Posted on 05/12/2010 12:43:21 PM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Widely reviled by the left, Bush's faith-based initiatives were claimed to be evidence that Bush was a "religious zealot" trying to destroy America with evil Christianity. Now, two years into the Obama administration, we are seeing what Obama intends to do with his continuation of Bush's faith-based offices: he wants to use them to push the religion of Greenicanism on America's churches.
This month Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its final report of recommendations and the result is nothing short of astonishing. (download .pdf file)
The question that immediately comes to mind, of course, is if the left will explode in excoriation of Obama's faith-based policies as it did with Bush's?
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
It was a bad idea when Bush did it too.
Government should not be funding this stuff
Is Obama becoming Napoleon from Animal Farm?
It’s simple; Bush just had the wrong faith. Obama’s faith has nothing to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
how much money is being put to his radical black churches, is there a way to track this money?
“Is Obama becoming Napoleon from Animal Farm?” ~ Tarpon
Becoming? 2008:
October 29, 2008
Negative Liberties and Obama Newspeak
By Bruce Walker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/negative_liberties_and_obama_n.html
The 2001 audio tape of Barack Obama describing the Constitution as a document of “negative liberties” reveals an utterly Orwellian Obama.
How can liberty be anything other than negative?
Liberty is the absence of external control.
Only in our age of collective thinking and untidy language could such a thing as “positive liberty” be conceived. The state power to coerce is not liberty.
Notions like “positive liberty” are part of the web of thought control by language manipulation which Orwell described in 1984.
[ Eric Arthur Blair was an important English writer that you probably already know by the pseudonym of George Orwell. He wrote quite a few books, but many believe that his more influential ones were “Animal farm” (1944) and “1984” (1948). http://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934 ]
If Obama cannot think of “positive liberty” as a contradiction in terms, then he simply cannot think.
The conscious surrender of language to the needs of the party creates a self-made prison from which escape is, quite literally, inconceivable. These unguarded remarks by Obama display a mind trapped in a reality in which words are phantoms.
Obama could have spoken about the limited value of liberty. Government does some things which reduce our private rights and yet which increase the common good. Politics is all about where the boundary between broad notions of promoting the general welfare by state coercion and preserving liberty should be.
Politicians on the Left have often argued that liberty should be reined in more tightly so that “the people” can live better. But implying that more state power somehow increases liberty is beyond mere Leftism. It is entry into that dead realm of Newspeak in which language is pureed into nonsense, and then nonsense is presented as argument.
Obama could also have spoken about the private duty of charity, that moral imperative which makes the virtue of liberty pure. Charity, though, is private. True charity is always a free act.
That does not make the moral duty of charity any less, but it means that it is a function of liberty. But it seems as if Obama’s mind cannot grasp this sort of distinction.
Is the Orwellian character of Obama’s mind a surprise? No. He is a man young enough to have grown up in a cocoon of semantic babble. The subliminal contradictions of popular entertainment, the indoctrinary quality of his education, the pandemic use of “politically correct” language, the nonexistence in Obama’s universe of any need for critical thinking, his absorption into a parish filled with surreal anger which numb his conscience — almost every single aspect of the life of Barack Obama dovetails into someone for whom the word “liberties” has no authentic meaning.
This is the newness of Obama in our history.
Leftists like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter lived real lives. Both served in the military. Both seemed to have been genuinely religious. Both worked in private business. Both came from states that were conservative, and so they had to defend their political philosophies.
Barack Obama, by contrast, has lived a life of utter sameness. There are no bumps or rough edges or hints of individuality at all.
It is not just his life, so marinated in rote theory, that makes Obama unique. He is an early prototype of a new creature in our lives: Orwell’s children, if you will. These are the people who can honestly believe that September 11th was an “inside job” or that the CIA invented crack cocaine to hurt blacks.
This is the generation which has grown up with no intellectual or cultural system of checks and balances.
Iron and dull control of education, destruction of the nuclear family, disappearance of religion in public life, degradation of art and entertainment into tasteless mush, and, most of all, the politicization of everything in life — these forces have created a new sort of human being, a person who lacks from life any tools of discernment or devices to describe life outside of the realm of collectivist political rhetoric.
There is something about Obama, many of us sense, which is different from any other politician.
Socialism is inadequate to explain Obama. He is both more and less than that. The Left with all its odd menagerie of causes and claims is not enough either.
Obama is part of that but part of something more disturbing. He is someone who can say “negative liberties” unaware that he is saying nothing at all.
Wouldn’t it be fun to make Chrissy Matthews or Keith Overbite explain what ‘negative liberties’ means?
George Orwell perfectly describes Obama and his illogical, gullible supporters in his book: Animal Farm http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451526341
Amazon.com Review
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell’s fable of a workers’ revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It’s OK to Write a Book Report About.
Fueled by Orwell’s intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works.
When the downtrodden beasts [Think “OBAMA ZOMBIES”] of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master [THINK “BUSH”] and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full.
The animals’ Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn:
All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy.
Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. “We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”
While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm.
Satire Animal Farm may be, but it’s a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs.
Orwell’s view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. —Joyce Thompson
<>
Orwell was an idealistic, naive Socialist who (unlike America’s Founders), denied human nature -— actually thinking that people are _basically_ good. Instead of denouncing Socialism/Communism as unworkable economic ideologies, Orwell denounced the men (”the Pigs”) who grabbed power and took advantage of the others.
In that regard, he was no different than other human-nature deniers like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama who believe that it will work if only the right people are in charge of the government.
Thank you! You’re welcome. :)
I'd pay to see it. :)
Try my tag line. I think it does a fairly good job.
So Obama is Stalin without the gulags and killings yet, eh ...
bttt
It was a bad idea when Bush did it too but not because faith itself is. It was a bad idea because once the gov’t funds the things the church should be doing, the church ends up not doing them and the gov’t doesn’t either.
It’s a bad bad hybrid.
I don’t think government should fund anything thats not government.
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