Crimes Against Liberty (48 page)

Contrary to Obama’s claims, America has the best healthcare system in the world, with far fewer chronically uninsured than he says. If Obama truly wanted to reform the system and bring down costs, he would initiate a series of market-based reforms, such as those offered by conservative Republicans, including expanding health savings accounts, reducing costly government mandates and regulations, permitting health insurance purchases across state lines, amending the tax code’s discriminatory treatment militating in favor of employer provided healthcare, tort reform, and portability solutions. As Dr. David Gratzer wrote in his book
The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
, “Capitalism is not the cause of America’s health-care problem. It is the cure.”

But instead of market-based reforms, Obama has forced through a system that will not ameliorate, but exacerbate the problems of access to care, choice, and quality. Finally, ObamaCare comprised more unsustainable spending on top of all the crushing debt our president has already lassoed onto our children. Nevertheless, he is determined to create a new entitlement to vastly expand the dependency class on whom he and other Democrats increasingly rely for their votes, their careers, and their resulting political power. What this is ultimately about is expanding government control—it’s about crimes against our liberties.

Chapter Thirteen

THE ANTI-AMERICAN

CRIMES AGAINST THE NATION

A
t the April 2010 nuclear summit in Washington, D.C., Obama uttered a single sentence that encapsulated his approach to foreign policy: “Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them; and that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.” Outraged, Senator John McCain declared this statement was a “direct contradiction to everything America believes in.”
¹

Obama’s disdain for American exceptionalism and for America’s history—as viewed in his eyes—is palpable. He has made that clear with his manifold apologies on both U.S. and foreign soil. He believes America unfairly consumes a disproportionate share of the world’s resources; that we have projected our power imprudently, imperiously, unfairly, arrogantly, and dismissively; and that America has been too nationalistic and too resistant to what he believes are the inevitable forces of globalism.

He believes we must radically change course and share much more of our resources, especially with third world countries. In his view, America should reach out to other nations, adopt more of their enlightened and progressive values, and make amends for our past wrongs. He thinks our already deplorable international record was exacerbated by his predecessor’s “cowboy diplomacy.” This, coupled with Bush’s record in the war on terror—including his invasion of Iraq, his approval of enhanced interrogation techniques, and his enabling of Gitmo—resulted in the proliferation of terrorists. He is convinced that by drawing a line in the sand between the forces of good and evil and by refusing to engage terrorists and terrorist sponsoring states, we have lost ground in the war. His approach to foreign policy and national security can only be understood against this backdrop.

“A SPRAWLING, PROFANE BEAR OF A PREACHER”

How do we know Obama harbors the attitudes we’ve described? Well, he sat approvingly at the feet of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for years. Wright’s incendiary sermons were legendary.
ABC News
, in its “review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of America based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.” How could anyone sit in Wright’s pews and be indifferent to his indictments of America, especially a man aspiring to be president of the United States?

Wright’s doctrine of choice, Black Liberation Theology, is arguably more Afrocentric and Marxist than Biblical in its orientation. While many have quoted Wright, a few of his statements bear repeating here, not for their inflammatory tone, but for the race-oriented grievance mentality against “White America” that they reveal. If Obama hadn’t adopted domestic and foreign policies consistent with this mindset (and with the principles and attitudes ingrained in him by his mother and his Communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, among others), there would be no point in quoting Wright. But he has.

Wright said in a 2003 sermon, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God da** America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God da** America for treating our citizens as less than human. God da** America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” On the Sunday following the 9/11 attacks, Wright implied America had invited the massacre. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
²

Wright has referred to “the U.S. of KKK A”
³
and has declared, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.... We [in the U.S.] believe in this white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” He also wrote in a church-affiliated magazine, “In the 21
^st
century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
⁴

Given to anti-Israel and anti-Semitic riffs, Wright referred to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, with whom Wright traveled to Libya to visit the country’s crackpot leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, as “one of the most important voices in the 20
^th
and 21
^st
centuries.” Beyond sympathizing with Palestinians, Wright also frequently condemned Israel directly, as when he said, “The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now,” and denounced “the injustice and racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”
⁵
He also once claimed in an interview that “them Jews” were keeping Obama from speaking to him.
⁶

Wright had been unleashing these racist, anti-capitalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American screeds for decades—and certainly as long as Obama had been affiliated with his church. In a much earlier sermon, Wright had claimed we live in “a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Portau-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere.... That’s the world! On which hope sits!” We learned of this sermon in Obama’s autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
,
⁷
written by a man who later claimed to be unaware of Wright’s invective.

