Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

   "Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:5)

   Tuesday night's Presidential Election "debate" (I wish they'd stop calling it that, because there is no true debate format to these meetings) was rather disappointing. It was simply more of the same old stuff - both candidates presenting all the talking points they repeat endlessly in their stump speeches, and which they had already trotted out in their first encounter.

This is an unprecedented time of financial meltdown. With the failure of AIG and other lending institutions, the loss of savings, pensions, and other assets  has climbed past 2 trillion dollars! Never has America experienced financial losses of this magnitude. This week's Time magazine cover picture shows an unemployment line from the Great Depression, raising the question of whether we might be headed into the same kind of situation. We have seen the sub-prime mortgage crisis create the failure of lending institutions and banks, and now the rippling of falling financial dominoes is going global, beginning to take down foreign banks as well. The government of Iceland declared this week that it is facing bankruptcy. Fear is growing.

In this kind of crisis Tuesday night was a time for McCain to step up with some passion, and make a definite emotional connection with the watching American people. But there was no passion - it was all too cool.

He was aggressive and emphatic toward Obama when it came to asserting where the Illinois Senator had been wrong about the surge succeeding in Iraq, and how his health care plan would raise taxes, and a few other places. But I'm not talking about that. What I mean is that he needed to show a bit of passionate anger about the outrageous and obscene amounts of money made by the executives of these fat-cat lenders like AIG, who utterly failed to protect their customers' mortgages, and who, just days after they were given an $85 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve had the unbelievable gall to spend $443,344 on a weekend for their executives at a luxury spa in California! 

And, he needed to name some of the people on Capitol Hill (like Congressmen Barney Frank and Chris Cox, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Chris Dodd, and others) who have for many years been in bed with lending institutions like AIG, receiving huge campaign contributions from them and in turn encouraging them to extend sub-prime mortgages to people who had no business getting them in the first place. And then he needed to look straight into the camera and say emphatically: "With your help, I'm going back to Washington and clean up the corruption on Capitol Hill, and clean up the corruption in the mortgage industry. Enough is enough! No more sleaze!"

He could have grabbed this election campaign by the throat, and completely taken the momentum away from Barack Obama. You see, Obama can't afford to come across as angry or upset or too passionate. Why? Because he must avoid giving the appearance of an angry black man. He knows that there are already hundreds of thousands of Americans that will not vote for him simply because he's black. And, if he shows an Al Sharpton type of anger, that will turn off millions more white Americans that are now leaning toward voting for him. His campaign would most assuredly be doomed. So, he has to stay cool. Which leaves a huge opening for McCain to show some passion.

But he didn't do it on Tuesday.

Right now, it looks to me like Obama is going to win this election. The polls are showing him well ahead, and even though you can't trust them all that much, they are probably reflecting reality.  So, barring a miracle, all Obama has to do is to play it cool, and avoid any major mishaps. The public is disgusted with the Bush administration, and is desperate for change. And all the more so because of the financial crisis.

In my view, an Obama Presidency would be an absolute disaster for America. Abortion would get a tremendous boost, and his pro-abortion nominee for any Supreme Court vacancy would virtually eliminate any chance to rid the nation of the slaughter of our unborn, at least in my lifetime. Taxes would be raised dramatically; health-care would be socialized and we would be led far down the road to duplicating the ghastly medical practices of Canada and Great Britain; an already horribly bloated Federal Government would expand its control over our lives; public education would be further federalized, with a further corresponding deterioration in quality; and on and on.

But, at this point, with Obama's election likely, we had better look a little deeper at who this guy really is.

His TV ads put forth the biographical image of Obama as growing up with solid Midwestern values, working his way through college and law school, and rising to become a legislator that put through bills reducing welfare rolls and extending health care to returning vets. The truth? Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, didn't work at all when he was in school (except for one summer job in college and one summer-associate position in law school), opposed the welfare reform bill, and wasn't even present to vote on the health care bill for vets.

