Published with permission of ALG.

© Jack Cashill, August 19, 2010

To understand why President Barack Obama endorsed the Ground Zero Mosque-before he didn’t endorse it-a look at his various parents and their ideological roots might be in order.

Much has been made about the Kenyan Obamas and their Muslim heritage, but it has become increasingly clear that Barack Sr. probably never even saw little Barry until he visited the boy and his family in Hawaii ten years after the boy’s birth.

Still, the Obamas matter since President Obama has pulled much of his identity from them. For obvious political reasons, however, he has been skittish about their faith.

“In reality, Barack Sr. lived his early life as a Muslim. In Dreams, Obama’s half-brother Roy suggests that he died one as well.”

Yes, his grandfather was a Muslim, but he converted because Islam better reflected his mercilessness. But no, Barack Sr. was not a Muslim. On one occasion in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, a Chicago barber asks, “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?” Obama replies evasively, “Grandfather was.”

If Obama conceded that his father was a Muslim, he would have had to deny his father to erase his Muslim roots, and that would have worked against Obama’s master narrative.

In reality, Barack Sr. lived his early life as a Muslim. In Dreams, Obama’s half-brother Roy suggests that he died one as well. “The government wanted a Christian burial,” Roy tells Obama. “The family wanted a Muslim burial.”

By 2006, knowing how toxic a Muslim heritage would be to an aspiring presidential candidate, Obama would write in Audacity, “Although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist.”

During the campaign, the Obama press office declared that Obama senior was simply “an atheist” and did not mention his Muslim upbringing. An Obama-friendly media accepted this line uncritically.

If not a practicing Muslim, Barack Sr. was a practicing socialist, perhaps even a communist. In Hawaii, he studied Russian, and a month before he left the state in 1962, he spoke along with former Communist Party USA head Jack Hall at a communist-front “Mother’s Peace Rally.”

In Indonesia, where Obama lived off and on from ages six to ten, he did register in school as a Muslim and attended prayers services with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.

“Barry was a Muslim,” his third grade teacher told the Los Angeles Times in 2007, but this was a rare acknowledgement by the media. In general, they approached the subject in damage control mode.

According to Obama, Soetoro practiced a kind of a benign, half-baked hybrid form of Islam. Whether Soetoro ever adopted Obama is a question the media have chosen not to ask.

The fact that Obama was listed on his mother’s 1968 passport renewal application as “Barack Hussein Obama (Soebarkah)”– Soebarkah?–and that Ann Dunham’s 1965 passport application and any that might have preceded it were inexplicably destroyed have done little to still settle legitimate questions about his faith or his origins.

Whether adopted or not, Obama has taken pains to distance himself from his Muslim roots, particularly during his Indonesian phase.

In Dreams, Obama tells the reader he “made faces” during Koranic studies and was scolded for it. And that is it for him and Islam. There is no mention in Dreams or Audacity of Hope of his 1981 trip to Pakistan and little mention of his close Pakistani friends and roommates.

In September 2008, in a conversation with George Stephanopoulos set up to quell any rumors that Obama was himself a Muslim, Obama slipped up and referred to “my Muslim Faith” before correcting himself at Stephanopoulos’ prodding. To be sure, this did little to quiet citizen concerns.

The most critical person in Obama’s formation was his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, and she was not a Muslim.

What she was, in Obama’s words, was a “lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” It showed.

In a critical but overlooked scene in Dreams, when Soetoro asks his wife to meet some of “her own people” at the American oil company where he worked, she snaps at him, “They are not my people.”

Mom raised the young Obama to be wary of the “ugly Americans” in their midst. The only thing exceptional about America, she taught him, was Barry Obama himself.

“As the last few weeks have shown, leftists and Muslims share one great transcendent passion, a contempt for traditional America.”

His education as a Muslim during those formative years was both offset and compounded by his grooming as a secular humanist with a deeply ingrained contempt for his fellow Americans. This was a lesson reinforced at every step of his life and career: third world good, first world bad.

At the end of the day, it really does not matter which element of his education prevailed. As the last few weeks have shown, leftists and Muslims share one great transcendent passion, a contempt for traditional America.

The Ground Zero mosque just gives them a common place to worship.

