ALG Editor’s Note: The following featured commentary highlights the Obama Administration’s true colors.
Barack Obama discovers socialist projects at home and a pro-Marxist foreign policy are making him unpopular
By Gerald Warner
July 23rd, 2009
Are the people rejecting their saviour? Barack Obama’s approval rating has slipped to below that of George “Dubya” Bush at the same stage in his presidency and this is causing some concern among right-thinking (by which, of course, I mean left-thinking) people. This is by no means the death of the dream that began in January – approval ratings slide up and down erratically – but it is at least an early intimation of mortality.
For this is no ordinary presidency, this is the reign on earth of The One: his approval rating was intended to break the mould by rising inexorably to 100 per cent and beyond. The problem about a mega-hype like the Obama scam is that when it goes pear-shaped it will crash and burn like nothing we have seen since that other hot-air powered marvel, the Hindenburg. Here we are, six months into the great adventure and already our hero is in deep doo-doo.
How is it with the economic rescue package? Terrific – if you are a Wall Street banker. But if you happen to belong to that uncovenanted majority of the population, the lumpen salariat, you may be coming to the conclusion that crossing FDR’s depression-prolonging New Deal with LBJ’s Great Society is not the answer to your problems. This one will run and run; and so, eventually, will its instigators if they want to stay ahead of the mob with tar and feathers.
Health care? Hillary must be laughing into her handbag: she was burning her fingers on this red-hot brick when Barack was still at law school. It is no longer Republicans who are the problem about getting this package through Congress: it is Democrats. Even the American left balks at a socialist scheme for health care that would have had Nye Bevan shouting “Hold on a moment!” Your brainchild, Barack – enjoy.
Meanwhile, in the wider world, American foreign policy is beginning very satisfactorily to fill the vacuum left by the Soviet Union. The Obama administration has set itself the objective of establishing Marxist regimes in the remaining democratic states of Latin America. Fidel has had his thunder stolen by Barack. The current project, being enthusiastically pursued by the White House, is to reinstate the Marxist fruitcake Manuel Zelaya, client of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, as president of Honduras.
Zelaya’s return is being demanded by Chavez, Nicaraguan Sandinista president Daniel Ortega and Evo Morales, president of Bolivia. These hoods are the Latin American chapter of the Axis of Evil, but Washington loves them. When the Honduran democrats stood unexpectedly firm against Zelaya’s return, Chavez telephoned the State Department to ask for help. Correct me if I am wrong, but I somehow do not think that when Fidel Castro was having problems subverting a Latin American democracy his first instinct was to ring up Condie Rice and cry on her shoulder.
The administration is supposed to be the new, cerebral replacement for dumb Dubya. So, how come it assumed, after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, in accordance with the constitution, had ordered the army to depose Zelaya that this was a “military coup”? The government has been embarrassed by Washington lawyer Miguel Estrada bringing into the public domain the fact that Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution insists that any president proposing the permissibility of re-election (as Zelaya did) “shall cease forthwith” in his office; and that Article 4 defines such an “infraction” as treason.
If the Congress and Supreme Court had not deposed Zelaya they would have been accessories to treason. They tell me Barack Obama was a lawyer. They also told us he was a democrat. Yet the Honduran crisis is a direct confrontation between Jeffersonian and Bolivarian principles, in which the President of the United States has chosen the Bolivarian – more bluntly, the Marxist – option. Madness, from an American perspective; but it casts an interesting light on some of the stronger allegations that were made against Obama during the presidential election. Three and a half more years to go – this could get very interesting.
