Barack Obama, The Big Talker, Is A Living Lie

By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 4:30 PM PT

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years.
Sen. Obama's election-year image is that of a man who can bring the country together, overcoming differences of party or race, as well as solving our international problems by talking with Iran and other countries with which we are at odds, and performing other miscellaneous miracles as needed.
There is, of course, not a speck of evidence that Obama has ever transcended party differences in the United States Senate. Voting records analyzed by the National Journal show him to be the farthest left of anyone in the Senate. Nor has he sponsored any significant bipartisan legislation — or any other significant legislation, for that matter.
Obama is all talk — glib talk, exciting talk, confident talk, but still just talk. Some of his recent talk has stirred up controversy because it revealed yet another blatant contradiction between Obama's public image and his reality.
Speaking privately to supporters in heavily left-liberal San Francisco, Obama let down his hair and described working class people in Pennsylvania as so "bitter" that they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
Like so much that Obama has said and done over the years, this is standard stuff on the far left, where guns and religion are regarded as signs of psychological dysfunction — and where opinions different from those of the left are ascribed to emotions ("bitter" in this case), rather than to arguments that need to be answered.
Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects "stereotypes" when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about "a typical white person" or "bitter" gun-toting, religious and racist working-class people.
In politics, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a "clarification," when people react adversely to what was plainly said. Obama and his supporters were still busy "clarifying" Jeremiah Wright's very plain statements when it suddenly became necessary to "clarify" Obama's own statements in San Francisco.
People who have been cheering whistle-blowers for years have suddenly denounced the person who blew the whistle on what Obama said in private that is so contradictory to what he has been saying in public.
However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.
Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.
"The working class," said Karl Marx, "is revolutionary or it is nothing." That is, they mattered only insofar as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."
Similar statements on the left go back as far as Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.
It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience — and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.
Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.
Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

Obama's Rev. Wright Mythology

Sunday, April 13, 2008 7:33 PM

By: Ronald Kessler Article Font Size

In his speech on race, Barack Obama tried to explain away his longtime minister’s denunciations of America by saying that for blacks of his generation, memories of “humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away.”
But an examination by Newsmax of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s background reveals that Obama’s characterization of his upbringing is mythology.
Described by Obama as his sounding board and mentor for more than two decades, Wright was born in Philadelphia in 1941. He lived in a racially mixed section called Germantown, which consisted of homes on broad tree-lined streets in northwest Philadelphia. The owners then were middle-class families.
For 62 years, Wright’s father, the Rev. Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, was pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Germantown. He was one of the first blacks to receive a degree from the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
Wright’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a schoolteacher. She was the first black to teach an academic subject at Roosevelt Junior High, the first to teach at Germantown High, and the first to teach at the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She became vice principal of Girls High in 1968.
Rather than attend the more racially mixed Germantown High School at 40 East High St., Wright traveled a few miles to the elite Central High School at 1700 West Olney Ave., graduating in 1959. Opened in 1838, Central High has a distinguished past and admits only highly-qualified applicants who are privileged to attend from all over the city. It is comparable to the Bronx High School of Science and Boston Latin School, both public schools known for academic excellence.
When Wright attended Central High, the student body was 90 percent white, according to students who attended around the same time. At least three-quarters of the students were Jewish. Former students of the period say racial tension did not exist.
Bill Cosby, who attended the school until transferring to Germantown High, has referred to Central as a “wonderful” school. In contrast to Wright, Cosby has denounced blacks who take refuge in self-pitying victimhood and seek to blame whites for problems in the black community.
“Central High was a marvelous academic environment,” says Tod Mammuth, who graduated in 1965 and is now a Philadelphia-area lawyer. “You had to have high academic credentials to be accepted and a high IQ score. Many later said it was more rigorous than college. We had no racial friction.”
In college, “I was so far advanced from the normal kids, it was almost unbelievable,” says H. Yale Gutnick, who graduated from Central High in 1960 and is a Pittsburgh lawyer. “In my freshman year, I didn’t have to do anything. I had already read most of what we had to read in English class, and I was equally advanced in the other academic areas.”
The 211th class yearbook described Wright as a respected member of the class.
“Always ready with a kind word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members of the 211,” the yearbook said. “His record in Central is a model for lower class [younger] members to emulate.”
Saying Wright can be compared to the school handbook’s description of “an educated man,” the description said Wright was “the epitome of what Central endeavors to imbue in its students.”
Next to a photo of Wright wearing black-rimmed glasses, the yearbook listed seven extra-curricular activities, including junior varsity football, band, school orchestra, and swing band.
In contrast to Wright’s comfortable upbringing, Morton A. Klein, who also attended Central High around the same time, lived in a poor, virtually all-black section called West Oak Lane.
“Four times a year, we would go to get big boxes of used clothing that was our wardrobe for the year. I never resented it. I was thrilled with my clothes,” says Klein, who was an economist in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations and is now president of the Zionist Organization of America.
“We never went out to eat,” says Klein. “We had no car. We did not go to summer camp or take vacations. I had dozens of black friends. We played in the street every day. I remember my childhood as wonderful, and it certainly did not breed hatred of America. I loved America.”
In contrast, the man Obama describes as being like an uncle has blamed America and whites for starting the AIDS virus to kill off blacks, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society to oppress blacks.
“The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not ‘God Bless America’ — God damn America,” Wright has said.
In a similar vein, Michelle Obama has said she is proud of America for the first time. Last week, Obama said Americans in small towns are “bitter” and cling in frustration to “guns, or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them...”
In his speech on race, Obama sought to evoke sympathy for Wright. He described a “lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family...”
Obama said this was “the reality in which Rev. Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted....Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.”
In retirement, Wright will continue a life of privilege that dates back to Central High. As a retirement gift, Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is building him a million-dollar home abutting Odyssey Country Club and Golf Course in the nearly all-white Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. The home sits on land the pastor purchased in 2004 for $345,000. In December 2006, Wright sold the land to his church, which took out a $1.6 million mortgage on the property. In April 2007, the church applied for a building permit for the brick and stone structure.
Wright’s new home has 10,340 square feet of space, about four times the size of a typical suburban house. It includes four bedrooms, an elevator, an exercise room, and a four-car garage.
Rather than being a victim of oppression of blacks, as Obama has claimed, Wright is a symbol of the American dream. Rather than meriting sympathy, he exemplifies what my friend Fox News contributor Juan Williams describes as black leaders who orchestrate support for themselves by manipulating blacks into seeing themselves as victims, creating a black “culture of failure.”
Obama’s attempt to excuse Wright’s hate-America rhetoric by deceptively describing his personal history and his failure to condemn him as a bigot speak volumes about the candidate’s own character and fitness to lead the country.

