Post-American Presidency (33 page)

Unspoken indeed it was, but that didn’t stop Dowd. She went on to explain that Wilson “belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a ‘smear’ the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.”
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Former president Jimmy Carter agreed with Dowd, sanctimoniously opining that Wilson’s outburst was “based on racism. There is an inherent feeling,” Carter asserted, “among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”
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And while the media wrung its hands about Wilson, unnoticed in the hubbub was the two-thousand-page elephant in the room. There was no serious debate about the merits of the government takeover of health care. No debate at all.

OBAMA INCITES RACE HATRED TO DEMONIZE HIS OPPONENTS

In July 2009, Black Studies professor (and friend of Barack Obama) Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a white police sergeant, James Crowley, after Gates created a disturbance when police showed up at his home to investigate an alleged break-in. The Gates affair became a national story because the president used it to make a statement inciting hatred on national television.

At a press conference on health care, Obama passed over the reporter whose turn it was for him to recognize, going out of his way to call on Lynn Sweet of
The Boston Globe
, who asked him about Gates. Obama admitted that he had not seen “all the facts,” but still charged that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly.” Then he played the race card: “What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” He suggested that Gates’s arrest was significant because it “shows that race is still a troubling issue.”
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But Americans soon showed themselves to be tired of the African-American president calling them racists, and after being roundly criticized, Obama began to try to backtrack on his racist demagoguery. “In my choice of words,” he said a few days after the incident, “I unfortunately, I think, gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Crowley specifically.”
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But he did not apologize, and invited both Crowley and Gates to visit the White House—which they duly did, and the incident was over.

But its effects lingered. Obama needed the bogeyman of lingering racism in the United States, and where he didn’t find it, he invented it. The monotony of the racism charge was understandable; this
tactic had once been effective. One prime example was the 2006 Virginia Senate race, and the destruction of George Allen’s reelection campaign by the “macaca” incident.
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A presidential contender was destroyed by a racism charge, despite the fact that it was utter nonsense. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s insult to Indian people (“You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”) went largely unremarked and unnoticed in the mainstream media, and Biden, unlike Allen, was given a full opportunity to explain and defend his remarks.
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The media also ignored the real significance of the Obama Joker poster. It wasn’t racism; it was a sign of America’s rude awakening. The editor of the online journal
American Thinker
, Thomas Lifson, observed that the poster showed that the inevitable backlash against Obama’s far-left policies has begun: “It is starting. Open mockery of Barack Obama, as disillusionment sets in with the man, his policies, and the phony image of a race-healing, brilliant, scholarly middle-of-the-roader.” But Lifson noted that “the president’s supporters have condemned the image, calling it ‘mean-spirited and dangerous.’”
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Mean-spirited? Dangerous? Racist?

For years the Left engaged in spiteful and malicious attacks on President George W. Bush. He was likened to Hitler. “Bushitler” was so commonly heard, it became a cliché. Leftists compared the jihadi attack on the twin towers to the Reichstag fire. And other motifs came into play as well: When
Vanity Fair
published the image of Bush as The Joker, no one said a word. Instead, we were told that dissent was the highest form of patriotism.

And indeed it can be. After eight years of relentless Bush bashing and America hating, the
Times
published a column by Charles M. Blow that went the whole way, calling for the shutting down of dissent and coming out more or less openly for a police state: “Society needs to
do a much better job of creating an environment where hateful beliefs are never ignored and suspicious behavior never goes unreported.”
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What kind of “hateful beliefs”?

Being American, standing for the fundamental values and our inalienable rights, was now deemed racism. This was a full-scale attack on the American people by Obama, Reid, and Pelosi—an attack against people who were daring to protest against a $14 trillion deficit, the bankrupting of our nation, and the enslaving of our children and grandchildren.

Nancy Pelosi gave a strong hint of what the Democratic party leadership and the administration thought of its opponents, and what it considered “hateful,” when she claimed that protesters against Obama’s health-care plan were “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare”—as if the only people opposing Obamacare were white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
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As soon as she made this charge, leftist bloggers rushed to try to substantiate it. The online journal
The
Huffington Post
ran a closely cropped picture with this caption: “In one image, a young man with a shirt that reads ‘Hitler Gave Great Speeches Too’ is photographed making what looks like a Hitler salute. TalkLeft blogger Jeralyn Merritt interviewed the teen, who told her [he] was 16 and hailed from former Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska.”
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The boy was actually holding his arm up, carrying a sign.
The Huffington Post
modified this article later to remove the preposterous claim that the boy was making the Hitler salute, but by then it was too late. The story had already spread all over the Internet. The damage was done.

