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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geller, Pamela A.
The post-American presidency : the Obama administration’s war on America / Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer ; foreword by Ambassador John R. Bolton.
p. cm.
1. Obama, Barack. 2. Presidents—United States. 3. Executive power—United States. 4. Political culture—United States—Congresses. 5. Control (Psychology)—Political aspects—United States. I. Spencer, Robert, 1962– II. Title.
JK516.G4 2010
973.932—dc 22 2010005967
ISBN 978-1-4391-8930-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-8990-0 (ebook)
To my children and my children’s children
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ambassador John R. Bolton
Preface: The Post-American President
One Obama and American Exceptionalism
Two The Indoctrination of Barack Obama
Three Obama and Jews
Four Obama and Israel
Five Obama and Iran
Six A Post-American President Wages War
Seven Obama and Islamic Politics
Eight An Islamo-Christian Nation
Nine Destroying the Prestige of America
Ten Freedom of Speech in the Age of Jihad
Eleven Socialist America
Twelve The Red Czars
Thirteen ACORN: Federally Funded Fraud
Fourteen The Energy Shell Game
Epilogue What Lovers of Freedom Must Do
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD
BY AMBASSADOR JOHN R. BOLTON
Barack Obama is the first post-American president, as his statements and actions since his inauguration have proven beyond dispute. Central to his worldview is rejecting “American exceptionalism,” and the consequences that flow from discarding this foundational belief so widely held by U.S. citizens. “Exceptionalism” is hard to define precisely, but it first appeared when John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Ronald Reagan went one better, and called us “a shining city on a hill,” and others have used the term “New Jerusalem.” Alexis de Tocqueville, the gifted French observer of the early United States, laid the basis for the actual phrase when he said in Democracy in America: “The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”
While most Americans have appreciated and prized our exceptionalism, that reaction has been far from universal overseas. It is no surprise, therefore, that since an overwhelming majority of the world’s population would welcome the demise of American exceptionalism, they are just delighted with the Obama presidency.
One student interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said ecstatically, “He sounds just like a European.” Indeed, he does. Of course, as a successful politician, Obama will never admit expressly that he rejects a unique U.S. role in the world. Asked during that visit to Europe about this very subject, Obama responded: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
This answer, of course, proves exactly the opposite of what Obama is ostensibly saying in his opening words. If every country is exceptional—and there are 191 other United Nations members Obama could have referred to as believing in their own exceptionalism—none is. Obama is too smart not to know this, and just slick enough to hope that his U.S. listeners would tune out after his opening phrase.
It fell to an admiring media commentator to lift the cover more fully, and indeed unknowingly, since he intended a compliment. Following Obama’s 2009 speech on the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas contrasted his remarks with Ronald Reagan’s address in 1984 at the fortieth anniversary:
Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn’t felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task.… Reagan was all about America.… Obama is “we are above that now.” We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something. I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the entire country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God… he’s going to bring all different sides together.
Thomas was dramatically wrong about Reagan’s speech, which included sustained praise for America’s wartime allies, and equating Obama with God is ring-kissingly breathtaking even for the U.S. press corps. But Thomas’s central observation was unquestionably correct: Obama is above all that patriotism stuff.
Obama is not the first Democratic presidential nominee to hold these views, but he is the first to make it to the Oval Office. The then–vice president George H. W. Bush best described the type in 1988, contrasting himself with his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts: “He sees America as another pleasant country on the UN roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe. I see America as the leader—a unique nation with a special role in the world.” In 2004, the Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, also of Massachusetts, argued that U.S. foreign policy had to pass what he called a “global test” of legitimacy to be fully acceptable, rather than simply resting on a basis acceptable to a majority of the American people.
The Dukakis/Kerry/Obama philosophy of near universal “moral equivalency” among the world’s nations is widely held by European leaders and others, so, under Obama, we will now find out just how European we have become. During the opening acts of Obama’s drama, the evidence is disturbingly robust across the spectrum of national security issues that we are well advanced in our post-American journey.
