Trickle Up Poverty (36 page)
By the time both Obama and Holder were of school age, but especially by the time they were in college, leftists had already substantially rewritten American history to suit their own perverse ideological requirements. The American education system was increasingly becoming the means to promulgate misrepresentations and outright lies about our country’s past and about its intentions. Young, disaffected blacks were particularly vulnerable to this sort of misinformation. Many leaders of the black community preached, as they still do, the message that blacks could not get ahead without special treatment.
Even Martin Luther King Jr. expressed the need for “a Marshall Plan for aid to Negroes” that involved giving taxpayer money to blacks to make up for the economic hole their enslavement had put them in.41 For young black males like Obama and Holder, that message got translated into one of hate for the white “oppressor,” and it found expression in the increasingly Marxist-influenced American education system, centralized and dominated by unions that supported leftist policies in their efforts to control the economics of education and what was taught in the classroom.
A rationale for retribution, and not simply reparations for the suffering of their people, was what people like Obama and Holder increasingly sought in the teachers and preachers who mentored them. Equal rights, what they were offered instead, was not close to enough, and once they began to gain power, they moved quickly toward the destruction of a system and a country that they saw as the enemy.
It’s un-Americanism at its ugly and uninformed worst, and if it starts with the perversion of history and education, it continues in complicit journalists’ censorship of the news in the loosely knit American Ministry of Propaganda’s refusal to report or offer opinions in support of anything critical of political figures with whom they’re in sympathy. Such cultural influences as the content of many of the movies produced in Hollywood demonstrate the reach and power of leftist propaganda. They’re among thousands of such phenomena that represent anti-Americanism run amok on the left.
Anti-Americanism is the informing sensibility of the Obama administration, and it has put our country at a crossroads very similar to the one we faced at the middle of the last century. But unlike the situation then, when we had to back down only the Soviet Union, now we face two enemies: militant Islam and Marxism. Both the political left and Islamists share a hatred of our country and what it stands for, and they’ve found an ally in President Obama, whose actions and policies demonstrate that he’s committed to undermining the principles on which our country was founded and on which it rose to greatness, and to replacing them with something very much like Thomas Friedman recommends: a dictatorship of the leftist elite.
In fact, so un-American are the president’s policies that it may well be time to revisit the 1950s again, this time to resurrect the House Un-American Activities Committee that was formed to weed out precisely the kind of purveyors of traitorism that we face today. It’s time to bring back HUAC! For the many people alive today who don’t remember HUAC, it was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives charged with uncovering subversive activity in the United States. It looked into the activities and associations of, particularly, those in the government and the entertainment industry, especially in Hollywood, who were suspected of being communists.
HUAC rooted out Soviet operative Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury on January 21, 1950, and it revealed the extent of the communist infiltration of the film industry, ultimately resulting in prison terms for the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” people found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about their communist affiliations.42 In addition, many other Hollywood communists were blacklisted and refused employment in the film industry.
HUAC served America and protected it from what was then the most serious threat to the national security of the United States: the spread of Soviet Communism. But the generation of leftists and fellow travelers that surfaced in the 1960s and ‘70s began a systematic rewriting of American history, claiming that the efforts of HUAC and its most famous leader, Joseph McCarthy, had been nothing but a witch-hunt. As they continue to do today, the leftists characterized McCarthyites as persecutors.
But the evidence of history, particularly since the Venona Papers were released after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, tells a different story. The Venona Papers were a collection of transcriptions of encoded radio messages by Soviet KGB agents in the United States to their superiors in Moscow between the years 1943 and 1948. They reveal that by the time World War II had ended, the United States government had been infiltrated at every level by Soviet agents who influenced policy and recruited others as Soviet spies. The Venona Papers revealed that HUAC’s pursuit of communists was a justified attempt to identify and weed out traitors to America who had infiltrated our government and our entertainment industry.
Today, the specific threat of Soviet communism is gone. But other threats, arguably even more dangerous ones, remain. The old far-left infrastructure still exists in the form of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the National Lawyers Guild, the NEA, and other organizations that are the new enemy within. Added to the threat of communism is that of Islamist terrorism, especially that which we face from converts to Islam right here in America. This threat also implicates members of the Obama administration, including the president himself and his attorney general.
