THE REAL OBAMA

"We are seeing the dawn of a new era of the current Democratic leadership trying to muzzle free speech and the First Amendment"
-Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, ret

Tomorrow in the US, we vote for the president of the united states, along with other local and federal offices. For many in the rest of the world, the choice is obvious: Senator Obama! Yet he's not doing well in many polls lately and I do not believe he'll win this election. I linked a Gerard Baker article about why Obama isn't doing better in America from a British newspaper. Now I'd like to try my hand at the same task.

From the outside, Obama looks great: bright, attractive, a good speechmaker, calling for change and hope and a move away from bitter partisan politics. He is a leftist, a socialist, which to many Europeans is not such a strange or bad thing. He's black, which to the left makes him the right choice just because there's been no black presidents. He publicly and repeatedly opposed the now successful, victorious Iraq invasion, which appeals to a lot of Europeans. So it seems inconceivable that he could lose the election.

Here's the problem: he's a terrible candidate. Putting aside the obvious fact that he's so unready for the office of president even his wife just four years ago scoffed at the idea and dismissed it, there are a host of basic problems with the man.

CORRUPTION
Obama's campaign finance has repeatedly broken the law by accepting donations from non-Americans, and deliberately set their credit card donation system to not bother with any security; just the number and amount. Why? A credit card software expert explained to Ace:

Obama has left the door open for anyone to run prepaid cards and foreign credit cards without proper screening. In addition, it is easy to run multi-transactions on the same card but under different aliases. In other words, an organization like Move On.org could run tens of thousands of transactions for millions of dollars using essentially cards belonging to only handful of very large liberal donors like George Soros, Peter Lewis and Eric Schmidt.

In addition, Obama's site violates his agreement with Visa/Mastercard. Visa Mastercard regulations require each credit card acceptor to "obtain the 3 digit Card Validation Code [CVV2 found on the back of your credit card. 4 digits for American Express Cards] and submit this code with all authorization requests with respect to transactions where the card is not present..."

Many foreign credit cards do not have CVV2 codes. Requiring such codes would limit foreign donations.

Secondly, disabling the security allows would be credit card thieves to "ping" numbers till they get a hit. In other words, a crook could simply type in random numbers until he found one sequence that worked in some fashion. That could give a thief a starting point for committing credit-card fraud. If all they had to do was type nonsense values for names and addresses, such as Doodad Pro, they could quickly determine which numbers were valid - and they could probably program bots to do that kind of work.

THUGGISH INTIMIDATION
Obama's supporters and staff regularly intimidate and pressure anyone who disagrees with or makes the senator look bad. Take the case of a woman in Sugar Land, Texas who was arrested for a tasteless sticker on her truck. Or the statements by Missouri governor Blount who called for an investigation of how the Obama campaign uses lawyers and government pressure on foes. Or his legal pressure on any station that runs ads he doesn't care for - and against the companies who produced the ads.

Democrats in congress are eager to reinstitute a "fairness doctrine" shut down voices of opposition and popular radio programs that disagree with them politically.

A Sheriff dared to use Senator Obama's full name (Barack Hussein Obama), so he sicced the Federal Elections Commission after the man.

A woman told off an Obama phone bank operator, so the Secret Service was sent after her - the operator claimed she made a death threat.

As the Quote of the Day notes, Joe the Plumber was attacked by the press and investigated by Democrats in his state for daring to question Senator Obama and make him look bad on camera.

Anticipating (hoping?) for an Obama victory, the FCC sent letters out to people who went public in their support for President Bush's war in Iraq, at the behest of Democrats in congress:

The FCC has sent letters to some of the nation's most prominent military analysts -- some of them pro-President Bush and pro-war -- suggesting they may have broken the law when they appeared on television stations to comment on and explain the war on terrorism.

The FCC investigation raises the question of whether a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House next year will investigate -- and perhaps criminalize -- all sorts of actions taken by the Bush administration. Obama is leading in all presidential polls, while Democrats are set to greatly increase their hold on the House and Senate.

