In fact, the enemy is a large segment of the very population he is sworn to protect and honorably represent, if not the very country itself he ostensibly leads. His campaign against the vigor and solvency of the United States is indisputable, whether we are considering the unsustainable exorbitance of “Obamacare”; or the bid to install cap-and-trade; or the printing of fiat money; or the defamatory assault against the Chamber of Commerce; or the strangling effects of excessive bureaucratic regulation; or his intention, let’s say, to raise high the debt ceiling, carpenter; or his politicization of the Department of Justice; or his reluctance to drill for oil which would move the country along the path to energy self-sufficiency and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for this president, the United States is Battleground America.
True, probing so inscrutable a personality as Barack Obama can be a frustrating proposition. The president, after all, is vexingly protean. Is Victor Davis Hanson accurate in his playboy depiction of Obama as “an inexperienced, hard-left, messianic president whose job apparently was to enjoy life, politick, play golf, hang out at Martha’s Vineyard, pick up prizes and awards, and turn the economy and foreign policy over to the Ivy League professoriate.”? Does “Obama clearly ha[ve] Muslim sensibilities,” as African-American clergyman E.W. Jackson claims? Is Stanley Kurtz right to see him almost exclusively as a “stealth” socialist or is Dinesh D’Souza closer to the truth when he posits a hatred for America stemming from Obama’s anti-colonialist father? Theories abound.
Nevertheless, as I have pointed out, several aspects or features of his “career” are plainly observable: his relatively obscure past, air of resentment and obvious irascibility, his anti-American training and agenda, his indecisiveness in foreign policy, and his evident belligerence and even hostility toward those of his fellow Americans who tend to disagree with him. As Alinsky recommended in Rules for Radicals, “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” And this is precisely what Obama has done, though sparing America’s self-declared enemies where such a tactic would be useful and productive.
Instead, he has applied Alinsky’s Rule 13 not only to America’s geostrategic allies, but also to those amongst the American electorate whom he views as competitors, or as obstacles to his leveling ambitions, or indeed to anyone who resists on principle his vision for the country’s future. As has been well-documented, he does not engage in reasonable discussion; he attacks, denounces, slanders and strikes—he will bring a gun to a knife fight. And where he can, he will govern by executive order. There is lots of temper in his temperament. Such is his modus operandi.
Let Americans not be deceived about this. They are ruled by a gimcrack president with a chip on his shoulder who has bought into a loony and retrograde ideology. Worse, the nonsense Obama spouts and enacts is nothing short of destructive. As novelist and poet Mervyn Peake has said, “Nonsense can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere.” In the case we are examining, a winning smile is a losing proposition. As for rhetoric, it is as often as not a strategic distraction; by their deeds shall ye know them. The economic plan Obama is implementing looks to bankrupt the country. By his lights, Congress is a nuisance to be circumvented, as in the Libyan affair. The dictates and Resolutions of the United Nations appear to take precedence over the Articles of the Constitution, which is an impediment to his political designs. We are informed that America is no more “exceptional” than any other nation. And as we have seen, Americans of a different persuasion are to be frozen, personalized and polarized.
All this is so well known as to require little commentary; yet many are loath to draw the inescapable conclusion. A president for whom the major battle to be fought and won is not with totalitarian entities or hegemonic Islam but with center-right, consensus America is a president who is himself the enemy or the problem.
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