Post-American Presidency

by Spencer, Robert; Geller, Pamela

  His success in that drive led to the election of Democrat senator Carol Moseley Braun, and made Obama “a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.”11

  Through ACORN, Obama established numerous long-standing political associations. “He met people not just in the African-American community but in the progressive white community,” David Axelrod recalled. “The folks who funded Project Vote were some of the key progressive leaders.”12

  At a December 2007 ACORN rally, Obama was effusive about the important role the organization would play when he became president: “Before I even get inaugurated, during the transition, we’re going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We’re gonna be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda of the next presidency of the United States of America.”13

  And in February 2008, Obama acknowledged his personal debt to the organization:

  I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.14

  In December 2009, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said he was certain that any investigation of ACORN would “lead to the White House.” King pointed out that “Obama has worked for ACORN, and he has been part and parcel of that—Project Vote in particular. That entire network is something the Chicago Organization that now sits in the White House knows a lot about.” King also noted a spectacular example of Obama administration hypocrisy: White House counsel Robert Bauer called last year for George W. Bush and John McCain to be investigated for “alleging that ACORN was promoting fraudulent voter registration activities.”15

  Despite everything that is unsavory about the organization, however, the ostensibly nonpartisan ACORN really does indeed want people to register to vote—as long as they’re Democrats. Republican registrations go into the trash.

  REGISTER AS MANY VOTERS AS YOU CAN—AS LONG AS THEY’RE DEMOCRATS

  In February 2008, Fathiyyah Muhammad of Jacksonville, Florida, heard that ACORN was paying people three dollars for each voter they could register. ACORN paid her three dollars for each voter she registered, but Fathiyyah Muhammad says that the group threw out her votes and fired her when she brought them registrations of Republican voters.

  Fathiyyah Muhammad voted for Obama. “I’m a Republican,” she says, “and this was the first time that I voted for a Democrat since JFK.… I’m one of those rare birds, a black conservative Republican, and actually this is the black conservative capital of the country, Jacksonville, Florida.”

  She is an entrepreneur and a great American: she makes custom hats for her businesses Bilal’s Custom Caps and Only in America. She and her husband, James, have made custom caps for politicians, sports heroes, musicians, and others. “America,” she says, “is the place you can live your dreams if you work at it.” She’s a can-do woman with a great American spirit, and when she saw what was breaking in the news about ACORN, she came forward; I interviewed her in October 2009.

  “This is my first experience” with ACORN, Muhammad said. “This was before Obama got the nomination, long before then.… I heard about this group that was paying three dollars per person, to go out and to get people to sign up to vote. So I went over, I thought that well this is a good way to make some money because I know everybody, you know. I went over there and this guy signed me up and everything, and gave me my little pad, all this stuff.”

  Muhammad went to the ACORN office in Jacksonville. There she encountered a young man speaking to a room of about twenty people. “He was telling us, you know, about his experience, he was from Brooklyn, he wasn’t from this area. He was just here recruiting people to register people to vote. They had a big office here, and I would say maybe about ten or twelve people at there.”

  She went to work: “Well, I went out and got a lot of people, homeless people, but of course I signed everybody up as a Republican, and I would have put people had they been Democrats.” She was not forcing people to sign up as Republicans: “You could put down anything you wanted.” But when she got back to ACORN, a group leader was not pleased: “So I showed what I had, and he said, ‘No, no, you a fraud, there can’t be any black Republicans,’ and oh, he just kind of hung me out to dry.… But of course their main aim was to register only Democrats. They’re not interested in registering Republicans.”

  She saw ACORN officials in Jacksonville throw out the Republican registrations she made. “They just discarded those, they weren’t valid. All of the registrations… they just threw those out.” Yet she says that she is sure that the people she registered were actually going to vote: “Yes, they all were going to vote, I just didn’t want to get anybody just to get the three dollars, I wasn’t desperate for three dollars.”

  ACORN did not honor its agreement to pay three dollars for each registered voter. “He took my papers,” says Muhammad, “didn’t pay me anything and I just left, I just figured that this is just another scam.… Everyone else got paid, all the other people got paid, but I didn’t. And I didn’t make a big deal about it, I just figured that it was another one of life’s experiences.”

  Fathiyyah Muhammad didn’t know anything about ACORN at that time. She didn’t know that ACORN has been doing this for a long time. As far back as November 2006 the organization was indicted for some forty thousand illegal voter registrations, and that was before any of the recent revelations.

