What Obama Has in Store for Us (What he will do if, God forbid, he wins a second term)

National Review ^ | 08/06/2012 | John Fund

[SeekAndFind]

The latest line of attack on Mitt Romney by Obama supporters is the most breathtaking yet: Romney, we are told, is a stealth candidate.

Michael Tomasky, who wrote the controversial Newsweek cover story declaring that Romney is a “wimp,” now accuses Romney of a “desire to sneak into the White House all but unexamined by voters.”

Holy Double Standard! Romney certainly could have handled the release of his tax returns better, and it’s likely he is concealing embarrassing details. But Barack Obama, aided and abetted by a subservient media, spent much of his 2008 campaign trying to conceal his radical roots and evading questions about his past. Stanley Kurtz, the author of the new Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, has demonstrated convincingly that the Obama campaign lied to reporters (including me) about Obama’s involvement with the socialist New Party and his work for the infamous ACORN operation (which subsequently went bankrupt following a 2009 scandal).

Similarly, scholar Paul Kengor has written a new book on Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s teenage mentor, entitled “The Communist.” Dave Weigel of Slate acknowledges that “Kengor’s bang-on right: Davis was an avowed Communist, and the media of 2008 didn’t care.” But Weigel thinks “Obama never pretended not to know Davis” and notes that Davis appears as the black-power advocate “Frank” in the president’s 1995 book Dreams from My Father. True enough, but Obama was certainly leery of too much scrutiny of Davis: The audio version of Dreams, read by Obama himself, removes all 24 references to “Frank” that appear in the printed text. Why the difference? Perhaps because the audio version wasn’t recorded until 2005, when newly elected U.S. senator Barack Obama was already contemplating a run for the White House.

Trying to figure out what makes Barack Obama tick, what influenced his thinking, and where he might take the country in a second term is the purpose of Dinesh D’Souza’s new $2.5 million documentary 2016: Obama’s America, which will premiere in hundreds of theaters on August 10. D’Souza, a bestselling author and the president of King’s College in New York, emigrated from India as a boy, and he says he understands something of how Obama’s exotic upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia might have shaped his view of America. But D’Souza, a conservative, sees America as a land of tolerance and opportunity. He believes Obama “adopted his [anti-colonialist] father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.” That may be stretching things just a bit, but remember, it was the president himself who just told small-business owners they can’t take credit for their own success.

D’Souza travels the world in search of clues to Obama’s thinking, using Dreams from My Father as his Baedeker guide. In a couple of spots his evidence seems forced or incomplete, but much of what he finds is disturbing. An old academic friend of the late Barack Obama Sr. tells D’Souza he believes father and son shared the same anti-colonial, anti-Western outlook.

Interestingly, one of the Kenyans whom D’Souza meets now thinks the British colonialists left too soon. George Obama, one of the president’s cousins, tells D’Souza that if the British had stayed, “they would have developed us. Instead, we were fighting over nothing!”

Where D’Souza hits storytelling gold is in his take on the recent controversy over President Obama’s return of a bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office to the British government soon after he took office. Churchill was prime minister in the 1950s, when Kenya’s colonial government crushed the Mau Mau rebellion. His father claimed he was arrested by the British and other members of the family were interned.

When columnist Charles Krauthammer last month repeated the charge that the Churchill statue had been returned, the White House went into bizarre overdrive to deny the story as “100 percent false.” Within days, the source of the confusion was revealed: The bust in question had been returned (as had been widely reported long before Krauthammer’s column), but a diffferent copy of the sculpture remains in the White House collection.

D’Souza’s film is perfectly pitched for conservatives who are skeptical of Obama’s motives but reject the bizarre theories that he wasn’t born in the U.S. (To his credit, D’Souza shoots down that premise early on.) But the film may also appeal to independents who have more questions about Obama than they did when they voted for him in 2008. Its production values are solid — it was produced by Gerald Molen, who was in charge of bringing Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List to the big screen. Some preview showings in Houston were outgrossed only by the new Ice Age and Spider-Man movies. That augurs well for the film’s ability to succeed based on word of mouth.

Dinesh D’Souza obviously wants his film to be taken seriously, and it deserves to be. In a couple places, however, it falls short in predicting where Obama, the anti-capitalist opponent of colonialism, would take America in his second term. I don’t think Obama’s move to reduce U.S. nuclear stockpiles from 5,000 warheads to 2,500 are quite as serious as D’Souza seems to. But the film scores points by highlighting Obama’s bizarre reluctance to develop North American oil and gas reserves while encouraging developing nations to develop theirs.

