What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (30 page)

On that day, an undistinguished state senator from Illinois published an article in a nondescript Chicago-area publication, the
Hyde Park Herald
. The Communist-mentored community organizer began his piece with a call for heightened airport security, more effective intelligence operations, and a “dismantling” of the “perpetrators’” organizations.

Then the Hyde Park agitator let loose with his deeply rooted anti-American kooksense:

“We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness.”

[Not difficult at all: it’s totalitarian Islam.]

“The essence of this tragedy” [it was a personal tragedy for those who lost loved ones, but for the nation it was an act of war], “it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” [They were jihadists, driven by their clearly articulated faith to kill the infidel, not “empathize” with them.] “Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” [As if we should have responded to the attacks by airlifting food stamps and subsidized housing to al-Qaeda. More to the point: most of the 9/11 hijackers were middle to upper middle class and highly educated, not exactly the poor, unwashed, desperate masses to whom he refers. Isn’t it interesting how the leftists always see ideological threats to our system and values the exact same way? Whether it’s totalitarian communism or totalitarian Islam, the Left portrays these movements as byproducts of inequality and never as the militantly anti-American movements they are. Those who carried out the September 11 attacks weren’t “ignorant.” They were jihadists.]

Obama went on to counsel patience and warn against overreacting: “We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.”

The United States had
just
been attacked by a barbaric and ruthless enemy, 2,977 people had been slaughtered in cold blood, and the nation was seized by grief. And Barack Hussein Obama took
that
moment to express compassion for the enemy, concern over imaginary American bigotry, a desire to socially engineer the rest of the world, and an urge to belt out that “the children are our future.” He placed all responsibility for the enemy’s acts upon
us
and then blamed
us
for regarding them as an enemy.

Obama’s
first
instinct was not to share in the collective national suffering or to offer more than a perfunctory note of sympathy to the bereaved families or to even recognize that the attacks were acts of war. Instead, his instinct was to reach immediately for the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that’s at the very heart of kookdom. It’s
our
fault that there is so much injustice in the world and such hatred toward this nation. American “exceptionalism” had created big imbalances between the have nations and the have-not nations. We’ve been a bully, throwing our weight around the world without thought of consequence, pillaging foreign lands and tossing their people aside when they could no longer be of use to us. Western civilization overall had been guilty of being dominated by white heterosexual Judeo-Christians. America was particularly guilty because she was born into slavery and then sought to emulate the noxious imperialism of Great Britain and France. As Dinesh D’Souza points out in
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
, this rabid anticolonialism informs Obama’s worldview. Obama believes, as do most kooks, that we must make up for over two hundred years’ worth of global rampaging through humiliating prostration, open apologies, and worldwide retrenchment. We must turn the United States from thuggish superpower into just another country, no better than any other nation, no more powerful, no more moral, no more influential. This is the mission of the kooks: the ultimate downgrade of American power.

The way in which the kooks seek to water down our exceptionalism is by redistributing
globally
everything that makes America great: our military and economic power, our diplomatic influence, our cultural strength—and most important, our principle of individual freedom. Obama’s Declaration of Dependence would extend to our role in the world. The leftists would back the United States off from global leadership, make us increasingly dependent on other nations and multilateral institutions such as the UN, get us to lean on international law over American law and interests, and ultimately seek transnationalism, a one-world global governing regime. The kooks would see to it that America soon would become nothing special, simply another nation on the world block with about the same power and appeal as Paraguay. After all, on this great spaceship called earth, all countries, cultures, and systems of government are created equal, and constitutional republics like ours have no right to exceptionalism, either on the world stage or here at home.

In his first address as president to the United Nations in September 2009, Obama said precisely that: “In an era where our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No world order that elevates one nation or group over another will succeed. That is the future America wants.” No, actually that was the future
Obama and the kooks
wanted: America over, done, put a fork in her. That’s why Obama’s first reaction after the 9/11 attacks was so revealing. The anti-American radicalism inherent in his initial response showed the mentality he would later bring to his role as commander in chief. Most of the time, America had been wrong: arrogant, selfish, the genocidal thief who’d shoot first and ask questions later. It’s no surprise that Obama spent twenty years listening to his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, slam America as a vain, unjust nation. In his sermon on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks, Wright claimed that the United States had brought on the attacks because we had also committed terror: “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!” he roared.

In addition to drawing obscene moral equivalencies and disturbingly warped historical analogies, Wright was revealing the essence of kook ideology. America is the root of all evil and must be punished. Obama claimed that he wasn’t sitting in Wright’s pews that Sunday after 9/11, but he didn’t have to be. As he had once said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.”