Who is Jack Cashill?

In fact, Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was a self-proclaimed atheist, whose mantra was ” Science is my religion.” That, of course, did not stop the media and the self-appointed liberal “watchdogs” from blaming the bombing of the Murrah Building on the Christian right.

Chief among the watchdogs in the Midwest, perhaps nationwide, is one Leonard Zeskind, an unrepentant Marxist-Leninist and author of the paranoid classic, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.

Zeskind had learned the arts of ritual defamation from his Marxist mentors well and deeply. For the last two decades at least, he and others of his ilk have traveled the land warning how the “the God, guts and guns crowd” was intent on turning America into “a white Christian nation.” If these faux Cassandras ever had a poster boy, of course, it was Timothy McVeigh.

Let us suppose they were right. Let us suppose that McVeigh was a member of some particularly wrathful, deeply anti-Semitic Christian sect, one with worldwide tentacles. Let us say that church members believed in polygamy, genital mutilation, the suppression of women’s rights, capital punishment for homosexuals, and the violent imposition of their own law upon the land.

Let us say, too, that the less overtly hostile members of that sect chose to build a 13-story church and cultural center overshadowing the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum at the site where the Murrah Building once stood. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let us say that they too pretended that their project was something other than an end-zone dance on the memories of the dead.

Given these circumstances, would any liberal anywhere in America, let alone President Obama, make self-righteous noises about this sect’s right to religious freedom? Would any liberal anywhere impute bigotry to those who challenged the Church of McVeigh’s towering thumb in America’s eye?

No, of course not. Our progressive friends would be leading the assault against the center. Hell’s bells, they are inevitably the one leading the assault when the local Presbyterian Church wants to expand its parking lot.

UnvarnishedOpinion.com

Pitfalls on the Road to Victory

Republicans and conservatives have good reason to be optimistic about our prospects this November. The circumstances favor us, no question. What remains undecided is whether we are ready to capitalize on this after the election. I contend that we aren’t.

The rhetoric of our party is relatively unfocused. A lot of the anger over the healthcare bill and the state of taxation in this country in general has coalesced around the TEA Party, and that’s a good thing, but to turn that anger into a focused mandate, elected Republicans need to run a more educational campaign. We have a lot of policy proposals, and for those of us who understand the background of these proposals, the true believers as it were, that’s great. We know what these proposals are about and what we are firmly convinced they’ll do.

But too many Republicans are just preaching to the choir. One of the great things about the TEA Party is that it’s shown the Republican leadership that the McCain model of go along to get elected is flawed. There are more than enough of us who get it to get them elected if they’ll present themselves as conservatives and then govern that way. But it’s destroyed the notion Reagan left behind that you get the people by being a welcoming, big tent party. The root of that metaphor should not be missed.

As it’s come to be used by the Republican party, ‘big tent’ means ‘open and inclusive of multiple points of view’, discussing a quite broad ideological space. As Reagan meant it, the metaphor means ‘open to all who wish to enter and be transformed’, a throwback to the big tent revivals of yesteryear, describing a very narrow ideological space but one into which all are welcome, regardless of gender, color, or creed. We are in need of just such a revival today, where we teach the basics of conservatism to any and all who will listen. That’s part of why I write this column. But this concept doesn’t seem to have penetrated the skulls of the conservative political class.

Elected Republicans need to start making the case that tax cuts are what will restore this economy, or at the very least, that tax hikes like the one slated to hit in January are not the answer to our slow growth or the ballooning federal deficit. Not extending the Bush tax cuts will hurt this economy more than anything else we could do. Republicans need to start reminding people that when the government takes more money out of your pocket, there’s less to spend, and that when there’s less to spend, there are fewer people with the money to hire, further damaging the job market.

New and higher taxes are not the only answer. Not all the money allocated for bailouts and stimulus programs has yet been spent, and we need to stop spending on it now. This could reduce the federal deficit by as much as half a trillion. We then need to keep the taxes from going up. We’re not recovering as it is; people are taking all their profits in this year at the lower tax rate, producing a so-called jobless recovery that’s no recovery at all. The whole house of cards will collapse beginning January 1, 2011.