Another image Senator Obama likes to project in this campaign is that he's a reformer, that he is going to change things, and that he is going to usher in a new day in American politics. (One of his favorite early campaign slogans was: "We are the ones you've been waiting for!") The truth? He is a run-of-the-mill liberal South side of Chicago politician. He is a smooth talker, but don't let that fool you. He has accomplished absolutely nothing in his political career - either in the Illinois Senate, where he used to absent himself from controversial voting situations, or in his three years in the U.S. Senate, where he has never tried to implement or vote for any reforms that might have cost him a political advantage. (By the way, he's missed almost half the votes since January, 2007). His charismatic manner and dulcet tones may deceive young people and the gullible, but he wouldn't even be in this election campaign if the Democrat movers and shakers hadn't been thoroughly fed up with the Clintons - especially Bill.

There are few American political systems are as perennially dirty and corrupt as that of Chicago. There, you use the taxpayers' money to keep yourself in power. You put all your political buddies on the payroll to help yourself get re-elected, and you use the power of your office to steer pension and other investment benefits to your pals. At one time, when liberals and conservatives had come together to try and clean up the Chicago political machine, a reformer (Forrest Claypool) ran against the machine candidate (John Stroger). Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg laid out the choice this way: "Isn't it enough that Stroger has turned Cook County government into a bog of waste, cronyism and incompetence? Isn't it enough that a solid, respectable, smart alternative exists? Claypool is a longtime reformer who has fought heroically to make Cook County better and more effective - if you are voting to try to improve the vital Cook County services, the vote is for Claypool. If you vote your race (Stroger was black), for any clown, no matter how ignored and betrayed you are year-in,year-out, then go for Stroger." Guess who Obama endorsed?

Of course, to vote for the reformer would have upset his good friend Tony Rezko (more on him in a moment) and other allies of the machine, including Mayor Daley. So, Obama toed the line.

How dirty is Chicago politics? There was a guy nicknamed "Quarters" because he was convicted of stealing $4 million in quarters from toll booths. Immediately after being released from prison he went on the city payroll, where he could shake down city contractors for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and campaign contributions. He was part of one of Mayor Daley's political organizations - (are you ready for this?): the Coalition for Better Government (!).

In an earlier commentary I talked about the Obama-Tony Rezko connection, in regard to a sleazy land deal (you can access all earlier commentaries in the website's Commentary Archives). There is no evidence that Rezko's sale of land to Obama, which ended up with the Obamas and the Rezkos living next to each other, was actually crooked, but the price was absurdly low. But that's not the point. The issue is their relationship. Why should Obama become buddies with a shady developer with a reputation of trying to corrupt public officials, including Obama? Because Rezko knew he could count on Obama to get grants and subsidies for him from the state (Obama wrote letters for Rezko on Senate stationery) and support legislation in Springfield that would increase demand for subsidized housing in Chicago. Obama in turn could count on Rezko for sweetheart land deals and campaign contributions. They spent weekends together, ate together often, and apparently became close friends. Obama is a reformer? Not exactly.

And then there is Obama's long-term relationship with Bill Ayers, the convicted Weatherman bomber. Does his friendship with this guy mean that he shares Ayer's radical views? (Ayers maintains to this day that he wishes he had done more blowing up of government buildings). No, not necessarily. What it does mean is that Obama has rotten taste in friends, and that he is guilty of a severe lack of judgment. He kicked off his campaign for the Presidency of the United States in Ayers' living room, for heaven's sake! Should a man with this kind of judgment be President of the United States? Not in my view.

Does the fact of Obama's having sat under the radical off-the-wall rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright mean that Obama agrees with Wright's racist screed? No, not necessarily. But Obama claims that he was shocked when he heard Wright's denunciations of America. That, folks, is a blatant lie.