ECONOMIC DISASTER
Only an idiot would raise taxes in the teeth of potential recession or worse, yet that's Senator Obama's plan. He claimed he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning under $250,000 in a pledge taken at the Democratic Primary Debates, but the number is steadily plunging:

"What we're saying is, that $87 billion tax break doesn't need to go to people making an average of $1.4 million," Biden said.

"It should go to middle-class people, people who make $150,000 a year."

Actually, Barack Obama has promised to cut taxes on households earning less than $200,000 a year while raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000 annually.

At QandO there's a helpful chart that shows visually what raising taxes on the generators of wealth does to a country, and during a time of economic stress, even crisis.


But tax policy isn't all. Senator Obama has glibly commented that he wants to bankrupt the coal industry and cause energy prices to skyrocket. Presumably this is what he means by a coming deep and lasting recession: he'll make one if it won't happen on its own.

SURRENDER YOUR LIBERTY
One of the most dearly defended liberties in the US is the right to keep and bear arms, as plainly laid out in the US Constitution. Senator Obama doesn't care for that. Although he changed his story about the right after the Supreme Court made its ruling recently, his actions in the past have plainly shown he wants guns taken away from people.

That Senator Obama wants to disregard the US Constitution in the Bill of Rights is not surprising, he made it rather clear that he thinks the document is "fundamentally flawed" because of its opposition to redistribution of wealth:

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution...

Americans aren't fond of that kind of thing. We revere the founding fathers and their genius, honor their memory, and consider the US Constitution beloved, almost sacred. Every person who takes high office swears to defend and uphold that constitution, not attack, bypass, or violate it.

LIAR
Senator Obama has a bit of trouble with the truth as well. When he's not padding his resume, he's falsely claiming the Kennedy administration paid for his father's trip from Kenya.

• He claimed a questionairre that laid out his radical leftist viewpoints was filled out by an aide and didn't reflect his own positions, which was not true.
• He told voters in Illinois he wouldn't run for president if they elected him to the Senate, then later several times that he'd absolutely serve out his time and not run.
• He claimed he was conceived after the Selma march, which happened in 1965. He was born in 1961.
• He claimed he was not raised as a Muslim, but documents from his youth contradict that claim.
• He vowed he'd take only public funds, then broke that when it wasn't working for him.
• One of his ads claimed that he passed laws that “extended health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.” He didn't even vote on it.
• He claimed to be on the Senate Banking Committee (calling it "my committee") but is not a member of it.
• He promised to fire anyone on his staff who spread rumors about Governor Palin, but does not.
• He claimed he opposed the Infant Born Alive act because it lacked a provision in the federal bill, but it had that provision and he knew it.
• He claimed he would overturn NAFTA, but privately told Canadian officials he would not.
• He claimed that he'd never heard in his 20 years at the TUCC any inflammatory or radical sermons from Reverend Wright, which is patently false.
• He claimed that he didn't rely on Reverend Wright for political advice, but said earlier that he did regularly.
• He claimed first that he went to TUCC every Sunday, but then later said he missed months at a time.
• He claimed that hate crimes doubled against Hispanics because of right wing talk show hosts, which is an absurdity, and the hate crime stats had not been compiled or released for 2007 when he said so. Hate crimes against Hispanics the previous year actually went down per capita.
• He claims he had no ties to ACORN but gave them $80,000 and did legal work for the organization, gave them his list of donors, and ACORN is returning the favors.
• He claims he's for cutting taxes on people, when most of the "tax cuts" are actually to people who pay no taxes. That's right, people who earn so little money they pay no actual taxes will get more money under Obama's plan. And he calls that a "tax cut."
• He even claimed his 2002 anti-war speech was based on watching Colin Powell's presentation to the UN - which happened in 2003.
  

Oh, and that's just some of them.

