Oops! …He Did It Again

Dec. 15, 2009

The American Thinker

By Joseph Ashby
The former Vice-President has been caught spewing climate propaganda again. This time claiming “fresh” climate models show that the northern polar ice cap could (75% chance) completely melt in as little as five years.

Gore described the new projections as shocking, but perhaps the biggest shock came to the scientist Gore credited with the research. Timesonline reports:

The climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

To recap, Gore’s “fresh” news was several years old. The data was not so much data as it was a visit with a scientist; and most importantly the polar ice caps are not going to melt in five years.

Sort of a microcosm of Mr. Gore’s post-electoral life, isn’t it?

Obama the Red Avenger

Dec. 15, 2009

The American Thinker

By James Lewis

The French called Hitler a “revanchiste” — a Kaiser soldier of World War I who was aching to avenge that defeat. Hitler made no secret of his desire for revenge. He made it a Nazi slogan. Well, you can have ideological revanchisme as well — for instance, a Marxist determination to take revenge for America’s victory against world  Communism in the Cold War.

The word “Marxist” is now used as a kind of a sly boast in academia; I just talked with a professor who calls himself a “Marxist historian,” and smiles to himself when he says it. He obviously thinks he’s a hero by being a Marxist in America.  But according to Marxist historians themselves Red regimes killed at least 100 million people in “crimes, terror and repression,” with still more dying today in North Korea. That’s not even counting the dead and wounded in wars fought by Communist regimes.

Obama’s early life indicates that young Barry may have been brought up as a Red Avenger against America. We know that he talks like an anti-capitalist and an anti-Constitutionalist, and that he compulsively apologizes for American actions during the Cold War. The Cold War was not something we started; it was started by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other totalitarian mass murderers long before the Korean War and the Vietnam War, our two hot proxy wars in the Cold War.

What we haven’t understood is how deeply Obama was indoctrinated in the war against America from childhood onward. But every intelligence agency in the world has to have it figured it out, because it’s all in the public record. Leftists around the world have also known it from day one, and that includes the leading Democrats. Obama was not an unknown to Democrat Party apparatchiks. Or the media. Only the American people were kept in the dark. The media and the Democrats are still doing their Obama cover-up today, and hoping they will get away with it.

Why is Obama so deeply, emotionally opposed to America’s defense of freedom and democracy in the Cold War? Because Barry Soetoro was born in 1961 and lived in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta from age six to ten, the years 1967-1971 — right after the bloodiest civil war in Indonesian history, which took place from 1965 to 1967. The Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, was wiped out and massacred during that civil war. There is absolutely no way a Leftwing family living in Jakarta could not have been in a constant uproar during those years, even after the massacres had died down. After all, his parents were active sympathizers if not Party Members themselves, as was his biological father

Indonesia was host to millions of ethnic Chinese, some of whom were slaughtered in the “communal violence” which followed a failed coup. China was then in the middle of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which killed from 50 to 70 million people. Ann Dunham, Lolo Soetoro and Barry Soetoro were living in the very midst of the hottest front line between the West and totalitarian Communism.

Indonesia’s dictator General Sukarno was overthrown in 1965, either by the Communist Party (the PKI), or by the Indonesian army and Islamic parties — and probably by all three. The PKI was the third biggest Communist Party in the world outside of the Soviet Union and Communist China.  (See The Year of Living Dangerously). PKI members were killed in the resulting riots and massacres throughout 1965 and 1966, starting in the capital city of Jakara, which is where Barry Soetoro’s family lived. Imaging living in Atlanta, GA, right after General Sherman got through marchin’ through Georgia, and not knowing anything about it?

There is simply no way those earth-shattering events could not have touched Barry Soetoro’s life in Jakarta from the age of six to ten. Barry’s temporary Dad Lolo Soetoro was originally a supporter of General Sukarno and the Left; Sukarno’s party had sent Lolo to Hawaii to get a graduate degree, where he met Ann Dunham. There is no real safety in such conditions.  Revenge killings happened after World War II in Europe, and after the Civil War in the United States.

The big question is: why did Ann Dunham risk bringing her young child to Jakarta? She must either have been utterly naive politically, or, much more likely, she knew that she and Lolo were protected by powerful political forces.

Ann Dunham was at least an active fellow traveler with the Communist Party. Remember, this is just fifteen years after the death of Stalin, and after the American domestic reaction to Stalinist infiltration, now dubbed “McCarthyism.” We now know with historical certainty that the US Government was in fact infiltrated by Stalin’s Communist Party members, including the State Department and the White House, and that secrets of US nuclear bombs were instantly passed to the Soviet Union by Manhattan Project member Klaus Fuchs, who was honored by the East Germany Communist Party when he went back there. Stalinist Communists were also very powerful in Hollywood, in the newspapers and the universities.

