Trickle Up Poverty (33 page)
Of course, once Obama had secured the presidency, with the help of rampant election fraud on many fronts, he needed a veto-proof majority in the Senate to enact legislation that would enable him to advance the leftist agenda. Enter Al Franken and the Democratic political thugs seasoned in stealing elections. You didn’t think Al Franken’s election to the U.S. Senate was in any way fair, did you?
The Secretary of State Project, a not-for-profit “527” corporation, has as one of its agenda items “putting Democrats in jobs where they can ‘protect elections.” The SOS, as it is sometimes known, was founded by MoveOn.org principal James Rucker with financial and organizational assistance from George Soros and several of his comrades. The Secretary of State Project made campaign contributions to Mark Ritchie, the Democrat who’s the Secretary of State in Minnesota and who was charged with overseeing the election that ended up seating Al Franken as a U.S. Senator from that state.
Don’t think for one minute that it’s a coincidence that Ritchie is also an ally of ACORN.46 Although Republican Norm Coleman won the election by 725 votes, by the time Ritchie and his cohorts finished manipulating the vote count, Franken had picked up “new” votes that totaled “more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).”47 Franken “won” the sixtieth Democratic seat, although he trailed by double digits in opinion polling just before the election.
You Don’t Need an Acorn to Know Which Way the Oak Grows
Nearly two years into the Obama presidency, we’re able to gather enough evidence to assess how the administration is progressing toward its goal of making all Americans subservient to its radical agenda. The news is disturbing at best. From his association with such radical leftist groups as ACORN, the SEIU and other labor unions, and the patently Islamo-fascist New Black Panther Party to his willingness to engage in the most corrupt electoral practices, the president is making clear his intent to stamp out individuality and the human spirit and replace it with an ugly repressive regime that tramples on the notion of American liberty.
From the early days of his presidential campaign, Obama made it very clear where his sympathies lay. As commentator Mike Baker puts it, “The endorsement of the New Black Panther Party was posted on Barack Obama’s website. Why was this tolerated unless Barack Obama wanted their endorsement? If he does not want their endorsement, how much control over his staff is he going to have once he’s elected President?”48 Obama’s Nation of Islam ties don’t end with a mere website posting, though.
The former treasurer of Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign, Cynthia K. Miller, is a member of the Nation of Islam, as was Obama’s Director of Constituent Services, Jennifer Mason, during his time in the Senate. Obama also has close ties with Islamist Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah, who, along with the Obamas, attended a fund-raising dinner at which the keynote speaker was Edward Said, who had been an advisor to former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.49 And in the latest affront to America’s people and their support of the struggle against Islamo-Fascism, the Obama administration allowed deported Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan back in the country to promote his own brand of Islamism.
Ramadan’s smarmy, disingenuous “hope” for America is that we won’t, “in the name of [our] fear or mistrust of Muslim-majority countries, … end up betraying [our] own values.” Ramadan’s visa had been revoked in 2004 because he had contributed money to an Islamist organization that was on the U.S. terrorist list, but the ACLU sued on his behalf to have it reinstated. He was permitted to return after Hillary Clinton signed an order enabling him to re-enter the country, while doing nothing to have Michael Savage’s name removed from the UK list of banned terrorists and murderers.50
And don’t be fooled by the fact that it appears as though the efforts of O’Keefe and Giles have crippled ACORN, the Marxist component of the Marxist-Islamist thrust of the Obama administration. ACORN lives on, even if it’s being forced to close many of its offices. It lives on in the practices, policies, legislative initiatives, and sympathies of the Obama administration, with its hatred of white people and its implicit commitment to the Marxist principles on which ACORN was built.
Likewise, ACORN lives on in the form of numerous ACORN affiliates and front groups, including Wake Up Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Organizing Project, Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now, Site Fighters, and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, all of whom perpetuate ACORN’s anti-business agenda. Add in such labor unions as SEIU and UFCW, along with the leftist Secretary of State Project, and you have the foundation for Obama’s ongoing assault on free elections and free enterprise.51
One of the things that so many so-called analysts miss is the fact that Barack Obama, while he may not technically be a practicing Muslim—the jury is still out on that point—is very much a Muslim sympathizer. It’s amazing to see pundits wonder why Obama treats Israel, one of the United States’ most important allies, not just in the Middle East but in the world, so badly. When you see our president looking the other way as Iran rushes toward its goal of having nuclear missiles while he comes down hard on Israel for developing real estate in its own capital city, Jerusalem, you begin to understand what a perversely leftist moral equivalency Barack Obama created.
