PrintJuly 31, 2009
Obama's birth debate: It's about loyalty
The birth debate about Obama is real enough, but it is legally complicated, as analyzed by legal beagle Andrew McCarthy at National Review. No judge is going to question the Constitutional qualifications of an elected president. I'm sorry, but that's the practical reality. The judge is going to follow stare decisis -- the sheer weight of commitments that cannot be reversed without creating chaos. Once the political system of the United States, the voters, the media, and the politicians themselves are all committed to the proposition that Obama is president, trying to reverse it would mean riots in every city in the nation. At some point even debatable claims become irreversible. That is why Al Franken is now the US Senator from Minnesota, even if his election was corrupt and wrong. It's water under the bridge. Leave it to history.
And yet the Obama "birther" debate is important. What's important about it is the feeling a growing number of Americans have in their bones that Obama is foreign -- to our traditions, loyalties and shared understandings about the nature of America. In a way the legal debate matters less than that bone-deep sense that Obama is fundamentally "Other than American."
We all recognized George W as a prototypical American -- even if you didn't agree with him or even like him. There he was cutting dry brush around his modest West Texas ranch house, to keep down the fire danger, while the fat and foolish White House punditry stayed huddled back in the air conditioning. Or flying onto the aircraft carrier in a jet trainer after Saddam was overthrown. Or heading straight to walk Ground Zero with the cops and fire fighters right after 9/11. Bush looked at home with those cops, because he was. He likes those guys, and they like him. They are made of the same stuff. Obama isn't.
Obama is a socialist, which means that his deepest commitment is not to our nation but to the Internationalist Ruling Class. That is why the Left always has to argue that Americans' love of country will kill off the rest of the world -- by global warming, by overpopulation, any excuse will do. The fact that it's all lies proves the point: The Left must lie in order to convince millions of Americans that their normal feelings of patriotism are evil.
These facts are so obvious that they are not even worth arguing about. Obama's first international speech -- characteristically before getting elected -- started with the phrase "Citizens of the World!" Anybody on the Left has to think, "Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" That was the intended message to the left, of course -- that's how David Axelrod thinks, that's how Obama's mentors have always thought -- going back to his way-left mother and his Kenyan socialist father. The interracial affair between the Kansas anthropologist 20-year-old and the Kenyan socialist was itself a revolutionary act, the way these people think. It was a positive good to bear an interracial child, even if the kid was going to be abandoned by his father and mother. From that point onward the Old Left handled the whole chain of custody. Obama was passed along by leftie sponsors, one after the other. Frank Marshall Davis was the Communist Party guy in Hawaii, and wrote for the Hawaiian Communist Party rag. You can trace it link after link, following the Alinskyite chain all the way to the far left wing of the Chicago Machine, then 20 years of being preached at by Rev. Jeremiah Wright (whose brand of Christianity is only Marxism under a transparent layer of lies).
That's our Obama, and that's what he proudly proclaimed: Not Oh Say Can You See/ By the Dawn's Early Light, but Dreams from My (Kenyan Socialist) Father.
This is not a secret. Obama is foreign to America in a way that has little to do with his birth certificate. He could be American-born and still think in this very anti-American way. A lot of people are. But whatever he is legally, there is not a shred of doubt that he is steeped in an Anti-American way of thinking.
This is what I suspect the birther movement is about. Yes, the legalities are suspect. No, it will never make any practical difference. But most important, the birthers are aware of a deep intuition about Barry Soetoro Barack Hussein Obama: That he is profoundly out of tune with the meaning of America since the Founding. He is out of harmony with this country and this culture, like the dissonant scream of a power-saw biting into steel or concrete. He just grates on the American sensibility.
Obama is a Ruling Class Aristocrat -- by intuition, beliefs, and personal egomania. He was born to rule. It's partly that he has always gone to all the elite schools, from Hawaii to Harvard, just like Michelle. But he was put into those schools by the efforts of the left, which is a Socialist Ruling Class movement. The left in its own vision is always Ruling Class To Be that is being kept unjustly from taking over the world. That's why they hate real democracy, why they sneer at Coke and fries, and why capitalism is so bad: Because it constant caters to "vulgar" tastes.
(The fact that the left always claims to help the lowest of the low is just a political tactic. By digging up the most resentful victims -- by race, class or gender -- you bring out the most explosive revolutionary dynamite; it's the people who are the most envious and resentful, who want nothing more than to flip the world upside-down and watch destruction rain down. That's why the Left constantly appeals to the "idealism" of teenagers, the natural rebels. They all want to rock the world. And if it's not teens, it's illegal immigrants, sexual deviants, the homeless, drug addicts, criminals, the racially oppressed, those who hate themselves, the prostitutes, and the mentally ill. Karl Marx called them the Lumpen-Proletariat, the Eternal Underclass who want to smash whatever is. As the Nazi slogan said it, "Alles Muss Anders Sein" -- "Everything Must Be Different."
The left is about the overthrow of whatever is, whether good or bad. The Eternal Underclass is the cannon fodder of any revolution. They are the lowlifes who can be trusted to burn down the Reichstag, to smash the stores of the Jews -- or in Indonesia, of the Chinese -- and to hang the rich from the nearest lamp post. When blue collar workers started to make money the Left didn't rejoice in their new well-being and happiness. Rather, the left just looked for another Underclass: Those who felt oppressed by race, gender, sexual habits, whatever. For the left, any Underclass only exists to be manipulated by the Natural Ruling Class, the Aristocratic Vanguard, the Obamas of this world. That's the only political strategy of the left. That is why they constantly lie and still believe in their own moral superiority.)
So is Obama American-born? I don't know. I bet he never comes up with that vault copy birth certificate for us to examine. But it's never going to matter a hill of beans, because no judge wants to be accused of overthrowing a sitting President of the United States.
But is Obama in tune with the soul of this country as Americans have understood it since 1776?
I think we all know the answer to that.
That is what our political battles will be about, for years and years to come. Don't expect it to be solved soon. It's been going on for a century. It didn't end with American victory in the Cold War. It is most of all a battle for minds and hearts, not for territory -- although territory matters. Conservatives helped win the Cold War, but did not win the battle for the schools and universities. That is why Barry Soetoro Barack Hussein Obama is now President.
Gear yourself up, and don't stop fighting the battle for hearts and minds. It's all-important.