Leftist columnists and pundits climbed on. Radio host Bill Press wrote of the town hall protesters: “Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion,
shout over any pro–health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It’s mob rule, pure and simple.”
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Nonetheless, it was unlikely that the American people would fall in large numbers for such tricks. With the Tea Party and town hall protests, ordinary Americans could see for themselves what the administration and its supporters were doing. It was no longer a media story they never heard or saw. The victim of this thuggery was the American citizen. The average American was being smeared.

Accordingly, one thing was clear in the summer and fall of 2009: the Left’s libelous smear of racism had lost its sting. If everything was racism, then nothing was. The more that Leftists pulled this trick, the more ordinary folks shrugged. The sad and terrible thing was that by using this tactic, the Left obscured the true evil of genuine racism. The fact is, when the Left makes everything about race, and sees everything through a prism of “racism,” it shows us who the real racists are.

VIOLENCE AT TEA PARTIES AND TOWN HALLS

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs admonished demonstrators: “Behave yourselves like your mom would probably tell you to do.”
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The only real thuggery, however, was coming from his side. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina told Senate Democrats facing hostile audiences at town hall meetings, “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”
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Some apparently took these words to heart, not taking Messina to be referring to rhetorical hits at all.

At Rep. Kathy Castor’s (D-FL) town hall meeting in Tampa on August 6, 2009, the hall was packed with union and ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) members who had been ushered in through a back door. Castor’s security personnel, meanwhile, shut the doors on opponents of Obama’s health-care plan,
and pro-Obama union thugs roughed up a protester, Randy Arthur. Fifteen hundred people were present, but only about seventy-five were allowed in—only to find ACORN and union members occupying seats that had been reserved for them in the front of the room. A YouTube video recorded the scuffling as all this took place, and notes that according to an eyewitness, Castor squandered the opportunity to stage a rally before a handpicked crowd, leaving after taking no questions and claiming she “couldn’t hear.”
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Meanwhile, in Missouri, over a thousand people were locked out of Rep. Russ Carnahan’s (D-MO) town hall meeting in South St. Louis—while members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) were let in a side door marked “handicapped.”
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SEIU thugs attacked Kenneth Gladney, a St. Louis conservative activist—and Carnahan promptly blamed Gladney himself for the altercation. Gladney’s attorney, David B. Brown, explained:

Gladney himself observed, “It just seems there’s no freedom of speech without being attacked.”
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Not for conservatives. Not for free Americans. Not in Barack Obama’s America.

Obama and the SEIU are closely linked. According to the Federal Election Commission, the SEIU’s Committee on Political Education spent $18,818,358.97 on Obama’s behalf through December 2008.
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This money went for, among other things, door-to-door canvassing for Obama, voter identification and registration, and phone banks. The total SEIU expenditure for Obama was much higher: Andy Stern, the Service Employees International Union president, said in May 2009: “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama—$60.7 million to be exact—and we’re proud of it.”
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For his part, Obama paid at least $2,250,000 to the SEIU over the last few months of his election campaign: reimbursement for travel, per diem, and other expenses—even reimbursement for staff salaries and benefits.
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Obama continued to pound the American people. The majority of Americans—those who lived by the ideals of individualism, self-reliance, and capitalism—were relentlessly demonized. In November 2009, as Americans continued to voice their opposition to Obamacare, the president’s national health-care program, Obama smeared his opponents as “extremists.”
The
New York Times
reported: “According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, ‘Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit’ Democratic voters ‘and it will encourage the extremists.’”
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DESTROYING OBAMA’S OPPONENTS

One of Obama’s foremost critics is the popular radio and TV host Glenn Beck, who ignited a firestorm in July 2009 when, in the wake of the Gates affair, he called the president a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
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A black activist group, Color of Change, began calling for a boycott of Beck’s advertisers—and several of those advertisers withdrew their advertising from Beck’s program.