Take China as an important example. After Obama’s November 2008 trip, the media highlighted how unyielding Beijing had been, thus confirming the conventional wisdom of a rising China and a declining America. But any objective analysis would show that it was in fact much more Obama’s submissiveness and much less new Chinese assertiveness that made the difference. Take the apparently insignificant question of the staging aspects of the visit: where the president would speak, to whom, how it would be broadcast, and so on. The Chinese always fight hard to stage-manage such visits, but the difference this time is that Obama’s team let them prevail. Multiply this snapshot many times on substantive policy, and t
he failures of Obama’s visit become more understandable.
What happened in China has happened across the board: in the war against terrorism that is no longer a war, but a matter for law enforcement; in the weakness and indecisiveness demonstrated in presidential command of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; in dealing with the nuclear proliferation threats posed by North Korea and Iran; and in unilateral and multilateral steps to reduce the size and strength of America’s nuclear deterrent capabilities.
This book carries forward the ongoing and increasingly widespread critique of Barack Obama as our first post-American president. What it recounts is disturbing, and its broader implications are more disturbing still. Most Americans believe they elect a president who will vigorously represent their global interest, rather than electing a Platonic guardian who defends them only when they comport with his grander visions of a just world. Foreign leaders, whether friend or foe, expect the same. If, by contrast, Obama continues to behave as a post-American president, our adversaries will know exactly what to do.
PREFACE
THE POST-AMERICAN PRESIDENT
America is being tested in a way that she has never been tested before.
America is under attack from within at the highest levels of power. Barack Hussein Obama’s policies are bringing America to her knees.
With a consistency that can come only from deeply held conviction, Barack Hussein Obama is damaging the office of the presidency and compromising American sovereignty.
Domestically, Barack Obama is contemptuous of capitalism and rugged individualism. Internationally, Barack Obama is enabling Iran’s Islamic bomb, is inveterately hostile to Israel, and generally appears intent on turning America’s historical enemies into friends and friends into enemies. His dream seems to be to turn America into something like the Indonesia of his youth or the Pakistan he visited as a college student: at best, just another country, unexceptional in any way. At worst, a Third-World nation lagging far behind other global economic and cultural leaders.
Obama’s perspective, his worldview, is of enormous import. It tells us who he is and why he is doing what he is doing. America did not shape Barack Obama. Instead, he was influenced and indoctrinated by many who despised America. These were his early influences, and many of them have been lifelong influences. Throughout his life and his political career, Obama has been consistent—right up to and into his presidency.
This book lays out in painstaking detail the political views of the people he has selected to help him govern this nation and the domestic and foreign policies he promotes. It is all a result of how he was brought up, of what shaped his mind and heart. It is all a result of what drives him.
What drives him is not American. He said it himself: “I was a little Jakarta street kid” who found the Islamic call to prayer to be “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”1 For the most part, Barack Obama has carefully distanced himself from any sign of patriotism or national pride throughout his political career and his presidency.
In his mind, apparently, to be a forthright believer in American exceptionalism would be unfair, chauvinistic, maybe even bigoted. On Barack Obama’s playing field, there is no American exceptionalism. (The irony here, of course, is that his presidency would have been impossible without it.) There are, in the appointments he has made and the policies he has chosen, many indications that for Barack Obama, there is no good, no evil, only equivocation and moral relativism.
Unlike Obama’s childhood homeland of Indonesia, America is not tribal. American identity is not based on race or creed or color. It is a shared value system. The idea of America is freedom and individual rights—a historical first.