Furthermore, businesses need some manner of stability and predictability concerning what government intends to do to their bottom lines before they want to start hiring people. Things like the new financial regulatory reform bill do nothing to contribute to this necessary sense of order and reason. Businesses can read the writing on the wall: this administration has consistently demonized them from Day 1, and will try to hike their taxes to pay for all their spending. This leaves them nervous about job creation and further hampers the economy. Investors are not willing to invest nor job creators to create when they may as well be playing Russian roulette with their bank accounts. I, for one, can’t blame them.

But all that could change. We could make permanent the Bush tax cuts and have a pledge for no further alterations to tax law except to repeal what’s already come down under this current Congress. Businesses would begin growing again, creating jobs and lifting the economy out of recession, and revenue to the Treasury would surge, as always happens in such scenarios. Once people feel secure in the predictability of government interference in their economic activities, people will be much more willing to act, meaning a flood of taxable transactions. After all, assuming a consistent average transaction value, which seems reasonable, 25% of 100 transactions is more than 40% of 50 transactions.

In the end, what all this needs to tie into is, ironically, a quote from Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The history needs to be cited: the way you get out of a recession is through substantial tax cuts. We need to begin taking back the history of the Great Depression. Republicans always get a bad rap on that one because of Hoover, but when you look at the policies that were implemented, Roosevelt doubled down on Hoover’s policies, and Obama has taken Roosevelt’s policies to the next level.

If the Roosevelt policies had worked, the Depression would never have been the epic economic disaster it was, and this recession would be nothing more than an unpleasant memory. By contrast, cutting taxes, letting the people decide on their own how best to spend their money, has a very positive historical track record (witness those under Truman after WWII, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush). Obama keeps talking about the failed policies of the past; we need to be sure the American people know just which policies have failed.

The single biggest reason they need to do this, the true urgency of it, is that when Obama’s commissions report back, their recommendations are going to be massive tax increases, and Obama the newly minted deficit hawk will call Republicans posers and hypocrites, people who can talk a good game on deficit reduction, but who don’t have the testicular fortitude to make the tough calls. If Republicans have not begun in earnest a campaign of economic education for the American people, this message from Obama will be quite effective.

But if they have run such a campaign, they will be able to turn it around on Obama with political credibility. They’ll be able to paint tax cuts as the truly difficult decision, and because they’ve educated the people, it’ll be a no-brainer for a lot of the country. Will it be poo-pooed in the chic coffee houses of Manhattan and San Francisco? Of course. But Republicans have played their cards right, the rest of the country will embrace the policies of the right, and this country will enter a new era of prosperity.

I rarely endorse candidates if for no other reason than that the choice is usually obvious. In the U.S. Senate race in Kansas it is not, but there is, in fact, enough difference between Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt to merit a vote for one or the other.

The fact that so much of the moderate money found its way to Moran made me wonder what they knew that I did not. As I learned, although a decent guy with a reasonable voting record, Moran lacks the kind of conviction necessary to advance conservative principles in a hostile Washington.

Tiahrt has that conviction.

Yes, he has made a few less than optimum votes in the past–so has Moran–but he has come far enough in his own self-education to regret them.

Besides, if Todd wins, I just might get to meet Sarah Palin. I did meet Karl Rove, who also endorsed Todd, and the reason he gave for that rare primary endorsement was enough to convince everyone in the room.

I can’t vote in Kansas–Dang that felony conviction!–but if you can, go do it.

For more info, see http://www.toddtiahrt.com/home .

Thanks

One of the issues that seems to come up every time we have a Supreme Court nomination is that of cameras in the courtroom. As of now, the Justices do not allow cameras into their proceedings, merely transcripts and the occasional audio tape, and that seems unlikely to change. But there’s great pressure to bring the cameras in and allow C-SPAN to broadcast the Court’s proceedings. I think this is, bluntly, a very bad notion.

In no small part, I find it problematic because of who wants it. The Senate generally and Senate Democrats in particular seem to have a greater sense of urgency on the subject in these hearings than previous ones, and that’s perturbing. They seem to think there’s something terribly wrong with the Court, a kind of illness. Justice Brandeis called publicity “the best of disinfectants…the most efficient policeman.” This quote has been particularly popular at Kagen’s hearings, and I have to wonder why.

