What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (8 page)

Less than a week before the 2008 election, Obama could sense full kookdom was in reach, saying, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Note his deliberate and continual use of the words “remake” and “fundamentally transform.” When he said he sought a “more perfect union” to “remake this great nation” and that he was psyched about “fundamentally transforming” the nation, many of us chose to believe he meant the election of the first black president or being free of the last president or improving the economy. And that’s how he wanted it.

Obama and his advisers knew their agenda would scare the pants off the American people if they came at them full-frontal, like a
Play-girl
magazine with Barry on the cover that no one wanted to buy. The people needed to be buttered up with lies about the real agenda so they were content and sedated before the kook ax came down. The leftists kept their ideas close to the vest and their inner circle very closed, lest someone from the outside gain entry and full view of the real agenda. Obama, wife Michelle, Axelrod, and Jarrett made up the core. They were the Un-Fantastic Four! All of them came from Chicago. None had political executive experience. None had global leadership experience. There was not a single older, wiser adviser close to them to offer advice based on his or her own deep experience. Many folks scratched their heads, wondering why Obama didn’t have a Henry Kissinger or James Baker around, or why he wheeled out economic and business leaders like Paul Volcker and Warren Buffett but didn’t listen to them. Keeping the inner team limited and cloistered was by design. The more people close to the inner sanctum, the more people who might risk exposing the true kook agenda.

In fact, when Rahm Emanuel left the chief of staff job to run for mayor of Chicago, Obama replaced him with Bill Daley from—you guessed it—Chicago. Unlike his brother Richard—the retired Chicago mayor—Bill Daley had business experience, and Obama used him to try to reassure the private sector that his policies weren’t fanatically antibusiness, which, of course, they were. Daley not only couldn’t carry the lie that the administration was business friendly. He couldn’t penetrate the Kook Inner Sanctum. Because of their need to protect the Big Kookuna and the agenda, they kept him perpetually on the outside. Daley lasted just a few months in the job before being shunted aside. Soon enough, it was back to the original barbershop quartet of radicalism. With all four working to reshape America in the image they harmonized to, every tone, every melody, and every lyric was used to push their master plan. There were many other advisers and strategists on the periphery, of course, but the tight-knit group kept a lid on the extent of the kookdom.

In order to make it work, they needed to do two things. First, they needed Obama to be a Candidate Zelig. Leonard Zelig is the character portrayed by Woody Allen in the film
Zelig
. Zelig is an enigma, a curiously nondescript man who has a mysterious ability to transform himself to resemble those who surround him. In the movie, Zelig gains fame as a “human chameleon.”

Obama needed to transform himself before he could transform America. In order to disguise his radicalism, he became whomever he was around. To folks like Peggy Joseph, for example, he was Santa Claus. If he were a Marvel Comics character, he’d definitely be the archvillain Chameleon, who did such dastardly deeds as disguising himself as Captain America in order to gain the trust of Captain America’s fellow Avenger, Iron Man. With each person Obama sat down with, from Rick Warren to Oprah Winfrey, he would put on a different face, tailor-made for that particular audience. Underlying every incarnation, however, was one theme: he would be their savior. As he indicated many times, he believes in “collective salvation,” by which he means salvation delivered by the state. But he made sure that when people looked at him, they saw only the concept of “salvation,” hence his deliberate use of Jesus/messiah imagery.

