What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  Van Jones, green jobs czar. Born Anthony Kapel Jones, he decided to go by the nickname Van, probably to sound more interesting and hard-core. Let’s face it: Would you take anyone named Tony Jones seriously? How many Marxists named Tony Jones do you know? Without his “Van,” he’d merely be a bespectacled dork named Tony Jones.

  In his early career as a radical activist, Van was a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a San Francisco–area Marxist-Maoist group. He was arrested in 1993 during the Rodney King riots and again in 1999 during the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. By that time, Jones was a fully committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who hated capitalism for its alleged exploitation of minorities worldwide. He made it his mission to undercut and ultimately destroy the global capitalist system by mobilizing leftist mobs and by seeking to remake entire sectors of the economy, primarily the energy industry, by leveraging the phony concept of green jobs. As he said, “This movement is deeper than solar panels! … We’re gonna change the whole system! … We want a new system!” In the fall of 2009, after just a few months on the job, Jones was forced to resign his czar post after Glenn Beck first reported on his communist ties. Jones moved into the George Soros–supported Center for American Progress, the leftist receptacle for radicals needing to move further below the radar. You’ve got to give it to Van: he doesn’t even bother to disguise the fact that he’s a raving communist maniac.

  Ron Bloom, car czar. He was responsible for the forced closure of thousands of Chrysler and GM dealerships around the country that resulted in the loss of up to two hundred thousand jobs. His only experience with automobiles involved sitting on his couch watching The Dukes of Hazzard. His leftist kookdom was revealed in all of its glory in a February 2008 speech, in which he said, “Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense.... We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.” Memo to Obama’s first communications director, Anita Dunn: you weren’t the only Mao-lover in the White House.

  Vivek Kundra, information czar. Also known as: Who the Heck Is Vivek? Obama appointed him the nation’s chief technology officer, in charge of a $71 billion budget, even though Kundra pleaded guilty to shoplifting $134 worth of stuff from JC Penney in 1997. Just days after his appointment, Kundra was placed on administrative leave after his former office was raided by the FBI. He would have been Obama’s point man in reading your e-mails. “Hi Vivek! OMG. LOL. ”

  John Holdren, science czar, who looks like he probably auditioned for the lead role in The Shaggy Dog, but don’t let the cuddly look fool you. Holdren is a particularly nasty piece of leftist work. He has called America “the meanest of wealthy countries” and has endorsed one-world government in a “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive planetary regime” that would control and dispense all global resources, redistribute the confiscated wealth, draft a world army, direct a “de-development” of the West, and limit the growth of the world’s population through compulsory abortion. Babies, schmabies! Who needs ’em?

  Nancy-Ann DeParle, health care czar. A strong proponent of health care rationing. While we’re aborting babies, let’s kill Grandma too!

  Ed Montgomery, car recovery czar. A former ACORN board member who serves on the academic advisory committee for the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

  Alan Bersin, border czar. An advocate of open borders, because after all, sovereignty is overrated.

  Obama, with the assistance of the radical czars and his wingmen in Congress, got the leftist rampage rolling. In the first hundred days alone, Obama pushed through the nearly $1 trillion “stimulus”; got a half-trillion-dollar omnibus spending bill; offered up a measly $100 million in “cuts” in a nearly $4 trillion initial proposed budget, all while claiming he wanted “fiscal responsibility”; nationalized much of the U.S. auto industry; screwed General Motors’ bondholders; pledged transparency while stonewalling disclosure of where the TARP (Trouble Asset Relief Program) money went; nominated five tax cheats to his cabinet; began to launch Adventures in Socialized Medicine; oversaw a Department of Homeland Security report that called our returning veterans “security risks”; politicized the 2010 Census by moving it into the White House; announced the closure of Guantánamo Bay without a plan to actually do so; released top-secret Central Intelligence Agency interrogation memos; opened the door to prosecutions of CIA officials who had engaged in enhanced interrogations of terrorist suspects; failed to respond to a North Korean nuclear missile test launch; was all smiles for longtime U.S. enemies Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ortega; bowed to Saudi king Abdullah; began his Apology Tour to offer his regret for past American injustice; and insulted our closest ally, Great Britain, not once but twice, first by returning a bust of Winston Churchill that had been a special gift, and second, by giving Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II an iPod loaded with his speeches (because, after all, Obama speeches are like Lay’s Potato Chips: you can’t have just one).

  The kooks knew that their redistributionist omelet could not be made without breaking a few eggs and that they might lose a few bodies along the way. Indeed, as time passed, the Obama Hypnosis began to wear off and the redistributionists’ agenda ripened. Pretty soon, “stimulus,” omnibus spending, bailouts, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank financial regulation, and suffocating Environmental Protection Agency and National Labor Relations Board regulations were no longer the dynamic new policies of the hip new president but the destructive policies of a president bent on deconstructing America. Despite his assurances that his policies would produce glowing economic results, they instead wreaked a tornadic path of economic terror.

