Saw end of this tonight: Beck: Barack Obama's Foundation
Tuesday , April 06, 2010
By Glenn Beck
Barack Obama has said that he's an ardent free market supporter:
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market —
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He mocks those that call him a socialist. Just last week, in an interview, lovingly — almost reverently — conducted by CBS's Harry Smith, he said that people couldn't back up the "notion" that he's a socialist:
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OBAMA: That's not the vast majority of Americans.
The truth is some of these comments when you actually ask, well this is based on what? This notion that Obama's a socialist, for example, nobody can really give you a good answer.
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I'm sure he's right. No doubt there really is nothing to lead one to believe that Barack Obama might have any socialist or Marxist tendencies. Certainly, the mainstream media hasn't found a shred of evidence.
But I want to look at this in a different way, because the next argument will be: Well OK, so what if he is? Well, this is the man who says he's going to fundamentally transform America. He signs bills into law that no one has read.
Nancy Pelosi says we have to pass it to find out what's in it. And on Wednesday, we'll take a look at the specifics in this bill. They've passed it against our will; now we'll show you what's in it.
We know that our country needs to be restored; much of it is broken. When you have something of real value, you need to be careful about who you're hiring: Are they going to remodel, restore or tear down? What kind of contractor have we hired? Let's look at him and his political structure.
The first thing we have to check is the foundation. So, let's start with his parents. First of all, as President Obama would say, "let me be clear," I want you to know that I'm by no means attacking his family. In fact, I think after five minutes, you will feel like I now do: Really sorry for little Barack Obama — the boy, not the man — because of the tragedy of parents that seemingly placed radical politics over everything, including this cute little boy.
I am not one to talk. I grew up with a dad who worked all the time. I work all the time. A lot of us to this; we work long hours to support our families. But how many of us have been abandoned not by just one parent, but eventually both? So brace yourself as I introduce you to his tragic childhood.
Barack Obama, Sr., was a committed communist. And while he was only in Barack, Jr.'s life only until the age of two, his economic policies have a familiar ring. As a Harvard-educated economist and Nairobi bureaucrat, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., advised the pro-Western Kenyan government to "redistribute" income through higher taxes. He wrote about his distrust of a capitalist system while quoting Marx. When Barack, Jr., was two, his father left for good to seek his Harvard education, hardly ever returning to visit.
Of his mother, Obama said she was "the dominant figure in my formative years.... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics." Stanley Ann Dunham was described by a friend as "a fellow traveler.... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."
She may have been a practitioner of "critical theory" — Marx to the extreme. She was a supporter of Adlai Stevenson, the former Illinois governor and presidential candidate. During the late 1950s, Stevenson campaigned on an aggressive liberal agenda he dubbed the "New America." Dunham later left Hawaii to travel to Indonesia for a second time, later moving on to Pakistan. She too, left Barack, back in Hawaii with her parents.
Obama has portrayed his mother's parents as conservative Methodist and Baptists from Kansas. There's a problem with that. At some point they changed, because when they lived in Washington State, his mother's parents were members of the East Shore Unitarian Church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue, near Seattle.
The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunhams' chosen church as "The Little Red Church on the Hill."
According to the church's own Web site, that name came from the "well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of 'Red China' to the United Nations." John Stenhouse, a local communist and former chairman of the Mercer Island School Board, once served as church president, possibly contributing to the "Red" label.
So to recap Barack Obama's childhood and formative years: His dad leaves him; his mom also, left him. His grandparents were called upon to continue to raise him throughout his high school years. I'm sure like most of us, Barack Obama has tender feelings for his grandparents and they may well have been fantastic people. But we're trying to discover who Barack Obama is, by looking into his foundation.
Obama's grandfather recognized that Barack had been abandoned by his mom and dad and Barack, according to his own book, was struggling with his racial identity. So, grandpa happened to know a poet living in Hawaii, who was a strong black male influence, who could mentor his grandson. And what happened?
Who was this strong figure — this mentor — during his impressionable teen years? Obama only identified him as "Frank" in his memoir. It took some time, but a New Zealand researcher/blogger finally did uncover and publish that his "mentor" was indeed: Frank Marshall Davis, black poet and communist with an FBI file.
So, nothing to see here, right? Just move along. No wonder the mainstream media hasn't given an ounce of credibility to any claims of socialism. Amazingly, it would seem that Obama didn't have much opportunity to become anything but a radical, based on everyone in his life to this point.
Then Barack Obama went to college. Here's how he described the company he kept in school:
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OBAMA: To avoid being mistaken as such a sellout, I chose my friends carefully: The more politically active black students; the foreign students; the Chicanos; the Marxist professors...
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After college he joined a church born of Marxism; one that taught radical liberation theology and which was led by a Marxist pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Obama didn't just join, he stayed for 20 years. He and Michelle were married by Wright, his children were baptized by him. We've obviously hashed and rehashed all the Jeremiah Wright rantings, so we won't do that again here. But what no one has touched on is his new spiritual adviser, whom we'll get into later.
OK, that's his past. There must be all kinds of evidence that he's changed dramatically since his upbringing, right? After all, we started this segment with him proclaiming that he is an "ardent free market believer," so surely there's plenty of evidence that he fully supports businesses that drive the economy and employ millions of Americans by bringing in large profits?
As an ardent free market president, we'd expect to see him singing the praises of successful capitalists, celebrating titans of industry and generally encouraging the principles that have made America the beacon of opportunity for hundreds of millions of immigrants over the last 200 years.
The discussion of "is he a socialist," is as meaningless as the argument we had 10 years ago: Did he do that with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky? America knew the answer then and we know the answer now. The question we must ask is: Does it matter?
When you build a house, the first thing you do is pour a foundation and we've shown the foundation that was poured.
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