Smarting from ridicule about the way John Edwards’ sexual mischief was covered up or ignored for months, the mainstream media have decided to avoid similar charges that they are protecting Barack Obama. Hence the unprecedented New York Times page-one treatment of Jerome Corsi’s latest best-seller, The Obama Nation.
Corsi’s book, copiously footnoted, assembles thousands of facts to present a newsworthy picture of the personality and character of the presumptive Democratic nominee. After all, that’s what Obama’s supporters say is of primary importance.
His political strategist, David Axelrod, is known for projecting personality as the principal factor in electing a candidate. Paul Waldman, the Media Matters spokesman chosen by Larry King Live and C-SPAN to rebut Corsi, claims that it’s not specifics or issues but character that counts the most.
Maybe Axelrod and Waldman are correct that the voters don’t demand to be told about their presidential candidate’s specific plans for withdrawal from Iraq, or health care, or tax policy. Maybe they don’t even care that Obama does not have a single legislative accomplishment from his service in either the U.S. Senate or the Illinois Senate.
The Obama campaign immediately issued a pathetic 40-page rant against Corsi’s book, citing minor inaccuracies such as the date of Obama’s marriage. The campaign rebuttal, however, was silent about Corsi’s main points.
Corsi’s book tells us what the voters do want to know about the personality and character of the candidate, who are his friends, who and what were the influences that shaped his worldview, and who he owes for his rapid ascendancy to political power. The voters do care a lot about who will have access to the Oval Office and who will be invited to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.
Corsi’s book introduces us to Obama’s friends and mentors, most of whom we would not want to see as White House guests. The majority of evidence for these answers comes from Obama’s own words and his two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.
Obama’s books reveal him as having the personality of a man embittered by being abandoned by his African father and his unconventional white mother, and who came to believe that race is the issue that trumps all else and must be used for the redistribution of power and wealth. Obama sought out relationships with the socialist-radical Saul Alinsky, the unapologetic bomb-thrower Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground associate Bernardine Dohrn, the Communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, leftwing Muslim-supporting politicians in Kenya, the corrupt political fixer Tony Rezko, and the black-liberation-theology Reverend Jeremiah Wright who preaches hate America and accuses the United States of creating the AIDS virus to kill blacks.
Corsi’s book quotes Obama’s own words as he established his relationship with these radical characters and then, when they became embarrassments, progressively changed his responses in order to distance himself from his friends. Obama’s disavowals are not persuasive.
Who would Obama appoint to fill the upcoming vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court? Certainly not justices like John Roberts or Sam Alito; Obama voted No on both of them and offensively called Clarence Thomas the worst justice on the Supreme Court.
Obama is even more pro-abortion than Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (which is hard to be). In the Illinois Senate, he voted against the law to ban partial-birth abortion, and against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.
Later, he said, if his daughters “make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” When the Reverend Rick Warren asked Obama when life begins, he said he couldn’t reply because that is “above my pay grade.”
In that same televised interview, the Reverend Warren asked Obama whom he would call on for advice. His response was his wife Michelle (whose Princeton thesis showed she shares Barack’s bitterness about race) and his aging grandmother in Hawaii.
When Obama ran for the Illinois Senate, he had four primary opponents including the black female incumbent. In a remarkable and probably unique display of political chicanery, Obama managed to get the Chicago political machine to throw all the other four off the ballot by challenging the names on their petitions, so that Obama ran unopposed.
David Axelrod and Barack Obama have decided to run a presidential campaign on the cult of personality and character. If that’s the battleground of the 2008 race, Jerome Corsi’s book provides all the information needed to defeat him.
Maybe Hillary Clinton’s top strategist and pollster, Mark Penn, had it right when he wrote this in a secret memo on May 19, 2007, recently unearthed by Atlantic magazine. Obama lacks “American roots” and “is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Obama Rejects English Assimilation
One would think that a presidential candidate who has no military service, who survived a public controversy about attending a church for 20 years where the pastor preached “hate America,” plus a flap about his refusal to wear an American Flag pin, would bend over backwards to showcase his patriotism. But Barack Obama has just given his critics another reason to question his support of American identity.
Obama said, “Understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English . . . you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.” But who “needs to make sure”? parents? public schools? government nannies?
Expanding on this theme, Obama added, “You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. . . . It’s embarrassing . . . when Europeans come over here, they all speak English . . . And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say is Merci beaucoup.” Embarrassed? We surely don’t want a President representing our nation in foreign travels who is embarrassed about our country. We want a President who is proud to stand up for America, our culture, our language, our laws and our customs.
Most Americans look upon the English language as the number-one factor that defines our national identity: e pluribus unum, one nation out of many peoples. We want English to be our national, official language, spoken by all who call themselves Americans.
The Zogby Poll reports that 83 percent of Americans favor legislation to make English our official language. Thirty states have designated English as the official language of their states, and ten more states are considering such legislation.
Obama is pandering to Hispanic voters by suggesting that the rest of us have a duty to speak Spanish. Most Americans not only don’t want to speak Spanish, we are annoyed by voices on the telephone telling us to “Press 1 (or sometimes 2) for English,” and we are outraged at the thought that a President would try to impose a Spanish obligation on us.