The second main focus of Senate Democrats in these hearings has been judicial modesty, an interest in showing Congress its due deference, which many members of the committee believe the Roberts Court has not, notably in reference to Citizens United. A fair number have gone so far as to call that case a plain example of judicial activism. I cannot help but think these two calls are related. Pardon, honored Senators, but I thought it was the Court’s job to make sure you follow the Constitution, which is precisely what happened in Citizens United.

What concerns me is that the Senate seems to be trying to further politicize the Court. Foundationally, the Court is an apolitical entity. Though it’s fought over by both sides, the Court holds itself above that fray. It’s ability to function as a respected arbiter in political disputes of a frequently quite heated and impassioned nature is predicated upon its political neutrality. Adding cameras to the courtroom will change all that. With the cameras will come the politics, and the fundamental neutrality of the Court will be called into question.

Right now, the Court stands aloof. The views of its members are well known, but it’s rare for the public to hear them debating these views as they question the litigants before them. With the introduction of cameras, that will change. While the proponents of cameras in the courtroom claim that this will allow the American people to come to a deeper and richer understanding of what goes on in the Supreme Court, and while this is undoubtedly correct, that understanding will necessarily be tempered by the lens through which it is offered to the people.

Most of the American people, given the choice, would rather watch Lost than oral arguments. Most will have neither the time nor the inclination to absorb large segments of frequently mind-bendingly complicated legal arguments. This means that the cameras’ contribution to their education about the court will come in clips and bytes, with the effect of skewing, intentionally or not, the performance of individual justices during oral arguments. While not everyone will be cutting tape up to take things out of context, it’s impossible to fit a lengthy clip into the evening news while maintaining ratings, and since what people want to watch is the salacious little bits, that’s what will be broadcast.

Unfortunately, this can be used to bring political pressure on individual members of the Court who seem during oral arguments to be taking one side or another in the views of interested parties, threatening the independence of the judiciary. There’s few threats more effective than having your reputation (and in Washington, social life) destroyed by clips on the evening news with little ability to respond in a public forum. As much as I might enjoy seeing this done to certain members of the Court (while shuddering while it’s done to others), on the whole, this kind of public embarrassment is simply not appropriate. I have no problem of principle with showing politicians to be asses, their careers are made out of being in the public eye, and if they can’t behave in a politically astute fashion in front of a camera, they probably shouldn’t be in politics.

But an ability to perform for the camera has no bearing on qualifications for the Court. I read an article this week claiming that Elena Kagen could be the counterbalance to the “conservative hegemony” of the Court–because her sense of humor will give Scalia’s a run for his money. I honestly couldn’t care less, and I really don’t see what impact one’s sense of humor (or lack thereof) has to do with ones ability to be a good judge. But cameras in the Court would focus attention on such superficial matters because that’s what people will want to watch, and away from the dizzying legal issues before the Court.

I never want to see opinion polls for job approval on Supreme Court Justices. I don’t want to know what the American people think of a given judge personally. Likability has no bearing on the job that judge performs, unlike the other two branches of government. Frankly, as it stands, the Supreme Court is enough of a political football. Cameras in the courtroom would only increase, intensify, and individualize that, and I can find no manner in which this would contribute to the independence of the judiciary.

In reading David Kupelian’s exceptional new book, How Evil Works, a worthy sequel to his bestseller, the Marketing of Evil, I had to ask myself a basic question.

In America, with what Kupelian rightly calls our “transcendent heritage of liberty rooted in self-government,” could we produce someone who is as genuinely evil as, say, a Saddam Hussein, whom Kupelian cites as its very embodiment?

That answer, unfortunately, is yes. But what Saddam accomplished through brute force, here one must do through guile, and there is no better example of the same than the late abortionist, George Tiller.

A few weeks back, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid memorialized the first anniversary of what Tiller supporters call his “assassination.”

Although Reid, an alleged Mormon, cagily avoided defending Tiller’s profession-”these are emotional debates, and ones on which people of good faith can disagree”–he expressed no such equivocation about his murder, which he branded “an act of terrorism.”

“What reverberated out to our borders and coasts from the center of our country,” Reid continued, “was the violation of our founding principle: that we are a nation of laws, not of men.”