Both have clear sympathies for and, in many cases, outright ties to both Marxism and Islamic terrorism. Covington and Burling, the law firm for which Holder worked, represented or currently represents as many as eighteen detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison. The firm contributed at no charge more than three thousand hours of legal services to Gitmo detainees during 2007 alone, bringing lawsuits against the American people to try to ensure that their clients, although they were terrorists captured on the battlefield, get civilian trials in American courts.43
What brings the leftist and Islamist movements together is a virulent hatred of the United States, and the fact that both have gained extensive support in the Obama administration is an indicator of just how far this administration has come toward achieving its covert purpose of overthrowing the U.S. government and replacing it with a tyrannical regime. For that to be successful, Obama requires the support of people like Eric Holder and deposed green jobs czar Van Jones and manufacturing czar Ron Bloom—who concurs with former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn that “we kind of agree Mao is right”44—people who believe in the leftist agenda, genuinely hate America, and will enact and promote policies that put that animus into practice. Un-Americanism is the theme of the Obama presidency, and he’s installed HUAC-worthy people in positions of power. It’s a heretofore unimaginably pro-socialist, pro-Islamist administration.
There is not a single issue in the left’s agenda that isn’t characterized by outright lying and misrepresentation of fact, coupled with relentless propagandizing in order to try to persuade American citizens that the Democrats’ Marxist manifesto is beneficial, that the science is decided, that whatever they do is going to save money, and that it’s going to benefit Americans. It’s another component of the Democratic “big lie,” one of the most disturbing aspects of the leftist mentality, their penchant for arranging facts and theories to fit their politics.
Of course, that’s what it takes for the left to advance their true agenda. In fact, only one thing is important to the left: the accumulation of power over the American people in the exercise of a vendetta designed to make us pay for being the most powerful, most successful, richest, most generous nation in history. Until we are all enslaved by their Marxist-Leninist totalitarian mind machine, they will not relent. And then the gulags will open to “re-educate” the former “Savages” and “Savagettes” who believe in freedom, self-determination, and God.
Obama’s War on the Military Our and National Security
I think war is never the answer to solving any problems.
The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.
—Sheryl Crow1
When I was a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, I loved going to the circus. Whenever the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, I wouldn’t miss it. I didn’t go to see the elephants or ride the Ferris wheel, mind you. I went for the freak show in back. In those days, they had genuine freak shows. You know, the conjoined twins. The man with two faces. The bearded lady. In other words, the people of today who became politicians were, in my day, working in the back room of the circus without a Windsor knot. Or, let’s say they were the same people you might find on MSNBC or CNN after some surgery.
Going to the freak show was a wonderful experience in its own way. Something about looking at these human oddities made life richer. You know, as a kid you walk around eating the popcorn, you gape at the freaks, and you thank God that you’re not like them. I realize some will say that the circus was exploiting them. Not so. If you ask them, they appreciated the chance to make a living. Aside from becoming a Congressman, how else could a guy with two faces make a living?
That said, fast forward a couple months after I went to the circus.
I was working in my father’s little antique store on the Lower East Side of New York. Late one afternoon, just before closing, in walks a Ringling Brothers circus performer, a guy from the freak show. I remembered seeing him. I mean, how could you forget a guy like this. He was billed as the half man/half woman. He had a breast on one side and not on the other side, and he had half a beard. Turns out the freak just so happened to live over on Long Beach Island when he wasn’t traveling with the circus.
Imagine my surprise to see him in our store. So, I watch him order a couple large pieces and then ask Dad to deliver them. Like I said, Dad had a small operation—after work, my father delivered his own sales. He didn’t have a delivery boy. I was the kid. I’d go along on the ride, whether it was in the Desoto or the Cadillac Series 62, with the merchandise piled in the back. My job was to lug the bronzes inside.
I’ll never forget this as long as I live. We pulled up late at night because this guy didn’t like to come out during the day. Doors are shut. Blinds are drawn. The porch light is off. My father rings the bell. We’re standing there in the dark, waiting. He rings again.
Me? I’m wondering what his house is gonna look like inside. As a kid with a sizable imagination, my mind is churning with the possibilities. How does a freak live? What kind of bizarro stuff would we see? Did he have a three-legged dog? Was he married to one of the other freaks at the circus? More than that, was he a dangerous person? Or did he just look scary? Part of me wasn’t so sure I was ready to find out.
Dad hits the buzzer a third time.
Finally, we hear “Who’s there?” from behind the closed door.