Indeed, during his presidential campaign, Obama insisted he “personally” hadn’t heard “such incendiary language.” Wright, he said, “always preached the social gospel.” Had he heard these sermons he “would have quit.” Not only did these denials fail the laugh test, but we have independent proof that Obama knew. A
New York Times
story from March 2007 reported that the Obama campaign had rescinded its invitation to Wright to deliver a public invocation at the ceremony announcing Obama’s candidacy. Wright reported that Obama called him “fifteen minutes before Shabbos” and told him “one of his members had talked him into uninviting me.”

Obama, citing a
Rolling Stone
article about his ties to Wright, reportedly told Wright, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”
⁸
The article, titled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama,” described Wright as “a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution,” and cited Wright’s “10 essential facts about the United States,” which were caustic and unflattering, to say the least. As
ABC News
’ Jake Tapper later asked with extreme understatement, “This [
Rolling Stone
piece] was more than a year ago. So ... what did Obama know then and what did he just all of a sudden learn?”
⁹

Based on Obama’s statements, policies, and performance in office, it is clear he shares Reverend Wright’s basic worldview, which is why Wright’s statements are still relevant today—they are directly impacting our nation. But Obama knew the public would be mortified if they were aware of his relationship with Wright, which is why he decided it would be “best” for Wright not to be “out there in public.”

If Obama hadn’t exhibited knee-jerk racism (as in the case of siding with Harvard professor Henry Gates against the Cambridge police before hearing both sides of the story, and as with his stunning protection of the New Black Panther Party); if he hadn’t exhibited such obvious hostility to our ally Israel; if he hadn’t been doing everything in his power to redistribute wealth among Americans in ways
he
believes are fair; if he hadn’t pushed through socialized medicine against the will of the people; if he weren’t trying to effect a redistribution of America’s resources to other nations to further settle what he perceives as our injustices toward the world; if he hadn’t appointed a slew of radicals as czars and advisers; and if he hadn’t apologized for and condemned America at almost every turn, we could dismiss his voluntary association with Reverend Wright. But based on what we know, we do so at our peril.

As noted, Obama’s worldview leads him to scorn American exceptionalism and American sovereignty in favor of a globalist approach. At a speech at West Point in May 2010, he pledged to shape a new “international order” as part of a national security strategy that emphasizes his faith in global institutions and international cooperation as the best vehicles for securing America’s interests.
¹⁰
Obama’s words caused some to question how much U.S. sovereignty he was willing to cede in exchange for global “cooperation.” KT McFarland, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Ronald Reagan, worried Obama was rejecting American exceptionalism. “It’s a very international sense,” said McFarland, “that America is just one of many, that we are not going to be a superpower in leading the world and I think it’s a very dangerous mindset and trend.”
¹¹

Obama is suspicious of our traditional allies and sympathetic to our rivals and enemies. A simple, three-framed cartoon from the comic strip titled “Hope n’ Change,” by Stilton Jarlsberg, placed it in graphic perspective. All three frames depict a smiling Obama with these captions: 1) Obama: “Okay, I admit that I’ve backed down from Russia, Iran, and North Korea. But I got really tough with Israel.” 2) An un-pictured questioner: “Isn’t Israel our ally?” 3) Obama: “Define ‘our’”...

WE’RE SO SORRY

Once sworn in, Obama wasted little time in making amends for what he viewed as America’s many sins against the world. He couldn’t trot the globe fast enough to apologize on behalf of America. Having dealt almost exclusively in the world of words throughout his life, he thought his utterances alone could move diplomatic mountains. Whether delivered on American or foreign soil, his message was the same:
America has been bad in the past, including the recent past. I had nothing to do with it, of course, but as its current leader I apologize. And I expect the slate to be wiped clean because I’m in charge now
.

Thus, on April 2, 2009, at the G20 meeting in London, he declared, “I would like to think that with my election and the early decisions that we’ve made, that you’re starting to see some restoration of America’s standing in the world.” Similarly, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, based on Obama’s apologetic rhetoric, Obama had “changed the image of America around the world” and made the United States “safer and stronger.”

Patronizingly, Obama told the CIA it had made “mistakes” in its Bush-era counter-terrorism policies. He told the Arabic-language
Al Arabiya
TV network that America “dictates” without knowing “all the factors involved.” He told the G20 group America needs to account for “inadequacies” in its “regulatory system.” He accepted blame and “responsibility” on our behalf for the economic crisis having begun in the United States—“even if I wasn’t president at the time.” He told the French that America failed “to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world,” and that we’d shown “arrogance” and been “dismissive” and “derisive.”