Ayn Rand articulated the essence of American exceptionalism when she wrote in a letter: “America’s founding ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more—nothing less. The rest—everything America achieved, everything she became, everything ‘noble and just’ and heroic and great, and unprecedented in human history—was the logical consequence of fidelity to that one principle.”2
This is anathema to Barack Hussein Obama. Witness his sanction of Ahmadinejad and the bloody putdown of the Iranians yearning to be free. Witness his abandonment of democracy in Honduras. Witness his betrayal of Eastern Europe by scrapping the essential missile defense program. Witness the ethnic cleansing of Jews from parts of Israel. Obama does not subscribe to the principle of man’s individual rights—and this is the key, the key to this country and its very nature. The United States is the nation of enlightenment, of the power of the individual.
But this is not Barack Obama’s point of reference.
Barack Hussein Obama did not grow up breathing these ideas. He spent a good portion of his childhood in Indonesia, and when he did move to the States to live with his grandparents when he was twelve, it was not to the continental United States, but off the mainland in Hawaii. Hawaii had only just become a state two years prior to his birth, and many on the island were not happy about it. So not only was it a nascent state, but many within it were hostile to the idea of America.
Obama’s absentee father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was a member of Kenya’s Luo tribe. 3 Obama, Jr., went so far as to oppose our ally in Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki, and to campaign for his fellow Luo tribesman, Raila Odinga, a violent socialist who claimed to be Obama’s cousin.
You have to grow up in America to get America. Or you have to escape tyranny, oppression, and suppression and live the dream by emigrating to America. Obama is missing the DNA of the USA. It’s just not in him—through no fault of his own.
Barack Obama’s “third-grade teacher Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now sixty-seven, has perhaps the most telling story. In an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, Obama ‘wrote he wanted to be president,’ Sinaga recalled. ‘He didn’t say what country he wanted to be president of.’”4
Barack Obama has no desire for America to win—hence his refusal to use the word “victory” in any of his remarks concerning the military operations in which the United States is currently engaged. His desire to make peace with the Islamic world was a legitimate goal in this age of jihad. But he seemed to have no effective way to attain this goal in light of Islamic intransigence—and so his every move made matters worse.
Obama sees himself not just as another American president. He announced during his Inaugural Address that he had far more sweeping plans: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”5 Remaking America? Into what?
Since he has taken office he has been hard at work to do just that: destroying the free-market system and nationalizing major segments of the U.S. economy, restricting dissent and the freedom of speech in general, turning against longtime friends of the United States, and above all subjecting America to the determinations of foreign authorities.
This is a deeply troubling presidency—and a dangerous period in American history.
The period of the post-American presidency.
He himself said it in April 2009. During a visit to London for a summit of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a reporter asked Obama: “[C]ould I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of ‘American exceptionalism’ that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?”
It was a question Ronald Reagan once answered without ever having been asked it. He said: “With all its flaws, America remains a unique achievement for human dignity on a scale unequaled anywhere in the world.”
But Obama offered no similar avowal of American uniqueness. Instead, he equated American exceptionalism with the national pride that a citizen of any nation could feel: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Then, perhaps realizing how much he had just trivialized the achievements
of the greatest republic and most magnanimous nation the world had ever known, Obama avowed: “I’m enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world.” He even allowed for the possibility that there were some reasons that Americans should not be embarrassed by their nation’s history: “If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don’t think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.”
Embarrassed? Who would even think such a thing? Except someone who is embarrassed by America. It’s as if the most beautiful girl in the world walks into the best party, bedecked in the most magnificent dress and finest jewels, and someone whispers to her, “Don’t be embarrassed.”
Obama even acknowledged that “we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.” But in saying that he may have sensed that he was venturing into areas where he didn’t want to go, so he backtracked: “Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we’ve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we’re not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.”
It was a defining moment. Barack Obama could find some praiseworthy aspects of America—but in saying that he was careful to say also that every country could say the same, apparently in equal measure, and while the U.S. Constitution and system of government—“though imperfect”—had some “exceptional” features, well, other countries also had “wonderful qualities.”
In other words, America was nothing special. Just another country. Former vice president Dick Cheney summed it up: “There’s never been a nation like the United States of America in world history, and yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his hosts and then proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me this is a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.”6
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