My Worries About Obama

After recently writing a post pointing-out some of the misleading things being touted by the Obama campaign and getting a few comments, I wanted to write a little more to clarify how I feel about the President.

In all truth, I don't dislike President Obama. I imagine, all-in-all, that he's a decent man with whom I disagree on lots of issues and agree on a few. I don't believe that the vitriol many people feel toward him is warranted, or even, for that matter, productive. In fact, I think it hurts those of us with legitamate concerns, because everyone who disagrees with him is automatically dismissed as either a racist who believes he's a Muslim or a crazy "Birther."

The most pressing issue with respect to which I disagree with the President is that I don't believe his economic policies can possibly succeed. You simply cannot fix an economy by going deeper and deeper into debt; in fact, economics is one of the only philosophies with which I still agree with those in the Tea Party. Not that I necessarily agree with Governor Romney's economic ideas either, though. Giving tax breaks to the wealthy job creators made sense during the whole "Trickle-Down Economics" experiment, but now we know it was a failure. Instead of using the extra money to create more, better- paying jobs, a lot of it just gets pocketed to make rich people richer. People blame President Reagan for that disaster, but blaming a President for following the advice of his advisers who were citing a real academic economic theory is moronic; he shouldn't be blamed just because, it turned-out, the theory failed to take into account the phenomenon of human greed.

Ardent Democrats argue that the unemployment rate is actually coming down, albeit slowly and that, if the American Jobs Act had been passed, it would have taken a bigger chunk out of the unemployment rate. Unfortunately -- they argue -- the Republicans chose to block that legislation and some cling to the tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that this was done purposefully in an effort to keep unemployment high to hurt Obama's chances at re-election.

What they fail to see is that the "official" (emphasis added, because the numbers they tell us are actually a clever lie anyway) unemployment numbers are falling only largely because people have stopped looking for work and are being removed from the calculation entirely (which has been happening for a long time i.e. the reason for my claim that the numbers are false). The powers that be claim the unemployment rate is down to 8.1% and 92,000 new jobs were recently created. What has not been highlighted is 360,000 people reported giving up on finding a new job entirely and have thus been removed from the "official" number.  These numbers, by the way, were currently as of the date of this article's publication on 8 September, 2012.

Also, Republicans were not the only ones who objected to the American Jobs Act. Many Democrats criticized the Bill due to it adding another $450 billion in spending, arguing that it is not viable to have a 'job creation' plan that costs more than $200k per every job it creates. These Democrats, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (one of my senators and formerly Governor of my home state) are decried by many on the Left as not being "True Democrats," (whatever that means) but I like Joe... then again, I like moderates. If moderate centrists, capable of governing responsibly through compromise, were the majority of both Parties, rather than the minority shouted-down by the lunatic fringe (Right and Left), we'd actually be living in a country that appeared to be run by adults instead of spoiled, squabbling children.

Anyway, to get back on subject, there are other aspects of President Obama's past that do worry me a bit. I've always believed that you get a more clear picture of who a politician really is, in their heart, by looking and listening less at what they say on the campaign trail and concentrating, instead, on what they did and said when they weren't seeking votes. For instance, I don't believe for a moment that Governor Romney is as Conservative as he is trying to appear. He was a very moderate Republican as a Governor (i.e. before he was faced with having to try to win the votes of the Tea Party and the Evangelical Republican base). As a Governor, he instituted Romneycare, which is nearly identical to the Obamacare plan he rails against now. I've written in partial support of Obamacare here on the blog before, and many of you readers were not at all happy about it.

If you wish, you can read those articles here and here (be sure to also read all the comments), so I won't rehash it all today. What I will say very briefly, however, is that, while it has definite drawbacks, it is *NOT* socialized medicine. It is, in fact, nearly identical to Romneycare, which was based on the Republican answer created by the Heritage Foundation in response to the Clinton Administration's push for Medicare-for-All during the 1990s. It is, essentially, a Republican plan that Senator Bob Dole campaigned on during his sacrificial run at the Presidency in 1996 and Governor Romney later instituted in his state. They are campaigning against it only because they need to draw a stark contrast between themselves and Obama. A wise person once said that politicians "campaign in poetry, but govern in prose;" so we should all be taking everything they say on the campaign trail with a grain of salt. We should look, instead, at what they did and said when national audiences weren't necessarily watching.

