So far, the analysis of President Obama’s deficit speech has focused largely on its vagaries, obfuscations, and outright lies. Charles Krauthammer rightly blasted Obama’s speech as “shallow … hyper-partisan … intellectually dishonest.” He cited Obama’s “numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing.” Krauthammer wasn’t alone – many commentators ranging from David Limbaugh to Larry Kudlow have targeted Obama’s woefully un-mathematical statistics, his fiscal magical thinking, and his utter inability to move to the center with regard to deficit reduction.
But the true heart of Obama’s speech wasn’t the faulty budgetary analysis or the demagoguery of attacking Paul Ryan personally. It was Obama’s soaring rhetoric.
Obama is an odd politician. Most politicians see the cloudy phraseology of their speeches as mere throwaway stuff, cotton candy for the simple-minded. Obama sees such gibberish as the soul of his agenda. If we want to examine where Obama truly stands, we must delve into his soaring rhetoric.
And the soaring rhetoric is unvaryingly drawn directly from Saul Alinsky.
As Andrew Breitbart makes clear in his fantastic new book, Righteous Indignation, the father of the contemporary left is Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was an intensely clever fellow with no compunction about exploiting popular sentiment to achieve his ends. One of his favorite methodologies was to use America’s founders to back his own Marxism. As Breitbart writes, “Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego. While championing ‘freedom,’ for example – he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved – he [pushed for] ‘communal freedom,’ which is to say tyranny led by the government.”
Obama was raised in the Alinsky tradition, and he speaks with Alinsky’s forked tongue. Thus, for example, Obama opened his speech by stating that Americans have historically “put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity … we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.”
So far, so good. But Obama continues: “But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.” This is un-American, and it is a lie. American unity doesn’t occur in opposition to free markets, but in defense of them.
This is typical Alinsky. By purposefully confusing principled individualism with principled communitarianism, suggesting that Americans are characterized by both, Obama begins the slow march to fascism. In this section of his speech, Obama essentially turned Americans into corporatists – free marketeers ready, willing, and able to turn over that free market to a well-organized state.
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