No one can really claim they know exactly what makes the president tick. But 2016: Obama’s America leaves enough clues on the table to make us wonder if we would be taking an even bigger risk in reelecting him than we took in 2008. After all, we’ve never observed the actions of a Barack Obama who knows he will never have to face an electorate again.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

[Diogenesis]

MITT ROMNEY - THE PROVEN BAD GOVERNOR

"As U.S. real output grew 13 percent between 2002 and 2006, Massachusetts trailed at 9 percent.
* Manufacturing employment fell 7 percent nationwide those years, but sank 14 percent under Romney, placing Massachusetts 48th among the states.
* Between fall 2003 and autumn 2006, U.S. job growth averaged 5.4 percent, nearly three times Massachusetts' anemic 1.9 percent pace.
* While 8 million Americans over age 16 found work between 2002 and 2006, the number of employed Massachusetts residents actually declined by 8,500 during those years.
"Massachusetts was the only state to have failed to post any gain in its pool of employed residents," professors Sum and McLaughlin concluded.
In an April 2003 meeting with the Massachusetts congressional delegation in Washington, Romney failed to endorse President Bush's $726 billion tax-cut proposal."
[Cato Institute annual Fiscal Policy Report Card - America's Governors, 2004.]

[zeebee]

My last comment stands.

[Crusher138]

MITT ROMNEY - THE PROVEN BAD GOVERNOR

The idiots at DU are reading your post and laughing...

[Ingtar]

The idiots at DU are reading your post and laughing...

Then Diogenes is doing them a favor. For the first time, the DUmmies are reading the truth.

[Crusher138]

Let’s turn this around and see how it looks...

President McCain passed consumer based health care reform which empowered individuals to buy insurance across state lines and initiated market based solutions. While not the complete laissez-faire solution some on the right wanted, it was a big step to getting government out of the business of health care. Additionally, President McCain has fought to make the Bush tax rates permanent, has supported legislation to deny federal funds for abortions, and has opened up some federal land for oil exploration.

In this reverse-world, some on the right are upset that with a majority in the House and Senate, McCain did not dismantle Medicare, did not outlaw abortion, and did not open Anwar for oil exploration.

So now it is 2012 in this reverse-world and the left has nominated Joe Lieberman for President. There are some on the far left who just can’t get behind Joe because he has supported the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They want someone like David Kucinich as their nominee and are threatening to stay home or put Kucinich up as a third-party candidate.

It this were the case, don’t you think that most of the Republicans would be THRILLED with the strife within the Democrat party? Even though McCain wasn’t “right” enough, they would still support him, just to keep the country moving in the right direction.

[Diogenesis]

And YOU think the CATO report is secret?

Don't want to rain on your RomneyBOT parade
but Obama has featured it in ads on TV for MONTHs.

Only the GOPe is ignoring it.

Mr. RomneyCARE is TRULY the chosen loser.

[Diogenesis]

“The Massachusetts Republican Party died last Tuesday.
The cause of death: failed leadership.
The party is survived by a few leftover legislators
and a handful of county officials and grassroots activists
who have been ignored for years.
Services will be public and a mass exodus of taxpayers will follow.
In lieu of flowers, send messages to Republican voters
warning them about a certain presidential candidate named Romney.”
- Boston Herald, 11/12/2006

---

"In 2006, while Romney was chairman of the National Republican
Governors Association - a group dedicated to electing more
Republican governors - his own hand-picked Republican successor
as governor lost badly to the Democrat, despite the fact that Republicans
have held the governorship in Massachusetts since 1990. Romney largely
ignored the Massachusetts elections and spent most of the time
during the campaign out of state building his presidential campaign.
He came back and publicly campaigned for the Republican candidate
the day before the general election!
“Locally, this is a rebuke to Mitt Romney and checking out within six months
after being elected and having accomplished almost nothing,”
[Jim] Rappaport [former chairman of the state Republican Party]."
- Boston Globe, 11/8/2006

"A political party cannot be all things to all people.
It must represent certain fundamental beliefs
 which must not be compromised to political expediency
or simply to swell its numbers."
--  President Ronald Reagan

"We don't intend to turn the Republican Party
 over to the traitors in the battle just ended.
We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged
 to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support.
Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates
wouldn’t make any sense at all.""
--  President Ronald Reagan

- Boston Globe, 11/8/2006

[zeebee]

I strongly believe that Reagan would have endorsed Romney in this upcoming election. He would never allow a commie in the WH.

As much as he had distain for what we now call RINOs, he hated commies much more.

[Diogenesis]

Pres. Reagan, like any real Conservative,
would NEVER have supported Mr. RomneyCARE - Author of STATISM.

NOPE. Pres. Reagan would have castigated Mr. ROmneyCARE
for his attacks on Gov. Palin and his cowardice.

[Ingtar]

All I am trying to do is to keep those who can vote for Romney from getting their hopes too high. I believe it is wrong for me personally to vote for him. It also does not matter here in Tennessee, as if he needs my vote, he has lost the election already. Romney’s past indicates a lot of disappointment for those who support him.

Do you truly think McCain would have done any of that? He and the “leadership” in the House and Senate would have lurched Left while Palin and the voters screamed in futility.

[RichInOC]

The good news is that Barack Obama stands behind America. The bad news is that he’s rolling on a condom.

[zeebee]

So do you think he would have sat this election out? Voted 3rd party?

WWRRD?