The Exact Word
By Jerry A. Kane
What is the right word for Obama. He once told us “words matter.”
In his commentary “The Real Obama,” Thomas Sowell rightly points out the importance of using exact words to communicate effectively. Sowell argues that Senator Barack Obama’s critics are making a strategic mistake when they use the word associate to describe the Senator’s ties to William Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Father Michael Pfleger. According to Sowell, the word ally is the more appropriate word to describe Obama’s connection to these people. Obama is not guilty by association; his guilt is through alliance. He is aligned to leftist radicals in that he shares in their fierce opposition to the ideas of a free market, individual liberty, and religious freedom, which are America’s founding principles.
Sowell is right; ally is the more accurate term for Obama’s relationship with these people. The one thread that binds them is their radical, leftist politics. Obama has been called the most liberal Senator in the U.S. Senate by right-of-center commentators and radio talk show hosts; but again the word choice problem crops up. Obama’s politics are not liberal; his politics match those of Saul Alinsky and the leftist radicals of the 1960s.
Obama’s radical leftist politics explain his political and theological ties with such radical and revolutionary pastors the likes of Wright and Pfleger, who incidentally are part of a nexus along with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that aligns black-liberation theology with black Muslim nationalism. Stanley Kurtz connects the dots of this unholy trinity in his National Review article “Left in Church: Deep inside the Wright Trumpet.”
Black-Liberation Theology is a type of Marxist Liberation Theology that promotes an Afrocentric social gospel. Inspired by Black Muslim nationalism, James Cone combined Marxism with black religion and a black Gospel and created Black-Liberation Theology. Cone’s theology is designed to liberate African-Americans from the economic slavery of the white man’s free market system and to build a completely new society. Cone is Wright’s mentor, and Cone credits Wright for lifting his theology from his books and making it work in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Cone’s theology is the core doctrine and his books are required reading in the church Obama attended for 20 years.
Cone’s theology proposes that the black Jesus (Wright’s church believes and teaches Christ was black) will give black Americans the ability to do away with the white man’s greed and free market system and replace them with a black value system. In addition, Cone writes “black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy” and that being black means “committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores.” Obama has said that black liberation theology is sensible, has called Wright his mentor, has said that Wright has given him the best education he ever had, and throughout his campaign has declared America’s institutions as broken and in need of fixing. For a more comprehensive look at Black-Liberation Theology, read “Obama: Stealth Socialist?” by Investor’s Business Daily.
Obama’s radical leftist politics are so meshed with his socialist religion that it’s difficult to know where one leaves off and the other begins. For example, in a 1998 radio interview, Obama discusses how certain portions of the African American community are not doing very well with crime, education, and employment, and he recognizes his fate is tied with theirs. He goes on to suggest that his “individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country.” He further states, “Unfortunately, I think that recognition requires we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.”
On the stump, Obama divines the time has come “to perfect this nation.” Not long ago, I brushed such statements aside, without a second thought. When Hillary playfully mocked Obama’s remarks, “a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama,” it never occurred to me to take such remarks seriously. When the Obama Sith, Chris Matthews, said, “This is bigger than Kennedy….This is the New Testament,” I just figured he was caught up in the exuberance of the moment. And when Halle Berry said that she’d “collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear”; or Eve Konstantine said he is “our collective representation of our purest hopes, our highest visions and our deepest knowings,” I unthinkingly whisked them away as so much sophomoric giddiness and bizarre tripe.
Now, that the antenna is up and the red flags are waving, I am astounded when I reconsider that Bill Rush of the New York Times actually believes Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate, “was divinely ordered….God’s plan”; that Oprah Winfrey thinks his “tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth”; that Gerald Campbell sees him radiate “truth and goodness”; that Gary Hart deems him not to be “operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians”; and that Deepak Chopra considers him “A quantum leap in American consciousness.”
It’s apparent that Obama not only believes his individual salvation depends on collective salvation, but he also desires to bring about a new day and age. Maybe next time Charlie Gibson will ask the hubris question of Obama.
On second thought, hubris is not the exact word, megalomania is more appropriate.
