of Israel… bespeaks a pre-planned policy.
Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been
completely one-sided and strikingly unfair—as if he has inflexible,
preconceived notions about the conflict and is impervious to the
facts and history.”
“How can an objective witness to Obama’s behavior fail to
conclude that he has bought into Palestinian propaganda and its
skewed view of history?” Limbaugh asks.
THE GREAT STRENGTH of Limbaugh’s indictment lies in part in the
wealth of material he amasses in building his case. By so doing, he
not only provides opponents of the administration with a rich
source of campaign material, but also creates a series of topical
sections that in themselves could provide the basis for numerous
full-length books.
In a chapter called “The Narcissist,” for instance, Limbaugh
lays out the particulars for an indictment of Obama’s enthusiastic
aiders and abettors in the national media, who simply swallowed the
idea of an idealized Obama whole, and burnished it. The resulting
media-enhanced image may have had little to do with reality. But in
this case reality wasn’t important. In fact, perhaps better to
ignore it.
As the world knows, members of the national media are
overwhelmingly liberal/left, and in Obama they saw—finally, after
decades of waiting, and in an anticipation fueled by intense Bush
hatred—the fulfillment and personification of those old
liberal/left sociological dreams and ideals that today carry little
contemporary currency west of the Ivy League and a few other
selected college campuses where old tenured professors doze in the
libraries and dream fading dreams of dialectical materialism, Ho
Chi Minh, Che, and Bernardine Dohrn.
And in fact, Obama could well have been created in a test tube
in an Ivy League social sciences lab. He proved that affirmative
action (aka racial preferences), long an apparently unfilled
liberal/left ideal, actually worked—at least once. He was a man of
color, but not too much. To be sure, he affected a passion for
basketball, but he walked, talked, and dressed like any Caucasian
writer of thought pieces or any of the regular Newsweek
guests on the Charlie Rose show. To quote Vice President Biden, who
summed it up succinctly, he was “clean.”
(Unfortunately, excessive Obama worship combined with a lack of
serious journalistic effort torpedoed Newsweek as a news
magazine, and as it sinks beneath the waves its editors, who have
deserted the ship en masse, could well find their reservations at
the Charlie Rose table canceled. Rumor has it that to maintain his
TV presence, Jon Meacham, the unctuous former Newsweek
editor and chief cheerleader of the Obama media fan club, may have
to negotiate for a spot on Dancing with the Stars.)
But best of all, from the national media’s point of view, Obama
was a writer—one of us, they believed; and those claims
that he may have had a great deal of help in writing his
best-selling memoir were thus invariably met with a fierce and
emotional response. He had to have written it himself. If
not, he isn’t one of us. The press has drunk the Kool-Aid that they
themselves helped to mix, and they’re determined to keep it
down.
INTERESTINGLY, THE RESPONSE is equally fierce and emotional
whenever the discussion turns to matters involving the source and
nature of the beliefs and ideologies that have shaped Obama’s
thinking, and particularly, as happened most recently, when
questions are raised about his father’s influence. Without judging
the father, anyone who has actually read Obama’s memoir, Dreams
from my Father, in which, among other things, Obama searches
for his Kenyan identity, would be hard-pressed to deny the
influence of his father’s attitudes.
But that aside, it requires no great analytic ability or
expertise to understand that in 2008 a large number of Americans,
who rely on the media to keep them informed, bought into his act.
And the media certainly provided the stage, and continue to provide
it to date.
According to the Washington Post’s media critic Howard
Kurtz, writes Limbaugh, “during Obama’s first few months as
president, the networks gave him more coverage than George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton combined in their first months—and more positive
assessments as well.” As Limbaugh notes, “His name or face appeared
in half of Time magazine’s covers in 2008. As of the
August 2009 edition, he had appeared on seven Time covers
since his election….One of those covers celebrated him as ‘Person
of the Year,’ and another as the reincarnation of FDR.
Newsweek featured Obama on twelve of its 2008 issues.”
In addition to the stage, the media has also provided the
applause, and at times even the adoration. Limbaugh quotes the
erstwhile Newsweek editor, pontificator, and Charlie Rose
regular Evan Thomas, appearing with fellow worshipper Chris
Matthews on MSNBC: “Reagan was all about America….Obama is—we’re
above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just
chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something. I
mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above the world,
he’s sort of God.”
At any rate, questions of divinity and possible exorcism aside,
Limbaugh’s primary purpose in this book is to chronicle “the words
and policies of President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party and
their devastating effect on America and its founding principles.
Unless stopped—and reversed—the casualties of Obama’s systematic
assault on this nation will be our prosperity, our security, and
ultimately, our liberty.”
To this end, Crimes Against Liberty should serve as a
thorough and hard-hitting indictment of Barack Obama and his
administration. And for readers in general, it will not only
provide a good read, but will also help explain why The One may
really be The Other.
