Monthly Archives: January 2015

Obama as “Father of Our Country”—Part 3

The root cause of crime in America is the breakdown of the two-parent, marriage-based family which is responsible for socializing their children and teaching them morality, personal responsibility, the work ethic, the value of education, respect for personal property, respect for law and order, and respect for duly constituted authority.  Of course, that is true, regardless of race or color.
And why has the two-parent, marriage-based family broken down?  The welfare system—the “long march” into cradle-to-grave entitlement to just about everything for the “poor” and “underprivileged” and “disadvantaged” at the expense of taxpayers.  In 1994, when Minority Leader Newt Gingrich introduced his Contract With America and recaptured Republican control of Congress with his trailblazing idea to put the welfare system out of work, millions of formerly dependent welfare recipients got job training and jobs, effectively raising the self-esteem and independence of multimillions of black Americans who had suffered under the Democrat-controlled indentured slavery welfare system for decades. That system had created a permanent government-funded underclass which was predominantly black. 
In fact, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and its extensions by federal and state governments has been one of the greatest social-political failures in U.S. history—and probably the costliest.  It led directly to the breakup of families and to driving fathers out of the home, so that young people grow up without a male role model-authority figure in their lives.  
The welfare rules first encouraged unwed motherhood and then encouraged unwed mothers to have more children to get more welfare money, in essence subsidizing promiscuity!  The rules also penalized the mother if there was a male (wage-earner or not) in the household by reducing welfare payments.  As a result, kids were running in the streets, getting into drugs and crime and other antisocial behavior.  In a socially destructive spiral, babies were having babies, and poorly educated and poorly socialized children were having children who were then even more poorly educated and socialized—all at the expense of the taxpayer.  In other words, the government was subsidizing poverty! 
Moreover, when the children’s parents were derelict in their responsibilities, the government stepped in to make the children wards of the state, rather than relatives or private charity taking responsibility.  The state then became the authority-father figure as provider and protector.  It’s impossible to bond to that kind of “father,” but you sure can get addicted to the welfare payments and state-provided benefits.  
But Obama refuses to recognize or acknowledge this shameful history of government-controlled family life.  His “solution” calls for more of the same unworkable approaches which are destroying America as a land of prosperity and opportunity, and transforming it into a socialist state in which the father-provider is nothing but faceless bureaucrats and the family-recipients have no responsibility other than to keep their hands out and wait for the welfare check because they’ve come to believe that entitlements are rights.
Freud said, “Happiness is the fulfillment of a childhood wish.”  It isn’t a wish for power, wealth or fame, but for loving nurturance in a stable two-parent family.  Citizen Kane’s last word, “Rosebud,” reflected his failure to find happiness through power, wealth and fame—because happiness can never be obtained through them.  Under President Obama, America is being turned into a socialist state in his vain quest to capture what he never had.  The state will become a nice nanny, taking care of everyone.  And the love and approval and appreciation for all that will go to The Great Provider.
But it’s widely recognized that a government big enough to give you everything is a government big enough to take everything you have.  The nice nanny becomes Big Brother.  The white glove comes off to reveal an iron fist inside it.
Beyond that, however, the unrequited yearning for a father’s love continues to grow in the only way possible—the deification of Obama as The Messiah.  He has never renounced the childish public adulation he’s received as the The One, The Messiah.  Patriots recognize how foolish and even satanic it all is, but Obama’s mindset goes beyond replacing the Father of Our Country.  It goes all the way to replacing God the Father.  Caution:  Watch out for signs reading “In Obama We Trust” and “One Nation under Obama.”
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Obama as “Father of Our Country”—Part 2