Although Kupelian does not address Tiller specifically, he makes a shrewd point as to how citizens and politicians conspire to keep his profession alive. “We elect liars as leaders because we actually need lies.”

The pro-life activists in Kansas who had worked years to bring Tiller to justice were devastated by Tiller’s murder for one very good reason: his murder enshrined the lie and got the liars off the hook.

Here is the essence of the lie as documented in Wikipedia, a brilliant service even when it merely reflects the prevailing media sentiment as it does in this case:

“Tiller treated patients who discovered late in pregnancy that their fetuses had severe or fatal birth defects. He also aborted healthy late-term fetuses, in cases where two doctors certified that carrying the fetus to term would cause the woman “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

The Wikipedia page also notes-to suggest a bit of hysterical overreach on my part–that “columnist Jack Cashill compared the trial to the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.”

The Kansas City media had been promoting the idea that Tiller’s trial in Wichita for performing illegal late term abortions was really only about “technicalities.” Here is what I said at the time to counter that: “As the all too typical experience of Michelle Armesto-Berge attests, however, this is no more a trial about ‘technicalities’ than Nuremberg was.”

Armesto-Berge’s sworn testimony before the Kansas legislature should have put a lie to all of the media nonsense. In 2003, the then 18-year-old Michelle was pressured by her mother to abort her baby in the 26th week of her pregnancy.

“It’s murder and I will not do it,” Michelle protested, but the Tiller staff undermined her resistance with a series of lies, beginning with the fabrication that Catholics “believed in abortion,” and that a local Catholic group promised baptism for the aborted baby.

In reality, the Catholic Church considers abortion “murder” and “always morally evil.” As Michelle would soon learn, Tiller honored Kansas law about as faithfully as he proffered Catholic doctrine.

Under Kansas law, two independent physicians have to confirm that a woman carrying a viable unborn child could be saved from death or “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” only through a late-term abortion.

The technicality that had brought Tiller to trial was the fact that the second “independent physician,” Ann Kristin Neuhaus, was not independent and barely a physician.

Neuhaus had been twice branded a danger to the public by the Kansas Healing Arts Board and has no practice at all other than rubber-stamping the death warrants coming out of Tiller’s office. Michelle, as it turned out, would not even get the privilege of a rubber stamp.

Not one woman among the five with whom Michelle was being processed, herself included, risked physical or mental health impairment of any sort.

The women talked among themselves during their stay in Wichita. “All were there,” Michelle testified, “because they were told [late-term abortion] would solve their problems.”

These problems ranged from unreliable boyfriends to socially ambitious parents. In other words, Tiller was fully prepared to abort five healthy babies, ready to be born to five healthy mothers, in flagrant disregard of the most serious of Kansas laws. For Tiller, this was business as usual.

The literal millions Tiller had contributed to local Democrats earned him a special exemption from state law and even a night in his honor in the middle of the criminal investigation at the mansion of then governor, now HHS Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

After Michelle’s group watched a video on “Dr. Tiller’s legacy,” a nurse took her to a private room and prepared her for an ultrasound. When she tried to look at the screen, the nurse abruptly moved the screen away.

Michelle was then taken to another room. There a female doctor inserted a large needle twice to make sure she injected the unborn child, “and that,” said Michelle, “is when the baby was killed.”

By the third day Michelle’s labor had proceeded to the point where she was ready to deliver. They sent her to the toilet. What follows is not for the faint of heart.

“I finally birthed the baby, and I distinctly remember seeing the baby on the floor to the left of the toilet.” Said Michelle, “That image haunts me daily.”

Despite the alleged threat to her health, there was no follow-up care of any kind for the young woman. Nor did Tiller’s clinic call to see that there was.

Only when Michelle obtained her medical records four years after the abortion did she learn the depths of Tiller’s deceit: He had falsely designated her baby “non-viable,” a status that did not require even Neuhaus’s rubber stamp.

That sham second opinion added time to the process, time that might have enabled an obvious waverer like Michelle to resist parental pressure and halt the process.

This was one baby out of 60,000 sacrificed to Tiller’s death machine. Yes, he made a lot of money, but money does not explain a heart of such inexplicable darkness. Evil does, and evil can triumph, Kupelian reminds us, only through lies.