The second thing the Obama inner circle needed to do was amp up the cult of personality begun in 1995 with the publication of
Dreams from My Father
and stoked in 2004 with his convention speech. If many Americans could be swept up in the carefully crafted Orwellian projection of the man, they would be less inclined to focus on what he actually intended to do. They needed to make each person feel as if their vote for Obama were their own personal success. The voters needed to be caressed and cuddled, told how enlightened and beautiful they were, taken dancing, and given endless cheap wine in the back of a limo. As Candidate Zelig charmed each audience, he dripped with charisma and flashed a 100-watt smile. He glided through crowds, getting people to lean in to try to shake his hand or touch him, like the sick woman who was healed simply by touching Jesus’s garment. He spoke in carefully modulated tones, often using hypnotic techniques such as repetition (“Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”) and the “yes set,” which is an exchange that is intentionally set up to get a positive answer. For example, during the campaign he would ask the crowd if they were ready for “change,” and they would yell “yes!” Then he would ask them if they were ready for “hope,” and they would shriek “yes!” And then he would button it up by asking if they were ready to “fundamentally transform America,” and once again, they’d howl “yes!” He had them so hysterically riled up that nobody stopped to think. Do you want higher taxes? (Yes!) Do you want illegal aliens to vote? (Yes!) Do you want me to use the sauna alone with Hugo Chávez? (Yes!)

Obama was also an adept “grievance identifier.” Merely by identifying your grievance, he’d suggest he’d fix it. To Peggy Joseph, who either didn’t want to or couldn’t pay her mortgage, he’d pay it for her. Your 401(k) down? No problem! Obama was going to take hold of the economy. Can’t afford a new car? No worries! Obama would take care of that. Jobs to the jobless! Health care to the sick! Apologies to the world! Free government-issued tighty whities, featuring Obama’s face sewn on the inside!

Obama was ingenious at laying out the nation’s grievances, and soon enough he had millions of people nodding in agreement: “Yes, that’s right.” “Yes, I have that problem, and that one, and that one too!” Pretty soon, you were agreeing to problems you didn’t even know you or the nation had. This was one of the key essences of the redistributionists’ strategy: convince you of a set of problems and then tell you that only government can solve them. Why fix something yourself when there’s someone in front of you—Barack Obama—who is offering to fix it for you? In short order, Obama was riding the “hope and change” tsunami. If Bill Clinton had indulged the Elvis cult, Obama ratcheted up a level and indulged the Jesus cult. In fact, the Obama campaign even trained volunteers to “testify” about how they “came to Obama” the way one would testify about how they “came to Jesus.” These would be the same Obama campaign staffers who often referred to him as a “black Jesus.” John Lennon had provoked a public outcry in 1966 when he claimed that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Forty-two years later, Obama laid claim to the same proposition and was adored for it.

The mainstream media fell into the Obama trance as well, although they needed even less of the hypnotic induction than most people. Since the vast majority of reporters and editors in print and television media are left-wing, they had a built-in ideological affinity for Obama. They were predisposed to love him and he them, like two juvenile delinquents at a warehouse rave party taking Ecstasy and playing with glow sticks. In the past, however, although many so-called journalists would openly support the Democratic candidates, they didn’t necessarily fall in love with them. Until Barack. Many in the left-wing media either remembered or idealized the Kennedy years, with a young, handsome Democrat in the White House, surrounded by a glamorous wife and young children. Obama updated Camelot for the twenty-first century, and the media lapped it up like parched puppies. They would do their part to re-create the Kennedy mystique around this dynamic black couple, help him get elected, and maintain the mythology.

The press took their cheerleading to absurd levels. The then
Newsweek
editor Evan Thomas took the “black Jesus” metaphor literally when he gushed, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God.” MSNBC host Chris Matthews spoke of the homoerotic charge he got while listening to Obama speak: “I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.”

In June 2008 the Associated Press went out of its way to tell us that Obama is a “great man.” In a piece of ostensibly straight reporting, the AP gushed: “Indonesians were rooting for the man they consider to be a hometown hero. Obama lived in the predominantly Muslim nation from age 6 to 10 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather and was fondly remembered by former teachers and classmates.” The AP then helpfully quoted from some “regular” admirers:

“He was an average student, but very active,” said Widianto Hendro Cahyono, forty-eight, who was in the same third-grade class as Obama at SDN Menteng elementary school in Jakarta. “He would play ball during recess until he was dripping with sweat. I never imagined he would become a great man.” Away from the reporter and missed by the AP, the man then added, “But as I remember, the great man still has a terrible jump shot.” Just kidding.

