Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 8:32:32 PM
Today at Hugh Hewitt’s blog he posted a paragraph from an article by Bill Bennett, “My Old Party” where Dr. Bennett compared Senator Obama to McGovern, Carter, Kerry, and Dukakis. While comparisons are interesting, all fall short of aiding us in understanding Obama. He is quite different than each of the people mentioned and comparisons to these fairly conventional politicians fails to give us an appreciation for Obama. What follows is a review of some of the literature that looks at Barack Obama’s friends and associates, his career path, and his political ambitions.
Stanley Kurtz has a number of in-depth articles about Senator Obama. Kurtz’s early effort in The Weekly Standard, “Jeremiah Wright's Trumpet,
" received more attention than the others around the blogosphere. Kurtz’s collective effort on Obama should be required reading for all voters.
A. Other articles by Kurtz (with a brief excerpt from the article) build on a picture of Barack Obama:
· Here, then are some of the political passages from the fuller version of “The Audacity to Hope” text reprinted in What Makes You So Strong?:
In order for a people to have taken a negative and turned it into a positive, surely somebody had to have had the audacity to hope. In order for a race held in bondage to slavery to have taken a proclamation not worth the paper it was written on and to have turned it into a proposition that produced a race full of giants, somebody had to have had the audacity to hope. Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the “Great Emancipator” of the slaves, but in reality, he did not see black Africans as equal with whites. (The issue of slavery was paramount for him because it threatened the unity of the country. The primary reason that the Civil War was fought was not to free the slaves, but to save the United States.... [p. 104])
2. “Left in Church, Deep inside the Wright Trumpet” by Stanley Kurtz.
· Trumpet frequently discusses the works of James Cone, the founder of black-liberation theology, who considers Wright and Trinity UCC to be the premiere exemplars of his system….
The nature and status of this kind of Christianity is complex and controversial. There is a profound difference between “black-liberation theology” and Christianity as conventionally understood. Trinity itself recognizes this difference, to the point where Wright, his followers, and his theological mentors often present conventional American Christianity as both false and evil. (Emphasis added.)
· What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama. (Emphasis added.)
4. Kurtz's recent column on June 2, 2008, “NO LIBERATION, Obama may have left Trinity, but he’s still on the Left,” is at NRO:
· Having now left Trinity United Church of Christ, can Barack Obama escape responsibility for his decades-long ties to Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright? No, he cannot. Obama’s connections to the radical-left politics espoused by Pfleger and Wright are broad and deep. The real reason Obama bound himself to Wright and Pfleger in the first place is that he largely approved of their political-theological outlooks.
B. A number of other recommended articles on Senator Obama:
1. “What Makes Obama Run? Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn't need another career. But he's entering politics to get back to his true passion--community organization” by Hank De Zutter, December 8, 1995. This is a Chicago Reader profile of Obama when he first enters politics. Some of his responses provide rare moments of transparency about his goals in politics. As far Obama reaching across the aisle (and reminiscent of his comment about small town American clinging to guns and bibles), he has this to say about his political opponents:
· "The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility. (Emphasis added.)
2. An Investor’s Business Daily editorial, Obama: Stealth Socialist?
· The reticence, combined with Obama's radical ties, begs the question: Is he hiding an un-American agenda?
We know his longtime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, detests America and its capitalist system, viewing it as unjust, oppressive and enslaving to minorities. He and his fellow travelers think they have in Obama the perfect candidate to remake America into a self-loathing dispenser of apologetic largesse to victim groups at home and Marxist regimes abroad.
Key among these is reverend-turned-professor James Cone, who believes merging Marxism with the Gospel will liberate African-Americans from the supposed economic slavery of "white" capitalism. "Together," he says, "black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society." (Emphasis added.)
Cone is the mentor of Obama's mentor, Wright. Wright adopted Cone's "black liberation theology" as his church's core doctrine. According to Cone, the reverend "is really the one who took it from my books and brought it to the church."
Cone's books are required reading at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, where Obama has worshiped for the past 20 years. Trinity instituted the theology and its attendant "black value system" a full decade before Obama formally pledged membership in 1991.
· In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn't fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation--community organizer--it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears. With his old classmates from Columbia, he had talked frequently about political change. Now, he was moving to Chicago to put that talk into action. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, recounts his idealistic effusions: "Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. That's what I'll do. I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change."
· Evidenced by his list of supporters, from Ayers Dohrn, Hayden and Fonda, to the New Black Panthers, the New SDS, the New Winter Soldiers, et al., the radical Left has anointed Obama as the One. Every aging, anti-war, anti-capitalist group and their new offshoots are flocking around Obama like moths to a flame.
He is the One they’ve been waiting for. Biding their time during the dark, dreary days of Reagan, throughout the self-absorbed Boomer years, into the Yuppie sellout decade, and on through the compromising Clinton years, they’ve waited and planned and hoped.
· Obama’s support among radicals in the Palestinian community — and even from Ahmed Yousef of Hamas — has not gone unnoticed. In fact, in 2003 Obama helped honor Rashid Khalidi, a well-known critic of Israel and advocate of Palestinian rights, at a celebration where anti-Israel poetry was read and the United States was sharply criticized.
That evening, Obama told guests stories about his long relationship with the Khalidis, the meals he had shared with Rashid and his wife, Mona, and the effect they had had on his political thinking.
Last month, another concerning relationship came to light between the Obamas and Hatem El-Hady, former chairman of the Toledo-based Islamic organization Kindhearts for Charitable Human Development — a group shut down in 2006 for raising money for Hamas. Until recently, El-Hady had a personal website on the official Obama campaign site and Michelle Obama was listed as one of El-Hady’s three “friends.”
6. Barack Obama’s America, Fast forward to 2012, by Michael Novak.
· Neither Obama nor his party seems to understand how incentives motivate human behavior — not force, not coercion, not mockery, not nursery-school regulation, but real possibilities of good fruits up ahead for free and responsible actions. They do not understand the wellsprings of a virtuous, free, and prosperous society. They are still entangled in the fantasies of the European Left of 150 years ago.
Thus, Obama is now the creature and the prisoner of the American far Left, which has learned nothing from the failures of socialist and statist and anti-capitalist ideas during the past hundred years. Many leftists learn nothing, know nothing, and propel themselves not with practical wisdom, but with outrage and contempt and a desire to punish those who do not agree with them.
My friend himself thought, he finally revealed, that the West has come to an epochal axial point in history. From now on, economic and political progress would grow far less quickly than ever before, and a long-lasting, precipitous decline is about to begin. Overseas, and also at home.
There is more to Senator Obama than merely a man: without McGovern’s military and political record, without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor, without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate, and without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976. In addition to all these short comings, Barack Obama is a man with a far more radical vision than anything these pedestrian politicians have ever considered. Each voter needs to fully understand the scope of that radical agenda.