Political Insights

Sun Sep 7 13:43:34 PDT 2008

"*TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE" MINISTRIES*

*Jim & Marie Watt*

*PO Box 25116 -- Federal Way WA 98093-2116*

*Tel: 253.874.4265 -- Email: jmbetter at gmail.com*

*Web: www.2rbetter.org*

*2008.09.07
<http://www.2rbetter.org/>*

   *2008.09.06 - Obama*

 *My friend "N" sent this to me a couple of days ago. In the light of such
challenges, Senator Lieberman brought to the Republican Convention this week
on the behalf of John McCain a word that seems to follow up on this.*

 *Like Lieberman, Marie and I are American first, and Republican second. We
tend to vote for the Person, not the Party, and have voted Democrat a number
of times in the past when we felt their candidate could serve our country
more effectively than the one representing our own party. We remember the
words of George Washington - that the greatest danger in the future for our
nation - would be the polarization of the parties. We see too much of this
today.*

 *After all - human beings are human beings! What we do in politics in
divisiveness, we also do in the church. 2000 years ago the apostle Paul had
to strongly exhort the members of the City Church of Corinth. They were
becoming class, partisan and personality committed. Different groups claimed
to be of Paul, Apollos, Peter and Christ. Paul's retort was - "Is Christ
divided? Wasn't it Christ, not Paul, who was given and died for us?"*

 *Just as Americans should not allow that overall unity to be disrupted by
partisanship - so Paul exhorted Christians not to be divided by movements,
denomination or personalities. All gifted leaders are given by God for
allof us. Luther is ours! and Calvin, Knox, Madame Guyon, Fenelon,
Molinos,
John of the Cross, Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Finney and Moody! All are ours,
as well as the movements and denominations for whom they stand. Let us
preserve the undergirding unity of both our nation and our church. One
Calvinist on one occasion asked George Whitefield when in America - "Do you
think John Wesley (an Arminian) will make heaven?" The Calvinist Whitefield
replied, "My dear sir, when we get to heaven, John Wesley will be so close
to the throne of God, that we will be scarcely able to see him!"*

 *That's** the spirit we need to have both in politics and in the church. **
That's the spirit John McCain has consistently modeled throughout his life.*

 *And when a Democrat comes to the Republican National Convention and pleads
with his fellow-Democrats and Independents to vote for John McCain for the
good of our country - then we ought to take note!*

 *Both he and John McCain gave a good word for Senator Obama. They said that
he is a good speaker and no doubt sincere, and that perhaps in a few years
he would gain the experience to be a true presidential contender.*

 *Consider then the articles released by "Investors Business Daily."*

 (The following information about Obama has come across my desk - it is
worth reading - N.)

 *Here's a run down on the socialist agenda of the Democrat party's nominee
for President from "Investors Business Daily."*

 During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at
least four times: "I've been working my entire adult life to help build an
America where economic justice is being served," he said at the
group's 99thannual convention in Cincinnati.

 And as president, "We'll ensure that economic justice is served," he
asserted. "That's what this election is about." Obama never spelled out the
meaning of the term, but he didn't have to. His audience knew what he meant,
judging from its thumping approval.

 It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're
launching this special educational series.

 "Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing
their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.

 In the past, such rhetoric was just that - rhetoric. But Obama's
positioning himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action
on a scale not seen since the birth of the welfare state.

 In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net
that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the
"winner-take-all" market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record
gains in living standards for all).

 Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for
soaking mom-and-pop business filing individual tax returns.

 It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer
in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful
only get rich at the expense of the poor.

 Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step
in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of
wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement
days of old.

 Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist
garbage through the front door. He's disguising the wealth transfers as
"investments" - "to make America more competitive," he says, or "that give
us a fighting chance," whatever that means.

 Among his proposed "investments":

 * "Universal," guaranteed" health care.

 * "Free" college tuition.

 * "Universal national service" (a la Havana).

 * "Universal 401 (k)s" (in which the government would match contributions
made by "low- and moderate-income families").

 * "Free" job training (even for criminals).

 * "Wage insurance" (to supplement dislocated union workers' old income
levels).

 * "Free": child care and "universal" preschool.

 * More subsidized public housing.

 * A fatter earned income tax credit for "working poor."

 * And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the
Third World, first and foremost Africa.

 His new New Deal also guarantees a "living wage," with a $10 minimum wage
indexed to inflation; and "fair trade" and "fair labor practices," with
breaks for "patriot employers" who kowtow to unions, and sticks for
"nonpatriot" companies that don't.

 That's just for starters - first-term stuff.

 Obama doesn't stop with socialized health care. He wants to socialize your
entire human resources department - from payrolls to pensions. His
social-microengineering even extends to mandating all employers provide
seven paid sick days per year to salary and hourly workers alike.

 You can see why Obama was ranked, hands-down, the most liberal member of
the Senate by the National Journal. Some, including colleague and
presidential challenger John McCain, think he's the most liberal member in
Congress.

