Obama brands Republicans as radicals

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – US President Barack Obama on Friday branded Republicans as radical and reactionary, in campaign appearances for high-profile Democratic senators under threat in November's mid-term polls.

Obama rallied crowds in Los Angeles, California, and was to move on to gambling paradise Nevada in a bid to rescue wobbling Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid, on the third day of a four-day campaign blitz.

He charged that the first Republican president, his political hero Abraham Lincoln would not be able to win the opposition party's presidential nomination in the modern age.

"Seriously, can you imagine him trying to run with these folks?" Obama said, in a bid to portray the Republican Party as outside the mainstream ahead of November 2 congressional polls in which his Democrats fear heavy losses.

Obama accused Republicans of sitting on their hands while he saved the economy from a second Great Depression and of wanting to go back to the same lax regulatory regimes that caused the crisis in the first place.

"This agenda that poses as conservatism is not conservative. It resulted in a radical shift from record surpluses to record deficits, allowed Wall Street to run wild, nearly destroyed our economy," Obama said.

"This is a choice between the past and the future, between fear and hope, between moving backwards and moving forwards. And I don't know about you, but I want to move forward," Obama said, at a campaign event for under-fire Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

"They are clinging to the same worn-out, tired, snake-oil ideas that they were peddling before."

‘‘You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.’’ — Charles A. Beard

If being called "radical" by Obama means Tea Party Republicans are using the "very phrases our founding fathers used," then what an honor to be called radical by a man who states that his nation's Constitution is "flawed."

Even Charles Beard recognized that the ideas of liberty, and against an all-powerful government power center, were and are radical and disturbing to any who wish to impose their own will on American citizens.

Of the Founding principles, Lincoln said: ". . . it is no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. . . .The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society . . . And yet, they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. . . All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce in a . . . revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers [initiators of threatening change] of reappearing tyranny and oppression."

Yes, the battle of ideas is re-engaged in America today, and those who have attempted to initiate threatening change, are seeing the Founders' ideas as "stumbling blocks" to their thirst for power.

There is no way that comity will be established between the White House and Congress once the next Congress is seated.

The Kenyan usurper is a rabid left-wing ideologue who will continue to use inflammatory and patently absurd language to try evoke raw emotion rather than rational and civil discourse.

He's a blatant demagogue and a true student of Alinsky.

Fortunately, the Kenyan Clown's applauding audience has shrunk to only a few very credulous individuals.

Is the AP headline supposed to be a reference to the Radical Republicans who opposed Obama? If anything, I think the closest correlary to the Radical Republicans today is Obama's own demoralized base, who accuse him of not moving fast enough, not being radical enough. They wanted Guantanamo closed immediately, they wanted both wars ended, they wanted total socialized medicine. Similarly, the rad-GOPers back then wanted Lincoln to move faster, to free the slaves, give them the right to vote etc.

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