What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  There it is. Not only did Joseph tell us what she and countless other Obama voters saw in him—a nonstop big-government goodie giveaway—but she unwittingly revealed the leftists’ grand strategy of moving America away from individual self-reliance and global exceptionalism and toward “collective salvation” and global inconsequence. Joseph was down with that; she just wanted to be on board, hand extended, palm up. With her few exclamatory statements, Joseph summed up the Obama Kook Crusade.

  If voters were still unclear about Obama’s intentions, an episode on the 2008 campaign trail should have taken away all doubt. On October 12, an employee of a plumbing contractor, Joe Wurzelbacher, was playing football with his son in his front yard in Holland, Ohio, when Obama came campaigning through town. Obama stopped, perhaps expecting the fawning adulation he received elsewhere. From Joe the Plumber, however, he got a direct question about his tax plan, which Wurzelbacher correctly suspected was a nasty bit of class warfare: “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes two hundred fifty to two hundred eighty thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan’s going to tax me more, isn’t it?”

  Obama responded with a gassy answer about how his plan would affect small businesses and admitted that for individuals and businesses with revenue over $250,000 per year, the marginal tax rate would go up.

  And then Obama revealed his ultimate objective: “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too.... I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” (Emphasis added.)

  Classic kook.

  That exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber became a seminal moment of the campaign, but for the wrong reason. Most observers focused on Joe as a symbol of middle-class working Americans and how they were being squeezed by taxes and regulations. But the more revelatory moment was Obama’s “spread the wealth around” remark. He spent so much time during the campaign projecting an image of moderate reasonableness, but if voters were truly focused on what he was actually telling them, they would have seen the truth. Obama was no reasonable moderate. He could not get to the presidency fast enough in order to “spread the wealth around.”

  Of course he wants to “punish your success.” This reminds me of the old, reliable breakup line: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Of course it’s you, which is why they’re breaking up with you! I quote the great George Costanza, who once said, “You’re giving me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ routine? I INVENTED ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ So NOBODY tells me it’s not me, it’s them. If it’s anybody—IT’S ME!”

  In April 2010, Obama gave a speech in Illinois about financial reform. In his prepared remarks, he was supposed to say this: “Now, we’re not doing this to punish these firms or begrudge success that’s fairly earned. We don’t want to stop them from fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy.” Instead, he went off teleprompter and supplied his own thoughts on the matter of making money: “We’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I do think that at a certain point, you’ve made enough money. But you know, part of the American way is, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product.” (Emphasis added.)

  The idea that you can “keep on making money” that Obama cannot touch is abhorrent to him. He was essentially saying that you can just go make that money again in order to justify his taking it from you the first time around. But the point is that he never intends to stop confiscating it from you. After all, his ravenous beast of government needs constant care and feeding.

  In 2011, Obama spoke at one of his taxpayer-subsidized “green jobs” boondoggles during which he portrayed “the rich” as lazy Thurston Howell III types on the perpetual three-hour tour. “I believe,” he said, “that we can’t ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money, and don’t worry about it. We’re not going to ask anything of you.” No; instead, Obama planned on taking the SS Minnow out of port in order to crash the ship onto the rocky shoals of redistributionism.

  Obama speaks with such disgust about the “rich,” as if the “rich” became rich by sitting around, doing nothing, relaxing. If sitting around, doing nothing, and relaxing are the gauge of wealth, then he’s got to be more loaded than Richard Branson. As if the country “doesn’t ask anything” of the “rich,” when they carry the vast majority of the tax burden. As if the “rich” spend all day eating bonbons, “counting their money,” and watching Kourtney & Kim Take New York. (Okay, they may do that last one, but only because, I mean, who can resist?) Understand: he doesn’t want the Olsen twins’ money or Bill Gates’s or Tiger Woods’s or Harvey Weinstein’s money. Obama’s friends can keep their wealth. Instead, he wants to confiscate the wealth of the small businessman. He wants the property of the oil worker, the local dry cleaner, and the insurance salesman. Regular Americans are his targets.

  In fact, in mid-2011, Obama’s acting solicitor general, Neal Katyal, went before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to argue in defense of ObamaCare’s “individual mandate.” He told the court that if somebody didn’t like the mandate, they could just earn less money. After all, as Obama said in the fall of 2011 while criticizing the banks, “You don’t have some inherent right just to—you know, get a certain amount of profit.” He’ll see to that.

  Less than a week before the 2008 election, Obama could sense full kookdom was in reach, saying, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

  Note his deliberate and continual use of the words “remake” and “fundamentally transform.” When he said he sought a “more perfect union” to “remake this great nation” and that he was psyched about “fundamentally transforming” the nation, many of us chose to believe he meant the election of the first black president or being free of the last president or improving the economy. And that’s how he wanted it.