Shortly after Obama had clinched his party’s nomination, the AP ran another piece suggesting that if you don’t vote for Obama, you might be a racist. They posed two questions about the candidates:

“Will [Senator John] McCain be able to overcome the country’s intense desire for change by separating himself from the unpopular Bush while sticking close on issues of war and taxes?” And, “Will Obama be able to overcome the country’s unsavory history of slavery and lingering bigotry that deeply divides the public to be elected the first black president?”

In other words, if you don’t vote for McCain, you’re anti-Bush. Yay! But if you don’t vote for Obama, you’re a racist. And you hate America.

The AP’s work here is done. I could go on with a gazillion other examples of the mainstream media drooling over Obama, but then this book would be the size of the ObamaCare bill.

A particularly egregious example of the media’s pro-Obama activism was the attempt by some of them to bury the Jeremiah Wright scandal. As tapes of Obama’s longtime pastor spewing vicious anti-American rhetoric flooded the airwaves, the left-wing media tried to ignore the story until they couldn’t anymore, and that’s when they panicked. They needed to figure out a way to defend Obama against the allegations that by sitting in Wright’s church for twenty years, he agreed with Wright’s brutally anti-American and racist views. Obama’s candidacy was in peril. Bill and Hillary Clinton were licking their chops, as were the Republicans. Obama needed his chestnuts pulled out of the fire, and the left-wing media obliged.

As the
Daily Caller
originally reported, members of JournoList, a listserv made up of hundreds of left-wing journalists from media organizations such as
Time
, Politico.com, the
Baltimore Sun
, the
Guardian
,
The Nation
, Salon.com, and
The New Republic
were outraged that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News had asked Obama why it had taken him so long to dissociate himself from Wright’s comments. The left-wing journalists jumped into action, with Thomas Schaller of the
Baltimore Sun
suggesting, “Why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” and writing a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Stephanopoulos had asked Obama.

At one point, Chris Hayes of
The Nation
tipped his kook hand: “Our nation disappears people,” he wrote on JournoList. “It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians—men, women, children, the infirmed—on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”

There it was: kookdom in all of its anti-Americanism. No wonder so many in the left-wing media sought to protect and advance Obama. The media honestly believed in the man and his mission and they would do whatever they could to make his presidency a reality. No rigorous probing into his background. No demands that he release the most basic life records that they demand of other candidates, such as college and law school records, Selective Service registration, medical records, law practice client list, or Illinois state senate records. We demanded answers. How long has he had a subscription to
Good Housekeeping
,
Teen Vogue
, and
Hustler
? How many speeding tickets does he have? How often does he rent
House Party 2
from Netflix? These are all records we’d like to see, but the press just checked out. No tough questions. Just polite requests to touch his garments and sepia-toned hagiographies.

Once he became president, he used the full force of the White House to create an Orwellian landscape, in which media organizations and reporters that didn’t play the Obama propaganda game were intimidated and punished. During Obama’s hard sell of ObamaCare in August 2009, the White House appointed health care “czar” Nancy-Ann DeParle and former ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass to lead the effort to monitor the blogs and “casual conversations” of ObamaCare opponents and then report them to the president. The
Boston Herald
got slammed by the White House for having the audacity to run an op-ed by the former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney. The
San Francisco Chronicle
was punished by Team Obama because a print pool reporter recorded anti-Obama protesters at a Bay Area fund-raiser. A local Texas reporter at WFAA TV was criticized by the president himself for interrupting him. CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson was “screamed at” by White House flunky Eric Schultz for probing the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal. The Obama 2012 reelection team launched “Attack Watch,” which, as they put it, was “a new way to track and respond to attacks against President Obama.” And the White House orchestrated a war on an entire news network, Fox News. If media organizations did not toe the line, fall in, and gush over Obama and his agenda with the appropriate enthusiasm, they were called out, dressed down, and punished.