 But could he really be "more left," as McCain recently remarked, than
self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (for whom Obama has openly
campaigned, even making a special trip to Vermont to rally voters)?

 Obama's voting record, going back to his days in the Illinois statehouse,
says yes. His career path - and those who guided it - leads to the same
unsettling conclusion.

 The seeds of his far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a
teenager in Hawaii - and they were far more radical than any biography or
profile in the media has portrayed.

 A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals
that his childhood mentor up to age 18 - a man he cryptically refers to as
"Frank" - was none other that the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who
fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his
"subversive," "un-American activities."

 As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis' feet in his
Waikiki bungalow for nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable
guest with liberal doses of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the
white establishment.

 "They'll train you so good," he said, "you'll start believing what they
tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**.

 After college, where he palled around with Marxist professors and took in
socialist conferences "for inspiration," Obama followed in Davis' footsteps,
becoming a "community organizer" in Chicago.

 His boss there was Gerald Kellman, whose identity Obama also tries to hide
in his book. Turns out Kellman's a disciple of the late Saul "The Red"
Alinsky, a hard-boiled Chicago socialist who wrote the "Rules for Radicals"
and agitated for social revolution in America.

 The Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to
hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board with
terrorist Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. Ayers was one of Obama's
early political supporters.

 After three years agitating with marginal success for more welfare programs
in South Side Chicago, Obama decided he would need to study law to "bring
about real change" - on a large scale.

 While at Harvard Law School, he still found time to hone his organizing
skills. For example, he spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national
training course taught by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. With his
newly minted Law degree, he returned to Chicago to reapply - as well as
teach - Alinsky's "agitation" tactics.

 (A video-streamed bio on Obama's Web site includes a photo of him teaching
in a University of Chicago classroom. If you freeze the frame and look
closely at the blackboard Obama is writing on, you can make out the words
"Power Analysis" and "Relationships Built on Self Interest" - terms right
out of Alinsky's rule book.)

 Amid all this, Obama reunited with his late father's communist tribe in
Kenya, the Luo, during trips to Africa.

 As a Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Harvard-educated
economist, grew to challenge the ruling pro-Western government for not being
socialist enough. In an eight-page scholarly paper published in 1965, he
argued for eliminating private farming and nationalizing businesses "owned
by Asians and Europeans."

 His ideas for communist-style expropriation didn't stop there. He also
proposed massive taxes on the rich to "redistribute our economic gains to
the benefit of all."

 "Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing
100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government
commensurate with their income which is taxed," Obama Sr. wrote. "I do not
see why the government cannot tax those who have more and siphon some of
these revenues into savings which can be utilized in investment for future
development."

 Taxes and "investment" ... the fruit truly does not fall far from the vine.

 (Voters might also be interested to know that Obama, the supposed straight
shooter, does not once mention his father's communist leanings in an entire
book dedicated to his memory.)

 In Kenya's recent civil unrest, Obama privately phoned the leader of the
opposition Luo tribe, Raila Odinga, to voice his support. Odinga is so
committed to communism he named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.

 With his African identity sewn up, Obama returned to Chicago and fell under
the spell of an Afrocentric pastor. It was a natural attraction. The Rev.
Jeremiah Wright preaches a Marxist version of Christianity called "black
liberation theology" and has supported the communists in Cuba, Nicaragua and
elsewhere.

 Obama joined Wright's militant church, pledging allegiance to a system of
"black values" that demonizes white "middle classness" and other mainstream
pursuits.

 (Obama in his first book, published in 1995, calls such values "sensible.
There's no mention of them in his new book.)

 With the large church behind him, Obama decided to run for political
office, where he could organize for "change" more effectively. "As an
elected official," he said, "I could bring church and community leaders
together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer."

 He could also exercise real, top-down power, the kind that grass-roots
activists lack. Alinsky would be proud.

 Throughout his career, Obama has worked closely with a network of
stone-cold socialists and full-blown communists striving for "economic
justice."

 He's been traveling in an orbit of collectivism that runs from Nairobi to
Honolulu, and on through Chicago to Washington.

 Yet a recent AP poll found that only 6% of Americans would describe Obama
as liberal," let alone socialist.

 Public opinion polls usually reflect media opinion, and the media by and
large have portrayed Obama as a moderate "outsider" (the No. 1 term survey
respondents associate his with) who will bring a "breath of fresh air" to
Washington.

 The few who have drilled down on his radical roots have tended to downplay
or pooh-pooh them. Even skeptics have failed to connect the dots for fear of
being called the dreaded "r" word.

 But too much is at stake in this election to continue mincing words.

 Both a historic banking crisis and 1970s-style stagflation loom over the
economy. Democrats, who already control Congress, now threaten to
filibuster-proof the Senate in what could be a watershed election for them -
at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

 A perfect storm of statism is forming, and our economic freedoms are at
serious risk.

 Those who care less about looking politically correct than preserving the
free-market individualism that's made this country great have to start
calling things by their proper name to avert long-term disaster.

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