What is it about the fact that Obama is a Muslim sympathizer that analysts don’t understand? What is it about the fact that Barack Obama is in sympathy with the radically absurd Nation of Islam version of Arabs versus Jews that is so difficult to comprehend? It’s a wonder Obama hasn’t referred to New York City as “hymie town,” as his anti-Semite associate Jesse Jackson once did.
White people are the devil incarnate if you buy into Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad’s version of the evolutionary process. And Obama seems to buy into it. His sympathy for the Nation of Islam extends to include that group’s hatred of Jews as he ignores Israel’s plight, rudely dismisses the Israeli Prime Minister during the latter’s visit to the United States, nods his approval through silence when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to drive Israel into the sea, and holds up shipments of bunker buster bombs to Israel to make sure Iran’s nuclear weapons development program is not interfered with.
Barack Obama seems to harbor a deep and visceral mistrust, not to say an outright hatred, of the United States and Israel and the freedom they represent. His long associations with such radical anti-American groups as ACORN and the New Black Panther Party reinforce that mistrust, and it is becoming institutionalized in the policies and legislative initiatives currently being pursued and enacted in the Obama administration.
From the outright disrespect he’s displayed toward Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu to his insistence that Israel is the culprit holding up the Middle East peace process and his demands that the Israelis stop building settlements in their own capital city, Obama has made a strong case that he sympathizes with the notion that Israel should not be allowed to survive. Like ACORN and the New Black Panther Party and so many other blackBlack Muslim radical political groups, Obama continually demonstrates his race-based enmity toward Jews and those who support them.
Domestically, his support for policies designed to keep minorities on the dole through encouraging the re-invigoration of the welfare state demonstrate that, far from being a champion of minorities, he uses them cynically, subsidizing failure in exchange for their votes. His open calls for blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities to support the Democratic Party in the mid-term elections of 2010 reinforce the racist bias of his administration. Obama is certainly in sympathy, if not in league, with would-be revolutionaries like ACORN and the Black Muslims. His actions and policies indicate that he’s committed to helping them advance their anti-American agenda.
School Daze: Eliminating the Propaganda Ministry
It would be good … if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.
—Woody Allen1
The unofficial Obama Ministry of Propaganda has managed to adopt a disturbingly skewed, anti-capitalistic, anti-personal freedom, anti-spiritual, rule-by-the-gentility vision of what the world should be, and they’re damned if they’ll be stopped from trying to impose that empty, nihilistic view on the middle class. The current iteration of the U.S. Ministry of Propaganda isn’t made up only of members of the press—once the fourth estate but now the fifth column—who have been in Obama’s hip pocket since the presidential campaign of 2008 began. It encompasses other institutions, including American schools, that perpetuate the leftist version of “the big lie” that today threatens to turn our representative democracy into a dictatorship favored by Marxist fellow travelers like Old York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman. It includes the U.S. film industry and many Hollywood filmmakers who continue to insist on producing movies that promote a leftist agenda.
Look no further than Friedman. In an op-ed piece entitled, “Is China the Next Enron?” 2 Friedman offers an assessment of China’s place in the world, one that illuminates the political left’s attitudes toward America and toward representative government. It’s his contention that “when [a country] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, … that one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”
The policies Friedman is referring to include dictating that a society’s industries pursue such technologies as “electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.” In other words, Friedman is ignoring the abject fiscal failures of every socialist-communist government of the past century. In fact, he’s promoting for the United States precisely the same communist-style dictatorship as those who engaged in criminally negligent homicide in the name of a managed economy in Red China and the Soviet Union during that time.
Friedman goes on: “Our one-party democracy is worse.” He insists that in America “only the Democrats are really playing.” By “playing,” he means trying to force America down the same ill-advised technology development path that China, very likely to its ultimate economic detriment, is traveling. This is 21st-century state-speak at its worst by a writer who’s a member of this administration’s unofficial and loosely organized Ministry of Propaganda.
It’s Friedman’s modus operandi to spew assertions unbuttressed by fact in his writing. The fact is that he is apparently neither intelligent enough nor informed enough to understand America’s place in history and to compare it with the state-run economies of, for instance, the Soviet Union or Red China in the 20th century. Unfortunately, it’s a problem he shares with so many others who have been blinded by the leftist ideology. Friedman’s ersatz arguments are typical of leftists who, having been indoctrinated rather than educated, don’t understand that propagandistic assertions are not the same as reasoned arguments. His insistence that tyranny is better than democracy is absurd on its face, but because so many on the left have adopted that position, it needs to be dealt with.