  Obama and his advisers knew their agenda would scare the pants off the American people if they came at them full-frontal, like a Play-girl magazine with Barry on the cover that no one wanted to buy. The people needed to be buttered up with lies about the real agenda so they were content and sedated before the kook ax came down. The leftists kept their ideas close to the vest and their inner circle very closed, lest someone from the outside gain entry and full view of the real agenda. Obama, wife Michelle, Axelrod, and Jarrett made up the core. They were the Un-Fantastic Four! All of them came from Chicago. None had political executive experience. None had global leadership experience. There was not a single older, wiser adviser close to them to offer advice based on his or her own deep experience. Many folks scratched their heads, wondering why Obama didn’t have a Henry Kissinger or James Baker around, or why he wheeled out economic and business leaders like Paul Volcker and Warren Buffett but didn’t listen to them. Keeping the inner team limited and cloistered was by design. The more people close to the inner sanctum, the more people who might risk exposing the true kook agenda.

  In fact, when Rahm Emanuel left the chief of staff job to run for mayor of Chicago, Obama replaced him with Bill Daley from—you guessed it—Chicago. Unlike his brother Richard—the retired Chicago mayor—Bill Daley had business experience, and Obama used him to try to reassure the private sector that his policies weren’t fanatically antibusiness, which, of course, they were. Daley not only couldn’t carry the lie that the administration was business friendly. He couldn’t penetrate the Kook Inner Sanctum. Because of their need to protect the Big Kookuna and the agenda, they kept him perpetually on the outside. Daley lasted just a few months in the job before being shunted aside. Soon enough, it was back to the original barbershop quartet of radicalism. With all four working to reshape America in the image they harmonized to, every tone, every melody, and every lyric was used to push their master plan. There were many other advisers and strategists on the periphery, of course,
but the tight-knit group kept a lid on the extent of the kookdom.

  In order to make it work, they needed to do two things. First, they needed Obama to be a Candidate Zelig. Leonard Zelig is the character portrayed by Woody Allen in the film Zelig. Zelig is an enigma, a curiously nondescript man who has a mysterious ability to transform himself to resemble those who surround him. In the movie, Zelig gains fame as a “human chameleon.”

  Obama needed to transform himself before he could transform America. In order to disguise his radicalism, he became whomever he was around. To folks like Peggy Joseph, for example, he was Santa Claus. If he were a Marvel Comics character, he’d definitely be the archvillain Chameleon, who did such dastardly deeds as disguising himself as Captain America in order to gain the trust of Captain America’s fellow Avenger, Iron Man. With each person Obama sat down with, from Rick Warren to Oprah Winfrey, he would put on a different face, tailor-made for that particular audience. Underlying every incarnation, however, was one theme: he would be their savior. As he indicated many times, he believes in “collective salvation,” by which he means salvation delivered by the state. But he made sure that when people looked at him, they saw only the concept of “salvation,” hence his deliberate use of Jesus/messiah imagery.

  The second thing the Obama inner circle needed to do was amp up the cult of personality begun in 1995 with the publication of Dreams from My Father and stoked in 2004 with his convention speech. If many Americans could be swept up in the carefully crafted Orwellian projection of the man, they would be less inclined to focus on what he actually intended to do. They needed to make each person feel as if their vote for Obama were their own personal success. The voters needed to be caressed and cuddled, told how enlightened and beautiful they were, taken dancing, and given endless cheap wine in the back of a limo. As Candidate Zelig charmed each audience, he dripped with charisma and flashed a 100-watt smile. He glided through crowds, getting people to lean in to try to shake his hand or touch him, like the sick woman who was healed simply by touching Jesus’s garment. He spoke in carefully modulated tones, often using hypnotic techniques such as repetition (“Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”) and the “yes set,” which is an exchange that is intentionally set up to get a positive answer. For example, during the campaign he would ask the crowd if they were ready for “change,” and they would yell “yes!” Then he would ask them if they were ready for “hope,” and they would shriek “yes!” And then he would button it up by asking if they were ready to “fundamentally transform America,” and once again, they’d howl “yes!” He had them so hysterically riled up that nobody stopped to think. Do you want higher taxes? (Yes!) Do you want illegal aliens to vote? (Yes!) Do you want me to use the sauna alone with Hugo Chávez? (Yes!)

  Obama was also an adept “grievance identifier.” Merely by identifying your grievance, he’d suggest he’d fix it. To Peggy Joseph, who either didn’t want to or couldn’t pay her mortgage, he’d pay it for her. Your 401(k) down? No problem! Obama was going to take hold of the economy. Can’t afford a new car? No worries! Obama would take care of that. Jobs to the jobless! Health care to the sick! Apologies to the world! Free government-issued tighty whities, featuring Obama’s face sewn on the inside!

