Dissecting Obama

By Bruce Bawer, AM THINKER

Not so long ago, America had a great economy, the lowest unemployment ever for a range of demographic groups, energy independence, an increasingly secure southern border, a strong international profile, and no new wars. It had freedom. It had national pride. And all because it had a highly skilled president of unabashed patriotism who was devoted to the best interests of his people.

Now we’re being readied to eat bugs while our overlords dine on steaks. To live in “fifteen-minute cities” while they fly to conferences in Fiji. To tighten our belts to prevent rising sea levels while they luxuriate in sea-level mansions in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard. In a direct challenge to parental authority, common-sense values, and sensible pedagogical priorities, government schools indoctrinate children in Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology. To shatter our sense of security and restrict our freedom of movement, Soros prosecutors turn major cities over to violent felons. Patriots rot in jail for meandering around the Congress for a couple of hours two years ago while young people are encouraged by their teachers to celebrate Antifa and BLM thugs who have burned houses down. Blacks who love liberty are smeared as “white supremacists” while Muslims who love jihad are depicted as virtuous victims.

Then there’s what happened during the pandemic. Churchgoing was banned, violent street protests permitted. Small businesses were forced to close and went bankrupt; giant chain stores stayed open and reaped record profits. Americans, but not illegal immigrants, were ordered to mask and vaccinate. Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi, with imperial condescension, violated their own lockdowns.

In this new world order, “our democracy” means the tyranny of the unelected (including the FBI, CIA, DHS, and DoJ), propped up by a Pravda-like corporate media. Their message? If we want to be known as supporters of equality, models of compassion, and friends of the planet, we’ll knuckle under, obey them, and parrot their progressive creed — as spelled out in that chilling Independence Hall speech in which Joe Biden, against a Bismarckian blood-red backdrop, demonized MAGA voters as enemies of freedom.

Of course, this dystopia in the making didn’t begin with Biden. It’s a carry-over from the Obama years, interrupted by that Belle Époque, the Trump interregnum. “To understand the crisis of the Biden administration,” observes Daniel Greenfield, “we have to go back to its origins in the Obama administration.” This statement appears in Greenfield’s introduction to an engaging and definitive new collection of essays, Barack Obama’s True Legacy. How He Transformed America, which, under the editorship of Jamie Glazov, does precisely that: it ponders Obama and his appalling presidential tenure from a number of angles, and in doing so gives us what seems to me the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet of who Obama really is, what he did to America, and why.

Political scientist John Drew recalls the Obama whom he met in 1980 when they were both students dreaming of Communist revolution. At first glance, Obama struck Drew as a child of “wealth and privilege”: he “carried himself with the dignity and poise of a model,” he “talked like a white guy,” he came off “like a foreign prince visiting the United States.” Drew also thought Obama was gay — an impression later confirmed, sort of, by a letter in which Obama wrote: “I make love to men daily, but in the imagination.” Politically, soon enough, both Drew and Obama shifted to “a more practical view,” deciding that politics, not revolution, was “the preferred route to socialism”; Drew eventually left the Left entirely, but, as we know, alas, Obama did not.

New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon also reaches some distance into the past, tracing Obamacare to the 1930s, when Quentin Young, a young Communist doctor in Chicago, first began thinking about socialized medicine. In the 1990s he advised Hillary Clinton on health care; later still (he lived until 1992), he collaborated with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy. As it happens, Young shared his medical practice for two decades with Obama’s personal physician, David Scheiner, and was present at the meeting, hosted by former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, at which it was announced that Obama, also present, would be running for Congress. Along the way, he played a huge role in shaping Obama’s views on health-care coverage.

New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon also reaches some distance into the past, tracing Obamacare to the 1930s, when Quentin Young, a young Communist doctor in Chicago, first began thinking about socialized medicine. In the 1990s he advised Hillary Clinton on health care; later still (he lived until 1992), he collaborated with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy. As it happens, Young shared his medical practice for two decades with Obama’s personal physician, David Scheiner, and was present at the meeting, hosted by former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, at which it was announced that Obama, also present, would be running for Congress. Along the way, he played a huge role in shaping Obama’s views on health-care coverage.

Glazov’s book includes several contributions on Islam and the Middle East. Highlighting Obama’s hideous 2012 statement at the UN criticizing “those who slander the prophet of Islam,” counterintelligence expert Stephen C. Coughlin recounts the Obama Administration’s purging of counterterrorism pros (largely in response to pressure from terrorist-linked CAIR) and reports that Muslims at DHS, founded to combat Islamic terrorism, shifted its focus 180º to target “Islamophobes” — that is, American patriots who dare to worry about terrorism. In other essays, former Knesset member Dov Lipman corrects “historical inaccuracies” about Israel in Obama’s memoir A Promised Land, and Greenfield and Clare M. Lopez supply cogent takes on Obama’s treachery toward Israel and championing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

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