The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (6 page)

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Authors: David Limbaugh

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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ASSERTIONS “UNACCOMPANIED BY PERSUASIVE LEGAL CLAIMS”
Leal was convicted in 1995, but arresting authorities allegedly didn’t advise him of his right to contact his nation’s consulate, an oversight that supposedly violated the UN’s Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Liberals inside and outside the administration wanted a stay of execution to provide time for passage of a pending bill offered by Senator Patrick Leahy that would have mandated federal review of the case. While the administration complained about the importance of the United States demonstrating respect for international law, it did not exhibit much respect for American law, given the jury’s conviction of Leal based on compelling evidence.
63
The media focused on the diplomatic implications of the case while offering scant details of the heinous crime.
64
They seemed untroubled by the savagery of the murder or the damning evidence against Leal, such as bite marks found on Sauceda’s neck that matched Leal’s teeth; blood discovered on the underwear Leal wore the night of the murder; blood stains found on the passenger door and seat of Leal’s car; and the fact that thirty minutes after Leal and Sauceda left a party together, Leal’s brother arrived at the party and revealed that Leal had come home with blood on him and admitted he’d killed a girl.
65
The Supreme Court refused to grant the stay, proclaiming, “Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be.” Nor was the Court impressed by the administration’s extra-legal arguments about possible diplomatic fallout from the execution. The Court declared, “We have no authority to stay an execution in light of ‘an appeal of the president’ presenting free-ranging assertions of foreign policy consequences, when those assertions are unaccompanied by persuasive legal claims.”
66
PRAISING COMRADE CHE
Based on the administration’s leftist internationalism, it was no surprise when Alec Ross, the State Department’s senior advisor on innovation, paid homage to Che Guevara as an exemplar of freedom. At the Innovate Conference in London in June 2011, Ross said, “One thesis statement I want to emphasize is how [the internet] disrupt[s] the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation state—from governments and large institutions—to individuals … the Internet has become the Che Guevara of the 21st Century.”
67
Che Guevara, of course, was a mass-murdering communist who declared just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, “If the [nuclear] missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
68
Along these lines, the U.S. Navy officially named its new cargo ship the USNS
Cesar Chavez
, after the controversial labor leader. Congressman Duncan D. Hunter criticized the choice, arguing that Chavez was a communist who hated the Navy. “This decision shows the direction the Navy is heading,” said Hunter. “Naming a ship after Cesar Chavez goes right along with other recent decisions by the Navy that appear to be more about making a political statement than upholding the Navy’s history and tradition. If this decision were about recognizing the Hispanic community’s contribution to our nation, many other names come to mind, including Marine Corps Sgt. Rafael Peralta, who was nominated for the Medal of Honor for action in Iraq.”
69
TAXES AND REGULATIONS GO GLOBAL
Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism proceeds from his leftist affinity for globalism and for transnationalism—the notion that U.S. law should be subordinate to international law. Obama appointed Yale Law School dean Harold Koh—the United States’ leading advocate for transnationalism—as the State Department’s legal adviser, and he appointed for commerce secretary John Bryson, who some believe, partially based on a video, favors a world government. In the video, Bryson speaks favorably of the 2009 UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen as “the closest thing we have to a world governance organization,” hinting that it provides the best model for imposing global climate regulations. Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, says that Bryson’s statements prove he supports a more powerful United Nations that can impose its will on climate change policies.
70
Climate change is not the only issue on which Obama wants to empower the UN. In September 2010, in preparation for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Obama endorsed “innovative finance mechanisms”—a euphemism for global taxes. The revenue generated from these “mechanisms” would be over and above our foreign aid spending and would provide another avenue for Obama’s grand goal of wealth redistribution, this time on a global scale. One related proposal calls for “small global taxes,” such as one scheme advocated by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, to tax international currency transactions to the tune of $35 billion a year. Alarmed by these plans, Senator David Vitter introduced Senate resolution 461, “expressing the sense of the Senate that Congress should reject any proposal for the creation of a system of global taxation and regulation.” Predictably, the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee refused to take action on the resolution.
71
President Obama’s fingerprints are all over these developments. It’s no secret he has been a strong supporter of the UN since he was in the Senate and that he even sponsored the Global Poverty Act, a failed attempt to force the United States’ compliance with these MDGs.
Perhaps of even greater concern is the “Monterrey Consensus” contained in an outcome document for the UN Summit on MDGs. The document, which has been approved by the UN General Assembly, expresses participating nations’ commitment to spend 0.7 percent of their Gross National Product on foreign aid for developing nations. In 2009, Obama fully embraced the so-called Millennium Development Goals which, if implemented earlier, would have imposed staggering costs on the United States. As Accuracy in Media reported, “Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.‘s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the Millennium Development Goals, this amounts to $845 billion from the U.S. alone, according to Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N.‘s Millennium Project.”