  Obama was ingenious at laying out the nation’s grievances, and soon enough he had millions of people nodding in agreement: “Yes, that’s right.” “Yes, I have that problem, and that one, and that one too!” Pretty soon, you were agreeing to problems you didn’t even know you or the nation had. This was one of the key essences of the redistributionists’ strategy: convince you of a set of problems and then tell you that only government can solve them. Why fix something yourself when there’s someone in front of you—Barack Obama—who is offering to fix it for you? In short order, Obama was riding the “hope and change” tsunami. If Bill Clinton had indulged the Elvis cult, Obama ratcheted up a level and indulged the Jesus cult. In fact, the Obama campaign even trained volunteers to “testify” about how they “came to Obama” the way one would testify about how they “came to Jesus.” These would be the same Obama campaign staffers who often referred to him as a “black Jesus.” John Lennon had provoked a public outcry in 1966 when he claimed that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” Forty-two years later, Obama laid claim to the same proposition and was adored for it.

  The mainstream media fell into the Obama trance as well, although they needed even less of the hypnotic induction than most people. Since the vast majority of reporters and editors in print and television media are left-wing, they had a built-in ideological affinity for Obama. They were predisposed to love him and he them, like two juvenile delinquents at a warehouse rave party taking Ecstasy and playing with glow sticks. In the past, however, although many so-called journalists would openly support the Democratic candidates, they didn’t necessarily fall in love with them. Until Barack. Many in the left-wing media either remembered or idealized the Kennedy years, with a young, handsome Democrat in the White House, surrounded by a glamorous wife and young children. Obama updated Camelot for the twenty-first century, and the media lapped it up like parched puppies. They would do their part to re-create the Kennedy mystique around this dynamic black couple, help him get elected, and maintain the mythology.

  The press took their cheerleading to absurd levels. The then Newsweek editor Evan Thomas took the “black Jesus” metaphor literally when he gushed, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God.” MSNBC host Chris Matthews spoke of the homoerotic charge he got while listening to Obama speak: “I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.”

  In June 2008 the Associated Press went out of its way to tell us that Obama is a “great man.” In a piece of ostensibly straight reporting, the AP gushed: “Indonesians were rooting for the man they consider to be a hometown hero. Obama lived in the predominantly Muslim nation from age 6 to 10 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather and was fondly remembered by former teachers and classmates.” The AP then helpfully quoted from some “regular” admirers:

  “He was an average student, but very active,” said Widianto Hendro Cahyono, forty-eight, who was in the same third-grade class as Obama at SDN Menteng elementary school in Jakarta. “He would play ball during recess until he was dripping with sweat. I never imagined he would become a great man.” Away from the reporter and missed by the AP, the man then added, “But as I remember, the great man still has a terrible jump shot.” Just kidding.

  Shortly after Obama had clinched his party’s nomination, the AP ran another piece suggesting that if you don’t vote for Obama, you might be a racist. They posed two questions about the candidates:

  “Will [Senator John] McCain be able to overcome the country’s intense desire for change by separating himself from the unpopular Bush while sticking close on issues of war and taxes?” And, “Will Obama be able to overcome the country’s unsavory history of slavery and lingering bigotry that deeply divides the public to be elected the first black president?”

  In other words, if you don’t vote for McCain, you’re anti-Bush. Yay! But if you don’t vote for Obama, you’re a racist. And you hate America.

  The AP’s work here is done. I could go on with a gazillion other examples of the mainstream media drooling over Obama, but then this book would be the size of the ObamaCare bill.

  A particularly egregious example of the media’s pro-Obama activism was the attempt by some of them to bury the Jeremiah Wright scandal. As tapes of Obama’s longtime pastor spewing vicious anti-American rhetoric flooded the airwaves, the left-wing media tried to ignore the story until they couldn’t anymore, and that’s when they panicked. They needed to figure out a way to defend Obama against the allegations that by sitting in Wright’s church for twenty years, he agreed with Wright’s brutally anti-American and racist views. Obama’s
candidacy was in peril. Bill and Hillary Clinton were licking their chops, as were the Republicans. Obama needed his chestnuts pulled out of the fire, and the left-wing media obliged.

  As the Daily Caller originally reported, members of JournoList, a listserv made up of hundreds of left-wing journalists from media organizations such as Time, Politico.com, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, The Nation, Salon.com, and The New Republic were outraged that George Stephanopoulos of ABC News had asked Obama why it had taken him so long to dissociate himself from Wright’s comments. The left-wing journalists jumped into action, with Thomas Schaller of the Baltimore Sun suggesting, “Why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” and writing a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Stephanopoulos had asked Obama.

  At one point, Chris Hayes of The Nation tipped his kook hand: “Our nation disappears people,” he wrote on JournoList. “It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians—men, women, children, the infirmed—on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”

  There it was: kookdom in all of its anti-Americanism. No wonder so many in the left-wing media sought to protect and advance Obama. The media honestly believed in the man and his mission and they would do whatever they could to make his presidency a reality. No rigorous probing into his background. No demands that he release the most basic life records that they demand of other candidates, such as college and law school records, Selective Service registration, medical records, law practice client list, or Illinois state senate records. We demanded answers. How long has he had a subscription to Good Housekeeping, Teen Vogue, and Hustler? How many speeding tickets does he have? How often does he rent House Party 2 from Netflix? These are all records we’d like to see, but the press just checked out. No tough questions. Just polite requests to touch his garments and sepia-toned hagiographies.