In Dreams from My Father, Obama makes clear that he adopted his father’s ideals and social philosophy—which essentially was Socialism-on-the-way-to-Communism.  Why does he want to be like his father?  Is it because he thinks that adopting his father’s worldview will somehow yield him the paternal love, approval and guidance he never got?
In the Father’s Day 2009 edition of Parade magazine, Obama wrote about being a father.  He said, “My father left my family when I was 2 years old, and I knew him mainly from the letters he wrote and the stories my family told.  And while I was lucky to have two wonderful grandparents who poured everything they had into helping my mother raise my sister and me, I still felt the weight of his absence throughout my childhood” (21 June 2009, p. 4).   
He continued, “I came to understand the importance of fatherhood through its absence—both in my life and in the lives of others.  I came to understand that the hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility is one that no government can fill.”  And he concludes, “That is why we need fathers to step up, to realize that their job does not end at conception; that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one.”
Finally, he goes on to declare that he doesn’t want that sense of abandonment and emotional distance to happen to his daughters and therefore he is recommitting himself to “those duties that all parents share.”
Self-insight and self-understanding are fundamental to maturity and happiness, and it is to Obama’s credit that he stated what he said above.  But it is to his discredit that he avoids all mention of his father’s politics as the basis of his own.  Is it deliberate or does it reflect a failure to recognize and assess his father’s irresponsibility and shortcomings?  Is it a lack of maturity in Obama which prevents him for seeing that the Emperors in his life had no clothes?  
For all his words about what makes a good father, Obama doesn’t see—or perhaps is simply unwilling to admit—that both his father’s and his own political philosophy, as expressed in the vast socialist governmental actions he has already taken and proposed, is the foremost contributor to the dysfunction of the black community in general with which he identifies.  
To the extent that the black community is functional, it is because of two factors.  First, many blacks have let go of their race-based identity enough to assimilate into mainstream America and take advantage of the opportunities available to them, and have recognized that the only colors which really count are red, white and blue.  Second, black religious institutions such as churches and mosques insist on moral behavior and self-restraint.  
Remove that and what’s left?  Dysfunction verging on anarchy and chaos!  Bill Cosby’s recent criticism of the black community blames bad parenting for:
– the high rate of crime in the black community
– the high rate of incarcerated black men
– the high dropout rate of black high school students
– the high rate of unwed mothers and one-parent households
– the coarse behavior, vulgar speech and slovenly dress of black youth
– the failure of many blacks to move up the socioeconomic ladder
Cosby declared that parents are primarily responsible for these social ills—not their slave heritage and not white oppression—and therefore they must change their parenting behavior to provide moral guidance and socioeconomic upward mobility for their children.
(To be concluded)

Obama as “Father of Our Country”—Part 1

Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2016 shows that Barack Obama comes from a dysfunctional family, and the results of that on him.  The dysfunctionality can be defined as being “due to the absence of a father, either physically or emotionally, or both.”  Obama’s father abandoned him early in life, at age 2, when he left Obama’s mother and returned to Africa.  In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama described Barack Obama Sr. as a gifted but erratic alcoholic who never lived up to his intellectual promise.  Obama’s half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, confirmed that.  In his recent book Nairobi to Shenzhen, he said their father was an abusive alcoholic who beat his mother and him.
Obama’s experience of abandonment was compounded by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who married his mother Stanley Ann Dunham and took her and Obama to Indonesia, but later left her when Obama was 10 and never reentered his life.
A child needs two parents for mental health and wholeness.  Boys need a father or father figure who provides emotional nurturance, moral guidance and positive male role modeling.  In their absence, boys grow up with a gaping emotional void.  A need to fill that void, to seek constant adulation and approval, often drives them into careers—such as politics and other power-holding positions—to compensate for the love and approval they never received from their fathers.  
That is what’s behind Obama’s socialist politics.  That is what’s behind his wish to take care of everyone from cradle to grave in the way he must feel no one took care of him—at least in significant ways.  
How best to accomplish that goal?  Offer government programs, tax-free welfare and other forms of “spreading the wealth” which will earn him the Great Provider moniker he seeks so that he becomes, figuratively, “the father of our country.”  (Move over, George Washington!)  That way he will be able to ease the pain of his father’s and stepfather’s absence and to exorcise the uneasy presence of that influence.
Or so he unconsciously thinks.  However, it is a badly misguided attempt to find the love and approval which his father and stepfather failed to provide.  (Incidentally, you can’t “fix” a person’s pain by making them endlessly childlike and dependent!  Most dependents end up hating the “benevolent” giver, precisely because that so-called giver reinforces his or her feeling of inferiority.)  That is why biracial Obama regards himself as a black man (after his father) rather than white (after his mother or grandparents).  He has said publicly that he self-identifies as a black man.  That is also why he adopts the victim identity of black-liberation theology, both of which are his cries for love and approval from his father and his stepfather—who are deceased and therefore can never provide what Obama lacks and wants.  
That puts Obama in an unsolvable dilemma:  unconsciously yearning for something he can never have, yet not daring to recognize—first personally, then publicly—the nature of the problem because it might destroy all he has done to compensate for it.
(To be continued)

A Republic of Virtue?