Fox anchors O'Reilly and Hannity fire back at Wright
Chicago Sun-Times
PALLASCH: Conservative Fox News talk show hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity hit back at Barack Obama's retired pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright Monday for his weekend comments criticizing them at appellate Justice Eugene Pincham's funeral. "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the church pews, Rev. Jeremiah Wright's back again," said O'Reilly. O'Reilly has bashed Wright since video surfaced three weeks ago of Wright's sermons criticizing American foreign policy as contributing to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, including such controversial quotes from Wright as, "God Bless America? No, God damn America!" O'Reilly and Hannity have blasted Wright as "anti-American" for those comments. "Come back on the program, Rev. Wright," Hannity dared. Coming out of his retirement Saturday to preside at Pincham's funeral Saturday, Wright said Pincham's faith wasn't the "you're either with us or against us" variety. "Fox News can't understand that. Bill O'Reilly will never get that. Sean Hannity's stupid fantasy will keep him forever stuck on stupid when it comes to comprehending how you can love a brother who does not believe what you believe," the Sun-Times reported Sunday. On his Monday night show, O'Reilly said, "I don't think he likes me very much . . . [but] I don't know what his beef is with me." O'Reilly's guest commentator Marc Lamont Hill of Temple University told O'Reilly that Wright's beef with him was that O'Reilly misrepresented his criticism of American foreign policy as criticism of America. "I have heard you say people [who disagree with you] don't love America," Hill said.
>> Read more at Illinois News Page

Obama hits back with sarcasm, makes fun of Clinton 'talking like she's Annie Oakley'
Chicago Sun-Times
Democrat Barack Obama lashed out Sunday at rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, mocking her vocal support for gun rights and saying her record in the Senate and as first lady belied her stated commitment to working class voters. "She knows better. Shame on her. Shame on her," Obama told an audience at a union hall here. The Illinois senator has spent three days on the defensive after comments he made at a San Francisco fund-raiser were disclosed that suggested working class people are bitter about their economic circumstances and "cling to guns and religion" as a result. Obama reiterated his regret for his choice of words at the fund-raiser but suggested they had been twisted. He said he'd expected blow back from GOP nominee-in-waiting John McCain, but had been "a little disappointed" to be criticized by Clinton. Then, laughing along with the union audience, Obama noted that Clinton seemed much more interested in guns since he made his comments than she had in the past. "She is running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment. She's talking like she's Annie Oakley," Obama said, invoking the famed female sharpshooter. He continued: "Hillary Clinton is out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday. She's packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better."
>> Read more at Illinois News Page