As a senator, presidential candidate, and president, Obama had incessantly attacked President Bush on every aspect of his foreign policy. He pounded Bush for being a unilateralist cowboy, prosecuting an “unnecessary war” in Iraq, essentially abandoning the so-called good war in Afghanistan, ravaging the Constitution by establishing the terrorist facility at Guantánamo Bay, subjecting terrorists to enhanced interrogation techniques, maintaining “black sites” around the world to which terrorists might have been transferred for interrogation, instituting warrantless wiretapping and data mining to track terrorists and their financing, damaging our relationships with our allies, and needlessly antagonizing our adversaries. Bush, he suggested, was a lawbreaking renegade who had inflicted grave damage upon our international reputation.

Obama’s assertions were flat-out lies. Bush built international coalitions for the military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He went to the United Nations and exhausted all diplomatic avenues before ordering the military action. He went to multilateral organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for Afghanistan, the European Union to help manage the Iranians’ march toward nuclear weapons, and a coalition of five other major Asian powers to deal with North Korean aggression. He didn’t do those things to dilute American power, as Obama is doing, but to assert American leadership in creating coalitions for American-led action.

The very foundation of kookology is to assign blame to others and then position yourself as the one uniquely gifted to solve the grievances you’ve just identified. That move also becomes your ticket to power—and to keeping it. Right on cue, Obama said that it would take years to undo all of the damage, but it could be done with the right leader who possessed an almost otherworldly ability to bring nations together and “heal the planet.” Where could we find such a leader? Why, one just happened to be standing right in front of us. Imagine the luck.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama made all kinds of outlandish claims, from the grand (“it was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”) to the grander (“we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”). His godlike aspirations were on particular display when he was abroad. He wouldn’t have to do much of the heavy lifting of world peace because that kind of work was only required of Usual Politicians. He wasn’t Usual. He was the Lamb of Chicago, walking on water and multiplying fishes and loaves to feed the masses. He could breast-feed the world and cause Chris Matthews to have to adjust his pants. A mere glance in the direction of hostile states would bring an end to conflict. He was the Magical Merlin of the World, spreading his fairy dust everywhere and watching peace bust out all over.

It was this kind of one-world, American reductionist gobbledygook that led to two revealing critiques from high-profile members of Obama’s own party. When he was still locked in the primary fight with Hillary Clinton, she ran an ad that bitingly questioned Obama’s national security experience and judgment. Known as “The 3 a.m. Phone Call” ad, it reminded us that the world is a dangerous place in which a catastrophic crisis could explode at any time. With whom would you feel more comfortable as commander in chief, reaching for the phone in the White House residence at an ungodly hour? The junior senator from New York, whose national security experience was limited to whatever knowledge she absorbed through osmosis as first lady, or the junior senator from Illinois, whose foreign policy experience was limited to visits to Epcot Center with his girls? Fast-forward to today, and this Tweedledee/Tweedledum equation of Hillary and Barry has new meaning. In many cases, it’s the former junior senator from New York who is actually
making
the call at 3:00 a.m. now as secretary of state. So, as you can see, the voters actually had no real choice because these two foreign policy dopes ended up talking to each other.

Just two weeks before the 2008 presidential election, his own vice presidential pick reinforced the doubts about Obama, although from a different angle. “Mark my words,” Joe Biden said. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.... We’re about to elect a brilliant forty-seven-year-old senator president of the United States of America.... Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” He was basically telling the world that when we elect this sick antelope with one eye, one horn, and one leg, he’s going to get thirsty and hobble down to the riverbank to get a drink. And waiting for him there will be a giant crocodile, just barely submerged below the waterline, waiting to strike. And strike it did … in the form of Somali pirates, domestic terror attacks like the one at Fort Hood, and rogue regimes like Iran and Syria, which slaughtered their own people in the streets while marching toward nuclear weapons.

Hillary and Biden were pointing to a disturbing lack of national security experience and an equally important lack of steeliness to deal with the world as it was, not, as Obama and Michelle had often said in invoking Alinsky, the world as they wished it to be. Obama would do everything he could to turn the world into what he thought it should be. The “social and economic justice” he would force-feed America at home would be instituted abroad.

Obama would community-organize the world. He would be the global redistributor.

That’s why Obama’s first act of international diplomacy would be to log in to Facebook and send friend requests to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and, finally, the Winklevoss twins. All accepted his friend requests except the Winklevii.

Never mind that the world is a brutal Darwinian jungle, where only the strongest thrive and the weakest get either trampled or consumed. And never mind that cold calculations of national interest dominate; the world is not a charitable place, where do-goodism is rewarded and noble intentions are respected. To the contrary: it’s a do-or-die environment, where it’s far better to be feared and respected than loved.

The virtue of America has always been that in addition to our genuine do-goodism, we have projected strength and power, which we were not afraid to use to defend our and our allies’ interests. As a result, we have been in the unique position of being feared and respected as well as being a true force for good. The United States has spent more blood and treasure liberating more people from tyranny and oppression than any other nation in world history. And no nation has asked for so little in return.