  Looking back on it all, Fathiyyah Muhammad mused: “I can’t believe that they got away with it for so long.” And she wanted her story to be told: “How are you going to shine a light on the laundry if you don’t want to come out and say what happened?”16

  Fathiyyah Muhammad was unafraid to shine that light. And her testimony was another nail in the coffin of the community organizers of ACORN and their stealth agenda. But ACORN, of course, still had powerful friends. And they had been in damage control mode for quite some time.

  So was Barack Hussein Obama.

  OBAMA LIED

  As scandalous ACORN stories began to be virtually a daily news feature, the potential for Barack Obama to be seriously embarrassed—and even the possibility that his political career could be damaged—began to grow.

  And so he lied.

  During his presidential campaign, his Fight The Smears Web site contained a preposterous claim: “Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.” Yet Toni Foulkes, a leader in Chicago’s ACORN chapter, wrote an article in 2004 in which she spoke proudly about Obama’s role as an ACORN trainer, and emphasizes that Obama’s Project Vote activities were done in conjunction with ACORN.17

  Representative King charged in November 2009 that Obama had appointed Robert Bauer to be White House counsel in order to gain his help in deflecting scrutiny away from Obama’s ties to ACORN: “Bauer’s hiring,” said King, “appears to be a tactical maneuver to strategically defend the White House exactly one week after Louisiana attorney general Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN’s national headquarters in New Orleans and seized paper records and computer hard drives that may lead to the White House.”

  Bauer, incidentally, is married to former White House communications director Anita Dunn, who caused controversy in June 2009 when she called a murderous totalitarian communist, Mao Tse Tung, one of her “favorite political philosophers.�
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  BRAZENING IT OUT

  ACORN has received over $53 million in federal money—taxpayer money—since 1994.19 The feds gave ACORN $2.6 million in 2003 and 2004 just for the organization’s housing programs alone.20 And the stimulus package that the post-American president rammed through Congress in his first days in office contained the staggering sum of $5.2 billion for ACORN.21 ACORN was eligible to receive the funds, but they declared bankruptcy and rebranded themselves so that they could masquerade as a different group and steal under a new name.22

  But in late September 2009, after the prostitution video and other corruption scandals, ACORN lost its federal funding in a congressional vote that was not even close: in the Senate the vote was 85–11, and in the House it was 345–75.23 Around the same time, Barack Obama gave five interviews to the Sunday morning news shows, and only one interviewer bothered to ask him about ACORN. Obama’s answer? He brazened it out: “You know, if—frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.” And he downplayed the importance of the issue: “This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.”24

  Taking him at his word, what exactly was Obama paying attention to? Nationalizing a perfectly good private health-care system, the best in the world? Outreach to the ummah (the worldwide global Muslim community)? What was he paying attention to? Mounting a Department of Justice witch hunt, a persecution of CIA agents whose crime was keeping us safe from the worldwide jihad in the immediate aftermath of 9/11? What was he paying attention to? Ethnically cleansing Israel of the Jewish people? Or facilitating a nuclear Iran? Sanctioning Islamic law there and snuffing out the people marching for freedom in Iran? Lest we forget his priority of crushing democracy in Honduras.

  Yet Barack Obama was ACORN. Remember, this was the same Barack Obama who said, in an address to ACORN in 2008, “I have been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.” And Obama was still fighting alongside ACORN: after both the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly to cut off ACORN’s federal funding, his post-American Justice Department found legal cover to continue giving taxpayer dollars to ACORN—and congressional Democrats shot down Republican attempts to stop this.25

  This is madness. ACORN’s massive voter fraud constitutes a coup on the American electoral system, a usurpation of the will of the people: government by the people and for the people made into a sham. It’s a government by the moochers and the looters, for the moochers and the looters, stolen from the good, hardworking Americans.

  And worse, the American people sat by and let it happen. Obama’s presidency was not an accident of history. It was a very deliberate assault by the Hard Left on the foundation of the greatest country in human history.

  If we purged the illegals, the dead, and the fraudulent whom ACORN has placed on the voting rolls, we would have honest leadership that reflected the real landscape of this great nation.

  ACORN is a racketeering criminal organization whose specialty is sedition—overthrowing the good governance of this great nation. Why hasn’t it been stripped of its funding and rendered illegal like the Cosa Nostra? What’s the difference, except that the Mafia was patriotic?

  Investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz, noting that Obama’s links to ACORN are “wide, deep, and longstanding,” draws the inescapable conclusion: “If Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself.”

  Intensely radical, leftist, and fanatically partisan: it was a profile of the post-American president.