With that in mind, some of the people President Obama has surrounded himself with over the years and positions he has championed worry me a bit.

Regarding the 2nd Amendment, Obama has been largely silent during his Presidency, giving the impression that he is a sensible moderate. In fact, the radical anti-gun Brady people are not at all happy with him. Yet, it was not always thus. Between 1994 and 2002, Obama served as the director of the extensive billion+ dollar Joyce Foundation. Yet, he has been largely silent about this, even when being criticized as having insufficient executive experience while campaigning for the 2008 election. I believe this is because, during his tenure, the Joyce Foundation spent millions on anti-2nd Amendment activities.

They even went so far as to attempt to manipulate the Supreme Court. Their plan involved paying for law review articles (which are typically written either for free or for a tiny stipend by law students) that opposed the 2nd Amendment. They did this because, when unable to cite an existing judicial precedent, judges often turn to law review articles, due to the fact that they are (supposedly) impartial and well-cited. During this period, the Joyce Foundation under Obama even paid $84,000 to buy-out an entire issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review and had it published with every article being an argument against the 2nd Amendment. They brought in an outsider to serve as editor of that issue, a professor who just happened to have been a former director of what is now the Brady Campaign, and who offered a $5,000 fee to each author who would produce an article opposing the individual right view of the 2nd Amendment.

Interesting, at the least, wouldn't you agree? Of course, it's possible President Obama has simply changed his viewpoint; but it's also possible he is waiting for his second term when he will never again have to campaign and win votes. Who knows.

He has also spoken-out heavily in support of partial-birth and late-term abortion, something that even most otherwise Pro-Choice Democrats oppose. In fact, a recent Gallup Poll shows us that only a tiny 10% minority of Americans support such heinous practices, meaning President Obama's views on the subject are in line with only the lunatic fringe of his own Party and far from representative of the beliefs held by most Americans.

Also, something can be said for the company he keeps, though it probably wouldn't be anything at all pleasant. We all know about his ties to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and that he sat docilely through many potentially controversial and divisive sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, only denouncing the things he said when he was worried it might cost him the 2008 election. But one must also take a hard look also at the man he hired as his Science Czar, Dr. John R. Holden.

Dr. Holden, it seems, has an interesting literary history and an odd view of the world. He believes that overpopulation is a huge threat to the planet and to the future of our species, which I agree with... but that is where our agreements end.

Dr. Holden favors, not only legalized abortion (some of his writings were published before Roe v. Wade), but also forced abortions and mass sterilization of the poor and undesirables. He argues that existing single-mothers should have their children forcibly taken from them and placed in the homes of married couples and that future single women who become pregnant should be forced either to get married or to have an abortion. He favors mass sterilization through the introduction of infertility drugs into people's drinking water and staple food sources. He favors the development of a method of birth-control wherein an anti-fertility capsule is placed beneath a young girl's skin at puberty and only removed when she has received "permission" from the government for one of a limited number of "approved" children. He favors that a planetary regime be put in place to implement and oversee all of this.

Worst of all, he justifies his views on abortion by arguing that it isn't the taking of a human life, on the grounds that neither the fetus, nor the newborn, nor the toddler, is truly human anyway. Yep, you heard it right: newborns and toddlers are not really human because they are as yet unable to procure the necessities of life for themselves independently.  His argument is basically that if you dumped a 9 year old kid naked in the woods, they'd at least look for water and food and a place to get warm, whereas a toddler would just die there.  Therefore, in his warped view, a 2 year-old is actually more akin to a fetus than a "child," and it's okay to kill fetuses (because they aren't yet human), so murdering a 2 year old isn't murder either -- it should, rather, qualify as an abortion instead.  I'm not making a word of this up; you can read it all for yourself in his books "Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions" and "Ecoscience".

In short, he's a crazy person.  And President Obama gave him a job.  Take from that what you will.

Maybe those aren't his views, or maybe they once were and he's now changed his mind.  We don't know, but I've always believed that the people with which a person chooses to associate themselves is telling of their character.  That's why I worry about President Obama getting a second term.

As always, comments are welcome.