How To Get Off Obama's Path To America's Destruction By Herb Denenberg

Source: http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/05/01/herb_denenberg/doc49fa670e2a0d8017635702.txt

May 01, 2009

[Bulletin] Editor’s note: This column is the basis for a speech Herb Denenberg will deliver to the Tredyffrin Township (Chester County) Republican Committee at its Derby Day event this Saturday.

The greatest country in history has a president who seems to hate America and has joined the blame-America-first club and the bash-and-trash-America club. He even pours out his endless criticism of America while on an international tour.

This greatest democracy, unique in history, with a governmental system based on the Judeo-Christian foundation, now has a president who bows and scrapes to the Muslim king of Saudi Arabia.

After bowing and scraping before that king, the Barack Obama administration denies that ever happened. He was just shaking hands, they say. So we are told, “don’t believe your lying eyes, and recall his handshakes during the campaign. Wasn’t he bowing then, too?” This is the biggest Obama lie since he claimed he doesn’t know what the racist and America hating bigot, Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright was saying for 20 years … when Mr. Obama sat there in the pews of Rev. Wright’s church.

At the very time he denounces earmarks and pork and calls for their end, he signs a bill with 9,000 earmarks in it. His phoniness and hypocrisy knows no end.

The president releases what he calls the torture memos but edits out the sections of those memos documenting how enhanced interrogation produced important life-saving intelligence on terrorists. As an old consumer reporter, I’d call that consumer fraud.

We’re in the middle of a war against terror, and those in charge are afraid to use the word “terror,” transforming it to “overseas contingency operations.”

The flag, that sacred icon of the greatness of America, was viewed by this man as a symbol of false patriotism when worn as a lapel pin. He only added the flag to his lapel when he encountered flak during the campaign.

This president is the first black man ever elected president, but what does he do to assure a colorblind society? He plays the race card during the campaign, claiming his opponents will call attention to the fact that he doesn’t look like other presidents and is a black man. That, of course, was as sleazy a campaign move as he could make as his opponents and the Republican Party avoided any trace of racist campaigning. This supreme phony objects to the race card by playing it more than once.

This is a president whose main legislative achievement in the state senate of Illinois is leading the fight for legislation that would continue to legalize infanticide. He is the most radical pro-choice politician in high office, who thinks the main purpose of the Constitution is to assure the availability of abortions without any restrictions or limitations whatsoever. He now claims he’s doing exactly when he said he would do in the campaign. In fact, he’s doing the opposite. He said he would be a save-and-invest president, when he is in fact a borrow-and-spend president. This save-and-invest president is spending a billion dollars an hour. He said he would be the great nonpartisan, but is proving to be hyper-partisan in practice, virtually freezing the Republicans out of the legislative process. To say the least, at a time when we need the greatest leadership in our history, we have a president who has done the impossible — he makes Jimmy Carter look good by comparison. But to put this all into perspective, we need a little background on those who would criticize a president.

We have to be careful, or we’re going to let political correctness kill us. We better understand that you have to tell the truth, as you see it, about the world as you see it, and act accordingly. If you don’t, you escape into a fictional world, you detach yourself from reality, and you react and behave on the basis of a kind of fiction instead of fact.

When you call the war on terror an “overseas contingency operation,” you’re not only escaping reality, but in my view you’re showing signs of mental disease. When a terrorist attack becomes a “man-caused disaster,” again, in my view, you are sick. I must remind you we’re not as semantically suicidal as the Brits — who call terrorism by an even more ridiculous Orwellian inversion —anti-Islamic activity.

When you can’t explain behavior in rational terms, you can sometimes only explain it in terms of mental disease. Indeed, Michael Savage, the talk show host, may well be right when he describes liberalism as a mental disorder. I’m afraid we’re living in a world gone mad, when you’re almost forced into explanations based on pathology rather than rationality.

The great English historian Paul Johnson, in a classic article in Commentary Magazine, suggested that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, bizarre afflictions without a rational basis, could best be explained as mental diseases.

Many hold back from such explanations, especially when they characterize the president of the greatest country in the history of the world. We all know that we’re navigating in the most dangerous times that America has ever faced, with an international enemy of a kind we’ve never fought before and with economic problems that plague us and the rest of the world. And that’s not to mention nuclear proliferation, a chance that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists if the government of Pakistan collapses and a possible pandemic. We know we need a president with first-class leadership abilities and we know our very survival depends on his leadership and his decisions. So, in a way, it’s hard to criticize a president, especially one who is often treated as a Messiah and a Savior.

Having said that, we can’t confuse our hopes with reality and what we need with what we have. This all adds up to a situation in which people don’t want to hear what might be the truth. It is too frightening and too painful. But I think we’re still better off if we understand reality rather than some fictional scene manufactured out of political correctness.