Barry’s childhood and education under the guardianship of Communist Party rep Frank Marshall Davis, followed by an endless parade of far Leftist mentors from Hawaii to Harvard and Chicago, were all shaped by the identical political narrative. Every adult he ever knew told the same story. Everybody hated the same satanic enemy: American capitalism — also known as freedom and democracy — the CIA, the US military; Senator Joe McCarthy, President Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. We now know that Nixon was overthrown by the American Left using the Watergate scandal, including the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, in close coordination with the FBI’s Assistant Director Mark Felt, who was Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat.

The Jesuits used say “Give us a boy before he is ten and we will have him for life. That’s why the Ranting Reverend Wright’s Church of Marxism was such a natural place for the Obamas to go every Sunday, and to bring up their own girls. It’s what they were used to; it had that old home feeling.

When kids believe that their mothers and fathers are in danger, they often imagine themselves to be the saviors — they can get a Savior Complex. (Sound familiar?) Children in abusive families often feel that way. Barry Soetoro grew up needing to rescue his side in the Cold War — the Red side.

Human beings who think they are world saviors are narcissists from day one, because they believe they have God-like powers. How else can you Save the Planet? How else can you “keep the seas from riiiiising,” as Obama said in his acceptance speech to the Democrats? Narcissism is a standard character trait on the Left. It’s one of the basic differences between ideological Leftists and conservatives. Edmund Burke, the granddaddy of Anglo-American conservatism, pointed that out in his most important book, Reflections on The Revolution in France (1791). Conservatives are generally normal people. Ideological Leftists are ambitious World Saviors who turn out to kill a lot of people who resisted being saved by coercive force.  Can you think of any American conservative who acts like Obama?

Take a kid with a savior complex and raise him with an endless slew of Leftist mentors, from Mom onwards. He is the savior child as far as they are concerned — the Red Avenger. He will redeem them in the bitter aftermath of the defeat of Communism. Barack Obama has had substitute parents — patrons who eased his way — throughout his life, including Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Emil Jones.

Notice that I have not said that Obama is dangerous. A lot depends on defeating ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, EPA regulation of CO2 and dozens of other mad and foolish schemes.

The American political system is resilient, but we must know the truth. I believe that “Red Avenger” is the ground truth of who Obama really is.

It’s not Obama’s blackness that’s at issue. It’s his redness.

Obama’s Secrecy

Dec. 15, 2009

The Obama File

The Washington Times contends you can’t have a closed-door meeting about the need for fewer closed-door meetings and expect anyone to take you seriously.  That’s like writing a memo to order fewer memos.  Such folly is business as usual in the Obama White House.

Obama promised a historic level of transparency from his administration but hasn’t delivered.  On Dec. 7, he held a “workshop” on government openness that was closed to the public.

Perhaps Obama didn’t want the public to hear about some of his less-than-glamorous transparency report cards.  This comes on the heels of a purported transparency Web site — Recovery.gov — delivering fake information to the public about fantasy jobs in imaginary congressional districts.

The political landscape is littered with broken promises for ever-greater transparency.  Obama promised that all health care negotiations would be open to the public.  Yet the day before the secret meeting to condemn secrecy, he held a Democrats-only closed-door strategy meeting to push a new version of his partisan health care plan.

Obama’s purple prose continues nonetheless.  “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure,” he said.  Talk is cheap.

The administration has sometimes released information only after weeks or months of pressing from watchdogs and reporters.  There has been foot-dragging about what cars people bought through the “cash for clunkers” program, rules about the interrogation of terror suspects and White House visitor logs, for starters.

We have some sympathy for Chicago’s favorite son.  After all, it has to be embarrassing for him to have to reaffirm the George W. Bush administration’s decision to keep national security information secret, but that’s what he’s doing.  The Obama administration is using the state-secrets privilege just as President Bush did to keep eavesdropping programs in the shade.  Obama also didn’t allow the planned release of hundreds of photos by the Pentagon that show the purported mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. personnel.

A Nov. 18 Zogby poll shows that just 38 percent of likely voters think the Obama administration is more transparent than the Bush administration, with the same number viewing the Democratic team to be less transparent.  That’s not a great showing for a would-be reformer who made openness one of the hallmarks of his campaign for the highest office in the land.

Obama has the lowest-ever recorded approval rating at this point in time.  Perhaps he might win broader public support if he didn’t promiscuously abandon his campaign promises.