Obama had sat under just that kind of vicious and vitriolic preaching against America for over a decade. Proof of this is to be found in the book Obama wrote before Audacity of Hope, his autobiography: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995. Michael Gledhill, who reviewed the book recently for National Review magazine comments: "Finishing Dreams, I could not recall a single positive sentence about the United States or European society." (And, it should be noted that Gledhill observes that although most books by politicians are clearly ghost-written by someone else, it is obvious that Obama wrote this one himself). In the book, Obama accuses U.S. society of being a "racial caste system," where "color and money" determine how far you advance in life. Yet in his campaign Obama claims that "throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given." Not exactly.

Today, candidate Obama presents himself as a man who is proud of his multi-racial identity, who can happily draw from both his black and white background. But in Dreams he makes it quite clear that he rejected his multi-racial roots and totally identified himself as a black man who was angry at white society. After college, he dumped a rich white girl friend who wanted to marry him, because she wasn't black. He felt he would be betraying his black identity, and that he would become lost in a white culture.

His view of U.S. history was that it was simply a story of whites oppressing blacks, and that it would never change. "The other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart." Obama also apparently agreed with what Jeremiah Wright said to him one time: "Life's not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be." That, of course, is an absurd statement, ignoring the fact (as Gledhill points out) that nearly all black murders are committed by other blacks, and that there are eight times as many violent crimes committed on whites by blacks as there are by whites on blacks.

Justice Clarence Thomas went through a similar period when he was a very angry black man, hating white society, and embittered against the hope of racial reconciliation and healing in America. But his heart was healed when he returned to a close relationship with God and the Catholic faith of his youth. Dreams was written in 1995, and this is thirteen years later. Does Barack Obama still harbor any of those same views at this point in his life? Apparently not, but it's a legitimate question to raise. Why hasn't anybody openly asked him about this on the campaign trail? One thing is sure: if there are any traces of these views still left in his heart, he has no business becoming the  President of the United States, who represents all Americans.

Last night Fox news revealed that the Las Vegas office of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) was raided and fraudulent voter registration forms seized. It appears that the ACORN folks are guilty of massive voter fraud - registering one person ten separate times, and registering the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboy NFL team, as well as a number of people that are long dead. The spokesperson for ACORN said that they were SHOCKED that employees of their organization could have done such a terrible thing, and they were determined to root out all the wrongdoers.

Yeah, right. And if you believe that, they've got some waterfront property in Nevada that they want to sell you.

Does that mean that Obama has had anything to do with voter fraud? No, not necessarily. But what it does mean is that Obama has a long-term connection with an organization that according to one observer sees itself as a "solitary vanguard of principled leftists." Its membership is primarily made up of inner-city blacks and Hispanics, and its agenda is to push state governments for economic redistribution (read radical socialism). It was founded by Saul Alinsky, who was a nastily leftist professor specializing in teaching community organizing for radical causes. His influential book, Rules for Radicals, was eagerly lapped up in her post-college days by one of his most devoted disciples, one Hilary Rodham.

Obama became a trainer for both ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation, another far-left community organizing group. What do these groups do? They often use confrontation, intimidation, and civil disobedience to further their political goals - they do not play nice. ACORN members have often served as volunteers in Obama's various election campaigns, and he has maintained his ties to Gamaliel, even while a U.S. Senator.  An October, 2007 report done for the University of California says that in spite of the fact that it is "almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago."

And, guess who has received more campaign contributions from ACORN than anyone else in the U.S. Senate except for one Senator? You got it!

Does this mean that Barack Obama holds the radical, far-left views of these organizations? Not necessarily. But questions need to be asked.

In my view, many of Barack Obama's previous viewpoints and attitudes make him totally unqualified to be President of the United States - if in fact he still holds to them. The question is whether he still is a radical - a stealth radical, if you will, trying to fly into the White House under the radar.

There are too many unanswered questions about Barack Obama, too many past sleazy associations.

Who really is Barack Obama?

Copyright, 2008, Peter J. Marshall.  All rights reserved.

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