Dad tells him it’s us with his bronzes and, a moment later, the freak tries to open the door but he can’t. He can only open it a crack. Why? Turns out there was too much stuff in the way, blocking it. So we wait some more while he moves stuff around then invites us in. Following my father’s lead, I squeezed inside and saw his house was littered with art objects cast about in no particular order. I’m talking hundreds of statutes and paintings covering the floor. By the looks of it, this guy lived alone and would buy one beautiful thing after another. He just randomly put them on the floor like a giant warehouse.
That night, riding home over the empty Southern State Parkway, I couldn’t help but think about my first impressions of the freak. I thought I had him pegged based upon his public persona as one of the oddball members of the circus. But I had been wrong. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought he would have been a collector of fine art and statues. I mean, he may have been physically hard to look at, but he wasn’t an ugly person. He had a genuine appreciation for beauty and decided to surround himself with beautiful things as much as possible, even if it was in a compulsive way.
In other words, I learned first impressions are often misleading.
You cannot assume people are the way they’re portrayed to be in public.
In the case of Barack Obama, the analogy works in the reverse. On the outside, he’s a well-dressed man. There’s certainly nothing freakish or sinister looking about him. But that first impression is, likewise, misleading. When you pull back the curtain and see the monstrous things Obama the Destroyer has done—and is doing—you realize this president, his agenda, and his policies are to be feared because he is putting the survival of a nation on the line.
Why do I say that?
As I’ll document in a moment, Barack Hussein Obama is dismantling, disarming, and demoralizing our military. In this chapter, you’ll see how this man is systematically dismantling our nuclear defense through an unnecessary treaty with Russia, disarming the ability of our troops to fight and win wars through a maze of politically correct rules of engagement, and demoralizing our valiant young men and women on the front lines.
No question, the troops are brave. They’re doing their jobs as the best fighting force on the planet. They are not the problem. And yet, as you’ll also see momentarily, they get nailed to a cross when they do their job too well. The blame for this war on the military lies with our president of unknown origin, whose loyalties—based upon his actions—don’t appear to lie with the country that elected him.
I also blame Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have been reduced to empty suits. They’re basically little more than a gaggle of Stepford Wives in Obama’s harem, there to do his bidding. Whatever Obama says, they do—even though Obama never served in the military and it remains doubtful he has ever fired a Daisy BB gun in his life.
How else can you explain the fact that these men in tights let Obama kill production of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, one of the best fighter planes in the Air Force’s arsenal? Forget about the fact that these jets are considered to be “the most technologically advanced fighter ever made.”2 That means nothing to this president. Instead, Obama justified shooting down the jets, saying, “At a time when we’re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit, this would have been an inexcusable waste of money.”3
Let’s get this straight. President Obama is spending trillions of dollars on ineffective, wasteful economic stimulus packages, and trillions of dollars more to socialize health care, and is hoping to pass some sort of costly cap-and-trade measure, but he didn’t think twice about making America more vulnerable in order to trim a relatively paltry $1.75 billion from the defense budget? How does that make any sense? Constitutionally speaking, one of the president’s top priorities is to defend our country, not turn it into a socialist wealth—fare state. What’s more, by scrapping the F-22’s, he’s saving a meager one-third of 1 percent of the 2010 defense program.4
This is a profound military blunder. Why?
The Heritage Foundation reports, “Russia is expanding its fighter forces more now than at any other time since the end of the Cold War. The Russians plan to field 300 Su-Fullback strike aircraft by 2022 and an additional 300 Sukhoi Pak fifth-generation fighters.”5 Likewise, China is ramping up its purchase of additional attack jets. How, then, could any American president think it was a good idea to cut our radar-evading F-22’s?
What’s more, we didn’t hear a peep out of Gates and Mullen when Obama surrendered our anti-missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic or when Congress cut back on funding for Future Combat Systems—an essential program that enables the U.S. Army to modernize its equipment and strategies. We didn’t hear a word of protest from them over the recently announced “almost 20% cut in the dedicated forces they could allocate to respond to a weapon of mass destruction attack on U.S. soil.”6
We’re talking about our very survival as a nation. Why won’t these men stand up to this radical president who continues to impoverish the military and compromise the ability for America to defend herself against those who would want to wipe us off the face of the earth? Make no mistake about it. The trickle up poverty here is the weakening of America’s capacity to defend ourselves and the impoverishment of the fighting spirit once the centerpiece of the U.S. military—all because of the mental disorder of liberalism exhibited by far left’s influence on the top brass and Barack Hussein Obama’s radical policies of appeasement.