  Within a few months of their takeover, the Democratic casualties began to pile up. There were more dead carcasses on the ground than in the final scene of Reservoir Dogs. In November 2009, voters in deep blue New Jersey and purple Virginia elected Republican governors, Chris Christie and Robert McDonnell, respectively. In January 2010, voters in deep blue Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, to replace Edward Kennedy. In November 2010, voters across the country swept Republicans into control of the House and closer control of the Senate, while the GOP took eleven governorships from Democrats in states such as Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, as well as one governorship previously held by an independent in Florida. In September 2011, two Republicans won special congressional elections in Nevada and in a New York district that had been represented by such left-wing icons as Geraldine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer, and Anthony Weiner. There were a few Democratic wins during this time in special elections in upstate New York and California, but the overall trend was overwhelmingly Republican. Being a Democrat was like being a leper, as they watched their precious limbs rot away and fall off, one after another.

  And yet Obama shrugged off these losses as transactional costs in the “fundamental transformation of America.” In perhaps the most telling example of Obama’s Alinskyite view that the radical ends justified even steep political losses, one of the last remaining Democratic moderates in the Senate, Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln, begged Obama to abandon kookdom. Increasingly nervous about how Obama’s radicalism would affect her reelection chances in 2010, Lincoln tried to get Obama to repudiate “extreme” liberals such as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and move toward the center. During a February 3, 2010, meeting Obama held with Senate Democrats about Obama-Care, Lincoln pleaded with him to moderate his far-left agenda because, she said, it was sowing job-destroying “uncertainty” in the business community. She asked him point-blank: “Are we willing as Democrats to push back on our own party?”

  Obama’s reply? Sorry, Blanche: you’re crud out of luck.

  “If the price of certainty,” he shot back, “is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depres
sion—we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street—the result is going to be the same.” Obama’s words made clear that he had no intention of “moderating” his agenda or “triangulating” Bill Clinton–style. His own personal political survival—as well as the political careers of his fellow Democrats—placed a distant second to the implementation of the kook agenda. In fact, Obama occasionally indicated that his fate may be a single term as president. In January 2010, he told ABC News that he would “rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” And in June 2011, he told NBC News, “I’m sure there are days where I say one term is enough.”

  To Obama, if he could slam the entire redistributionist agenda into one term, he’d gladly check out after four years, even if that meant a reelection loss. “My work here is done, America. Socialism 4-ever! Peace out!”

  There was, however, another critical element to the kooks’ strategy, one that was even more important than the cult of personality opiate they kept mainlining to the masses. America had been hit with heroin, morphine, codeine, and finally Baracksycontin. And still, things were about to get worse. When it came time to discuss major policies, from the “stimulus” to ObamaCare to the budget and spending to the debt ceiling, the redistributionists made the Republicans and everyone else believe that they were engaged on the same playing field when, in reality, the kooks were on a different one entirely.

  Time and again, the Republicans took Obama at his word that he wanted real fiscal responsibility, deficit reduction, spending cuts, cost-containing health care reform, job creation, and economic growth. Time and again, they believed him when he said he was interested in their ideas and was willing to listen to them. And each time, the Republicans would ready their alternative market- and individual-based proposals, present them to Obama, and eagerly await his promised “conversation” about them, only to be met with a rolled-up newspaper slapped across their noses. The congressional Republicans received worse attention, harsher treatment, and less face time than Obama’s dog Bo. In fact, at one point Bo decided he was going to relieve himself inside the White House. Upon discovery, the president blamed the mess on Eric Cantor.

  The perfect symbol of the disconnect between what the kooks were actually doing and the Republicans’ naive belief that they were to be included in policy making was Representative Paul Ryan’s budget presentation in the spring of 2011. When the GOP took control of the House in January 2011, they began work on a budget. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, had been working on budgetary issues for years and labored tirelessly on a major reform document that proposed serious spending cuts and structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs in order to rescue them from the jaws of insolvency. Ryan, all boyish good looks and earnest demeanor, released the Republican budget and prepared for brutal political attacks but also at least serious engagement from the White House on the issues. He accepted Obama’s invitation to attend a major address by the president on spending and the deficit.

  Ryan was seated front and center, perhaps expecting to hear the president announce that he was finally ready to meet the GOP and him halfway in order to restore fiscal order. Instead, Ryan and his plan were met by a relentless barrage of partisan insults, policy attacks, and Obama’s own budget proposal that was so ludicrously budget-busting that it was later unanimously defeated in the Senate 97 to 0. Representative Ryan should have known something was amiss when he was seated in the “naughty chair” and forced to wear a KICK ME sign while Joe Biden tied Ryan’s shoelaces together. Ryan was by far the more thoughtful and mature of the two men in the room that day and the only one with a serious budget plan, but Obama assumed the Big Daddy persona and cast Ryan as the naive schoolboy who needed to be taught a lesson.