  FOURTEEN

  THE ENERGY SHELL GAME

  OBAMA’S ENERGY POLICY, LIKE HIS HEALTH-CARE POLICY, IS ABOUT BIG GOVERNMENT CONTROL AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE. OUR ENergy needs are easily solved. I’ll restate the obvious: drill, baby, drill. America has enormous resources that we deny to ourselves. Democrats, Leftists, and environmentalists have blocked development of new sources of energy; drilling for oil in Alaska, off the Florida coast, and anywhere else; the construction of new oil refineries; and the expanded use of clean nuclear energy and clean coal. In October 2009, the post-American Interior Department froze oil and gas development at sixty (out of a total of seventy-seven) drilling sites in Utah.1

  Obama doesn’t seem to mind building “peaceful” nuclear plants in the oil-rich Islamic dictatorship in Iran, but he and his radical leftist cronies prohibit the building of new nuclear plants here. Instead of fostering traditional American self-reliance, we depend on foreign oil, selling out our principles, our politics, and our foreign policy to our enemies.

  Sarah Palin has counted the cost: “Think about how much of our trade deficit is fueled by the oil we import—sometimes as much as half of the total. Through this massive transfer of wealth, we lose hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could be invested in our economy. Instead it goes to foreign countries, including some repressive regimes that use it to fund activities that threaten our security. Reliance on foreign sources of energy weakens America.” If not for the American dollar, the global jihad would be relegated to the cave from whence it came and where it belongs. In the largest transfer of wealth in human history, we are committing economic suicide while effectively funding a movement whose sole objective is establishing a worldwide caliphate that will impose upon societies the most brutal, misogynistic, antihuman ideology in history.

  This situation has no doubt been long in the making. But the Obama administration and the Democrats are now ramming through an unprecedented energy policy that seems designed to cripple the nation. And it is completely unnecessary. Palin pointed out that drilling to augment our domestic energy problem would not only help lessen our energy dependence upon hostile states; it would also pull America out of the current economic malaise. “Building an energy-independent America,” said Palin, “will mean a real economic stimulus. It will mean American jobs that can never be shipped overseas.”2

  In contrast, Obama’s energy plan mandated scarcity in the richest country in the world.

  CAP AND TRADE

  On June 26, 2009, the House of Representatives passed by seven votes the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, known popularly as the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill—a massive, thousand-page-long bill that would place limits on the greenhouse gas emissions that supposedly caused global warming.

  Would climate justice ensue? Normalized temperatures? Cleaner air? Healthier forests, lakes, and streams?

  Don’t hold your breath. Despite Obama’s pious public rhetoric, the bill was unlikely to bring any of that about, or do much of anything except bleed American taxpayers dry. The plan supposedly would reduce emissions by 17 percent from their 2005 levels by 2020, and by 83 percent by 2050.3 In reality, Obama’s cap-and-trade plan was a gigantic shell game, in which the government sold businesses emission rights—licenses to give off certain amounts of gases deemed harmful to the environment.

  If you had the cash, you could be as big a polluter as you cared to be. Emissions rights could be bought, sold, traded. The Wall Street Journal explained that this would result simply in higher costs for ordinary Americans: “As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to ‘offset’ their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.”4

  The idea was to give the federal government enormous power to regulate the activity of American businesses—and to open up a lucrative new tax revenue stream. Obama was banking on bringing $300 billion to the elephantine and hypercentralized U.S. government by 2022.5 The tax burden from the cap-and-trade plan was so large that a Treasury Department estimate showed that it would place an additional $200 billion annual burden on American taxpayers, raising every taxpayer’s personal income taxes by 15 percent—an average of $1
,761 annually from every household in the United States.6

  A Heritage Foundation estimate saw the plan as even more prohibitive than that, costing $1,870 for every family of four in the United States by 2020, and $6,800 per family of four by 2035, as some of the end-loaded restrictions came into effect.7 Another dire estimate came from Ben Lieberman, senior policy analyst for energy and environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. In testimony before the House and Senate Western Caucus on July 30, 2009, Lieberman declared: “The higher energy costs kick in as soon as the bill’s provisions take effect in 2012. For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000. But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012–2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.”

  Lieberman called cap and trade “nothing more than an energy tax in disguise,” and labeled the bill “the most convoluted attempt at economic central planning this nation has ever attempted.” He said that “cap and trade works by raising the cost of energy high enough so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less of it. Inflicting economic pain is what this is all about.” He said that over a million jobs would be lost, “while others will be outsourced to nations like China and India that have repeatedly stated that they’ll never hamper their own economic growth with energy-cost-boosting global-warming measures like Waxman-Markey.”