72
Liberals sometimes complain that Obama’s critics portray him as not fully American—an “other” who doesn’t relate to American values. However widespread this impression may be, Obama himself is mostly responsible. With his incessant belittling of America, both at home and abroad, and his obsequious flattering of foreign governments—many of whom are hardly friends of America—our own president constantly betrays his deep unease about our nation, our history, and our founding ideals. These expressions cannot be dismissed as mere verbal miscues since his administration’s policies—from its advocacy of Al Jazeera to its enthrallment with the United Nations—reflect the same worldview. If Obama really believes in American exceptionalism, if he really is proud of his country, if he really thinks we are the rightful leader of the free world, then he only needs to do one thing to convince us: act like it.
CHAPTER TWO
THE WAR ON THE RIGHT
But from the beginning he has been one of the most partisan and divisive presidents in our history. Because his extremist liberal agenda has been unpopular with the electorate, he has demonized his opponents as a means of diverting attention from the substance of the legislation or policy in question and making it a contest about personalities. As I showed in
Crimes Against Liberty
, he has always picked out one or more groups to target with each initiative (“Fat-cat Bankers,” “the Wealthy,” big insurance companies with their “obscene profits,” “Big Oil,” etc.), but on all proposals he also demonizes Republicans who, obviously, he regards as his main adversaries.
He said he didn’t want Republicans to do a lot of talking; he’d prefer they “sit in back.”
2
He chided the tea party for protesting his reckless spending, saying, “You would think they’d be saying thank you.”
3
He denounced Republicans in Congress as “hostage takers”—with the American people as their hostages—for opposing his tax policies.
4
He told Latinos that people who believed in protecting America’s borders “aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”
5
Even at a back-to-school speech to high school students in Washington, D.C., Obama couldn’t leave politics out of the mix. The
Los Angeles Times
admitted that Obama used his supposedly uplifting message to students as a means to stump for his jobs bill.
6
In recent years, “hope and change” has given way to another motto. As Republican National Committee Chairman Rence Priebus noted, “With this president it’s all politics, all the time.”
7
“THE EMPIRE IS STRIKING BACK”
Throughout the 2010 campaign, Obama harped on a theme that has been a hallmark of his entire presidency—do-nothing Republicans are solely responsible for the poor economy, deceitfully obstructing Obama’s herculean efforts to spark economic growth. At a Democratic fundraiser in Atlanta in August 2010, Obama claimed Republican leaders “have not come up with a single, solitary, new idea to address the challenges of the American people. They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas—not one. Instead, they’re betting on amnesia. That’s what they’re counting on. They’re counting on that you all forgot. They think that they can run the okey-doke on you. Bamboozle you.”
8
In fact, Republicans had consistently offered new ideas only to be peremptorily rejected by Obama. It was Obama who was stuck on the same failed ideas. His promised panacea—his grandiose stimulus package—had already fallen flat, and yet he offered no new economic policies, only more spending.
As the 2010 elections drew near, Obama began deriding Republicans as lazy Slurpee sippers who stand around doing nothing while Democrats struggle valiantly to improve the economy. At a Democratic rally at Bowie State University in Maryland, he said, “We’re down there. It’s hot. We were sweating. Bugs everywhere. We’re down there pushing, pushing on the car. Every once in a while we’d look up and see the Republicans standing there. They’re just standing there fanning themselves—slipping on a Slurpee.”
9
Castigating Republicans for not helping to get a car moving was an odd metaphor considering just a few months before, Obama had blamed Republicans for driving “the car into the ditch” and yet wanting “the keys back.” “You can’t have the keys back,” said Obama. “You don’t know how to drive.”
10
In a rally in Philadelphia, Obama boasted that 3 million Americans were back at work because of “the economic plan Joe and I put in place, that’s the truth…. The hole we’re climbing out of is so deep. The Republicans messed up so bad, left such a big mess, that there is [sic] still millions of Americans without work.”
11
At a campaign stop in Ohio, he portrayed Republicans as the villains from Star Wars. “They’re fighting back,” he warned. “The empire is striking back. To win this election, they are plowing tens of millions of dollars into front groups. They are running misleading negative ads all across the country.”
12
In Los Angeles, Obama painted the Republican Party as so extreme that Abraham Lincoln would lose the GOP nomination today. Again, he accused Republicans of standing on the sidelines while he saved the economy from a second Great Depression, and of wanting to bring back the kind of deregulated economy that ostensibly led to the financial crisis. Republicans are “clinging to the same worn-out, tired, snake-oil ideas that they were peddling before,” he intoned.
13
Despite all
his
bellicosity, Obama said that if Republicans won the congressional elections, they would have to learn to get along with him and “work with me in a serious way.”
14
A few days later, he told radio host Steve Harvey that he needed people in Congress “who want to cooperate, and that’s not Republicans…. Their whole agenda is to spend the next two years trying to defeat me, as opposed to trying to move the country forward.”
