By Mark Rhoads -
I often tell my old friends who still think President Obama is a cool dude that he is doing a lot of damage to America as a free society and they scoff because they think I am attacking their hero on a personal level, but I am not. I only try to show why his policies are not compatible with a free society and often do damage to the stucture of freedom as we have known it.
Barack Obama was both smart enough and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to ride his improbable and accelerated political meteor from a back bench seat in the Illinois State Senate to the office of president of the United States in a span of less than 51 months.
Surely President Obama and his allies to not see him as someone who is tyring to harm the country. Part of the Obama problem is that too many old-fashioned Democrats pretend to see Obama as nothing more than a traditional "progressive" or liberal Democrat when he is the most extreme Left-Wing national political figure since Vice President Henry Wallace served during the last term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1941 to 1945.
Wallace was so extreme that FDR fortunately dropped Wallace from the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and replaced him with Sen. Harry S. Truman of Missouri. If FDR had not replaced Wallace, he would have become president in April 1945 when FDR died in office. Wallace as Secretary of Commerce at the start of the FDR fourth term wound up feuding with President Truman and he won zero electoral votes when he ran against Truman, Thomas E. Dewey, and Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1948 as the candidate of the very far Left Progressive Party.
For Barack Obama, all the superstitions of socialism are a "normal" way to see the world. His father Barack Obama, Sr. was a socialist leader in Kenya and his mother Ann Dunham was called by her son a secular humanist and was described by some of her college classmates as a "fellow traveler" if not an actual member of the Coommunist Party USA.
In any case, President Obama had many far-Left mentors and teachers when he was growing up. He was never particularly religious as he explained in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. Obama wrote, "I was not raised in a religious household ... My mother's own experiences ... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones ... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known."
"Religion for her was "just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote.
This description of his mother could well apply to Barack Obama, Jr. himself so religion based on God is not at the center of his life but he claims that "sprituality" is. He is always careful to say he believes in the principles and teachings of Jesus Christ but never does he say he believes that Jesus Christ is his personal Lord and Savior as many Christians go.
If Obama believes in any "religion" at all, it is the religion of government and the secular god of government. Because of this combination of factors, Barack Obama has no clue as to where the dividing line is between a free society based on the idea that rights come not from the state but from God and a collectivist society where all exist not for their own good but for the good of the state.
In short, Obama does not understand or acknowledge that there is any difference between the role of government and the role of all of society at large in human affairs. For him, government is the sum total of society and therefore all human affairs can be reduced to political positions no matter how personal or private. Obama knows a little bit about the modalities of democracy but almost nothing at all about the fundamental nature of personal freedom or why it is essential to so many Americans and why it has sustained the success of America for so much of our history.
Given his worldview, Obama was always doomed to fail as a president of the American republic because in his heart he does not believe that personal freedom is more important than the government. He believes the opposite and that is why his all out campaign to transform America into his collectivst worldview continues to fail. Hopefully that failure will be ratified by the voters with his defeat on Nov. 6th.