HYPOCRISY
Senator Obama calls for equal pay for equal work, claiming Senator McCain is opposed to this and thus women shouldn't vote for him. Yet in practice, Senator Obama pays his female staffers less than he pays his male staffers, less than Senator McCain pays his:

Obama's 28 male staffers divided among themselves total payroll expenditures of $1,523,120. Thus, Obama's average male employee earned $54,397.
Obama's 30 female employees split $1,354,580 among themselves, or $45,152, on average.

On average, Obama's female staffers earn just 83 cents for every dollar his male staffers make.

By contrast, female employees of Sen. John McCain fare much better. They actually average more in salary, $55,878, than their male counterparts. Women in McCain's Senate office make $1.04 for every dollar men take home. Furthermore, LegiStorm's figures show that McCain places more women in positions of influence than Obama does. Of Sen. Obama's twenty highest paid advisers, just seven are women. McCain counts 13 women among his 20 highest paid staffers.

He complains that Senator McCain is in the pocket of big oil, yet takes more money from Exxon than McCain.

Not that saying one thing and doing another is new to the man:

Although Senator Obama doesn't care to spread his own wealth around, leaving his half brother in Africa, the school (named after him) he promised assistance to, and his Aunt living illegally in the US in poverty while he keeps his millions, he calls anyone who doesn't care for higher taxes "selfish" and says he wants to "spread the wealth around." Just not on his own dime, nor Senator Biden's, who calls anyone who doesn't want to pay more taxes "unpatriotic."

RADICALISM
Not that this should surprise anyone; Senator Obama's ideological formation was steeped in Marxism and socialism:

Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student. He continued to associate with Marxists later in life, even choosing to launch his political career in the living room of a self-described Marxist, William Ayers, in 1995, when Obama was 34.

Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."

The man described as his "mentor" in this book is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, CPUSA member and avowed communist.

Small wonder the US communist party is excited about a possible Obama win:

A rare bird in the political world, the US Communist Party is feeling rather smug in these days of capitalist turmoil.At the party's New York headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, regional party chairman Libero Della Piana, 36, laid out why he thinks Marxist-Leninism's time has finally come.

"We are very excited, we feel that we are at a turning point," Della Piana, an imposing half-Italian, half-African American with a pony tail, told AFP.

Naturally, Senator Obama has tried to keep this leaning quiet, but the ties between him and extremists such as Bill Ayers are clear and long-standing. His actions in the past have plainly shown that he doesn't simply agree with this kind of hard left ideology, but he takes action based on it. When he was in charge of the one hundred ten million dollar Chicago Annenburg Challenge, Senator Obama sent the money almost exclusively to leftist causes, radical schemes, and much of it to his own church to help Reverend "God damn America" Wright.

Add that to his and his wife's continual running down of the USA and its people, continual negativism, misery, and gloomy predictions of doom, and you've got a candidate that's tough to support.

"This is confusing to many pundits, who don’t understand why a far-left, first-term Senator with dodgy mates, no policies, a profound humour deficit and a habit of committing astonishing gaffes isn’t in front by 20 points."
-Tim Blair

WHY?
The question isn't "why isn't Obama doing better" in America. It's "why on earth is he doing so well?" That's for another article, but in breif: because this stuff gets buried by the media, because he's almost never asked any tough questions, because the legacy media is essentially a 24-hour ad campaign for the man, because too many people are like this woman:

“I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage”

People who look to the government for answers, who turn to the government for solutions rather than their family, their neighbors, and themselves. Its because Americans have been so indoctrinated with white guilt that merely being black is enough cause to say you'll support him in an attempt to avoid social shame, and because the polls are being nudged to help Senator Obama look better in the election than he's really doing.

This is long I know, but it would have been even longer if I'd listed all the examples and problems with the man. He's a liar, a hypocrite, a man who uses thuggish intimidation, he's a radical leftist who represents economic disaster and wants to assault our liberties. That's why America isn't as fond of Senator Obama as some around the world.

Politics, America, Senator Obama