Only 26 percent of Americans, according to a Rasmussen survey, believe that every American should be able to speak two languages. Even that low number would probably nosedive if confronted with the notion that the government might enforce bilingualism on us.
Why should that second language be Spanish? The United States today has immigrants who speak over 200 different languages. Should the Asian immigrants be forced to learn Spanish as well as English?
Obama’s statement is not only out of sync with the big majority of Americans, but it is condescending and further evidence of the elitist attitude the Obamas displayed when Barack looked down his nose at Americans whom he said rely on religion and guns because they are “bitter,” and when Michelle said that Barack’s campaign was “the first time” she was “really proud of my country.”
Americans are not backward hicks because we don’t learn a second language. We consider it a waste of time because English is fast becoming the worldwide language and because the ability to speak English is the litmus test of whether or not immigrants are assimilating into the American culture.
Obama conceded that immigrants should learn English but, unfortunately, many do not. The Pew Hispanic Center reported that only 52 percent of Hispanic naturalized citizens speak English well or pretty well, and that 28 percent of Latino immigrants speak only Spanish on the job.
Obama voted against making English our official language on four Senate roll-call votes. In 2006 and 2007 he voted twice against Senator James Inhofe’s (R-OK) amendment to repeal Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 13166, and voted twice in favor of Senator Ken Salazar’s (D-CO) amendment to make Executive Order 13166 stronger than it already is.
Executive Order 13166 discourages assimilation by committing all executive-branch agencies to provide all federal benefits and services in foreign languages (even though the Supreme Court held in Alexander v. Sandoval that immigrants have no right to demand this).
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission discourages assimilation by suing over 200 employers for requiring English to be spoken by employees on the job (even though a Rasmussen survey found that 77 percent of Americans believe that employers should be allowed to do this).
Providing foreign language ballots discourages assimilation (even though only citizens are supposed to vote and to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, the immigrant must demonstrate “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English”).
Bilingual education (known as language apartheid) discourages assimilation by keeping children with Hispanic-sounding names for years in Spanish-language public school classes (even though bilingual ed has been rejected by the voters in referenda from California to Massachusetts).
It’s no surprise that the Rasmussen survey reports that 59 percent of Americans believe government actually encourages immigrants to retain their home-country culture instead of assimilating into America. Senator and Mrs. Obama should tell immigrants to assimilate and get the facts from the new Bradley Foundation report called “E Pluribus Unum: America’s National Identity.”
Why Hillary Clinton Lost
The post-mortems are rolling in to explain the long-drawn-out and spectacular failure of Hillary Clinton’s once-so-promising presidential campaign. She and her supporters are sure they know how and why she was rejected: she was the victim of sexism.
Feminist ideology teaches that American women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal society. No matter how rich or prominent or smart or advantaged a woman may be, success and happiness are still beyond her grasp because institutional sexism holds her down.
The aging Gloria Steinem opined on CNN that it is “clear that there is profound sexism.” She whined that Hillary couldn’t crack the “glass ceiling” (an architectural figment of feminist imagination) because there are “still barriers and biases out there.”
Oh, the unfairness of it all! Steinem bemoaned that women find it so “difficult to be competent and successful and be liked.” Au contraire, women are not disliked because they are competent and successful, but because they are chip-on-the-shoulder feminists.
The feminists are living in an unhappy world of their own making. In truth, 92 percent of Americans say they would vote in a presidential election for a qualified female candidate from their own party, and 55 percent say Yes when asked if America is ready for a woman president.
Hillary lost because (a) she simply is not likeable, and (b) the voters (especially Democrats) suffer from Clinton fatigue. The Clintons’ offer of two-for-the-price-of-one didn’t play particularly well in 1992, and it was even less attractive in 2008.
The bad attitude of victimhood is indoctrinated in students by the bitter feminist faculty in university women’s studies courses and even in some law schools. Victimhood is nurtured and exaggerated by feminist organizations using a tactic they call “consciousness raising,” i.e., retelling horror stories about how badly some women have been treated until little personal annoyances grow into grievances against society.
Consider how Katie Couric of CBS Evening News, a woman promoted and paid above her suitability for the job, solemnly promotes feminist mythology about discrimination against women. She breathlessly reported that “90 percent of teen girls say they have been harassed at least once.”
And what does this “harassment” consist of? “Unwanted romantic attention, demeaning gender-related comments based on their appearance, and unwanted physical contact.”
Where did the authors of this nonsense find females to claim that light-hearted banter (at which no boy would take offense) can now be defined as sexual harassment? Predictably, “girls who had a better understanding of feminism . . . were more likely to recognize sexual harassment.”
This silly report came from feminists who believe there are no differences between males and females, and that anyone who suggests otherwise should be cast into exterior darkness. Remember Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers.
Another reason Hillary lost was that people resented her sense of entitlement. She believed that the presidency was hers, and that all the people whom the Clintons had appointed or helped, like New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson, should fall in line.
Hillary kept repeating that she was the candidate most ready (on day one) to be America’s CEO and commander-in-chief. That’s hard to believe when she couldn’t run her own campaign staff.