The American political experiment in self-rule begins with everyone ruling himself. James Madison stated it explicitly: “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government.” The two essential elements which undergird self-government are freedom and personal responsibility. Without that, the self-government which we Americans enjoy will degenerate either to tyranny or anarchy (which would soon be followed by tyranny).
The sickening corruption in American politics today was foreseen by our Founders as a very real and dangerous possibility.  That is why the Constitution authorizes impeachment for high crimes (violations of law) and misdemeanors (grossly immoral behavior).  
Our Founders understood that, as Madison put it, men are not angels.  They understood, with Jefferson, that “virtue is not hereditary.”  They understood the difference between liberty and libertinism is moral self-restraint and respect for the rights of others.  They understood elected officials would be drawn from the seedbed which produces all candidates for office, the American society.  Without a moral citizenry committed to public virtue, they said, this republic will not endure.  Virtue and morality, along with an alert, informed and involved electorate, are the best safeguards against political corruption.  Therefore they spoke of America as “a republic of virtue.”  
The idea was derived from the Baron de Montesquieu’s 1748 The Spirit of the Laws, which discusses different political systems, from tyranny and monarchy to a republic.  Montesquieu said that each regime has different requirements of its people.  A tyranny must cultivate a capacity for fear in people, a monarchy must cultivate a capacity for honor and a republic must cultivate a capacity for virtue.  
Self-rule, the Founders said, must always be moral.  Even more strongly, they said it can only be moral.  Otherwise, politics will degenerate by the action of dishonorable and dishonest officials, urged on by dishonorable and dishonest citizens seeking access to power.  That undermines our happiness, our security and our future.  It will lead straight to social and economic chaos, which is always followed by tyranny.
Listen to the Founders: 
In a 1788 speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention for the Constitution, James Madison said:  “Is there no virtue among us?  If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.  No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.  To suppose liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a [vain] idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of…men [to hold federal office]. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”
John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it simply:  “civil liberty cannot be long preserved without virtue” and a republic “must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty.”
Patrick Henry, the American Revolution’s “voice of liberty,” said it plainly:  “Bad men cannot make good citizens:…A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”
Likewise, Benjamin Franklin warned that as nations become corrupt, they have “more need of masters” [dictators] and therefore “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
So did John Adams:  “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families.…Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” 
George Washington agreed in his Farewell Address:  “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”  While praising the Constitution, he said that it would survive “only so long as there shall remain any virtue in the body of the people.”
Lack of virtue among the electorate will lead to election of nonvirtuous officials.  Misuse of freedom—nonvirtuous action—ironically results in slavery to our appetites and addictions, which in turn leads, via the political process, to anarchy or dictatorship.
The preservation of freedom is therefore everyone’s responsibility, and it begins with personal moral alertness and moral commitment.  Unless we have sufficient good character (moral rectitude) and self-discipline (moral fortitude), we will not be able to govern ourselves, individually or collectively.  And what follows from that?  We will get exactly the government we deserve:  dictatorship and tyranny.
That is why the first level of government in the American system is the family.  That is where newborn citizens receive their basic education in self-rule and have their character moulded to take personal responsibility for that understanding.  That is where they learn self-control, respect for property and the rights of others, respect for duly constituted authority, the value of education, thriftiness, civic responsibility, public decorum and other fundamentals of the American way of life.  
Reflect on the words of Samuel Adams, the Father of the American Revolution:  “He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of this country who tries most to promote its virtue and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chose into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man…The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of heaven [a free and independent nation], let us become a virtuous people.”

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