The fact that there has emerged a kind of loosely defined Ministry of Propaganda on the left reflects the fact that the Marxists of the last century never really went away; they only went underground.
The Obama administration is pursuing the same strategy—assertion rather than argument, bullying rather than persuading—that’s been pursued by single-party regimes and their Ministries of Propaganda throughout history to enslave their people. In fact, in an important sense, Friedman is nothing more than a cog in the emerging leftist Ministry of Propaganda in the United States. It’s not an official department, but because of the leftist educational hegemony and the complicity of the so-called “mainstream media” in perpetuating the left’s anti-American, anti-Democratic message, it serves much the same function as such ministries served in the Soviet Union during the 20th century and in such dictatorships as that in Iran today.
With its emerging Ministry of Propaganda, America under Barack Obama is pursuing a similar course to other countries that currently have official ministries. These include those sparkling examples of democracy Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, and the United Kingdom. Iraq’s Ministry of Information was disbanded after Saddam Hussein was deposed, but who can forget Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf. Remember that piece of work? During the American invasion of Iraq, he blindly asserted before an international television audience that things were fine in Baghdad. He claimed American troops were being repulsed on every front—despite the fact that the sounds of American tanks only a few blocks away from where he was speaking could be heard in the background.
We’re getting lies equivalent to that whopper out of Obama’s administration and the press corpse daily, and the results, if those lies are allowed to go unchallenged, will be only slightly less devastating for the United States than those al-Sahaf and Friedman insist on perpetuating.
And, as was the case in more than half a century ago, when anti-Americanism threatened to overwhelm us, it might just be time for a return of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC, as it was known, unflinchingly outed suspected communists and their associates and required their testimony before Congress. What is particularly disturbing, though, is that the reason we need to bring back HUAC today is to weed out Marxists at the very top of the current federal government. It’s the people running the government, from the Chief Executive on down, we should fear for their un-American propensities.
How the Obama Ministry of Progapanda Works
In many ways, what’s happening in the United States today mirrors what was happening at the middle of the last century. Only then, the people who operated the communist Ministries of Propaganda were primarily in other countries. A relatively small number of communist agents were infiltrators of the U.S. Government. Of course, the Old York Times was always ready to answer the leftist call and promote Marxist causes. Today, though, far from being a threat from outside our country, the Ministry of Propaganda that spews leftist-slanted “news” is a functioning component of our own leftist administration, supplemented by members and supporters who work as educators and in the entertainment and communications industries in the United States.
The first decade of the 21st century has become the ‘50s on steroids, thanks to the proliferation and homogenization of many media outlets. Among print media, it’s not just the New York Times that promotes the anti-American agenda, but newspapers, albeit dying newspapers, in every city that toe the administration’s hate-the-U.S. line. And although spewing anti-American venom is demonstrably bad for business, most TV news outlets also ignore their plummeting ratings and continue to hew to the leftist message.
The aftermath of the Democrats’ victory over the American people through their passage of healthcare legislation demonstrates several of the key ways the left gets its message out. The message in this instance is that anyone who opposed health care and didn’t buckle under to political pressure is mean, nasty, and racist. One conservative columnist explains how that message gets sent, describing it this way:
… the well-prepared stunt of having several members of the Congressional Black Caucus walk above ground to the Capitol on the evening of the vote, rather than through the underground tunnels. Their route took them past a noisy crowd of tea party protesters. Two members later claimed that they had run a gauntlet of ugly racial slurs. Representative John Lewis, D-Ga., said, “I haven’t heard anything like this in 40, 45 years.
Since the march to Selma, really.” Representative Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., claimed that he was spat upon…. Headlines were assured.3
Although Congressman Cleaver claimed he was spat on by a protester, video of the incident, examined frame by frame with Zapruder-worthy intensity, produced no evidence of intent to expectorate. Ignoring the fact that there were no grounds to prosecute in the first place, Cleaver magnanimously refused to press charges against his so-called “attacker.”4
In other words, Democrats themselves typically create the situations, make the threats, or perform the acts that incite violence (throwing bricks through their own Democratic campaign office windows, for instance, or walking conspicuously past protesters just prior to a controversial vote). Then they blame conservatives, using trumped up or phantom threats or acts of violence in order to show how thuggish conservatives are. They’re not above using these set-ups to raise money from Democrat supporters by playing on the fear factor they themselves have created, either.