One of the clearest examples of the Obama administration’s efforts to undermine our military is the new rules of engagement, which are killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan—literally.
Ready, Aim, Hold Your Fire
Imagine you’ve voluntarily signed up for active duty in the military because you believe in defending this great country—even if it costs you the ultimate sacrifice: your life. You leave friends and family behind and subject yourself to the rigors of grueling training for weeks on end. You study the strategies of combat, you’re trained in the use of the best high-tech weapons on the planet, and then you’re deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.
Now, imagine you’re told the following about your mission:
No night or surprise searches.
Villagers have to be warned prior to searches.
The Afghan National Army (ANA) or the Afghan National Police (ANP) must accompany U.S. units on searches.
U.S. soldiers may not fire at the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first.
U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present.
Only women can search women.
Troops can fire at an insurgent if they catch him placing an improvised explosive device (IED) but not if insurgents are walking away from an area where explosives have been laid.7
Nothing imaginary about those rules of engagement (ROE).
According to the Washington Times, that’s just a partial list of what our brave service men and women actually must do while rooting out the Taliban! Tell me that’s not absolute madness. Does the American military really need the ANA or the ANP babysitting our highly trained, perfectly capable troops every time they search a mud hut? How many of them are Taliban by night? What’s wrong with conducting surprise searches?
Isn’t the “element of surprise” key to most victories?
What’s more, if our soldiers are required to go door-to-door as if they’re selling Avon cosmetics, to warn villagers of a pending search, doesn’t that give the enemy time to pack their explosives and slip out the back? Why aren’t nighttime searches permitted? Are we afraid of interrupting a terrorist in the middle of his bomb making? Is it any wonder are troops are bogged down? Is it any wonder we’re not making progress against an enemy who doesn’t play by the same rules?
Army Captain Casey Thoreen is frustrated by the disadvantage these rules create for his men. “We have to follow the Karzai 12 rules,” he says, referring to Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. “But the Taliban has no rules. Our soldiers have to juggle all these rules and regulations and they do it without hesitation despite everything. It’s not easy for anyone out here.”8 Ah, but you know that President Karzai didn’t create the list of regulations hamstringing our troops? That was crafted by the commander of our forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.
Why did McChrystal do this to our troops?
Captain Thoreen concedes, “It’s a framework to ensure cultural sensitivity in planning and executing operations. It’s a set of rules and could be characterized as part of the ROE.” In other words, the Obama military establishment is running a damn PR campaign, not a war! They’re more concerned about cultural seeeeensitivity than getting the job done—which is no way to win. Thoreen adds, “For our guys, it’s tough. Sometimes they feel they have their hands tied behind their backs.”9
Need proof? In an article entitled, “Strict rules slowing offensive, troops say,” the reporter covering a battle in Marja, Afghanistan swerves into the ugly truth of this untenable situation:
If a man emerges from a Taliban hideout after shooting erupts, U.S. troops say they cannot fire at him if he is not seen carrying a weapon—or if they did not personally watch him drop one. What this means, some contend, is that a militant can fire at them, then set aside his weapon and walk freely out
of a compound, possibly toward a weapons cache in another location.
Tell me that isn’t crazy. Tell me that’s not a formula for disaster. Why must our men hold their fire? Isn’t killing the enemy the whole point? Not so, as this reporter goes on to explain:
NATO and Afghan military officials say killing militants is not the goal of a 3-day-old attack to take control of this Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. The more important focus is to win public support.10
If we’re intent on playing with the enemy as some sort of goodwill gesture, where does that leave our troops? In short, we have a military that’s about as threatening as a candy striper passing out flowers to the sick. As Captain Sam Rico, of the Division’s 4–25 Field Artillery Battalion, puts it, “You get shot at but can do nothing about it. You have to see the person with the weapon. It’s not enough to know which house the shooting’s coming from.”11 Why must our soldiers fight with such oppressive handicaps in the heat of a battle? All in the name of winning “public support”? That’s an outrage!
What’s more, if our men are not permitted to search women for weapons, which is one of the Karzai ROE, that creates a dangerous Catch—22. As the Washington Times points out: “Because of the Karzai 12 rules, U.S. forces have had to bring in American women to conduct searches of their Afghan counterparts.” I thought America had a policy forbidding women in combat? As one soldier explains, “It’s OK for the insurgents to use their women to hide weapons but it’s not OK for us [men] to search them. So now, we have to break our own rules and bring women into combat just so they can search the women.”12