I must confess I’ve never been a slave to political correctness. Right from the beginning of the last presidential campaign, I characterized Barack Obama as a fraud, a faker, a phony, a liar, a hypocrite, an America-basher and more. I said he was an inexperienced, unvetted, untested beginner who had never accomplished anything before, except polish his resume and write his memoirs. I should only have added he is a demagogue and a charlatan.

I said he should be disqualified on the basis of his associates alone. As I’ve said, here was a man who sat in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright for 20 years without one small peep of protest. He seems to have never listened … for 20 long years. Now we know he learned his own habit of America bashing and blaming America first from the master. That’s why Mr. Obama is the first president to go on a world tour apologizing for and bashing America. As columnist Charles Krauthammer has pointed out — before the world on foreign soil — he spent his time “indicting his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world, while engaging in an obsessive denigration of his own country.”

Mr. Obama was a man who associated with terrorists such as William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, bigots and racists such as Wright and Rev. Michael Pfleger and a crook, Tony Rezko.

Perhaps the terrorist association is why he seems more concerned with the sensitivities of terrorists than the safety of Americans. Mr. Obama was the most radical, leftist, socialist who was ever a serious candidate for president of a major political party. And that certainly translates into the out-of-control spending, higher taxes, the spread-the-wealth philosophy, weak national defense and foreign policy, big government, more bureaucracy, more regulation, less freedom and individual responsibility, and an anti-free market, anti-capitalist philosophy that dominates his programs.

Electing such a candidate is a recipe for disaster, and that’s who we elected and that’s the recipe that is now being served up.

How did this happen? The mainstream media — such newspapers as the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, such television networks as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, and such magazines as Time and Newsweek — committed the greatest piece of journalistic fraud and journalistic malpractice in history… by acting more like a campaign manager and cheerleader for Mr. Obama than acting as journalistic enterprises. And now, as he takes us on a path to the destruction of America as we know it and perhaps to the very destruction of America, the biased, dishonest and fraudulent mainstream media still act as press agents and cheerleaders for Mr. Obama, and certainly not as journalistic principles dictate.

I won’t bore you with the details. Perhaps if I had to point to one thing, it would be the $787 billion stimulus package. This is perhaps the most important piece of legislation of the Obama administration to date. It wasn’t written by the White House, as such important legislation usually is. It was delegated to Congress and those noted leftists, Speaker of the House Nancy “San Francisco Values” Pelosi and Sen. Harry “Wave the White Flag – This War is Lost” Reid. It was passed with more pork than that found in all the history of the Chicago stockyards, loaded with earmarks, all contrary to Obama promises. And what’s worse, it wasn’t even read by those that voted for it. This came after the Obama promise to go after all spending on a line-by-line basis. This is all too typical of Mr. Obama. His rhetoric has no connection with his reality and his record. He talked about bipartisanship, but has a highly partisan history and now demonstrates anything but bipartisanship.

He has the talking disease, mistaking his speeches for reality, his rhetoric for real accomplishments. He also has the campaign disease, acting as if he is still running when he should be governing. He is more interested in his popularity than America’s interests. He is more intent on pleasing the European socialists than preserving America’s free-enterprise system. He is consistent on one thing. He does the opposite of what makes sense. As North Korea launches an intercontinental ballistics missile and as we face the threat of missile nuclear attacks from Iran as well, Mr. Obama cuts back on missile defense. He seems to have unlimited money for pork, for earmarks and for loony left schemes, but only has the scalpel and tight budgetary control for defense spending.

He talks of energy independence, but fights offshore drilling and nuclear power. He advocates pie-in-the-sky energy alternatives and turns his back on our own resources in our own backyard. He bootlicks and appeases our enemies and slams our allies. As Dick Morris suggested, if you want good treatment from the Obama administration, become an enemy of America.

What can we do about reversing the course for America set by Mr. Obama? America is in extraordinary danger from outside forces such as the Islamofascists and from inside forces such as the mainstream media and the Obama administration. This will require a loyal opposition better organized and more effective than ever before. And a big part of that opposition has to be the Republican Party. That will require that the public be weaned off the mainstream media and get information from alternative sources as well. Otherwise, they will be propagandized into drinking the Obama Kool-Aid.

This means we have to educate the public about the bias of the mainstream media and the alternatives to it. It also means we ought to boycott the mainstream media and use other available pressures. Start by doing one thing. I’d suggest canceling the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer and joining the boycott of the New York Times by going to the boycott site, www.boycottnyt.org, maintained by the media watchdog Accuracy in Media.

It will not be enough for the Republicans simply to be the loyal opposition. They will have to make their case to a majority of the American people and convince them we are on a course to destruction and extinction unless the Obama and Democratic programs are defeated and the damage they’ve already inflicted is undone. We can’t respond as it is just business as usual. We have to respond as our survival is at stake, as it is. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and paying that price is the greatest bargain in all of history. It’s time to pay up as never before.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.