15
“IT’S A SUBSTANCE PROBLEM”
All of Obama’s heated rhetoric failed to avert electoral catastrophe for the Democrats. But just as he had failed to see Scott Brown’s upset election to the U.S. Senate in January 2010 as a direct repudiation of his agenda, particularly ObamaCare, he misread this monumental, personal defeat as well. In anticipating his defeat a month earlier, Obama had already begun to rationalize the inevitable, passing it off as a failure to get his message out. He said he’d focused so much on policy that he’d not spent enough time making his case to the electorate. Former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, incredulous at Obama’s obtuseness, remarked, “I think he’s more out of touch than anybody ever thought if he believes the problems are from marketing and not substance. Cap and trade is not a communication problem, it’s a substance problem.”
16
But Obama still didn’t grasp how unpopular his policies were (or simply pretended not to), for after the defeat in November, he defended his positions—those that had just been resoundingly rejected by the American people—as “tough” but “right.” After demonizing Republicans for two years, he appealed for “common ground,” while still signaling he had no intention of backing off his agenda.
The day after the election, an angry, defiant Obama let his hair down during a conference call with his leftist friends at
MoveOn.org
. “We always knew that bringing about change wasn’t going to be easy,” he argued. “And, it might get tougher in the days ahead, but the message I take away from these elections is very simple. The American people are still frustrated and they still want change and we just gotta work harder to deliver the change the American people want…. Sometimes I know this is exhausting, but we didn’t sign up for doing what was easy, we signed up for doing what was right.”
17
In a different setting he declared, “Yesterday’s vote confirmed what I’ve heard from folks all across America. People are frustrated, they’re deeply frustrated with the pace of our economic recovery.”
18
Yes, but they were even more frustrated—and genuinely outraged—at his radical leftist agenda and his ruinous spending. As House Republican Leader John Boehner observed, “The American people spoke, and I think this is pretty clear that the Obama-Pelosi agenda is being rejected by the American people. They want the president to change course.”
19
CIVILITY FOR THEE, NOT FOR ME
For years, Democrats have demonized conservative opinion as hateful, bigoted, and homophobic, and at least as early as the Clinton years they began to suggest that it could lead to violence. This was President Clinton’s angle when he sought to link Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing to conservative talk radio. Since then, Democrats have consistently used this intimidation tactic to chill or discredit conservative speech.
The Democrats’ passive-aggressive attitude toward civility was brought into stark relief in January 2011 after Jared Loughner, a mentally ill malcontent, opened fire outside a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding fourteen others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. President Obama delivered the memorial address for the victims at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In the speech, he called for what the
New York Times
described as a “new era of civility,” urging that if the “tragedy prompts reflection and debate… let’s make sure it is worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.” Obama added, “If, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy—it did not—but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”
21
Obama’s plea for civility would have seemed more sincere if his allies weren’t announcing from every conceivable media forum that the shootings were the fault of “violent” conservative rhetoric. They especially sought to tie the murders to Sarah Palin—simply because her PAC displayed a map that placed targets over districts where it was trying to unseat Democrats. Although “targeting” a political opponent is a commonly used metaphor across the political aisle, the map—whose targets were decried by the Left as “gun sights”—suddenly emerged as the prime example of the right’s supposed descent into murderous extremism.
Two days after Giffords’ shooting, the Atlantic Wire, a website associated with
The Atlantic
, ran an article asking, “Did Sarah Palin’s Target Map Play [a] Role in Giffords Shooting?” The article quoted
Atlantic
blogger Andrew Sullivan, a vociferous Obama supporter, professing, “No one is saying Sarah Palin should be viewed as an accomplice to murder”—and then he seemingly proceeded to do just that: “Many are merely saying that [Palin’s] recklessly violent and inflammatory rhetoric has poisoned the discourse and has long run the risk of empowering the deranged. We are saying it’s about time someone took responsibility for this kind of rhetorical extremism, because it can and has led to violence and murder.”
22
A Democrat operative later admitted that the Democrats plotted to blame another right-leaning group for the shootings. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the unnamed Democrat. “Just like the Clinton White House deftly pinned the Oklahoma bombing on the militia and anti-government people.” Another Democrat strategist argued that there was a similarity between Tucson and Oklahoma City because both “took place in a climate of bitter and virulent rhetoric against the government and Democrats.”
23
Meanwhile, Obama was content to issue vague calls for civility from both sides, never once calling out his own supporters and allies for their over-the-top accusations. Of course, these accusations assumed, without a shred of proof, that the shooter was conservative or at least influenced by conservative rhetoric. So it didn’t help their cause when investigators revealed the shooter was mentally deranged, with no connection to any conservative cause, group, or public figure.
I’VE BEEN DOING BIN LADEN
After the Giffords shooting, Obama abandoned his call for a political truce and returned to his usual truculence. In his various budget standoffs with Republicans—who were seeking to rein in Obama’s outlandish federal spending that has saddled us with unsustainable deficits and a record national debt—Obama had long since opted, in lieu of reaching across the aisle, for the “if they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun” approach. He opened his press conference on June 29, 2011 with unmasked partisan stridency, implying Republicans were shirking their responsibilities while he was magnanimously becoming involved in the budget debate despite his earth-shattering obligations elsewhere. “I’ve been doing Afghanistan, bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You need to be here. I’ve been here. Let’s get it done.”

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