David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Obama, explained how Democrats capitalize on such incidents. In response to questions about letters sent out to Democrats in order to raise funds based on the supposed threats that followed passage of healthcare legislation, Axelrod confirmed that such threats are “not out of bounds to use as fundraising tool.”5
Creating an incident of violence, or even political incorrectness, against your own allies and framing the political enemy for the deed is accurately described as perpetrating a mini-Kristallnacht. The name refers to the 1938 burning of the Reichstag likely perpetrated by Nazis but blamed on their opposition. The Democratic Party’s use of the method is part of the latest iteration of the tactic, and although its use by Nazis was far more brutal and far-reaching, resulting immediately in the deaths and deportation of tens of thousands of Jews and the destruction of thousands of Jewish businesses, the ultimate intent of Democrats’ using the tactic is very similar: the takeover of a nation by tyrants.
The contemporary U.S. ministry of propaganda is complicit in this tactic.
They vilify conservatives and Republicans for reprehensible behavior often committed surreptitiously by Democrats’ own, while ignoring precisely the same tactics committed by Democrats against Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Party members. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for instance, has no problem telling his readers to “hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy” for the latter’s resistance to the public option in Obama’s healthcare bill.6 And writing in the Washington ComPost, left-liberal columnist Courtland Milloy relishes the thought of knocking “every racist and homophobic tooth out of their [Tea Party members’] Cro-Magnon heads.”7 The irony of the contrast between Milloy’s acerbic words and the title of his piece, “Congressmen show grace, restraint in the face of disrespect,” seems to be beyond Milloy’s intellectual capacity to comprehend.
In fact, it’s overwhelmingly Democrats and others on the left who perpetrate hate speech in an attempt to brand their enemies. Washington Democratic Congressman Brian Baird used the term “lynch mob tactics”—a blatantly cynical attempt to liken opponents of our black president to Ku Klux Klan members—and compared those opposed to Obama’s healthcare legislation to “Timothy McVeigh” in one of his speeches.8
Inciting to violence has been a leftist tactic for decades, but it became especially prevalent during the presidency of George W. Bush. The vitriol spewed out at Bush was unimaginably vile and excessive, and the chance to use it without fear of retribution by a complicit journalistic corps brought radical leftists out of the woodwork. Referring to Bush as a Nazi was about as common as it was unreported. Not only wasn’t it not news when a fraudulent idiot like the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill used the term to label the president, since most of the mainstream media couldn’t find anything wrong with the practice, journalists couldn’t find any grounds on which even to consider that it might be newsworthy.
Websites such as oreilly-sucks.com posted pieces with titles like “Bush is Becoming More Like Hitler Everyday.”9 British playwright Harold Pinter and decades-past-her-prime American rock diva Linda Ronstadt likened Bush to Hitler. So did Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, as did Harvey Wasser-man writing in the Toronto Star. The George Soros-funded MoveOn.org was one of many left-wing websites that used the term.10
As to the charges that most newspapers ignore Democratic transgressions: John Hinderaker, an attendee at the 2008 Republican convention, reports that anti-Republican protesters “threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below. Fortunately, no one was killed…. We haven’t seen that sort of hate campaign since the Democrats went after Abraham Lincoln.”11
Hinderaker goes on to comment on the virtual lack of press coverage of these incidents of violence. It’s the Ministry of Propaganda at its willfully ignorant best, withholding reportage of newsworthy events of leftist violence in order to present the most one-sided coverage possible to a diminishing and increasingly savvy audience, one no longer willing to swallow the tainted “reportage” that passes for journalism in this country today.
Such tactics characterized “The Big Lie” in the 1930s, when the Nazi regime in Germany put it into practice. Simply put, it said that if you repeat a lie over and over, people will start to believe it. It’s the favored tactic of the informal Democratic Ministry of Propaganda in contemporary America. They’ve used it to misinform the American public about key economy-wrecking issues such as global warming and healthcare “reform.” The Big Lie incorporates the tactic of smearing your opponent in order to divert attention from the fact that you’re the party actually using deceit and violence to achieve your ends.
Congressional perpetrators of the left’s contemporary “big lie” abound. In an attempt to vilify conservatives and Tea Party members, South Carolina Democratic House Majority Whip James Clyburn whined after the incidents of vandalism and threats against member of Congress that ensued following passage of Obama’s healthcare legislation that Republican opponents of healthcare reform were “aiding and abetting terrorism.”12 In fact, Republican leaders spoke out unanimously against the minor crimes against property—rocks had been thrown through the windows of the offices of two House members—committed in the wake of the administration’s passage of healthcare legislation in defiance of the oft-expressed “will of the people.”