The New York Times reported that her employees, working with a “war room mentality,” “hurled expletives at one another, stormed out of meetings and schemed to get one another fired.” They engaged in “profanity-laden shouting matches” and used unprintable expletives.
Hillary promotes victimhood on her website by touting the long-discredited falsehood that women are paid “only 77 cents for every dollar men earn” and the worry that there might be any restriction on abortion. She is still pushing the Equal Rights Amendment even though it was rejected after ten years of national debate, and the Supreme Court declared it dead in 1982.
Michelle Obama is another feminist who, despite her bloated salary from a Chicago hospital, oozes the aura of victimhood. Although she was privileged to attend Princeton University, she wrote that she felt “as if I really don’t belong.”
Hillary’s allies blame the national news media for unfairly terminating her campaign because they are “suffering from sexism” and “Obama mania.” Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List and Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood emoted for an hour on C-SPAN about how sexism spoiled Hillary’s chances.
Contrary to the image Hillary has carefully cultivated, she is not a self-made woman like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Margaret Thatcher. Hillary got her career the old-fashioned way; she married it.
Who Will Protect Us Against Invasion?
President George W. Bush, in China attending the Olympic Games, responded promptly to Russia’s invasion of Georgia with the caveat that “territorial integrity must be respected.” We’re still waiting to hear the Bush Administration’s response to last month’s invasion of Arizona’s territorial integrity by the Mexican military.
More than 40 times this year, the Mexican military has crossed our border. The Mexicans even held one of our border guards at gunpoint.
How long are we going to put up with Mexican impudence and federal neglect of duty? One of the most emphatic duties set forth in the U.S. Constitution is that the Federal Government “shall protect each of them [every State] against Invasion.”
Some pretend there is a “misunderstanding” about exactly where the border is. But our border guards say there is a barbed wire fence at the point where the Mexicans entered the United States.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) immediately pointed out that if the Bush Administration had built the double fence that Congress ordered, the Mexican vehicles would not have been able to invade U.S. territory. The open-borders crowd claims that a fence is useless because people can easily climb it, but a Mexican army truck can’t do that.
Nor can the Mexican vans loaded with illegal drugs climb a fence. All the talk we hear about our “war on drugs” is totally hypocritical so long as no fence is built to keep out the drug-laden trucks.
It’s not just Mexican military vehicles that are invading our space. Again this month we read about an SUV packed with illegal aliens that evaded detection by our border patrol and then rolled over on a highway southeast of Phoenix, killing nine people and injuring the other ten on board.
They were crammed into two bucket seats in front and three seats in the back of a speeding Chevrolet Suburban. A border patrol spokesman commented, “The smuggler doesn’t care if their cargo lives or dies” because he’s already been paid.
But we care about the law, about highway safety, and about the cost. Ten people with critical injuries, who had no right to be here, are now being treated in Arizona hospitals at the U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
These latest Mexican invasions come on the heels of further depressing news about the mistreatment of border guards Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.
When federal prosecutor Johnny Sutton embarked on his national public relations campaign to defend his prosecution of these border guards for allegedly shooting a professional drug smuggler in the rear end, Sutton’s most impassioned argument was that Ramos and Compean obstructed justice by failing to report the incident. But on appeal, the Fifth Circuit overturned that part of Ramos’s and Compean’s conviction, even though the court upheld the jury verdict and the 11- and 12-year prison sentences.
It’s time to question not only President Bush but also the presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. Will you pardon these two border guards who most Americans and 75 Members of Congress believe are the targets of unfair prosecution (by friend-of-Bush Johnny Sutton) under a law never intended to be used against border guards, an unfair trial in which the Bush-appointed judge withheld from the jury damaging information about drug smuggler Davila who was the key witness against the defendants, unfairly long sentences (years longer than the same judge gave the professional drug smuggler whom Ramos and Compean intercepted), and unfair prison treatment in which they were beaten by illegal-alien prisoners?
In another recent flouting of the law, the Bush Administration quietly posted a notice late on August 4 that it is extending from one to two years its plan to allow Mexican trucks to enter the United States and have free access to our highways and roads. Only the week before, the House of Representatives Transportation Committee voted to terminate the program.
There are few issues on which Congress has demonstrated its will so emphatically with a bipartisan vote as the matter of Mexican trucks on our roads. Both Houses of Congress have voted overwhelmingly against the invasion by Mexican trucks which do not meet U.S. safety standards, driven by Mexican drivers who do not meet U.S. safety and language standards.
The House of Representatives voted against the entry of Mexican trucks by 411-3 on May 15, 2007, followed by a second voice vote on July 24. The Senate voted likewise by 75-23 on September 11, and this law was signed by President Bush on December 26, 2007.
When will the Bush Administration stand up for the territorial integrity of the United States against foreign military vehicles, vans with illegal aliens, truckloads of illegal drugs driven by professional drug dealers, and unsafe trucks and drivers that don’t meet U.S. standards? And will the next Administration protect us against the invasion of illegal aliens, illegal drugs, and illegal trucks?
