“The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama”
By SusanUnPC on June 28, 2008 at 11:55 AM in Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, Bolshevikization, Campaigns & Campaign Financing, FISA, Iran, MSNBC, Media Bias, Obamatopia, Obamedia
On MSNBC yesterday, Republican Michael Smerconish, a Philly talk show host, brought up Charles Krauthammer’s latest Washington Post op-ed, and Flineo captured the video.
Smerconish actually says he’s thinking about voting for Obama? Does MSNBC now add a clause to its contracts that its hosts must appear inclined, ideally prostrate, before the Messiah?
Flineo has thoughtfully provided the audio text. Now, here’s a must-read section of Krauthammer’s op-ed. (Yes, yes, yes, I’ll provide the usual mandatory, it seems, caveat that we know that Dr. Krauthammer is a conservative and a neo-con, but he’s astute and he’s got Obama pegged.)
The last sentence of this quote from Krauthammer’s op-ed is especially important to read:
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech — designed to rationalize why “I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother” — then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great “race speech” now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.
Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama’s about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain’s 527 independent expenditure groups — notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico’s Jonathan Martin notes, “there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group” and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.
True, Obama’s U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That’s where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.
As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama’s abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight — switching sides in World War II, for example — whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.
Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky must be chuckling about that comparison.
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Read all of Dr. Krauthammer’s op-ed, which also gets into Obama’s two-faced positions on NAFTA, Iran, and more.
Unlike “authoritarian leftists” — a term coined by law professor Steve Diamond in his Juen 26th article here, “‘White Guilt’ Politics of Obama Crowd Undermined” — I believe in reading and listening to the viewpoints of ALL bright political observers.
The “authoritarian leftists” at Daily Kos and simlarly hardcore leftist blogs deem any quote by Mr. Krauthammer and others like him to be verboten.
It is as if they fear that their readers may be harmed by exposure to the opinions of Dr. Krauthammer, Patrick Buchanan, and other excellent writers on the “right.”
Further — and more worrisome — they do not permit any viewpoints but their own selective set of views.
That takes me to another term, “Bolshevikization,” coined here at No Quarter by Charles Lemos in his article, “The Bolshevikization of the Democratic Party.” Here is the first paragraph:
Bolsheviks (or “the Majority”) were an organization of professional revolutionaries under a strict internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism and quasi-military discipline, who considered themselves as a vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism. We can safely say that Obamaism can be equated with Bolshevism, this is nothing less than a coup led by a new caudillo, Barack Obama. For someone who professes to want to run a campaign from the bottom-up, this is the inverse. It’s centralized control from the top down. …
The hardcore leftist radicals and racists who have surrounded Barack Obama for over 20 years are all for the Bolshevikization of the Democratic party.
As are the hardcore leftists at Daily Kos who give lip service to “free speech,” but only when it comes to their free speech. Those who dare to disagree with the rigid viewpoints are swiftly, brutishly dealt with.
Meanwhile, they rationalize every flip-flop of Mr. Obama, assuming he’ll come back around if he’s victorious.
What they fail to get is that, as Dr. Krauthammer makes clear, Mr. Obama is nothing but a typical politician who’ll say anything, and shift any of his positions, to achieve his sole goal, which is winning.
But there lingers in my mind a bigger worry that, besides his being a two-faced typical politician, Mr. Obama’s longtime close associations with extreme radicals could have devastating consequences for this nation should he somehow be elected.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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