Only Conserva-tarians Can Save the GOP
Posted in Published Commentaries on March 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Only Conserva-tarians Can Save the GOP
By Jerry A. Kane
At what point does complacency end and panic set in for the members and leaders of the Republican Party? When will they notice the empty hour glass and recognize wickedness for what it is? The hordes of satiated simpletons shouting in rhythmic cadence, “Oh we love, the O-One … Oh we love, the O-One” is not the Winkie chant of guards entering a castle in a scene from a classic fantasy film. The ill winds of the 2006 and 2008 elections that uprooted the GOP House and Senate leadership and sent Republicans spiraling downward were not flash-in-the-pan Kansas dust devils but full-blown Category-5 whirlwinds.
The party of Ronald Reagan has been victimized by disorganized thinking, held spellbound, and led astray by the siren call for moderation from its left wing, which by nature votes for progressive governance. Before Republicans begin their assault on the castle to douse the progressive Democrats’ power grab, the party’s conservatives and libertarians, i.e., Conserva-tarians, must come out from under the spell and cast out the treacherous progressive element from the positions of power in their own ranks.
Caught up in the tidal wave of the ’94 election, Republican exuberance soon gave way to a heightened sense of self-importance; instead of governing on principles and fulfilling their Contract with America, Republicans lost their way and spent the next 12 years trying to convince the electorate that their compromises were smart, courageous, and compassionate. Now, it’s up to Conserva-tarians to rise to the occasion, accept the challenge facing them, and move the party in the direction of limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, greater economic opportunity, and respect for this nation and its heritage.
For more than a decade, the far-left progressive movement has been advancing its socialist ideas and positions through an all-out war against conservative and libertarian principles. The movement’s agenda includes a massive income redistribution scheme from corporations and the wealthy to low-income workers and the poor; a substantial reduction in military spending; an increase in social welfare spending; the implementation of universal healthcare; the adoption of living wage laws; the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and to engage in strikes and collective bargaining; the abolition of significant portions of the Patriot Act; the legalization of gay marriage; the execution of strict campaign finance reform laws; a complete pullout from the war in Iraq; a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare; and the acceptance of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every state, federal, and local regulation on abortion, abolish all state restrictions on government funding for abortions, and use income taxes to fund abortions.
Through the years, middle-class Americans were not mesmerized by progressive socialist movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism; but now, many in the middle class have become captivated by the mainstream media’s image of Barack Obama and the agenda championed by the progressive Democrats in Congress. They seem to have traded the American Dream for the empty promises of yellow-brick road infrastructure and merry old land tranquility.
Progressives no longer make up a small percentage of lawmakers; in fact, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is the largest partisan caucus in the House of Representatives, boasting 71 members, nearly one-third of House Democrats. Until 1999, the CPC worked openly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the country, to strengthen the Democrat Party’s left wing. DSA also helped to organize the CPC.
Progressives have turned the American political arena into a no-holds-barred war zone, where laws and rules are suspended arbitrarily for the greater good. Doubters need look no further than Joe Lieberman, who was out-of-lockstep with the Democrats on one issue only, but one was enough for the progressive elite to force him from the party.
In contrast, Senators Olympia Hiss-Snowe, Susan Ames-Collins, and Arlen Rosenburg-Specter have continually adopted the progressive positions of the opposition party and abandoned their own party’s positions on issues central to its survival, and have done so with impunity. ”Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country’s ruin!” If the GOP has any hope of veering this nation away from socialism’s road to serfdom and back to its founding free-market ideals, it can no longer tolerate such treacherous acts inside its ranks.
In the 2006 and 2008 elections, naïve Republicans brought a knife to a gunfight. As a result, the party now lies flattened, its stuffing ripped out, strewn asunder from a full-scale progressive assault. Grass-root Conserva-tarians must have the courage to brush aside any tinhorn leader who lacks the steely resolve to rid the GOP of Republicans in name only (RINOs).
Though stalwarts Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and William F. Buckley are gone, their ideals and dreams for America remain, for they mirrored those of the Founders’ before them. Only Conserva-tarian values and principles can restore the GOP to consequence. Otherwise, America will have but one major political party and a host of lesser parties with no real political power, and suffering humanity’s hope for self government will have ended a failure.
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