PrintJanuary 30, 2010
From Camelot to Scamalot
For almost half a century, the romantic and noble label of John and Jackie Kennedy's "Camelot" years in the White House has been an integral part of our political lexicon -- and a major asset to the once-liberal, now mostly left-illiberal Democratic National Party.
How ironic it is that in the late JFK's own state of Massachusetts, the voters who elected Republican State Senator Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate have laid the predicate for yet another presidential legacy label: the highly ignoble "Scamalot" for the unfolding political lives of Barack Obama and his far-left entourage.
Faced with so many false assurances, exaggerated "hopes," and inflated assertions about not only Obama's health care takeover, but also his radical policies on energy, taxes, the national debt, unemployment, the environment, and the ongoing War on Terror, Bay State voters came to believe that the president is simply deceiving them -- to the point that they were routinely thinking, "You lie."
But using the somewhat softer term of "scam," let us paint a full picture of what is going on here. Let us pose the tough question: "Does this charismatic, smooth-talking, and openly "progressive" (i.e., socialist) President Obama scam just a little, or does he truly scam a lot?" Consider, for example,
SCAM #1 -- He loudly asserts complete "transparency," but there is little or none -- e.g., his birthplace records, his Marxist parentage and upbringing, his school records from grammar to graduate, his passport records, his radical-left personal and professional associations, his deep association with the ACORN conspiracy, his Harvard Law Review and book-writing records, and his multiple far-left, non-vetted, unconfirmed, and largely unaccountable regulatory "czars."
SCAM #2 -- He continues to assure "bipartisanship" and "accountability," but there is little of either, with most of his "economic stimulus" legislation and "TARP" funding -- and now the health care proposals -- crafted behind closed doors and with all of the Republicans (and all centrist and conservative Democrats, as well) actually locked out.
NOTE: Massachusetts voters seem to have decided that "BUYpartisanship" might be a better spelling for the blatant vote-buying of several Senate Democrats (and probably as many House Democrats, as well) who are so servile as to be for sale.
SCAM #3 -- He promises not to sign any health care bill which "adds a single dime to the deficit" -- but he deceitfully front-loads taxes and back-loads benefits to make it seem so, and he contrives multiple "scoring" schemes which grossly underestimate hidden costs by trillions of such "single dimes."
SCAM #4 -- He pledges not to raise the taxes of anyone who earns less than such-and-such amount -- a number which keeps getting smaller and smaller -- and cynically labels $250-"stimulus" handouts as "tax cuts for 95 percent of all taxpayers."
SCAM #5 -- He has assured that there would no role (or positions of substantial influence) for "lobbyists" in his administration, but he has made so many exceptions and end-runs as to render the original pledge a prima facie lie. (Surely, SEIU President Andy Stern, who virtually lives in the White House, would never "lobby" the president on anything.)
SCAM #6 -- He pretends to have left the Liberation Theology church when he has merely distanced himself from a particularly radical minister -- while then appointing that minister's hand-picked and equally radical successor, Rev. Cecil Morris, to his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives. Further, he has appointed a Cuban expatriate Liberation Theology theologian, Professor Miguel Diaz, as his ambassador to the Vatican.
SCAM #7 -- He claims not to be a socialist, but a "progressive" instead -- when the latter has long been the radical left's codeword for the former, and even when such "Death to America" socialists and communists as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Daniel Ortega proudly claim the "progressive" label as well.
SCAM #8 -- He talks of "energy independence" but proposes multilayered policies of Less Energy at Higher Prices (LEAHP) -- all of which are devoted to a ruinously low "carbon footprint" belief system which is itself a pseudo-religious scam, correctly being called by many the Branch Carbonian Cult.
SCAM #9 -- He embraces as "scientific consensus" the junk science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and shamelessly rejects virtually all scientific evidence (re: solar cycles, cosmic winds, ocean currents, volcanic activity, etc.) to the contrary, just as the pseudo-scientific Branch Carbonians do.
SCAM #10 -- He promises "jobs, jobs, jobs" while he relentlessly proposes -- in an apparent state of cognitive dissonance -- both the proactive outforcing of jobs and capital investment and the determined downforcing of most major domestic energy supplies.
SCAM #11 -- He repeatedly blames the ever-exploding budget deficits and the unending loss of jobs on "the Bush economy we inherited" -- when it was clearly the Pelosi-Reid Congressional Economy of 2007-08 (with its promises of higher taxes and of radical "carbon-footprint" crackdowns) that he inherited, which had already ended the de facto Bush Boom of the preceding three years, 2004-06.
SCAM #12 -- He cynically relabels global terrorism a "man-caused disaster" and redefines al-Qaeda-inspired and trained enemy combatants as mere Miranda-protected "criminals" -- and thereby tries to insulate himself and his legacy from ever having "lost a war," which, after all, was never a war in the first place.
Topping it all, he and his dedicated fellow progressives will continue in the media, in academia, and elsewhere to muddle the truth about all of the major scams listed above -- plus provide false or flippantly unreliable promises to end earmarking, to reduce deficit spending, to close Gitmo, to end corruption in high places, ad infinitum.
And they will do this by a wide variety of deceptive tactics, many of which come mainly from the late, great Marxist tactician of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, and his infamous Rules for Radicals handbook -- which the young Barack actually taught to fellow radicals in both classroom and streetwise, ACORN-style settings.
And so it is that Barack Obama's Scamalot army marches onward. As the French always say, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose." In this case, it will be the same old Big Brother dream of world socialism -- and it will remain so until we are finally able to flush the electoral toilets all across the nation later this year and again in 2012, as has so appropriately just happened in Massachusetts.
A D.C.-area attorney and national security strategist, Jim Guirard was longtime Chief of Staff to former U.S. Senators Allen Ellender and Russell Long. His TrueSpeak.org website focuses on truth-in-language and truth-in-history in public discourse.