  Regardless of the issue, the president would blow a dog whistle and Republicans would eagerly come running to the table with their own ideas and proposals, only to be blown off in the most disrespectful and cavalier ways by Obama and the leftists. Obama never had any intention of reining in government, cutting spending, reducing the deficit, considering market-based ideas for health care reform, carrying out tax reform, or engaging in serious entitlement reform (see his immediate blow-off of his own deficit reduction commission, Simpson-Bowles). While he was busy “perfecting America” on one playing field, the Republicans were operating obliviously on another one. And the Republicans didn’t even realize they were being played.

  The GOP was Obama’s booty call. The Republicans were willing to be “friends with benefits” in the hope that a relationship would form. Meanwhile, Barry was just looking for a casual hookup in order to get what he wanted. Indeed, he already had a longtime girlfriend named Karla Marxism … so for him, it was simply “Wham, Bam, No Thank You, John Boehner.”

  His True Stripes

  * * *

  I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones.

  —Barack Obama, October 2011

  Barack Obama sold himself as the One who was going to bring us all together. He campaigned as the guy who, because of his biracial makeup and cool-cat demeanor, was the only one who could unite the nation and erase divisions based on politics, race, gender, and religion. The one area he deliberately left out was class divisions. He would need those in order to accomplish his redistributive mission. But he promised that under his leadership, other splits that have long riven America would be healed. He was unique. Special. A one-of-a-kind man for the moment.

  Instead of making good on his Rodney King–esque “can’t we all get along” promise, however, Mr. “I’m a uniter, not a divider 2.0” managed to divide the nation in ways unimaginable before his presidency. We are more polarized politically, economically, racially, and culturally than ever.

  And yet, notice that Obama hasn’t moved to fix these deepening divides. He hasn’t done any of the “healing” he promised because he never had any intention of healing anything. Like a dutiful Alinskyite, he never let a crisis go to waste, and he created them when necessary. If everyone were getting along and the economy were a job-creating dynamo, there would be no crisis atmosphere to justify his massive, unprecedented expansion of government.

  He needs the economic situation to stay dire. He needs spending to continue to spiral upward. He needs the debt to reach unprecedented levels. He needs unemployment to stay high. He needs the classes pitted against each other. He needs a growing pauper class to keep the class conflict going. He needs a wealthy class constantly under assault. He needs government-sector unions strong and growing. He needs union thugs on the march. He needs conflict between the public and private sectors. He needs a southern border out of control. He needs a world thrown into disarray by retrenching American leadership. He needs to have the latest iPad before everyone else.

  Obama and his fellow redistributionists have inflamed all of these crises as pretexts to sink the tentacles of state power into every part of our lives, from our checkbooks to our Chevy Tahoes to our hot dogs to our tonsillectomies. Obama has so consolidated power in his own hands and in the hands of the very few unelected kooks around him that freedom as we’ve always known it is slipping away.

  Chaos and control: the very elements of George Orwell’s 1984 are the exact underpinnings of the Obama presidency.

  And sitting atop it all is the one person we hire to look out for us: the president. He has always been a Trojan horse who said all of the right things, who whispered empty, sweet nothings like “hope” and “change” and “healing” and “perfecting,” but who—once he had gotten us to say “yes, we can”—sank the knife into our backs, à la Michael Corleone. “We knew it was you, Barry. You broke our heart. You broke our heart!”

  The writer Maya Angelou once said, “When somebody shows you who they are, believe them … the
first time.”

  Obama’s beliefs and policies were so extreme and destructive that many Americans tried to explain or justify them away, by claiming to themselves and others that he was “really not that bad” or that “his critics find any reason to attack him.” The defensive crouch sometimes expressed itself in a benign way (“he’s in over his head”) and sometimes in a much darker way (“his critics are racist”). As time went on, other excuses were offered: he was “trying to do too much,” “naive,” “incompetent.” When he continued to present the same big-government, big-spending policies and refused to moderate his positions, some people invoked Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. The New York Times even prepared a piece that suggested Obama suffered from clinical depression. Color me naive, but I have a hard time believing that a man who spends so many of his waking hours planning the latest celebrity visit to the White House is secretly the next Sylvia Plath.

  He is not naive, incompetent, insane, or depressed. And the longer we’ve danced around, trying to explain his commitment to redistributionism with every pop psychological diagnosis in the book, the longer we’ve given him to methodically effect his agenda.

  Every once in a while, a kook will forget the left-wing code of omertà and blurt out exactly what the organized crime syndicate known as the Far Left is up to. Ladies and gentlemen: give it up for the Reverend Al Sharpton, who on March 21, 2010, gave some smelling salts to a hypnotized nation. “First of all, then we have to say the American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama,” Sharpton said. “Let’s not act as though the president didn’t tell the American people—the president offered the American people health reform when he ran. He was overwhelmingly elected running on that and he has delivered what he promised.” Duh.